More on Pixar’s offices in this article by Sean Means in The Salt Lake Tribune (thanks, Jocke; see also this post). I liked these parts:

When Pixar started in 1985, [tour guide Elizabeth] Greenberg, it took 8 hours to render one frame (or 1/24th of a second) of computer animation. Now, it still takes 8 hours, because the artwork in each frame is far more complex.

An example of how something swells to consume increased capacity?

Sean Means writes, regarding how everybody are free to decorate their workplaces, that “[c]orporate culture comes from the top down, and for Pixar that means [John] Lasseter.” I don’t believe that this is true – especially not in the case of Pixar. Corporate culture does come from below. The head of a company can of course contribute to the culture, by being an inspiration and by being an example of the freedom that everyone in the company have to influence the culture. Corporate culture can’t be dictated; and everybody influences the culture more or less.

According to Lasseter, the early plan for the new studios was to build separate buildings for each department – story, animation, technology, etc – the way a regular movie studio does.

But Lasseter recalled a story from original Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, about the studio Walt build for them after the success of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” It was set to be the utopian animation studio,” Lasseter said. “Every guy had an office, and the [wings] were separated so that every office could have natural light. But what happened was that everybody became isolated, and no one knew what was going on.” So the multiple-building idea was scrapped, in favor of the single unit.

That wasn’t enough for Pixar’s CEO, Steve Jobs. “He thought it was really important that there only be one bathroom in the building, for all 700 people who work here,” Greenberg says.

Here’s the “bathroom effect” theory, as Greenberg explains it: “If you have bathrooms that are scattered throughout the building, you use the bathroom nearest to where you’re sitting. If there was one bathroom, all kinds of people would come together and talk with one another all the time […]. It would enhance communication […].

[…] The atrium also [aside from eight restrooms] boasts [a café], break rooms with an unusual number of toasters, the mailroom, conference rooms, pool and foosball tables, and an open area for the occasional concert or lecture. (Pixar University, the department where Greenberg works, arranges talks and classes for employees to broaden their expertise.)

A single unit office with centralized spaces for relaxing, eating, and having meetings; an environment characterized by freedom and creativity. This reminded me of a post by Chris Dent (found via Sébastien Pacquet), where he included something he wrote in preparation for a launch party for an organization named Blue Oxen. In it, he used the phrase “the freedom to generate more freedom”, which linked it to my post The Disney process. I ‘m happy for this loose association to the starting of a “think tank devoted to studying and improving high-performance collaboration.”