The Universal Headquarters project involved a joint venture team consisting of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture in the Netherlands, and House & Robertson Architects in Los Angeles, to form an entity known as OMA-HRA. The Universal Headquarters project aspired to break new ground architecturally and technically, and involved an international team of consultants, cost estimators, contractors and specialty subcontractors. Extensive and rigorous schematic design and design development phases were completed. Several HRA staff were temporarily officed at OMA in Rotterdam during the schematic phase, and a number of OMA staff worked in HRA’s office during the design development phase. Though the project was suspended when Universal was sold to Vivendi, the design and technical work was extensively documented in a special issue of Architecture and Urbanism (a+u) in May 2000.