RRG headquarters/guesthouse

Construction Fall 2008

Riedel Research Group is an equity research and analysis firm focusing on Asian, Latin American and Emerging European markets.  The Marin County headquarters manages 31 analysts in 15 countries covering 320 stocks and issuing about 600 reports per year.  It is a unique business model and has gotten much recognition within the financial sector. 

When approached to design the headquarters office space located just outside San Francisco, we were immediately interested in the similarities in dynamics between this hyper-connected business which exchanges information all over the world regarding constantly fluctuating financial markets (in seconds) and the volatile geologic activity within the ground the headquarters building will sit on (moving in millions of years.)  Because these two systems are operating at contrary scales the building focuses on single moments on the site. Capturing a single moment in time is one way to equalize processes happening at different speeds.  Furthermore, moments can be thought of as ‘section cuts’ or snap shots of time.  Section cuts can show us in an instant a diagram of a long history.  Such can be seen in tree rings or road cuts through mountains.  A snap shot freezes a moment in time which is like a single point along a graphed line…making it a piece of the overall timeline. 

There are three moments on site that are specific to the place that the building focuses on.  1. The Grove: the site is covered with the canopies of heritage oak trees creating a very sheltered, and interestingly proportioned space at the base. 2. The Tree: one of these oak trees is deciduous acting as a constant marker of time on the site. 3. The Mountain:  Mount Tamalpais, a fixture of Marin County, is clearly visible to the west of the site. 
Once these moments were identified, the buildable area on the site was extruded and perspective cone vectors from these three moments were allowed to slice through the block resulting in the building mass.  The voids become perspective directing elements towards these three single moments, the solids become two story furniture fixtures housing all the program elements for the building. 

This cutting of solid and void creates a series of discoveries for the observer as he transverses through layers of experiential strata.