Nike Icon Studios LA is the flagship studio housing the company's Global Brand Imaging operations. Facilitating a diverse range of photography and imaging capacity - print, editorial, product, imagery, video, post-production, and editing - all under one roof, Nike Icon Studios LA is a building packed with activity.
Combining this creative energy with the highly exacting technological and performative requirements of the space - and reflective of Nike’s ethos - the project design was conceived around confluent ideas pairing art and science. At its core, the project intends to embrace and bolster Nike’s restless spirit of constant innovation. Uniquely located outside of Nike’s World Headquarters (WHQ) campus in Beaverton, Oregon, this remote hub is strategically positioned to both connect Nike to its storied and long-standing Los Angeles roots, while placing their image and branding operations at the heart of the “image capital of the world”.
LOHA's design for the studio is organized within an existing 42,000 square foot linear, prefabricated core and shell building (487 feet long by 86 feet wide). It's arranged in a fashion that distills the complete photography process down, which has traditionally been outsourced, into an entirely efficient, in-house process. Influenced by the base buildings linear geometry, the project is organized along a central spine that runs throughout, serving as the primary circulation for both people and product that all of the programs generate from.
The ground level houses the more intensive production functions. Bifurcated by the main entry and multi-story social core of the project, product and editorial imagery are located in separate ends of the space. Each of the production spaces are built to the ideal specifications set by the requirements of their operations, but also made to be modular, re-combinable, and entirely flexible. Functioning like a camera itself, the studio is designed like a series of lenses that controls the light quality within. Instead of resorting to opaque hard surfaces as a means of separation, the spatial sequencing varies in degrees of transparency and opacity - hard and soft - as you move both horizontally and vertically across the building’s two levels. This material layering provides a higher degree of light quality, allowing light to pass from the perimeter into the building in an intentional and controlled way.