In Dyson's new headquarters, there's a whole lot of one thing. Space.
There's a lot of what I call wasted space, but it's a glorious waste of space.
In 2019, Dyson started renovating St. James, a nearly 100-year-old powerhouse, as it planned to move its headquarters from England to Singapore. And despite sharing a name—
It is utterly coincidental that it's called St. James' Power Station. And when I first came here, in the early 1970s, it was providing electricity for Singapore. Since then, it's been a nightclub and various other things, and now, it's our office.
And since this building is a national monument, everything Dyson built had to be reversible.
Every element was more like an addition as opposed to a subtraction.
The Wall Street Journal toured the Dyson headquarters to see how the company turned a space built for machines into one built for people.
Right now we're at the reception of our global headquarters. This space also used to be the old boiler house.
Originally, St. James was divided into three main buildings: the boiler house, the turbine hall, and the switch gear house.
The majority of the open plan office space is in the old boiler house here, as well as the turbine hall. This is also where we house a lot of our social spaces, like our cafe, our auditorium.
And Dyson put its labs in the old switch gear house because it was already divided up.
If you come around the side here, you start to get a concept of what the building was like when we first came here. It was completely open, and that is the height. It's like a cathedral with these clerestory windows. There's one, two, three, four high, right up the building.
In 2009, St. James was designated as a national monument. So when Dyson leased it in 2019, it had to follow strict guidelines to restore and renovate it.
One of the key parameters was to ensure that the open volume space is always retained. So if you look up here, what we really tried to do is build a building within a building. So all of these new floor slabs rely on a completely new structural system onto a new foundation.
Essentially, everything Dyson added to the 110,000 square foot building had to be completely reversible.
These things can be put in, installed, and then safely taken out afterwards. The main fabric of the building is preserved for another generation. We also like to emphasize what is new and what is old. So if you look at the building, all of the new floor slabs actually rely heavily on the white columns here, which are differentiated from the old columns, which you see here. So you'll see riveted beams everywhere, going all the way up there, and then steel girders across the top to hold the roof. It gives the building two characters, really. The character it had for its first life, and then the character it now has in its second life. And I sort of find that dual function doubly interesting.
So here we go through some strict security, but for some reason he's left the doors open for us.
This used to be the turbine hall. Now it's the atrium. And right past security, you'll see this massive helical staircase.
We knew we wanted vertical circulation. We looked at a myriad of options from straight stairs to scissor stairs, to spiral stairs. And really, as with all Dyson products, its form follows function.
While its function is clear, its form has taken on different meanings.
What I love is that people have drawn a lot of parallels to the stair with things that are related to our products.
When you look at it straight on, it has the look of a drill bit.
Which is a nod to our cyclonic action where we're separating things by centrifugal force in a Cyclone.
Whether it's the motor, whether it's a strand of hair going up, through using the same mindset and the process that we use for designing a building that we do for designing a product, actually, you get these very organic similarities in terms of the design, and that's how they manifest themselves.
