Major League Baseball (MLB) Offices – New York City
Major League Baseball’s new digs provide a refined home for the baseball community in the bustling center of Midtown in New York City, a space to honor the sport's past, present and future.
STUDIOS Architecture designed the Major League Baseball (MLB) offices uniting the two ends of the sport in New York City, New York.
STUDIOS worked with MLB to realize a world-class headquarters supporting the innovative work of its employees while embodying the future and heritage of baseball. Major League Baseball sought to unite their two main entities under the same roof, the Office of the Commissioner and MLB Advanced Media –– marking a new era for the organization and supporting the “One Baseball” initiative set out by the commissioner in 2015.
1271 Avenue of the Americas provided a dynamic canvas with which to imagine a complex, program-rich headquarters. The former Time & Life Building sits among a group of mid-century buildings on sixth avenue which all provide a similar challenge—large, bar-shaped, deep floor plates—but STUDIOS found planning and design solutions to embrace and celebrate these unique quirks. The deepest parts of the floor are utilized for spaces that don’t need light—tech rooms and support—while the perimeter is given to the open workstations with a mix of structured and informal collaboration for quick meetings. The idiosyncratic corners of the building were celebrated with destination and unique program elements including artful agile seating areas and color saturated conferencing space.
STUDIOS developed a set of 5 workstyles to accommodate the needs and work process. Media workstations mimic high-tech newsrooms, 120 degree surface allowing for multi-screen use and easy team collaboration with a ticker of live data overhead while legal and corporate teams’ larger workstation accommodates increased storage and work surfaces. These workstyles alternate across the floor creating a unique landscape of working groups which can easily grow or shrink as needed.
With an efficient workplace structure set in place, the focus shifts to the space which brings the diverse community together. Leveraging the deepest and most central portion of the floorplate as the heart of the project, STUDIOS created a triple-height destination. The aptly named Concourse connects people of all groups with a coffee bar at one end, stairs careening to the next floor, and physical and visual connections to primary program elements. Three pantries stacked atop each other are the only cafe point for each workplace floor setting up chance encounters between the many teams.
The Concourse boasts a triple-height, canted architectural feature wall on which media is projected—catering to the 21st century interpretation of MLB with live updates, statistics, and game content. The wall takes on an identity of its own, undulating in triangular patterns reminiscent of a baseball diamond.
The building offered top-tier amenity opportunities critical to a headquarters of this size and stature, including terraces and a double-height auditorium now called the Ponti Pavilion. A large-scale cafe with grab and go and food hall options sits in a unique corner of the building allowing the seating area open to all to hover 5 floors above sixth avenue—with front row seats to the iconic Radio City Music Hall sign and views extending down to One World Trade and up to Central Park.
Design: STUDIOS Architecture
Design Team: Joshua Rider, Jordan Evans, Frank Gesualdi, Nelson Tang, Lee Sewell, Rebecca Frederick
Contractor: JRM Construction Management
Photography: Eric Laignel
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