OMAHA VICTORY.

While responding to the landscape, design of new offices on the outskirts of Omaha, Nebraska expresses the adventurous spirit of its occupants.

Randy Brown Architects' design of offices in Omaha, Nebraska, continues the practice's interest in breaking down the banal and stereotypical. As before, in the design of Brown's own house and studio (AR November 1997), and in that of offices for a building contractor (AR May 1999), the practice has employed vigorous constructivist means to shape the scheme to site and purpose. Like its precursors, the building has a serendipitous quality with angled planes, strange asymmetries and conjunctions contrived out of familiar industrial materials such as birch ply, lengths of Glulam, translucent polycarbonate, silky stainless steel and corrugated metal.

The triangular site on the edge of Omaha forms one corner of a junction between two arterial streets. Its remaining side is bordered by a meandering ravine lined with trees. Close collaboration between clients, architects and site workers was a feature of the project; and after discussion it was decided that the various departments of the firm should be housed in two buildings, rather than one, and the spaces between them considered as part of the overall design of the site.

The first phase of the scheme, now completed, stands beside the ravine at the south-west entrance to the site and eventually will face its companion built within the site's curved apex across a service road. The building running north-south also falls into two parts: speculative offices still to be occupied on the north side, and purpose-built chambers for the client on the south. These architects' dislike of the featureless box -- coinciding with their clients' desire for 'stimulating offices' that would express the spirit of a dynamic innovative practice -- has resulted in an exotic presence in a familiar suburban landscape of houses, shopping centres and petrol stations.

Looking at the plan you can see how the the southern end has been twisted away from the main mass of the building, fractured and split by a gash running from west to east, its irregular progress through the building evidently inspired by the geological features of the ravine. Throughout design of these law offices the slight deformations from the orthogonal of horizontal and vertical planes, and their meshings, have produced extraordinary volumetric jugglings. Externally the split is indicated by a metal clad structure that encloses a first floor library and conference room before turning into a jutting canopy to emphasize the drama of entrance on the west.

Metal cladding taken inside the building and down the south face of the structure defines one side of a soaring luminous void spanned at first floor level by a void and illuminated by a glass roof and by glazed walls at either end. This passageway contracting and expanding, bristling with detached bits of structure, overhead ducting and planes -- at times metallic, at others translucent or massively opaque -- takes you in an Alice in Wonderland progression from reception (underneath the metal wedge) past offices and kitchen to stairs and ground floor conference room.

As in previous schemes, spaces bleed one into another vertically and horizontally so they become ambiguous. A mezzanine gallery on the south side breaches the upper confines of the double-height conference room which is barely divided from the corridor by a double-height glass wall. Division and surface are further dissolved by a skewed glass slot and the large east-facing window that leans inward, its distorted angles framing trees around the ravine. Elsewhere, on the first floor, delicate translucent walls of wooden framed polycarbonate and screen of corrugated metal have a fleeting, just-knocked-together quality.

But what appears haphazard is deliberately composed as you realize when you examine the sculptural nature of the confection and the careful juxtaposition of materials. Delight in serendipity and the occasional sense of displacement no doubt does much to dispel the complacency traditionally ascribed to lawyers.