Often Wrong, Never in Doubt by Donny Deutsch

Author:Donny Deutsch [Donny Deutsch]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061751035
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2005-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

The Corporate Homeland Security Theory

I gave our architect three words: industrial art gallery.

Its physical environment can say a lot about how an organization sees itself. It’s your home. Live in it.

In 1999 we outgrew our offices on Park Avenue South and went looking for space. I was never going to inconvenience our staff or clients by moving to a part of town that was inefficient. Moving out of town was out of the question; even if it had been cheaper to move to New Jersey, it would have been the wrong statement. Because we were innovators, trailblazers, on the cutting edge yet ruled by common sense, we weren’t ever going to move to Midtown and become a Madison Avenue firm. That wasn’t going to happen. I wanted a part of town that was new but not yet super hot, one that our presence could make even hotter, a place where we could get a great deal because that area or that building would be elevated by our presence. I wanted a very open space because we ran a very open operation.

I found an entire floor, 120,000 square feet, in a building downtown in Manhattan’s meat-packing district. The space ran from Fifteenth to Sixteenth Street, from Eighth to Ninth Avenue. A wide-open city block, east to west and north to south. You can sense a real estate wave as it starts to move and the area just had the whiff of excitement. It has since become the hottest area in Manhattan. The building’s owners had nothing but back-office tenants and were looking for a front-office name to make their mark. I always want to be in the new frontier; I don’t want to pay for someone else’s pioneering. The guy after me paid that price after we had credentialed the place.

It was the old Port Authority building. They used to drive trucks right inside. The floors were old and beat-up, but they were original concrete, not some newly poured facsimile. There was an aura of authenticity to the entire space that was unassailable.

I found a brilliant architect, Fred Schwartz, whose portfolio was impeccable and seemed to have the taste level I was looking for: simple, raw but sophisticated. I met him and liked his attitude and found he was at that position in his career arc where he could build his brand further by putting his soul into our place. (Apparently it worked. Several years later, after the tragedy of 9/11, Fred was runner-up for the redesign of the World Trade Center. Actually, he won the competition but got undermined by politics.)

I didn’t give Fred a set of pictures cut out of architectural magazines; that would have defeated his imagination. I gave him three words: industrial art gallery. In a gallery there is nothing but the paintings, and I wanted a simplicity and starkness that would suggest that the advertising we placed on our walls was highly valued. I wanted our people and the work we produced to be the things of value, but I wanted a very industrial feel.

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