Interiors of the company Avast

And even though the grand opening of the new interiors of the most valuable Czech IT company, as well as the manufacturer of the most trusted antivirus in the world, took place at the end of 2015, the interiors of Avast Software were completely finished by the studio VRTIŠKA • ŽÁK only in 2016.

Assignment
The architects began working on the project in the summer of 2014, when they won the tender with an innovative design and interior solution. “We had a specific assignment from the client, which was a clear challenge for us. To create a more playful office and environment than Google has in Zurich. Therefore, we invested most of our creativity at the beginning into finding new informal solutions in modern offices. The main theme was to find elements that would not only be attractive but also practical and widely used by all employees. The next challenge was to solve the layout of the company, the distribution of individual departments while maintaining as airy space as possible with maximum privacy,” comments Roman Vrtiška, one of the authors.
At Avast's Prague headquarters, we can find a private restaurant (the operation and consumption for employees is covered by the company), an internal central staircase spanning all seven floors, a gym, a workshop, a recording studio, a children's corner, a cinema, a game room, a golf simulator, a library, or a relaxation room full of hammocks and umbrellas. This quantity of non-standard elements for offices, however, has its reason. “The IT segment is currently one of the fastest-growing in the world, and thus there is a great demand for new talents when recruiting new employees, which the company can now attract, not only thanks to these attractive spaces. It is essential that Avast promotes a relatively benevolent and liberal strategy towards its employees, allowing us to integrate these elements into the interiors and essentially equip almost the entire floor,” adds architect Vrtiška.

Solution
The authors sought to incorporate the relaxed atmosphere that prevails at Avast into the interiors and, at the same time, highlight the company's IT origin and technological background through the use of industrial materials. Therefore, the duo VRTIŠKA • ŽÁK decided to place a core in the relatively narrow footprint of the building, which runs along its longitudinal axis and concentrates most of the spaces that are not workplaces (meeting rooms, phone booths, private work cabins, printing corners, etc.).
This core was chosen by the architects as a dominant element throughout all floors and was subsequently clad in white trapezoidal sheet metal, highlighting the slightly industrial character of the spaces. In this white metal mass, variously colored spaces for the mentioned functions are “bitten out,” with each room having its identical color (meeting room yellow, phone booths pink, work cabins blue, printing and coffee corners black, and others green), which serves not only as a color accent but also as orientation points in the space. Additionally, these rooms are completely lined with felt material (made from 100% recycled PET), which greatly improves their acoustic properties. “Basically, we managed to create such small recording studios,” clarifies Vladimír Žák, the second author.
A rather non-traditional solution is the stairs in the offices. Vladimír Žák adds: “We wanted to maintain the natural flow of employees and not limit people's movement only to the elevator. Movement is healthy and belongs to the human body; moreover, when you take the elevator just one floor up and wait for it for several minutes, it doesn't boost you at all. In contrast, running up a few stairs does. Besides, the staircase has become a kind of 'mixing point' in the office, with a large number of people flowing through and the elevators being used minimally. We intentionally widened this staircase so that employees could gather there, use it for informal meetings, and just hang out. Around the staircase, we also designed kitchens with dining tables and relaxation areas in the form of comfortable sofas and armchairs. In the imaginary center of the space, a very effective place for relaxation is created. The carpet here also has a different color – compared to the gray shades we use in the offices, we chose a brown scale here, so employees do not feel like they are still in the office when they go to relax.”

Semi-open Offices
An interesting solution to the problem of open space – the open space concept – is the so-called "mancave." These are semi-open offices that are executed in various materials on each floor, such as wood, steel, cement boards (Cetris), expanded metal, or cork. “We wanted to create a living organism, offices that give people the opportunity to truly use them. The entire project was essentially one big analysis of life in an 'IT office' and its study. We tried to avoid common stereotypes and offer Avast a completely different perspective on work in offices. This directly relates, among other things, to our idea of so-called office golf. Essentially, it is our own invention, where we tried to encourage employees to move regularly across all floors. Each office floor has a total of eighteen holes, just like a regular golf course. Moreover, everything is designed so that each one has different levels of difficulty. Employees can thus walk between individual floors during meetings, brainstorm, and also get to places they would normally not reach while working. The idea of office golf is indirectly related to the scooters, which are custom-made for Avast and are freely available on all floors. The building is 135 meters long, so the scooter is an ideal, simple, and fast way to move between floors,” the authors add.