Taking in the new office

Brick, mortar, and light
London, ON
November 2018
This photo originally shared on Instagram

I work for a pretty inspiring company, surrounded by some pretty inspiring people. We moved into a pretty inspiring new building a few weeks ago, and I've been busy grabbing little photographic snippets here and there as we've all slowly been figuring our way around.

The word "new" is a bit misleading, as the building - or more precisely buildings - is over a century old. It sits on the western edge of London's downtown core, and it is deeply tied to the history of this city and its business community. After buying it, our firm spent a couple of years painstakingly stripping it down to its brick-and-rafters bones and reimagining it as a space worthy of a 21st century tech company. Three weeks after we first moved in, we're still having hallway conversations about how much we all love this place, about how it has changed the way we work for the better.

Architectural heritage is baked into Info-Tech's DNA. The building we just moved out of, known as Oakwood, was built by the one-time mayor of London between 1880 and 1882 before he left town under a cloud of suspicion. After buying it from a church, the company lovingly restored it into a revered example of preservation done right. Our Toronto offices, the former Masonic Temple, hosted concerts by Led Zeppelin and Frank Sinatra, and was the favorite rehearsal space for the Rolling Stones. It, too, has had its interior carefully repurposed while still retaining its architectural history.

We can't spend all of our time staring at the brickwork, of course: Work needs to get done. But that sense of place and sense of business purpose are closely, linked, making for a lovely place to spend the day pulling letters into words and words into works that inspire others to exceed their own potential. That sense of architecture-driven inspiration is a nice bonus.

More to come...

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