(Sentry Centers employs its own executive chef ), with dining areas furnished with tables and chairs in a deliberate mix of shapes and heights. “One of the things that Michael and I have learned is that table height can indicate what to expect,” Bromberg said. “We call it the Starbucks Effect: If you’re at a high-top table — a communal table with stools — a certain kind of behavior is expected. If somebody wants to disappear and check email, they don’t sit at a round table, because you know they know other people are going to sit there, and there’s going to be a conversation going on; they go find the lounge chair that’s in the corner. People choose the appropriate setting among all the options we give them for what they need to do. They intuitively get the whole thing.” Which is why Sentry Centers wanted to create a
venue that is responsive to individuals. “Tradition- ally, meeting spaces have been designed for the meeting rooms themselves,” Kelly said. “But a lot of people are going to conferences because they want to be networking in between, before, and after the sessions. And oftentimes, the greatest success that people have, especially at associa- tion conferences, is not the learning that hap- pens inside of the room, but the networking that happens outside. And so we provide comfortable spaces for people to have breakout conversations that aren’t necessarily planned, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t important.” There also will be places where attendees can
get their own work done. “Everybody is plugged in these days with technology, and even if you’re out of the office, you’re still expected to be on call,” Kelly said. “And so the social spaces support the interac- tion for networking, but we’ve also designed and built in spaces that are fantastic for individual work, as well as small collaborative work.”
NO MORE BACK-OF-HOUSE One thing meeting planners won’t encounter at 32 Old Slip is Sentry staff hidden away behind the scenes. Attendees will arrive via escalator directly into a foyer where meeting planners will be based at built-in registration desks that also function as workstations, with another planner worksta- tion outside the auditorium. Sentry staff also will work in the reception area, so planners as well as attendees have ready access to them at all times. Putting operations staff in the middle of the space was a design challenge. “Those spaces get
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messy sometimes,” Fazio said, “and we had to think of how do you design something like that that provides the level of accessibility and easy accommodation that the participants are look- ing for, without looking like we’ve trashed up our reception area.” “This notion of trashing things up is very near
to my heart as a designer,” Bromberg added, laughing. “In most traditional meeting rooms and conference-center rooms, when nobody’s there, they look gorgeous, right? And then, the planners come in with their boxes and their easels and their signs. And people come in with their stuff, and two minutes later it’s a disaster. “I can sum up our whole design principle by say-
ing, ‘We know it’s going to happen, so how do we make it beautiful? Let’s not ignore it, let’s accom- modate it,’” Bromberg said. “There’s a rule that there will be no skirted tables at Sentry Centers, which is a pretty big deal.” That principle required the designers to think about the life cycle of every- thing in the facility — from glasses to chairs to cases of soda to flipboards. According to Fazio, they asked themselves, “How does it get stored? How does it get set up? How does it get used? What happens after it’s used, and how does it get put away?” The result of all that research and analysis is an
environment that is in tune with users’ work pat- terns and needs — including some, Fazio said, that users weren’t even aware they had. “I love that moment when someone is able to do something that they didn’t even know they needed,” he said,
“or they didn’t expect it was going to be able to happen to them in this space, and they say, ‘How did you know that I needed that?’ That would be a home run for us, and that’s, I think, going to hap- pen at this center.” There’s no doubt that the new center will be beautiful, Fazio said, but that’s not enough.
“Wooden walls, terrazzo floors, and cool light- ing — all of that turns heads and is the stuff that people will remember in terms of how it looks,” he said. “But what we’re really looking for is dif- ferent behavior.”
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Barbara Palmer is senior editor of Convene. ON THE WEB
› For more information about Sentry Centers, visit sentrycenters.com.
› Read “More Than a Feeling,” a Convene article about how environment affects learning and other aspects of meetings, at convn.org/space-design.