The Challenge:
Canadian video game designer Max Games wanted its new office space to reflect the colorful, vibrant world of the video games it creates. “They wanted something really different,” says Alicia Hobbs, Interior Designer, PlanWorks Architecture. “They wanted it to be a really creative space because they’re a creative brand.”
Focusing on the glass-enclosed boardroom that sits in the middle of the roughly 1,600-square-foot space with acoustical needs, the design team envisioned a ceiling that would create the kind of excitement the young, energetic tech company desired.
“We thought it would be an awesome opportunity to start with a really vibrant, elaborate ceiling in the boardroom that would be visible and have an impact throughout the rest of the space,” she explains.
The Solution:
The design team found what they were looking for in CALLA Shapes for DESIGNFLEX, a new line of Ceiling Systems from Armstrong Ceiling & Wall Solutions that enables designers to incorporate triangles, parallelograms, and trapezoids into their ceiling designs.
The design team selected a pattern from the online Armstrong DESIGNFLEX Pattern Gallery that features a combination of different color triangles and parallelograms. “When we showed the client the design, he absolutely fell in love with it,” says Hobbs. “He had never seen anything like it before.”
The pattern spans from the 253-square-foot boardroom into the adjacent ceiling space where it merges with white triangles and parallelograms and blends with the square white CALLA ceiling panels that make up the rest of the ceiling. “We knew with the glass walls you would be able to see the pattern all the way up, so we didn’t want it to terminate with the boardroom,” she adds. “We wanted the boardroom to be the center point and then just have the pattern explode out into the space from there.”
The ceiling design provided the desired visual impact without exceeding the budget. “We knew we weren’t going to be able to design the triangles and parallelograms for the whole space,” she explains. “So, we just chose to use as many as we could in an impactful way.”
Smooth-textured CALLA Shapes and square panels feature TOTAL ACOUSTICS performance, offering the ideal combination of sound absorption and sound blocking in one panel. The square white CALLA panels are also part of the Sustain® portfolio, meeting today’s most stringent industry sustainability standards.
While acoustical performance is a benefit the company will appreciate over time, it was not the main reason the design team choseCALLA ceiling panels. “It was more of an aesthetic thing,” says Hobbs. “We wanted a real clean kind of feel and Calla has that drywall finish to it – really clean, really contemporary.”
Project: Max Games Office
Location: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Architect: PlanWorks Architecture
Products: CALLA Shapes for DESIGNFLEX