Aragon completes 13,000 s/f of new office space for the Forward Assoc.

Aragon Construction has just completed building a 13,000 s/f office space for the Forward Association, a non-profit Jewish organization that publishes The Forward, America's most influential Jewish weekly newspaper. The office suite at 125 Maiden Ln., a 17-story office building, encompasses much of the building's 8th floor. Aragon built a new executive office wing with private offices, open department areas, conference rooms, informal meeting areas, a reception area, and a broadcast space for video, podcast, and other digital production. The space also features a gallery/performance space. The construction firm paid special attention to the installation of a broad range of materials and surfaces specified by Amie Gross Architects, which used the visual language of the Wiener Werkstätte as a primary inspiration. The palette, for example, is in keeping with those used during the time of the Wiener Werkstätte Materials include marble floors, custom wood doors, several different patterns and colors of carpets, specialty paints, and laser-cut wall panels. The installation also included "borrowed lighting" from internal windows that allow daylight to permeate the office core. "By working collaboratively," said Aragon president and founder Alex Getelman, "the teams were able to make this highly conceptual space into a beautiful and functional reality." The site is specifically designed to be conducive to coordination and collaboration across its various departments of the English and Yiddish newspapers and their award-winning website, the jewishdailyforward.com. "We designed one-of-a-kind group work areas, respecting each department's unique requirements, without using a single generic pattern or layout throughout the entire office space," said Amie Gross AIA, founder and principal at Amie Gross Architects. Gross said that in the art department, for example, employees sit at wheeled desks where they can either work individually or push desks together to create large and collaborative work surfaces. Furthermore, each reporter has compact desk space that features a bookshelf for storing research materials. All of the executive offices have internal conferencing areas where leaders can hold informal staff meetings. Aragon also renovated a 5,000 s/f office space for a sublease tenant for the short term; it will enable the Forward Association to expand its operations in the future. "We were really grateful to Aragon for their incredible speed in producing a project of this size and dimension within budget, under a very tight time frame," said Jaime Birman of Levien & Co., Inc., the owner's representative and project management firm. Aragon delivered the project to substantial completion in a record 10 weeks.