Worcester Event Space

A total transformation for the top two floors of Worcester’s tallest building, revitalizing a prime location to create a new event space with 360° views of the city and surrounding hills.  Formerly home to a private club for the original bank tenants of the building, the penthouse floors remained vacant for decades.  This project stripped out the defunct restaurant kitchen and bathrooms that occupied a large portion of the space, allowing full views across the building and complete flexibility of use for events, from daytime corporate seminars to evening weddings.  Integrated A/V, catering stations with connection to a ground floor restaurant, moveable serving and bar elements, and striking lobby spaces help the space accommodate this wide variety of uses.

The upper floor lobby has been re-imagined to a simple palette of dark steel and glass, with accents of wood elements and highlighted by an existing wall of mirrors on the building core that makes the space feel endless.  Color changing lights and a sea of suspended glass fixtures reference the original club environment in a contemporary way at night that blur the threshold between interior lobby space and the sky of stars.  The dynamic lighting effect is visible from across the city, forming a new version of the previously well known building landmark effect.

Mirrors clad the sides the large perimeter columns around the event spaces, producing an illusion that continues the floor to ceiling glass from corner to corner.  A dark ceiling and large orthogonal forms of lighting create a neutral ceiling overhead to emphasize the continuous glass surrounding the space and the vista views that make the building special.