Pinterest Hq

The new Pinterest headquarters in San Francisco is inspired by the redesign of the company's web platform - clean, simple, intuitive. The building is a four story concrete structure with mushroom columns and exposed slabs. It previously housed a John Deer factory in San Francisco’s Central SOMA district. The program is organized as porous, concentric layers around a large, central interconnecting atrium and stair. The program includes: large “town hall” all-hands /dining space on the ground floor, expansive open workspace on the upper three floors, and numerous meeting rooms - formal and informal, team rooms, lounge spaces, quiet room, maker lab, coffee bar, and design studio. A key aspect of the design involved extending the existing two story atrium to the ground floor, creating a central void at the building’s center that visually connects all four floors— into which was inserted the main communication stair.  The stair acts as the central organizing figure to the space at all levels. Clean, white and awash in daylight, this central stair - referred to as the Knitting Stair in reference to the company’s collaborative ethos represented by the act and product of knitting - takes the form of perforated volume that doubles back on and intersects itself at its midpoint. The intersection allows people unexpected glimpses between two flights of people moving up and down within the stair’s interior volume. The stair is  constructed using twin-walled white painted perforated metal surfaces in two different perforation densities: larger holes on the outer surface and smaller holes on the inner surface. It appears translucent from the outside, and more opaque from the interior. This twin wall of perforated steel panels also creates a subtle and dynamic moire and interplay between the light of day coming through the large skylight above and the integrated LED light strips along its