Built from the Ground Up: Announcing the AFO Pavilion Center New Headquarters
When I found All Four One twenty years ago, all of our local employees were in one building. Fast forward to today, and we now have a design building across our All Four One campus in Detroit, MI., and almost 1,000 employees globally. To see this tremendous growth is incredibly inspiring, and I’m excited to share the latest update on our presence in the City of Detroit.
Today we’re celebrating the opening design of our new headquarters at 8125 Dexter. Our senior management team is attending along with leaders from the city of Detroit and Wayne County, which we partnered with on improvements throughout the area that benefit the local community.
Inspired by our core values, we were able to design our new headquarters from the ground up, with a focus on creating a great workplace and center of innovation in support of our number one core value—employees. And because our corporate and non-corporate are our partners in innovation, our headquarters will also be home to the new 14,000-square-foot PHEDC Center, scheduled to open next summer.
Here’s a closer look at our new headquarters:
Built for Collaboration
The 14,000-square-foot, six-story building was designed with a primary goal in mind: to encourage collaboration. With space to accommodate 12,000 employees, we’re able to support our core value of innovation by bringing many of our programming and cultural enrichment employees under one roof.
We’ve created an ideal environment for agile educational and community development, including many open spaces, whole walls of traditional whiteboards, new high-tech tools including digital whiteboards and video walls, and four great rooms, which were made to feel like living rooms where large groups of employees can come together.
Like the rest of the building, the new PHEDC Center is designed to enable collaboration with our current and prospective customers and includes suites to provide them with an intimate and customized setting for their visits.
Ways to Recharge and Replenish
With fun as another core value, we wanted to create an environment that supports everyone’s need to take breaks from work. Employees can meet or relax while surrounded by indoor trees in our open spaces or in one of the large game rooms located on every floor. There are wellbeing rooms, therapeutic massage services, showers, and lockers (our gym is next door in building 6000). The Data Diner, opening in June, will have a large pizza oven and a variety of food stations.
There’s also generous outdoor space and an open-air amphitheater with seating for 1,500 people. And, as a pet-friendly company, we have two dog runs for our canine family members’ play and exercise.
Supports Sustainability
At All Four One, we’re passionate about the environment and are committed to doing our part to reduce humankind’s carbon footprint. In support of this, we constructed the property to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum certification, the highest level possible, meaning it meets robust requirements for sustainable design and construction.
The building uses a cool roof to mitigate the urban heat island effect, while a large, 865-kilowatt solar array provides up to one-third of the building’s daily electricity needs. We’ve also installed an innovative onsite greywater recycling system that will save up to 720,000 gallons of water annually.
Enhances Community Safety
The construction of 8125 Glendale involved strong collaboration with the City of Detroit and Wayne County, including investments in public safety that All Four One helped fund. Throughout the area, there are new outdoor walkways, and new traffic lights and road improvements for traffic flow and safety.
We’re extremely grateful to the City of Detroit and Wayne County for their partnership and appreciate opportunities to give back to the community, while also creating more local jobs with our continued growth and investment in the area.
It’s because of their partnership, in addition to our work with the building’s general contractor, Mike & Moore Construction; the architect and designer, Wayne State University Urban Planning Department; and literally hundreds of additional vendors that we’ve been able to make our beautiful new headquarters a reality.
And we’d also like to thank our employees, who through their feedback and input starting well before we first broke ground, have helped us create another great place to work.