Posted on Jul 21, 2022

The American office has changed dramatically as it evolved from the factory-like office floors of the early 20th century, to the cubicle-bound postwar corporate world, to our own era of flexible workstations and open-floor plans. But the stresses now coming to bear on the white-collar workplace are unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Three factors, distinct yet deeply intertwined, have conspired to make the work environment a site of unprecedented contention, as well as tremendous opportunity. First, the ongoing move away from manufacturing toward a knowledge-based digital economy has made the idea of the brick-and-mortar workspace (and the hierarchical structure that comes with it) seem outdated. Second, the Covid-19 pandemic allowed a huge number of people to begin working from home — and many are not enthusiastic about resuming their former habits. Finally, there’s been a tectonic shift in the way Americans are thinking about work itself, as evidenced in the phenomenon some have called “the Great Resignation.” How can offices adapt to this new and complex condition?

As an architect, I’ve spent the last two years thinking about how design could address these three factors and synthesize them into a compelling proposal for the future of the office. Since it was founded by my grandfather Walter Henn more than 70 years ago, our office has borne witness to the evolution from the industrial to the post-industrial world, and we’ve created spaces for both. As a result, we think about work a little differently: We believe the office is not merely a passive receptacle for modes of work or existing power structures, but an active force of its own, one with the capacity to accelerate change and to support a totally new kind of work and workforce.

I don’t pretend to have a complete solution to the problems confronting American workers and employers, but we’ve gathered three important clues about where our working lives could be headed next.

Workplaces for Work

Of all the office design trends from pre-2020, there is one in particular that seems especially unsuited to the changes afoot. Call it the Work-as-Lifestyle Office: grown-up jungle gyms; movie theaters; ping-pong tables and beer taps; nap rooms and meditation rooms. Only partially the product of the architects who created them, such office environments have been extremely attractive to corporate clients, especially (though not exclusively) those in the tech sector.

The shortcomings of the Work-as-Lifestyle model now seem obvious. During the work-from-home-wave of the pandemic, millions of Americans suddenly realized that if they wanted to mingle business and pleasure, they might as easily do it from the safety and comfort of their own living rooms. Those playground-style spaces, intended to make work a more joyous, more engaging enterprise, have had the perverse effect of staking an undue psychic claim on employees’ time: Why go home at all, they implied, when you can stay here and keep working?

Today, the spatial rhetoric of the rise-and-grind work culture seems less and less persuasive. This does not mean we need to return to the bland, fluorescent-lit sterility of an earlier epoch. But for a more efficient, healthier and happier workforce, the time may have come to ditch the bean bags.

The Rise of Office Urbanism

Whether in a lofty high-rise, a warehouse complex, or a sprawling suburban campus, the hallmark of much office design to date has been insularity — the calculated sealing-off, both physical and conceptual, of the work environment from its immediate surroundings. To some extent, this is inevitable. Today, we can work-from-home, work-from-office, work-from-café, work-from-anywhere. Work itself has become diffuse and distributed, and we need new ways to navigate the relationship between the private workplace and the public sphere.

Instead of merely thinking of office districts or office parks, we could begin by conceiving of a new, more comprehensive “office urbanism.” On the one hand, the idea would involve better connecting offices to the city, through technical and infrastructural integration that makes offices more efficient and more accessible. On the other hand, the office-urbanist concept points to an understanding of the workplace itself as a kind of city, a place with a variety of action and a gradient from more private spaces to more public ones, with opportunities for workers to participate in the urban life all around them.

What could this new outlook lead to? To take but one possibility: smaller, decentralized satellite offices that tap into existing public transportation networks, reducing the negative impacts of concentrated office towers (noise, traffic, high real-estate prices) and spreading their economic benefits.

This vision pairs well with the jettisoning of the Work-as-Lifestyle model, substituting public parks for the office playroom while reaping energy savings from smaller building footprints and shorter commutes. In whatever direction it ultimately leads, the idea of office urbanism affords a broad banner for designers and business leaders inclined to think outside the glass box, and to see the workplace as only one part of a larger civic whole.

Redefining ‘High Performance’

A phrase we use around our office a great deal is “high performance,” a term we borrowed from industrial fields like car manufacturing. Outside the industrial realm, the efficiency, safety and above all the worker-focused character of high-performance workspaces all have exciting implications for the office of the future.

Original article: The Way We Work Has Changed. So Should Offices.