In 1987, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, Davin Wedel, then a sophomore at Tufts University, sought to promote safe sex through a condom matchbook featuring the university’s mascot, Jumbo the Elephant. As it turned out, “Wrap your trunk” was an effective messaging campaign with college students. Shortly after this success, Wedel started Global Protection Corporation, a condom manufacturing company that uses cheeky marketing to advance public health. Today, Global Protection is responsible for supplying condoms to customers such as Planned Parenthood as well as the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In addition to condoms, it offers customizable novelty wrappers. For the company’s new headquarters in Lynn, Massachusetts, Studio J.Jih, with Maugel DeStefano Architects as architect of record, aptly emphasized play and performance in equal measure.
This duality informed much of the project. Located in a 45,604-square-foot former industrial creamery, the company’s office and assembly and distribution site was conceived as a series of dueling ideas occurring at the same time. Studio J.Jih founder J. Roc Jih refers to this approach as “parallel play.” The resulting design balances a series of double imperatives: workplace necessities with a language of domestic and nightclub spaces; the company’s roots in safe sex and queer activism with its penchant for humor; and a language of openings set against a series of scrims.
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