The Brickyard is a 250,000 SF workplace campus for one of the country’s most influential social media companies. The campus hosts a dynamic workforce engaged in a wide variety of operations, requiring a functional and engaging workspace. The two campus parcels include cafes, training rooms, virtual reality workstations, event spaces, libraries, terraces, game and music rooms, mothers’ rooms, and other workshops.

The existing buildings presented both technical and functional limitations: horizontally organized floorplates with little vertical circulation and inter-floor connection, and post-tensioned concrete slab construction. To form a cohesive vertical campus, a bespoke steel staircase was installed. Placed closed to the heavily glazed façade, the inter-floor connection is eye-catching from outside. From inside, repeated flights of stairs meander through communal areas, creating connections across multiple floors and encouraging the use of the stairs themselves as collective spaces.

To install the stair, existing post-tensioned steel cables within the stair’s footprint were de-tensioned, cut, and re-tensioned at the edges of the new slab opening. The new edges and re-tensioning plates are concealed by a continuous steel channel which provides a clean demarcation of the new vertical circulation and structural point of connection. The flights are as simple as possible – steel plate treads infilled with lightweight concrete welded directly to one-inch-thick steel plate stringers. Steel stanchions are welded directly to the stair stringers and support a stainless-steel cable-mesh guardrail. The continuous guardrail wraps the stairs and slab opening, providing secure fall protection without sacrificing transparency.