Future Office

Next-generation workplace design

Nicola Gillen

• Publisher: RIBA Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781859468456
• eBook ISBN: 9781000726664
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The office is dead. Long live the office. Despite decades of predictions that the office is on the verge of extinction, it is surviving and thriving. Of course, things are changing. And changing fast. Digital technologies are transforming not only the work we do, but also the ways our workplaces are designed, built and operated. Automation and AI mean that some jobs will no longer exist whilst others will be created.

But the very essence of the workplace — human interaction and collaboration, remains as necessary as ever. In fact, it is the human focus that is driving this new age, with four generations now in the workplace together for the first time.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book discusses the impacts of these changes on the future of work and workplace. The latest technologies are also explored from voice and digital twins, to new materials such as graphene and battery-powered buildings.

Part I
Buildings

Chapter 1
A Place in Time – Office Typologies

Nicola Gillen and Dimitra Dantsiou

Introduction

Traditional thinking states that, in the 1800s – as industrialisation gathered pace in the USA, UK and the rest of Europe – so too did the need to manage work activity and production. Clerks’ rooms became rows of desks with identically suited workers, whose administrative efficiency mirrored the manufacturing processes they oversaw.

This archetype for the commercial office endured for a century, until the advent of fast, efficient IT transformed people’s attitudes and approaches to work and led to the creation of new office typologies. The new offices followed an open-plan arrangement, and working practices prioritised collaboration over task-based concentration. At the same time, an army of freelancers and entrepreneurs pioneered ways of working outside of corporate structures.

If we look closer, however, the reality behind this narrative is more complex. Admittedly, the traditional image of the office with workers sitting at rows of desks is familiar, because it has been so dominant. It is also true that there has been a growth in location-independent working, inside and outside corporate life, in recent years.

But a number of other models of workplace organisation existed prior to the Industrial Revolution. For example, the vibrant coffee houses of 18th-century London supported people in the gathering and exchanging of knowledge. Elsewhere industrialists, such as Robert Owen at New Lanark Mill in Scotland, stressed the importance of the community in which work, housing and education combined to create a healthy, productive workforce.

These ideas bring humanity back into the design process. They, and others like them, have gained increased traction in recent decades. Workers are no longer seen as cogs in an administrative machine – they are autonomous human beings, whose skills and experience bring fresh ideas and new ways of doing things. As a result, any history of the office should do more than simply map layouts – it should articulate how people have become the focus of design for planners, architects and chief executives alike.

The Early Office

What was the first office? Ever since the start of writing and commerce, from medieval scriptoria to warehouse work tables in Renaissance Europe, people have needed spaces in which to collect and manage information – with several different approaches to workplace design emerging.

The company

One influential blueprint for the first corporate office was the London headquarters of the British East India Company (Theodore Jacobsen; 1729), which between 1699 and 1774 accounted for 13 to 15 per cent of all Britain’s imports (see Figure 1.1).¹ Around 200 clerks, known as ‘writers’, were arranged in rows of seats in East India House’s Great Court Room in the City of London, copying and filing the huge numbers of documents that kept this corporate behemoth running.² As Robins and others argue, the command and control bureaucracy put in place by the East India Company defined corporate life long after the company had ceased operations.³

Coffee and knowledge

London’s coffee houses – where business, gossip and politics mingled in a hectic free-for-all – stood in stark contrast to the company’s rigid and centralised hierarchy. By 1739, there were 551 coffee houses in London, with information the main commodity being traded.⁴ The London Stock Exchange started in Jonathan’s Coffee House (named after its founder, Jonathan Miles) in Exchange Alley in the City of London in 1680, and the insurer Lloyd’s of London took its name from the house in Tower Street where its founders issued their first shipping list and insurance registers in the 1680s.^{5, 6} As Weller and Bawden point out, these coffee houses were the archetypal knowledge network, governed by a self-organising principle and a self-selecting population.⁷

Figure 1.1: East India House (London, UK; Theodore Jacobsen; 1729)

Figure 1.2: New Lanark Mills (Clyde Valley, Scotland; David Dale; 1786)

Workforce welfare

In the 19th century, industrialisation brought with it overcrowding and the spread of slums and tenements, as people moved into cities looking for work. Although this squalor was not of great interest to most factory and mill owners, others thought differently. For David Dale and Robert Owen, owners of the New Lanark cotton mill on the banks of Scotland’s River Clyde, as shown in Figure 1.2, the welfare of the workforce was an important part of the industrial process. There had been dormitories for workers onsite since the mill had started production in 1786. When Owen took over in 1799, he also commissioned more housing and a school (‘The Institute’).⁸

Similarly, George Cadbury’s Quaker beliefs in fairness and parity informed his plans to build ‘a factory in a garden’ at Bournville near Birmingham in 1879, combining affordable housing and open spaces, designed by William Alexander Harvey, next to the factory.⁹ Two decades later, in 1898, Ebenezer Howard developed his garden city concept (see Figure 1.3), where living, working and nature would be harmoniously bound in small and well-connected satellite cities.¹⁰ Crucially, as Frampton has argued, garden cities weren’t just about pleasant surroundings, but also Howard’s idea – still radical, even now – of shared ownership of the town, with communal land and buildings.¹¹

Today, elements of these approaches are re-emerging in the latest thinking around ‘city quarter’ developments. This includes mixed-use neighbourhoods, and the choice of some developers to stay and manage both the spaces and the services they provide for those who live and work there. Some developments have introduced service charges that not only fund the upkeep of communal areas, but also events and new roles such as community liaison officers or concierges to manage the interface between locals and building owners.

The Office as Machine

By the start of the 20th century, the office had become a hub for administration and management. Innovations such as the railways and the telegraph meant that offices no longer had to be situated next to the factories they served. Governance of the processes of production and those tasked with overseeing them were often heavily influenced by the ideas of management expert F.W. Taylor, whose 1911 book Principles of Scientific Management saw logic and efficiency as the key to productivity, and whose methods were adopted by generations of industrialists in the USA and beyond.¹²

Figure 1.3: The Three Magnets (Ebenezer Howard; 1898)

The rise of logic and efficiency

In early 20th-century offices, workers were part of a scientifically managed organisational machine. Typewriters, electric lights and telephones meant that people could stay at work for longer and get more done while they were there. Open-plan spaces were busy, noisy and hot, as clerks and administrators played their part in the quest for optimum productivity. Executives usually inhabited plush private offices on the floors above them.

These buildings looked to embody the aspirations and achievements of the organisations they housed. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building (Buffalo, USA; 1906), with its striking geometric form constructed in red sandstone over six storeys, is an expression of power and solidity (see Figure 1.4). The Sears, Roebuck and Company Administration Building in Chicago, also completed in 1906 and designed by Nimmons & Fellows, displays a similar low-rise heft. While many of these buildings maintained a utilitarian interior in keeping with Taylorist principles, the seeds of what would become workplace wellbeing were being sown in others. The Larkin Administration Building was one of the first to be fitted with air-conditioning, and walls and furniture were designed with noise-absorbing properties.

By the time Lloyd Wright came to design the head office for Johnson’s Wax (Wisconsin, USA; 1939) three decades later, inside and outside combined to form a pioneering vision of a modern workplace. The elegant curves of its exterior, rendered in ‘Cherokee red’ brickwork, exemplified the Art Moderne style, a variant of Art Deco that appeared in the USA during the 1930s and 1940s.¹³ The streamlined exterior was complemented by large inside spaces, as shown in Figure 1.5, supported by mushroom-shaped structural columns and Pyrex skylights. The organic, forest-like forms aimed to give workers a sense of pride in their company and thus increase productivity. Although it is celebrated as a Lloyd Wright masterpiece, it is important to note that, within this space, managers still sat on an upper level. The building also had no outside views to distract workers from their ‘to do’ list.¹⁴ The office was still a machine – albeit one of striking design.

Figure 1.4: Larkin Building (Buffalo, USA; Frank Lloyd Wright; 1906)

It was at this point that the focus of design moved to the process of production. The management principle of command and control dictated that people needed to be seen in order to be managed. This idea still dominates in some modern offices, despite the paradigm shift in technology and culture.

Figure 1.5: Johnson Wax/SC Johnson and Son Administration Building (Racine, USA; Frank Lloyd Wright; 1939)

Towers of Power

While Taylorism made workers inside the office building as efficient as a production line, rising land values in cities prompted planners to look for ways to increase the density of constrained business districts. Elisha Otis’s invention of the elevator in the 1850s made it possible to expand vertically. The emergence of steel as a viable building material in the 1880s, and the adoption of clever structural engineering techniques from Chicago and New York’s suspension bridges around the same time, set the scene for the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• FOREWORD
• AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: BUILDINGS
• PART II: TECHNOLOGY
• PART III: PEOPLE
• PART IV: DELIVERY
• GLOSSARY
• REFERENCES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• IMAGE CREDITS