Dairy Farmers of America

1 / 28

Modern Meeting Room with Acoustic Glass Panels - Sliding Doors

2 / 28

3 / 28

4 / 28

5 / 28

6 / 28

7 / 28

Modern office lounge with mustard yellow armchairs and a white table, leading to a conference room with frameless sliding glass doors.

8 / 28

Modern office lounge facing a glass-walled conference room with sliding glass doors and a long conference table with chairs.

9 / 28

Modern office lounge facing a glass-walled conference room with fully opened sliding glass walls, seamlessly merging the lounge and conference areas.

10 / 28

11 / 28

Modern conference room with partially open sliding glass doors, wooden table, leather chairs, and adjacent lounge area for collaborative work.

12 / 28

Modern office space with a glass-walled conference room featuring a long wooden table, leather chairs, and an adjacent lounge area with armchairs for collaborative work.

13 / 28

14 / 28

15 / 28

16 / 28

17 / 28

18 / 28

19 / 28

20 / 28

21 / 28

22 / 28

23 / 28

24 / 28

25 / 28

26 / 28

27 / 28

28 / 28

1 / 3

2 / 3

3 / 3

Building for The Present and The Future

To accommodate not only current requirements but also future undefined needs, flexibility is an increasingly important aspect of office design. Spaces large enough to host an occasional mass meeting or social event are expensive luxuries unless they can also be used for other, more frequent activities. By designing rooms with NanaWall PrivaSEE opening glass walls, large spaces can divide on demand into smaller spaces with a high degree of acoustic privacy, while maintaining a sense of openness.

The Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) is the fourth largest dairy product company in the world. Their new office, a purpose-built three-story building in Kansas City was designed to express the organization’s identity. “This is a farmer-owned cooperative and represents and honors the farmer,” explains Eric Linebarger of HOK, Des Moines, lead designer of the project.

1 / 3

2 / 3

3 / 3

DFA was formerly headquartered in an antiquated office building with aging infrastructure. DFA decided to construct a new building that would provide a workplace of choice. They came up with a 3-story building, a soft B shape with an open center. The central atrium is dominated by a 25-foot sculpture of pouring milk. A prominent wall is covered in cowhide. A whimsical sense of branding includes a wall of grass, another of bubbles, and one that’s like a red barn, as well as “origins” materials such as barn wood wall cladding.

The new building also reflects the way the company wants to work, changing from 126 offices with no common gathering spaces to 11 offices and 99 meeting rooms. The 2nd and 3rd floors and lined with all-glass meeting rooms that pour light into the interior.

“The nicest meeting room we have in this building,” Massey says, “is the boardroom.” Prominently located at the head of the main staircase, facing a lounge area, the boardroom seems like a box sculpture, symbolizing both their history and their modernity. The grand wood table has a rippling white stripe down the middle to symbolize milk, surrounded by leather seating, weathered barn wood cabinetry and wall cladding, and a long white wall embossed with life-sized bottles of milk. “That’s where we gather when we have guests” comments Massey.

The prominent location, which inspired a boardroom they could really show off, also created a privacy issue. Meetings might require confidentiality, but the room adjoins a high-traffic public area.

“The Nicest Meeting Room We Have in this Building,” Massey says, “is the [PrivaSEE] Boardroom.”

To provide privacy while still being able to showcase the room’s richly symbolic features, HOK selected a NanaWall PrivaSEE, a frameless glass wall system specially designed for high acoustic isolation. The special acoustic glass panels (36 STC) are equipped with specialized acoustic seals, panel-to-panel edge-seals and drop-down floor seals that deploy automatically when the panels are locked together.

Despite acoustical issues in many other parts of the building, the boardroom is reported to function exceptionally well, and serve its purpose as intended. Massey notes that the building’s other NanaWall, expanding the first-floor café onto the patio, is opened frequently, bringing in the countryside views where cows are often seen grazing.

What Our Customers Have to Say

1 / 21

2 / 21

3 / 21

4 / 21

5 / 21

6 / 21

7 / 21

8 / 21

9 / 21

10 / 21

11 / 21

12 / 21

13 / 21

14 / 21

15 / 21

16 / 21

17 / 21

18 / 21

19 / 21

20 / 21

21 / 21

Helios

In a tenant improvement, available space is finite, and at a premium. See how to transform space, on demand, into different-sized rooms with different functionalities.

See Case Study

1 / 9

2 / 9

3 / 9

4 / 9

5 / 9

6 / 9

7 / 9

8 / 9

9 / 9

Snap on

The goal at Snap-on Tools was to have a flexible space where smaller areas could be opened up to each other to accommodate large groups and still be able to afford some sense of privacy and quiet when the spaces were divided.

See Case Study

“NanaWall also allowed us to have the open corner, and that was critical to the design. Other systems would have required a post.”

— Hakee Chang, Architect

See Case Study