Studio A at WASA completes new offices for Tocquville.

Studio A at WASA, an architectural and interiors firm, has announced the completion of a new office for Tocqueville Asset Management in midtown Manhattan.

A 25,000-s/f full floor located at 40 West 57th Street, Tocqueville's new office features a unique folding ceiling that projects a sense of animation and an interactive working environment.

Studio A's design meets Tocqueville's desire to have a facility that would have a glassy, open-plan configuration to reflect an open and interactive organization, but also house its managers in enclosed perimeter offices. Offices at Tocqueville's new location were devised with floor-to-ceiling glazed walls, to provide the extraordinary midtown views. To make a walled-in area at the project's interior more visually appealing, a ceiling system was designed that Studio A principal Jack Esterson said acts as an all-purpose "sculpture for working."

The ceiling, lowered below the level of a beautiful exposed concrete waffle slab, folds and unfolds like a giant origami, with ceiling cut-outs where light is needed, and planes hanging down from it where spatial divisions are programmatically required.

Whenever an incision is made in the ceiling plane, the resultant cut-out folds down or across and becomes a functioning devise.

"This strategy serves to animate the space and defines it in a loose but programmatically-driven way," Esterson said. "It also serves to tie together the disparate parts of this large open work space, and relieves it from a relentlessness so often found in corporate interiors."