CMC
AURORA, IL
CMC Materials produces many of the highly important elements that enable the world’s microchips to work. Their innovative polishing compound allows data to transfer over chips at the astonishing speed demanded by the technologically driven ethos of today. Forcade was hired to bring the essence of the company’s recent rebrand from Cabot Microelectronics to CMC Materials into their Chicago-area headquarters.
The rebrand was an important effort for the company, modernizing the traditional and dated look of the organization to better match the modern-day work they do. So our design team leaned heavily into bringing the elements of the new brand to life, especially their dynamic infinity-inspired logo.
This included an awe-inducing light sculpture in the office entryway formed from the deconstructed elements of the logo. At first glance, visitors see what looks like a beautiful ceiling-suspended, illuminated chandelier. But as they move further into the reception area, they reach a single point where the logo takes its full shape above, revealing the brand in a surprising and striking way.
Moving beyond the entryway and into the main office hallway, we brought the logo back into view in another lively form. As employees and visitors walked down this corridor, programmable lighting washed the walls in an ever-changing, energetic way, bringing them to a highly polished, highly reflective, illuminated logo at the end, where they could see their own reflection in the brand. It served as an inspiring and immersive brand experience right as people were entering the main office space.
Deeper into the office, we continued using the logo in unique ways. We crafted floor-to-ceiling, dual-color wooden slats along one main thoroughfare that formed a partial representation of the logo. This bold, dimensional design element was inspired by famed artist Yaacov Agam and helped to continually bring people into the new brand’s essence as they moved throughout the building.
Beyond integrating their new brand elements into our design plan, we also focused on creatively bringing the technology they’ve invented into the space they inhabit. This included a beautiful two-story tall, dimensional sculpture representative of the microchip wafers they work on.
Crafted from numerous-sized dichroic and mirrored magnified wafer-shapes, the pieces changed colors as people moved around them while traversing the office’s primary stairwell. The color-shifting nature of the sculpture brought the diverse array of solutions CMC provides the industry to life and also connected seamlessly to the color-changing corridor it resided in.
As people moved past the sculpture, we continued expressing the company’s expertise with a long “wave” wall. This flowing pattern, installed seamlessly from walls to glass, symbolized their industry-leading polishing technology used to ensure microchips are free from defects and can freely move data at astounding speed.
CMC holds an impressive array of patents – nearly 4,000 in total. We prominently showcased these important inventions by creating custom, dimensional structures on dual sides of a corridor. The most significant patents are hung in front of the others behind color-tinted glass that mimics the look of the entrance wafer sculpture. This incredibly visual installation serves as an inspiring daily reminder for employees to keep innovating.
Along with the patents earned for CMC’s technological creations, they also continuously receive accolades and awards. We cleverly built a trophy case right into the structure of the building, using x-braces as part of the shelving system. Several of the shelves contained multi-color backgrounds to connect to the patent walls and entry structure and all were internally lit to beautifully shine light on and through the mostly transparent awards.
Our team created several memorable moments within the space that were designed to provide daily inspiration to all employees. This included an employee showcase wall fashioned with wooden rails where people were encouraged to share photos that represented the culture and ingenuity of CMC.
A large, dimensional “be bold” installation that also featured CMC’s core values further motivated employees to bring their best selves to work and take the chances necessary to continue catapulting the company forward.
As a reminder that employees in this office were part of a bigger network of people supporting each other, we created a large worldview map with dimensional pegs that represented all the widespread locales of CMC’s people. We also created country-specific “flag posts” in the primary conference room highlighting these locations, etched and infilled with each country’s name and even featuring each location’s native language.
We adorned the largest wall of this same conference room with a larger-than-life quote from one of the company’s founders, ensuring every employee knew their hard work and innovative thinking were supported from the top down.
In total, all these moments of inspiration were strategically sprinkled throughout the space to provide employees with constant stimuli to be creative and courageous in everything they do.
Every component of our environmental design plan for CMC Materials was crafted to support the significance of the company’s recent brand evolution. The Forcade team boldly and beautifully created an employee and visitor experience that enlivened the essence of the new brand.
