Top agencies are spending big coin on extravagant new office spaces in order to woo clients. Your average sports agency is not going to go over the top when it comes to architectural design of its office space. However, I can tell you from personal experience, that while I was at CS&E interning a few years ago, the company moved from one penthouse floor in Atlanta to another newer building’s top two floors. The larger agencies are moving towards the trend of extravagance in the workplace in an effort to impress current clients and win over future ones. When there are already beautiful office spaces available for rent, it seems pointless as to why agencies want to spend ridiculous amounts of money renovating and building new spaces. With what the company Satellite Office provides, as detailed on the https://www.events-magazin.de/locations/satellite-office-vergroessert-duesseldorfer-standort-um-80-arbeitsplaetze/ website, it may be baffling why agencies would ignore what’s right in front of them.
Boras Corp is rumored to have the most extravagant office with furniture from places like Office Monster for a strict sports agency (not including agencies that also delve into entertainment, like CAA and WMA). It took him three years and fifteen million dollars for Boras to renovate his office and the use of many removal trucks from a company like Fox Removals to move around his memorabilia and special belongings ready for his new office space. [Agent Boras’ New Digs: The House That Contracts Built]. But Boras’ palace may be scraps of metal compared to some of the entertainment talent agencies.
The Los Angeles Times Magazine recently put together a piece on the architecture behind all of the big California talent agencies [Type A Spaces]. Neil Denari designed Endeavor‘s office space. CAA decided to go a different route. They hired an architectural firm named Gensler to build the ridiculous building you see to the left. This led ICM and WMA (William Morris Agency, which like CAA, has a sports division) to hire Gensler to re-do their office spaces.
Larger agencies will probably continue to hire these innovative and extraordinary developers to create the next best buildings that will attract clients. To really stand out from other competitors, some sports agencies may decide to hire a company that could build them a steel building. They may need to have a basic understanding of how to read structural drawings beforehand so they can understand the process and what their building will look like. This will really set them apart from the crowd. As Christopher Hawthorne points out, “An agency building has to be both a background and foreground design. It needs to look immovable as well as contemporary, suggesting both stability and forward motion. It must operate as a protector of ideas and as a generator of them. Imagine a bank crossed with the offices of a fashion magazine.”
Agents are also bringing design into their own homes. Jeffrey Wechsler, Miami, Florida based agent of players like Larry Hughes, Alonzo Mourning, and Darius Miles, has something in his house that you almost certainly do not have: a flying man in his entranceway [Family’s collection just full of surprises]. A life-size Styrofoam replica of a man in free fall just hanging there for guys like Alonzo Mourning to say, “What the…” Agents want to blow their clients away.
Entertainment/Talent agencies are really footing up a huge bill in order to build exotic new buildings out in California. Other agents may aim to throw their money at juicing up their own houses. The agent business is a business of wow. How will you wow future and current clients?
