Austin, Texas; August 3, 2015 — GLG (Gerson Lehrman Group, Inc.) announced today it has signed a new lease for office space in Austin, Texas, nearly doubling its footprint there. The ten-year lease is for 41,803 square feet from CommonWealth Partners at 301 Congress Avenue in Downtown Austin. Austin is the second-largest location for GLG, the world’s leading professional learning platform, with around 300 professionals working there today; the new space will accommodate 400 employees over the next few years. The office will be designed by award-winning architect Clive Wilkinson, who also designed the GLG global headquarters in New York City – one of the largest North American implementations of activity-based working. (Renderings of the new office are available at GLG.it/news.)
“Our mission is to transform the way the world’s top professionals share expertise and learn and our Austin team is critical to our success,” said GLG President and CEO Alexander Saint-Amand. “Since opening our office here in 2004, we’ve proudly supported and participated in Austin’s remarkable growth and success.”
GLG currently occupies 24,279 square feet at 301 Congress, which recently underwent a complete lobby renovation and amenity upgrades. The new office will cover the entire fifteenth and sixteenth floors of the building, which will be connected by a large atrium with a central staircase. Like the New York headquarters, GLG Austin will soon use activity-based working, an innovative concept that eschews assigned personal workspaces for a more flexible and productive approach to work life. Employees will choose from multiple types of private meeting and collaboration spaces, conference and training spaces, and a staffed coffee bar.
GLG was founded in 1998 to serve professionals who needed perspective they couldn’t find in one-size-fits-all industry reports, courses, or conferences. Today GLG facilitates thousands of connections a week between the world’s leading investors, entrepreneurs, corporations, consulting firms, nonprofits, and startups and a teaching membership of 400,000 policy specialists, academics, engineers, former C-level managers, professional leaders, and other subject matter experts.
Clive Wilkinson Architects is an award-winning Los Angeles-based firm responsible for Google’s corporate headquarters, Googleplex, and the “Superdesk” for the Barbarian Group’s New York offices. In 2014, GLG moved into their CWA-designed global headquarters in New York City – a 64,361-square-foot activity-based workplace in the historic One Grand Central Place (formerly the Lincoln Building). The office is organized into “neighborhoods” of work areas and shared space. Employees move from neighborhood to neighborhood depending on the work they’re doing. To make this work, employees have lockers to store their belongings overnight. They all use laptops that dock at screens where they choose to work. The office was featured in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, Interior Design, and Fast Company, among other publications.
“I’m excited to again work with the GLG team to bring an innovative, collaborative, progressive workplace to life,” said Clive Wilkinson, President and Design Director of Clive Wilkinson Architects. “GLG Austin will share a thematic aesthetic and operational sensibility with GLG’s New York office, while embracing unique local resources, materials, and craftsmanship. The office will feel both viscerally connected to GLG’s headquarters and distinctly Austin.”
CWA will be supported by local architects STG Design, led by PollyAnna Little. Aquila Commercial’s Todd Tebbe will manage the project for GLG. GLG will complete the build and move by July 2016.
A short video about the New York office is available here on Architizer.
About GLG / Gerson Lehrman Group
GLG is the world’s leading platform for professional learning. Business leaders, investors, consultants, social entrepreneurs, and other top professionals rely on GLG to learn in short- and long-term engagements from a membership of more than 400,000 and other experts. Clients partner with GLG to address their most complex strategic challenges, make better business decisions, and advance their careers through conversations, mentorships, small group convenings, surveys, and other interactions—all within a rigorous compliance framework. Global, technology-driven, and nimble, GLG’s more than 1,000 employees work in 22 offices in 12 countries. For more information visit www.GLG.it.
About CWP / CommonWealth Partners
Founded in Los Angeles in 1995, CommonWealth Partners is a vertically integrated and privately owned real estate investment, development, and management organization. CWP offers a wide array of services including investment & capital market transactions, portfolio management, asset management, property management, marketing, leasing, development, and accounting/reporting.
CWP has been involved in acquiring, planning, entitling, and developing well over 30 million square feet of large-scale, premier-quality office and mixed-use projects that set new standards of excellence in serving the needs of corporations, professional firms, and financial institutions. Currently, CWP holds assets throughout the U.S. including Washington D.C., Boston, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Austin, and Los Angeles.
