The art of alchemy: simple materials are magically transformed in these offices for a film company in Santa Monica.

Though most adults spend around half their waking hours in some form of workplace, many companies seem to regard an environment that offers space, light, privacy, or even a desk with a return, as tantamount to corporate suicide. These days, office interiors may be cheap but they sure ain't cheerful, proof of the triumph of gradgrinding middle management-think that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Truly, the bleak shall inherit the earth.

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Which is why it is heartening to report on Pugh + Scarpa's latest foray into the terra nulla of the workplace interior, here imaginatively recasting space for a post-production company in Santa Monica. Even though the project is clearly at the creative rather than call centre end of the spectrum, it manifests an intelligence and finesse, both in its disposition of space and handling of materials. It feels crafted, considered and humane, increasingly rare qualities in the flattened out and dumbed down world of work.

The client provides post production services for television commercials, including creative and off-line editing, film transfer, special, visual and audio effects. The brief involved remodelling a small, single-storey building originally designed by Frank Gehry in the early 1960s. Context and programme led the architects to conceive of the interior as being like a film or freeway, framing and containing reality.

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The outcome deftly explores and choreographs the tension between materials and form. The interior is, in effect, a skin or surface wrapper that alternately conceals and reveals the building fabric. Though the programme requires many sorts of cellular spaces (for editing, design, conferences and so on), these are distinguished by different formal treatments. Some resemble giant fish tanks or vitrines enclosed by translucent acrylic panels in jewel-like hues. Panels are backlit from skylights, transforming cheap plastic into something altogether richer and more enigmatic. Light is also employed as an ordering device, drawing you in and through the labyrinthine interior.

Set against this glowing translucence is a long, opaque wall of timber enclosing the necessarily hermetic audiovisual suites. Like soft fabric, the timber ripples and heaves with sensuous vitality, and door panels are so seamlessly integrated that the wall reads as one continuous, impermeable surface. Only the initiated know where and how to gain admittance.

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A common theme of the work of Pugh + Scarpa is a fascination with the idea of transcending traditional craft processes and dignifying modest materials. The timber wall was constructed by direct transfer, in which computer models were whizzed straight from the architects to a CNC router in the fabrication workshop. Some 74 Douglas fir glulam beams of varying thickness were sculpted by direct automation, virtually eliminating the need for traditional handcraft. Both the timber and the acrylic are transformed in unexpected ways, part of an elegant architectural alchemy that goes way beyond predictable one liners. Middle-managers everywhere will hate it.

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