Dubai-based design studio Roar has finished its first North American project, a law office in Chicago located at 300 North LaSalle, that merges bold architectural ideas with deep ties to the city’s identity. The firm’s design disrupts conventional corporate layouts while weaving in elements that reflect Chicago itself.
The project’s foundation lay in its structural approach. Most office towers rely on sealed-off floors, but Roar’s team cut through three floorplates, inserting a central staircase that links the space like a connected campus. This change eliminates the typical vertical isolation, ensuring movement and visibility between levels are deliberate rather than random.
Every private office occupies the same floor area, but the similarity stops there. By working with the building’s window-bay rhythm, the offices vary in shape and orientation, creating angular or slightly irregular spaces that required partners to become comfortable with a departure from the usual rectangular layout.
“Law firms are traditionally very cellular and hierarchical,” Dean explained. “We had to demonstrate that a space could be unconventional without compromising privacy, acoustics, storage or status.”
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Dean’s strategy began with evidence-based design. Roar partnered with a workplace psychologist to develop psychometric profiles and held briefing sessions with the steering committee as well as with different departments and user groups across the firm. The goal was to understand how people focus, collaborate, make decisions and manage the varied energy levels demanded by legal work, and to provide a spectrum of settings that give people choice and control over their environment.
The studio also infused the space with Chicago’s cultural essence. Inspiration came from the city’s Loop district, its jazz heritage, the Chicago River, and its nickname as a “garden within a city.” These influences shaped the office’s circulation paths, plant selections, materials, and even color palettes, which shift by floor to aid navigation without relying on signage.
Dean highlighted the café as a key example of the design’s flexibility. It functions as an agile working environment rather than a traditional canteen, featuring a high bar that overlooks the river, lounge seating, booths, and individual business-class-style pods where people can work with greater privacy. The café offers both open views across the city and more protected spaces, allowing users to choose the setting that best suits their task and their nervous system at that moment.
