Samsung America Headquarters (DS)

• 1.1M sq ft Silicon Valley HQ
• ~2,000 employees, 10 stories
• AIA LA Award of Merit winner

NBBJ needed to design a 1.1 million square foot headquarters housing roughly 2,000 Samsung employees across a 10-story tower, an amenity pavilion, and a shared courtyard, with an explicit brief to maximize spontaneous interaction between employees to support innovation. Because that goal is hard to judge from a floor plan alone, the team needed a way to test and compare design options before committing to one.

The team built a custom Grasshopper plugin, tied to the Rhino massing model and coordinated with the Revit building model, that could simulate a full day of movement for every employee in the building. The tool tracked how many other people each employee could see as they moved through the courtyard-connected tower, distinguishing sightlines on the same floor from sightlines across different floors, and estimated how much each layout had people walking and moving throughout the day.

Grasshopper was chosen specifically because it let the design team quickly compare many different courtyard and floorplate configurations against those same interaction metrics rather than relying on precedent and intuition alone.

The core challenge was that NBBJ's brief to "maximize spontaneous interaction" between employees is a qualitative goal that traditional design tools have no way to test. The team could produce as many massing and courtyard schemes as they wanted, but nothing in a standard 3D or BIM workflow could tell them whether a given configuration actually increased chance encounters, or whether employees on different floors could see and reach each other easily.

Without a way to quantify that interaction, comparing design options risked coming down to opinion rather than evidence, at a scale where a wrong call on tower height, courtyard width, or floorplate shape would be costly to reverse once a 1.1 million square foot building was under construction. The team needed a way to simulate real employee movement across the whole complex and turn "does this design support collaboration" into a measurable, comparable output.

Before this generative workflow, evaluating how well an office design supported cross-team interaction relied mainly on precedent studies, adjacency diagrams, and the design team's own judgment about how a floor plan or courtyard would feel in use.

Architects could sketch and model alternative massing options in a conventional 3D or BIM tool, but there was no way to actually measure how many chance encounters a given layout would produce, whether two employees on different floors could see each other, or how much an employee would need to walk over the course of a normal day. Comparing options meant relying on experience and qualitative reasoning about circulation rather than quantified simulation, which made it hard to say with confidence which of several courtyard or tower configurations would do the most to support the collaboration and innovation goals Samsung had set for the project.

By turning the interaction brief into a measurable simulation, the custom Grasshopper tool gave NBBJ and Samsung a data-driven way to choose between courtyard and tower configurations rather than relying on precedent alone. Each design iteration could be scored on how many chance encounters it produced and how easily employees on different floors could see and reach one another, so trade-offs between floorplate shape, courtyard width, and tower height could be weighed against actual interaction data before construction began.

The completed 1.1 million square foot headquarters houses roughly 2,000 Samsung employees across a 10-story tower, amenity pavilion, and shared courtyard, and the project went on to win an AIA Los Angeles Award of Merit. NBBJ has not published a specific ROI figure for the simulation work, but validating a design's effect on employee interaction before committing to construction represents a meaningful reduction in design risk on a project of this scale, where late changes to circulation or massing would have been far more costly to make.