Page 26 - RE-NJ #80 Nov.2023

24 WINTER 2023
with more than a dozen film and television production facilities
along the Bayonne waterfront. For the media sector at large, which is
a clear growth area in New Jersey, Gensler’s local office has drawn on the expertise of the firm’s Los Angeles team.
“We started introducing people to that product type,” Brockmeier said, later adding: “It’s also exciting for their own professional development because they’re working on another building type, but they’re being trained by experts in the firm that already have that. And that’s kind of how things have worked in general and how we grow offices — we grow offices because we actually grow our people first.”
In the meantime, it’s leaning into well-established practice areas
in New Jersey, including the life sciences sector. Led by Emily Ulrick, a studio director and senior associate in the Morristown office, the firm has designed projects for the likes of Bristol-Myers Squibb, Bayer and Celularity, among others. It’s also working in traditional
health care on behalf of major New Jersey players such as Hackensack Meridian Health and Atlantic Health Systems. For the former, Gensler has designed both the core and shell and the interiors for a new ground-up, 80,000-square-foot medical office building on Route 3, which will be one of the newest additions to Prism Capital Partners’ ON3 campus in Nutley and Clifton.
As Button notes, the design of such projects has changed as health care providers seek more of a “hospitality- inspired” environment and a better patient experience, especially with the growing trove of research focused on how the right environment can help the healing process.
“A while ago, it maybe wasn’t that exciting to work on a health care project,” she said, as designers
were somewhat restricted by the standards at the time and the need for functionality.
“And now I think we’re bringing in a lot of thought from other practice areas as to how you make it a really wonderful experience to be in a
health care situation,” she added. “It doesn’t have to be bleak.”
Brockmeier added that, across the firm’s practice areas, “we’re all used to them blending.”
“Even when we talk to clients about their project, we’re going have
people from different practice areas on a project, (which) traditionally, maybe 20 years ago, you would’ve never done,” he said. “And that’s the expectation, especially now that
after these two and a half or three years we’ve been through, it’s really about the human experience when you’re going into any of these types of projects.”
Equally important, Brockmeier said, is ensuring that local clients are not overwhelmed by Gensler’s size as a company. The firm notes that, despite having more than 6,000 employees globally and 100 locally, it typically has studios of 15 to 30 people that try to approach a project as a boutique firm would.
“They have all of the levels of experience necessary to do an entire project from start to finish,” he said.
“And that’s really important because that also directly goes to people’s professional development ... You might think it’s one big office and you come in and get lost. But (those studio teams are) the key to serving our clients, but also our people that are coming into the firm.”
That’s not to say that the Morristown team, like other local offices, doesn’t benefit from Gensler’s global reach. That breadth enables the firm to offer more growth opportunities and more sophisticated talent development programs, Brockmeier and Button said, from internal leadership roles to companywide networks and committees that are specific to a practice area.
“We want people to feel like they’re growing,” Button said. “So anybody in this office isn’t limited to what this office has. We have the whole
of Gensler, where you could move up into a management committee role or something like that. That’s kind of wonderful, and it really helps our people, I think, to see that their career can spans far beyond just the single office they’re in currently.” RE
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