The design of the Spotify At Mateo Campus in Los Angeles’s Arts District meets the challenge Spotify outlined for a visionary model to support their hypergrowth as an audio platform. The design is not just a backdrop, it is a catalyst for creating the cultural experience for the employees and visiting artists' labels and partners.
The campus encompasses three buildings, with spaces that represent the full industry process from music creation to podcast recording to creative workplace. An array of highly technical but intuitive recording studios, listening rooms, writers’ rooms, and editing suites bring a casual vibe to the creation process. The performance stage and screening rooms emphasize the scale at which the facility can invite both new and top talent. Amenities like the food hall, coffee bar, and pitstops create a series of casual cafes, more like a social club than a workplace.
The design incorporates interesting and diverse palettes to create a place that envelopes the users in an audio journey allowing for artists and creators to use the facility as a backdrop in content capture. This campus recreates the sparkle of Los Angeles arts and the allure of the music industry, whilst maintaining a space for inclusiveness encouraging local schools to connect with highly skilled recording teams.
With the entertainment industry scattered across LA, Spotify wanted this campus to actively contrast this by synchronizing the industry functions they needed together in one place. Imagined as an extension of the LA Arts District, the content production facility choreographs unique moments of overlap between the creators and the employees where engagement, creative exchange, and celebration can happen. Experientially, the design reveals innovation by marrying materials and forms that vary in scale and experience amplifying sonic transitions between significant points of interest and local artwork.