Fancy Football? Onefootball's Office by TKEZ Architects

Onefootball's new office throbs with the energy of a crowd, drawing its visitors past plum- and coral- hued thinking-chambers, foosball-table collaboration rooms, and glass-walled offices spaces. This tech start-up atmosphere fills the hub of an old factory in Berlin, providing an innovative space for employees and fans to live out the heart-beat frenzy of the world's most popular sport.

Onefootball's logo brings to mind road signs, circle-and-rectangle figures warning drivers of pedestrian pathways, or children playing. Here, the tilted figure leans in for a kick, ball awaiting its forward movement. The image is simple, pruned down to its essential signifiers: human and motion. TKEZ Architects uses the idea of a footballer as the focal concept of ONEfootball's office. In this space, open air reigns and turf greenways snake between offices, meeting rooms, and relaxation spaces. It's a former factory - now gutted, with its core removed - and a new façade only hints at the dynamic space within.

A football player in motion carries force, and a powerful inevitability. And in this design it parallels an idea gathering force, tearing down the turf, breaching defenders to have a shot at a goal. Onefootball's office literally guides its workers and visitors via turf. A white-striped artificial greenway draws eyes and feet as it it circumnavigates the office. The fresh color and stadium aesthetic add a jolt to a multipurpose space of white walls, hung-bar lights, and brushed concrete surfaces. It is industrial-simple, like the interior of a stadium, but functional. Glass floor-to-ceiling walls with electric curtains allow privacy on demand, but more often than that, an openness and conviviality. Workers can choose to work in cleverly-sequestered thinking spaces, or turn to multi-hued collaboration spaces. The translation of theme to design is continually woven in to space functionality. The collaboration rooms even have enlarged floor decals revealing the arrows and marks of a team playbook: conversation and teamwork undergird everything.

Onefootball brings detail and passion to the sports tracking game. The app features comprehensive stats, and brings a global approach to football fandom. Featuring over 100 international teams and functional in 9 languages, the company hopes to create a worldwide community through not only the app but this new space, each of which bring conversation - and a zeal for the game - to the fore. The space is meant to make its employees not merely feel active, but spontaneous - to act on creative impulse and to utilize their colleagues for an interdisciplinary, team-based approach. The final touch - a recreation in miniature of a football arena - provides space for employees and their families to enjoy games from all over the world on a big screen. TKEZ Designs creates a rare design which actually transforms the company who uses it, and not merely the space. This is powerful, and an important model for design that gets carried away by its own embellishment: make a space in which people are transformed and can grow, a space which does not merely tell, but influences its users.

Photography by Benjamin Antony Monn. Follow @BenjaminAntonyMonn