Bandwidth Global Headquarters – Raleigh
Gensler seamlessly integrated cutting-edge design with community spirit for the Bandwidth Global Headquarters in Raleigh, fostering employee connection and well-being across its expansive, nature-centric 22-acre campus.
Bandwidth is a technology company founded and based in Raleigh, North Carolina. From its early days, it outlined a mission to go “from Sparta to Athens.” This meant that it would start small and scrappy, keeping things all business until the time came for a big next step. Then, Bandwidth would create its Athens — a campus custom-designed to meet its needs. One glance at the company’s new 22-acre campus leaves no doubt: Athens is here.
Everything Bandwidth builds, it builds for its people. This idea is first exemplified by the campus’s functional core, a 439,959-square-foot, five-story office building. At its former location, Bandwidth was split across multiple buildings, making it difficult to foster internal equity. Now unified under a single roof, Bandwidth can be, as it likes to say, “one Band.” Inside, each workstation receives equal design consideration, with both focus and communal spaces crafted to support Bandwidth’s unique work modes.
Like every building on the campus, the office features a front porch concept; a staple of southern architecture that symbolizes home and generosity. The office space is unmistakably hospitality driven, most resoundingly illustrated via the lobby experience. A five-story atrium is made of carved wood, forming an organically intersecting staircase capped by a skylight to mimic the feeling of climbing a tree and ascending into the clouds. An adjacent 19,734-square-foot event center — affectionately known as the Barn — provides an indoor/outdoor retreat where employees can celebrate milestones and host events.
Without question, the campus’s beating heart is Ohana, a Montessori-based school for children ages five and under. Offering not just care but on-site education for young children, this facility is a testament to how Bandwidth expresses care not just for its employees, but for its employees’ families. Ohana has 12 classrooms, each designed for reconfiguration, and is organized around outdoor secure play and learning spaces with ample connections to the rest of campus. Parents are encouraged to visit with their kids throughout the day to share lunch or take a walk down to the creek together.
The Bandwidth campus, nestled between a farm, research forest, state fairground, and a connecting greenway, is expressly geared toward giving people opportunities to enjoy the outdoors. Whether hiking, running, or cycling, Bandwidth employees can revel in the campus’s calm seclusion and emphasis on both individual and collective wellbeing. The campus also features a fitness center that includes a state-of-the-art gym, yoga studio, and basketball courts.
Throughout the design process, Gensler worked closely with landscape architect Surface 678, to thoughtfully incorporate native plants in naturally evolving ecosystems across the campus. At the center of the campus lies a large pond that’s sidled by an outdoor amphitheater, and on the campus’s south end is a full-size soccer field and an apiary for beekeeping to support a diversity of flowering plants.
This new campus, the shining Athens reflecting the company’s many years of growth and dedication to its people, leaves no stone unturned in pursuit of that end.
Design: Gensler
Photography: Magda Biernat, Mark Herboth
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