It’s the early afternoon, and the ICON team is hard at work. Here and there, small groups huddle amid the rows of desks, discussing tasks at hand. In the conference rooms, teams are laying out plans on whiteboards. CEO JH Kim sits alone at a desk in the corner of the Council office, so focused on his monitor that he fails to notice the journalist filming him. In the lounge, colleagues gather around the coffee machine, breaking into occasional laughter.
It’s just another Thursday for ICON, the new digs notwithstanding.
On January 29, ICON departed the comfy but a tad constricted confines of its old home, the Euljiro WeWork Building, for a new nest in the landmark Signature Tower, a gleaming glass edifice overlooking Seoul’s landmark Cheonggyecheon Stream. The sprawling space on the third floor of the tower is currently home to not only ICON, but also several of its DApps and several partner companies under the DAYLI Financial Group umbrella. Like clothing you buy for a young child, the new office leaves ICON plenty of room to grow. Though the space bustles with an almost tangible intensity, the empty desks and chairs leave the most lasting impression. They convey a silent but powerful message, that the ICON family clearly expects to expand.
Yes, those really are chairs in the wall
ICON’s new office can accommodate up to 470 people. As ICON Council member Min Kim told The Iconist in an interview last month, the team hopes the space will support the project for the next three years. The bigger confines allow ICON to host more and bigger events, too – indeed, on the day this writer visited, the team was hosting its first developers’ workshop of the year.
Like many tech companies, the new office embraces an open plan that encourages socialization, interaction and collaboration. You’ll find no cubicle drones here, or cubicles for that matter. Even the conference rooms are enclosed in glass to emphasize transparency. The only truly enclosed spaces are the more security sensitive departments such as the blockchain research lab.
The office incorporates plenty of common space, too. The spacious lounge is the most prominent of these. The lounge decor includes plush sofas and couches for relaxation and more practice appointments for working lunches and breaks. It takes plenty of design cues from WeWork, too. This is most obvious in the coffee bar. A first-rate caffeination station is a sine qua non for any self-respecting tech company, and here, ICON does not disappoint, with a full selection of brewed coffees, espresso-based beverages and teas. The designer ICON mugs are eye-catching, too, the teal blue reminiscent of the famed celadon ceramics of Korea’s medieval Goryeo Kingdom.
Adorning the wall is a neon recreation of ICON’s round logo and what, at first glance, seems like a high relief of the corporate name. Upon closer examination, however, the literal writing on the wall is composed of embedded units you can pull out and use as seats.