Well-connected.

These new offices in Omaha, Nebraska are a practical demonstration of the contractor client's skills and the architects' ingenious inventiveness.

Randy Brown's commission to design offices for the John Luce Company in Omaha, Nebraska, was the direct consequence of Luce's involvement in constructing an office building designed by the practice. John Luce is a general contractor with a skilled team of design-conscious craftsmen. Having experienced at first hand the architects' idiosyncratic approach to structure and the organization of space, and intrigued by the pleasure they take in using ordinary materials in extraordinary ways, Luce asked the practice for offices that would be a practical demonstration to clients of his firm's craftsmanly skills.

At first glance Brown's work has a delightfully serendipitous quality. But the constructivist language employed in the organization of space is very carefully composed and the assemblies possess vigour and a kind of rough elegance. The house and studio Brown designed, also in Omaha (AR November 1997), bristles with exposed posts and joists, visible connections, angled planes and flying pieces of metal. Spaces bleed one into another vertically and horizontally so that they become ambiguous. You can see the same hand at work in subsequent schemes, and particularly clearly in John Luce's new quarters.

The scheme provides a reception area, workstations, a private office and conference rooms, all of which have been inserted into the amorphous interior of a prefabricated metal warehouse shell. Accepting the industrial nature of the building, the architects retained the concrete floor, giving it a coating of epoxy resin, and exposed the rust red structural steels and parts of the corrugated metal shell.

Since a great deal had to be packed into limited space, a mezzanine gallery was constructed. Irregular in plan, and reached by stairs in the centre of the building, the gallery describes a series of voids so that some spaces on the ground floor, such as the reception area and conference rooms, have clear views through to the roof of the building.

Volumes are contained and given shape by floating divisions of various degrees of transparency. A solid painted wall divides off a service section with lavatories at the rear; sheets of birch plywood fixed to angled posts form a latticed screen between a conference room and kitchen; upstairs, sheets of Plexiglas fixed to pinewood frames make translucent walls around a more private room.

Introducing luminance into the building was a concern. There are few openings in the metal shell and the architects were prevented by the planning authorities from cutting skylights into the roof (it was thought they would leak). So standard shopfitting fluorescents concealed by roof members are used to create an impression of daylight which is diffused through the voids into the ground floor and supplemented by local sources of light.

Connections are vigorously expressed and various, and are an important part of Brown's constructive aesthetic. On one side of the staircase the treads abut the stringer; on the other, they run over the stringer to support the metal uprights of fine balustrading. And manifesting Brown's delight in using materials devised for one purpose in other ways, the treads are made of lengths of Glulam truss - just as the translucent walls are made of the plastic sheeting normally used for signage. At times, such subversions reach poetic heights. In a ground floor meeting room, an overarching metal sheet sheds a silvery radiance over a concrete table top - the whole composition acquires a sculptural presence.

This is a clever scheme. The vaguely unfinished air of the various assemblies and the flashes of real elegance, the detailing and conjunctions of materials, are continually intriguing. With imagination and skill, a great deal has been conjured out of very little.

Architect Randy Brown Architects

Projects architects Randy Brown, Matthew Kruntorad, Ken Koense, Geoff DeOld, Kimberly Brown.

Contractor John Luce

Photographer Farshid Assassi