A Storied History and a Bright Future
Designed by iconic architect Marcel Breuer, BRIC (Boca Raton Innovation Campus) was IBM’s North American R&D facility in the 1960s, and today, at 1.7 million square feet, is the largest single-office facility in Florida. Home to the invention of their first personal computer, you could say that the future began there.
Determined to keep that spirit of innovation alive, our client Crocker Partners is currently evolving BRIC into a technology hub with the addition of a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) Lab, wellness center, tenant lounges, state-of-the-art fitness studio, event space to host large-scale coding camps and trade shows, on-site daycare, 1,200-seat campus dining room with Bistro cafe, and newly-renovated conference centers in close proximity to public transportation.
The Challenge: Making Big Feel Manageable
Crocker Partners, in a joint effort with Siguler Guff and Rialto Capital Management, purchased BRIC for $179.3 million in the biggest office sale in the tri-county region since 2016. Crocker wanted to position BRIC as a premier science and technology hub in the state of Florida, a destination for the community in addition to office space. But at the time there was little awareness of BRIC online, and not even a website to find it.
Moreover, because BRIC is situated on 123 acres and the building exterior looks the same from many different angles, it can be difficult to navigate for visitors, and even current tenants didn’t know who their neighbors were. How could we solve for these very real offline challenges with online solutions?
The Solution: A Better User Experience
Crocker Partners contracted Primary to create a functional website with a dynamic map that would serve both existing and prospective tenants and guests; to communicate the campus’ many amenities; and house it all in an innovative design that would match the innovative location.
We determined that an interactive map would be the key to accessing BRIC. We held an interdepartmental User Experience workshop for our 3D visualization, design, web development, and creative teams to explore how an ideal map experience should feel.
We ultimately chose to render the campus in 3D, and then overlaid each building with a vector object, enabling users to click on each building and identify tenant locations on multiple floors. Unlike a standard Google Map, our custom-developed map helps you travel around campus through a search field and a legend that pinpoints all amenities.
Every amenity gets the spotlight on the site with compelling visuals and copy, and accessing the amenity portal, where employees can reserve meeting spaces, sign-up for the fitness center, and place service requests, is seamless.
Our web design drew inspiration from the campus’ architect, Marcel Breuer, whose Modernist vision came to life in Y-shaped concrete support columns along each building’s exterior that resemble trees, which also help withstand a category 5 hurricane. Just as the tree-like columns would serve as the foundational element of the building’s integrity, so too would they support our website’s visual theme, as witnessed in the form of subtle animations and angular shapes containing content.
The Result: Form and Function United
According to Gianna Pacinelli, Marketing Director at Crocker Partners, “We didn’t have much of a vision or expectations for what we wanted BRIC’s website to look like. We just knew we had problems that needed to be solved. Primary helped us weed through the options and moving parts to put together an organized and interesting launchpad that identified both the past and future of BRIC.”
Like BRIC itself, the new website is built for future expansion. And as BRIC grows, Crocker Partners has the ability to add more information to the website ongoing themselves, including news, tenant information, amenities and more.
