Traction's Lofty Renovation

The Cage In the four years since Traction moved its headquarters to Warehouse127, our creative incubator of a workspace has been featured everywhere from local publications (here and here) to national websites.

A big part of that press, and the resulting photography, has been devoted to the small upstairs area that overlooks the rest of the warehouse. This long, narrow space (which we've always referred to as the Design Loft) has long been the domain of the Traction design team, and, up until now, boasted a completely wide open layout.

Recently, though, we've taken this already killer space and made it even killer-er. The process started when we put together a lean-to office area at the far end of the loft to accomodate our web developer. Unfortunately, his office space was staring directly into a storage area overflowing with accounts payable and a plethora of old ad shop files and artifacts. So we gutted it and replaced it with a small photography/production studio. We also brought in a meeting table and some decor to jazz it up.

Understandably, the designers at the other end of the loft were watching all this with contempt in their eyes. So, like fine design people do, they got to thinking of ways to divide their section of the loft; to create individual office spaces without forsaking the open atmosphere of the loft, or the warehouse itself.

As a result, the Design Loft is not longer the Design Loft. Thanks to some impromptu creative thinking and a couple of custom-made partitions (chainlink gates fastened to corrugated sheet metal, suspended from the ceiling), it is now The Cage. And, as you'll see from the following iPhone-snapped photos, it's a fog machine short of an early '90s rap video.

BEFORE

Design Loft - before (photo courtesy of McNeese Fitzgeral Associates)