Changing Skyline: Vertical Screen building offers bright ideas for cubicle slaves

For as long as people have labored in offices, architects have been promising to make the American workplace more bearable. Yet, more often than not, employees spend their days chained to their desks under a nimbus of fluorescent tubes. The only thing recycled is the air, and windows are a mere rumor. People must resort to their computers to find out if it's raining.

The green movement has certainly brought some improvements to the world of the cubicle slave. Eager to win the sweepstakes run by the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED program, employers will gladly install energy- and dollar-saving heating and cooling systems. They'll even amp up the window size. But that doesn't mean everyone gets a glimpse of the outside world between 9 and 5.

At the new Warminster headquarters for Vertical Screen, a company that runs background checks for major employers, it's almost impossible not to have a view. The striking, hangar-shaped building by the design crew at Philadelphia's Erdy McHenry Architecture features massive, 43-foot-high mosaics of glass at the two arched ends. Tall glass panels run the length of a third side.

So much natural light pours into the column-free room that only a couple of 60-watt bulbs are needed overhead, even on dull, cloudy days like we've experienced this week. The designers, who were assisted by the sustainability consultants at Re:Vision Architecture in Northern Liberties, rightly put the light where it is needed, on workers' desks. The pinpoint glow of task lamps punctuates the long rows of workstations, which, to be honest, are jammed in as tightly as they are at any corporate colossus.

Let it be said that the resemblance to a conventional, button-down office ends there. The building's designers, Scott Erdy and David McHenry, are the same guys who gave Philadelphia the roughly beautiful Piazza at Schmidts and Drexel University's Leaning-Tower-of-Pisa dorm. Inveterate shape-makers, these designers have always had an endless supply of ideas in their architectural bag of tricks. But at Vertical Screen, their overflowing imaginations have been harnessed to a newfound discipline.