Pixar’s building is Steve Jobs’s brainchild
In a Harvard Business Review article detailing how Pixar stays creative, Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull says it’s important to break down walls between disciplines. He says strong ties to academia are worth more than any ideas that may be revealed, and that cross-training employees helps them to appreciate what everyone else does.
He also credits Steve Jobs for Pixar’s innovative building layout and how it helps creativity:
Our building, which is Steve Jobs’s brainchild, is another way we try to get people from different departments to interact. Most buildings are designed for some functional purpose, but ours is structured to maximize inadvertent encounters. At its center is a large atrium, which contains the cafeteria, meeting rooms, bathrooms, and mailboxes. As a result, everyone has strong reasons to go there repeatedly during the course of the workday. It’s hard to describe just how valuable the resulting chance encounters are.
— How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity, Ed Catmull, Harvard Business Review, September 2008
When the Pixar campus was being built the press often focused on Jobs’s attention to aesthetics, but I don’t remember much press on just putting the important stuff in the atrium.
Elegant, simple, and practical.