Designed and built by SHED Architecture before the pandemic, video-game developing company, Edios-Montreal, has evolved its studio from a two-employee space to a 50,000 square foot two-story office accommodating nearly 500 people.
The main development challenge for the design team was to unify the two levels in the office into a coherent space. To resolve this, the architects were inspired by the principles of urbanism to conceive the design. The studio was built in the image of a city where a community of Eidossians and Eidossians live.
The growing studio requested a warm, human-scale space for its designers, creatives and artists. The studio manager wanted the employees to envision Eidos-Montreal as a place to come home. Inspired by the sense of community that reigns in the studio, the architects designed the layout of the new space with a village in mind.
The urban language is declined on the scale of the office: the rooms, the corridors and the entrance hall give way to houses, alleys, small squares and a large public square.
The creative rooms, meeting rooms and management offices are all volumes that participate in the play of solids and voids that form the basis of the city. Their locations naturally create paths that converge towards the forum, where the heart of the studio opens on two levels.
In the closed rooms, designed as small buildings, the windows open onto other windows and the skylight-style lighting recreates natural light. This reconstruction is inspired by the work of creating universes that the studio offers in its video games.
The row offices in the studio have been arranged to offer more sinuous, and less rectilinear circulation areas. The Pods are working pavilions where informal and creative meetings can be held, helping to break the orthogonal framework.
Inspired by the company logo and the graphics of some of their games, the triangular shape is found in many elements of the layout: from the handles of the wardrobes to the tables, through the stools and the bookcase.
The centerpiece of the project is its ceiling which conceals the mechanics over the entire surface of the studio in a visual signature specific to the agency. Designed and made to measure, this grid made up of thousands of triangles accompanies the areas of courses and meetings, while camouflaging technical disorders.
