The factory-wide renovation of Boeing's 98.3 acre factory at Everett was about improving the efficiency of production, and improving the work experience for the 30,000 employees who work there around the clock
Boeing Everett is the largest building in the world by volume, and is the size of a small city. The factory consists of a series of enormous "assembly lines" for large commercial aircraft separated by 5 story office towers, "buildings within the building". The factory is the major economic entity in the city of Everett.
Because of its size, the Boeing Everett factory was faced with a number of challenges for its users - the factory workers, office workers, and service employees who spent the majority of their awake hours within the building's space.
Through a stakeholder discovery process, the design team helped the client to identify critical success factors for the project, and problems which the factory renovation needed to solve. Among these success factors were:
1. Providing a connection to nature: within the factory walls, there was no daylight, no sense of time of day, and no sense of the natural environment beyond the factory.
2. Providing a connection to the product: workers in the office towers had no windows, they worked in a dense arrangement of cubicles, and there were physical barriers separating the product teams in the towers from the workers on the factory floor below who were building the planes.
Initial user and stakeholder research culminated in a set of core design principles which guided the the course of the three year design and construction process.
The architectural team collaborated extensively with the environmental graphics team to develop a site-wide kit of parts "urban plan" for the factory that integrated architecture, graphic wayfinding, skylights, open office spaces, collaboration zones, and amenity spaces.
Work on this project was done while at NBBJ.
Architectural Team: Brent Rogers (Principal), Pat Whempner (Lead Interior Designer), Keith Nielsen (Project Manager), Case Creal, Shih-hao Kuo, Alexandra Lara, Kazuya Mizuno, Kathleen Monda, Jan Ralkowski, Checha Sokolovic, Yoojin Sung, Samuel Sze
Environmental Graphics Team: Eric Levine (Principal), Samuel Stubblefield, Yusuke Ito
Photography by Sean Airhart
