Content area
Full Text
A decade ago, Abercrombie & Fitch, the 110-year-old clothing retailer, scrapped the leather elbow patches and chinos and focused all its energies on designing baggy cargo pants and muscle shirts for the collegiate set. In the late 1990s, the newly youthful Columbus-based company broke with its corporate parent, The Limited. Last year, Abercrombie moved into its own 300-acre-campus headquarters among the country-club estates 10 miles from Columbus.
Program
The Columbus area is a giant city-suburb so thoroughly average that demographers have made it America's de facto test-marketing capital for consumer goods. Within this context, Abercrombie's C.E.O., Mike Jeffries, wanted to create an office complex with a definite character and identity. He asked Anderson Architects to pretend it was designing a sylvan camp deep in New York's Adirondack region, the area that had originally inspired the company's founders in 1892.
Solution
Ross Anderson and project director MJ Sagan sited the headquarters deep in the thick of the forest, where nothing of the outside world can be seen or sensed. (The company's 750,000-square-foot national distribution center, planted at one corner of the property, proved harder to hide in tree cover.)
To avoid dominating the natural surroundings and to foster a villagelike community, Anderson proposed breaking down the headquarters into smaller sheds, roughly analogous to lakeside summer lodges. These two-story, pitched-roof buildings are arranged along a bow-shaped central street across which employees travel, using scooters, the nonmotorized vehicle of choice.
Even in...