Forsman & Bodenfors

01/08

The award-winning advertising agency Forsman & Bodenfors in Gothenburg had been working on relocating its various companies under one roof for some time. Having worked with Forsman & Bodenfors in various constellations for a long time, we were asked to develop a proposal for an office building on a narrow plot in the Merkur block on Skeppsbron, in central Gothenburg.

The advertising agency’s idea of a creative headquarters as an almost industrial building – a reference was the Center Pompidou in Paris – turned out to marry well with the city’s ambition to revitalize Stora Badhusgatan and Skeppsbron with outward-facing businesses and creative industries. In the end, we designed an office building of eight floors and approx. 8,000 square meters of floor area, as well as all the furnishings for the two tenants so far: Forsman & Bodenfors on five floors and Axel Arigato on two floors.

Forsman & Bodenfors’ central role in the process from before the first sketch made it possible for design concepts for the exterior and the interior to be developed together. Even though the entire building was tailored to the advertising agency’s conditions, the natural answer was to work with general and raw office floors to create robustness and flexibility that can handle the tenant’s constantly changing needs.

The interior design was developed in close collaboration with the tenant and takes inspiration from the aesthetics of industrial buildings with clean materials and a visual simplicity. The result was an ‘outside, inside’, where the character of the built materials was emphasized and where added surface layers were minimized.

A concept for the furniture was created with reference to Donald Judd’s ascetic design, where geometric wooden structures become seating and tables. Beech was consistently chosen for furniture as well as fixed furnishings and interior parts, an undeservedly untrendy material that is both robust and beautiful, and it felt like a statement to highlight this material in the interior.

Typology	Office interior
Size	3500 sqm
Year	2022
Status	Completed
Participants	Staffan Holm (furniture)

Client	Forsman & Bodenfor
Team	Bornstein Lyckefors Architects: Johan Olsson, Per Bornstein, Andreas Lyckefors, Viktor Stansvik, Johanna Engloo, Viktor Fagrell, Marina Pettersson, Joel Gödecke, Edvard Nyman, Rebecca Wallin
Location	Gothenburg, Sweden
Photography	Erik Lefvander