The Trajectory of History

The first thing to say is that here is little or no evidence to support the ‘death of the office’. Despite all the scare stories about the impact of new ways of working on the demand for office space, we haven’t deserted office buildings yet. On the contrary, the physical work environment appears as important as ever to how organisations perform.

Employers and politicians alike may voice concerns about the environment and commuting, but we still flock to the workplace in our millions every day and office property still provides the main backdrop to our working lives. The issue is how we will extract value from our work environments in 2030 and beyond.

As a starting point for thinking about the future, it is worth briefly looking back at how the modern office has been described over its short 150-year history, as a necessary by-product of the bureaucratisation of industry. If you study both the research literature and popular depictions of the office, as Tricia Austin (2007) pointed out, you will discover four main models are commonly used to describe the modern workplace.

The first is the economic model that sees the office in the context of efficiency, production, utilisation of resources and cost control. The second views the office as a polity, a place of power, rivalry, hierarchy, decision-making and politicking. The third model revolves around the idea of community, placing an emphasis on relationships, belonging, proximity and partnership. The fourth is the ecological model, inspired by Franklin Becker’s studies of the ecology of the workplace (1995), which views the workplace in the context of population flows, interdependence and sustainability.

One can immediately see that the majority of award-winners in this book have taken care to construct workplaces that replace the perception of the office as an economy or polity with ideas of community and ecosystem, based around the values of trust, interdependence and social interaction. Indeed, it would be hard today to find a BCO-endorsed scheme that nakedly flaunts its economic benefits far above the human needs of people to work effectively, or a project that promotes a brutal survival-of-the-fittest agenda at the expense of collaborative working.

That is because office work has become a fundamentally social activity. The balance has shifted from an overriding focus on management efficiency – conspicuous for much of the 20th century – towards the human factors of individual performance and well-being. Considerable efforts have been made to create a much tighter fit between corporate culture and work environment. The question, of course, is how far can this process go?

Three Waves of Change

While the edging towards community and ecology from economy and polity is one way to sum up the tide of change in office design, there are other ways to use the past to inform the future. Dr Frank Duffy of architects and designers DEGW has described three major waves of change over the past 100 years to suggest how the office environment has shifted from a visual metaphor for the power of the corporation to an expression of the power of the social network (2006).

Duffy identified the ‘Taylorist’ office (after American engineer and scientific management pioneer Frederick Taylor) as the first key wave – this was an engine of US economic growth in the early 20th century, characterised by corporate sloganising and time-and-motion efficiency. He identified the second wave in the post-1945 emergence of the ‘Social Democratic’ office in Northern Europe, a light and bright postwar reaction to the darkness of Fascism and a reflection of the rising power of the white-collar unions. The third wave he described as the ‘Networked’ office, which is set to redefine time, place and space in working life.

All three waves still wash up over the workplace today. Taylorism is alive and well in the formulaic office planning based on the American model of hierarchical arrangements – its chief benefit is that information is processed as efficiently as possible. Offices based on social democratic principles are still planned and built by progressive employers seeking to create flourishing communities of purpose, despite the high costs and inherent inflexibilities involved. (The Royal Bank of Scotland’s ‘village’ HQ in this book is a good example of such thinking; and more generally, the £14 million average price tag for office projects indicates the willingness to invest.) Neither the Taylorist nor the social democratic model looks in danger of disappearing any time soon.

But the really interesting trend going forward is the networked one. This wave is being led neither by developers (as in the Taylorist era) nor by owner-occupiers implementing social democratic principles, but by service providers offering office space for the time you need it. The eOffice network of serviced office environments in Manchester (see Chapter 1) is a clear pointer to things to come.

The networked office will increasingly operate like a ‘club’ whose members will be networked virtually and who will use the office space primarily for face-to-face meetings. And as the most amenable, attractive and convenient place for people to meet is usually the centre of the city, we can perhaps look forward to urban consolidation of office property after decades of out-of-town developments and suburban hubs. More on this later.

The Rise of Knowledge Work

The emergence of the networked office, however, depends critically on one factor – the growth of the knowledge economy, requiring the rapid acceleration of networks to capture, build and share knowledge. Already in this book, we have seen several schemes dedicated to the needs of knowledge workers to collaborate, think and act – such as the PricewaterhouseCoopers accountancy office in Birmingham, which offers a range of work settings via an online booking system on an on-demand basis, instead of the old way of allocating and owning workstations according to rank and status.

Rethinking The City: A New Approach To Measuring Urban Density By Paul Clarke. From Metricity Study (2008) Sponsored By Bco Urban Affairs Committee.

© Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre.

As a group, knowledge workers are on the rise and will be even more so over the next two decades. Research suggests that they identify themselves more with their professional discipline and specialism and less with their employer or place of work. They don’t fit easily into Taylorist corporate hierarchies and feel better served by networked office arrangements that reflect their more mobile and flexible work patterns.

Doctors, lawyers, academics, accountants and scientists were among the first identified ‘knowledge workers’. Today the term can be routinely applied to most executive and managerial roles within business, industry and professional services. That is because much of the repetitive process work that once occupied large numbers of staff in offices within developed economies is today already being handled by computers or sent offshore to lower-cost economies. In its place is a type of work less dependent on formula and learning from a set script, and more dependent on the independent application of knowledge and learning.

The economist Peter Drucker, who first wrote about knowledge work in 1960, has also drawn attention to an important new class of worker he has termed ‘knowledge technologists’ – computer technicians, software designers, analysts in clinical labs, paralegals and so on. This group is further swelling the ranks of knowledge workers worldwide. Instead of individuals sitting in serried ranks to follow explicit instructions within a supervised hierarchy, emerging working practices are based on collaboration, initiative and exploration – and require a new type of office space to make it all happen.

Experiments in Redesign

Knowledge-intensive companies worldwide have begun to experiment heavily with office redesign to raise the productivity of their smartest workers, but the results so far have been mixed. It seems we still have a lot to learn about designing workspaces that really support knowledge workers.

When the first international survey of new office schemes dedicated to the needs of knowledge workers was published in the book Space to Work (Myerson and Ross 2006), a key insight was how little time knowledge workers actually spend on the corporate campus. Instead they work across a continuum of different locations: employer’s office, settings for professional associations and networks, the city and the home. All of which explains why so many office schemes have occupancy rates hovering around 50–60 %.

Learning Organisations

According to Space to Work, the corporate campus – the traditional site for employers – is fast being remodelled along the lines of a university campus to encourage more knowledge sharing and collaboration. This is the so-called ‘Academy’ trend; work in these buildings is becoming a more social activity. PricewaterhouseCoopers Birmingham was identified as an Academy-style office, its central template derived from the historic university quadrangle.

Others in the same category included Zaha Hadid’s BMW Plant Central Building in Leipzig, Germany, an office space through which partly built cars move on a blue-lit production line above the heads of marketers, administrators and engineers. Hadid’s scheme is the fusion of two typologies – office and factory – bringing workers closer together and creating a community that shares knowledge and experience. We might expect more hybrids like this in the future, and also more robust conversions of factory buildings into office buildings.

Take the evidence of another Academy-style office – Sedgwick Rd, the Seattle-based subsidiary of the New York advertising company McCann-Erickson, which relocated to the 1926 Star Machinery Building and saved the original beams, windows and doors for reuse. The salvaged parts were recycled by architects Olsen Sundberg Kundig Allen to build six giant but easily moveable partitions which are reconfigured daily to form the newly required space of the day under the roof of the old machine shop.

Sedgwick Rd also has social spaces including a bar and media room. In this open and egalitarian environment, the agency grew 30 % in two years after the building completed in 2001. Many future trends are encapsulated in this one scheme: reuse, recycling, reconfigurable design, all in the service of improving knowledge worker performance.

In the Company of Peers

But of course knowledge workers don’t spend all their working day at corporate HQ. Many prefer to spend large amounts of time off-site in the company of their peers rather than with fellow

A View Of The Interior Of Zaha Hadid’s Bmw Plant Central Building (2005) In Leipzig, Germany, A Dramatic Fusion Of Factory And Office Typologies.

© Werner Huthmacher, Berlin

employees. They flock to the semi-public meeting rooms and exchange spaces of business centres, professional associations, media villages or scientific institutions so they can cluster with like-minded professionals sharing the same particular skill or specialism. For office property people, the professional cluster is one to watch, especially as many employers encourage this work trend to reduce pressure on their own space.

Flexible Scenery: Salvaged Parts Of The 1926 Star Machinery Building Form A Setting For Creative Workers In The Sedgwick Rd Advertising Agency, Seattle (2001). Architects: Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen.

© Marco Prosso

Nor do knowledge workers want to hide away from their clients and customers. In an age of user-led innovation, they are increasingly spending their time close to the marketplace. For employers, there is likely to be a growing demand to provide office space that has a more permeable relationship with the city – either by enabling public thoroughfares through office buildings, providing public facilities such as art galleries or rooftop restaurants or observation platforms, or creating workspace within mixed-use developments, retail schemes or landmark civic buildings.

The City as Office

Integrating the office more effectively into the urban fabric has many motivations. The requirement for knowledge workers to get closer to the action has been hitherto under-developed. However, we can expect that to change in the near future as boundaries blur and offices become more permeable to public space. Urban Splash’s Fort Dunlop scheme in Chapter 3 has some of these forward-thinking characteristics, a landmark site incorporating workspace, public space and a hotel.

The social democratic SAS building outside Stockholm, completed in 1988 by architect Niels Torp, set a trend for the office as city. The SAS scheme was a large, influential project based around a long, solar-lit internal ‘street’. It gave rise to a spate of out-of-town and suburban campuses across Europe that provided all the amenities of a city inside the workplace. Architects even used the language of urban planning – quiet zones, boulevards, gathering spaces, town squares, etc – within a single building. Some of that thinking persists in some of the BCO winners in this book.

However, the upcoming trend is the opposite – the city as office. Companies in future will downsize the footprint of their urban property and make fuller use of city-centre facilities that are publicly available – coffee shops, eateries, city parks, library reading rooms. Why add millions to the cost of your office scheme to build a boardroom used once a month, when you can simply book a private room in a grand restaurant every month for two years in advance? Why worry about the limits of technology when the city is itself covered by a wireless network?

It all adds to the compelling argument for why offices should head back to urban centres – and not be sealed off from metro life like they were in the 20th century. Already in the UK, the majority of office schemes are within urban areas – 23 % of office stock alone can be found within London. The next 20 years will see office developers play a fuller role in the communal life of the city, no longer plonking down bland rectilinear boxes but creating schemes that are more connected to and respectful of urban street patterns and flows.

That doesn’t mean bowing to the heritage lobby. Contemporary design has a vital role to play. BCO winner, 19 George Road in Birmingham (see Chapter 2), has already shown how a bold statement can succeed in a conservation area and we can expect more daring juxtapositions of this type in the future. We can also expect more ‘narrative’ workspaces that project corporate values – branded office experiences that exploit the closeness of customers to sell the company’s wares. In these workspaces, employees will literally be on the marketing frontline. Already brand leaders in various fields are experimenting – from Accenture’s city networked offices to Apple’s showroom-workspaces.

Space and Light

While the big themes of future office design – such as networked workers’ clubs, knowledge worker interactions, city locations and branded contemporary design – form the outline picture of change, the more detailed strokes are still taking time to come into focus. However, we can still speculate, based on what we have seen already and on what demographic trends tell us.

Take lighting for example: the era of artificially-lit deep office space already looks at an end, as thin ‘finger wings’ in many schemes allow natural light to flood the workspace from both sides and give more workers a window view. As engineer Max Fordham predicted in the Architectural Review (April 2005): ‘The need for natural light will make buildings thinner so that light will penetrate from the windows.’

In this book, the Roche Products head office at Welwyn Garden City, praised as a ‘love affair with light’ by the judges, and the doughnut-shaped GCHQ at Cheltenham, which has 80 % of space close to a window, point the way forward. Before the Industrial Revolution, natural light was the only available option to illuminate the world of work. Rooms in which people worked tended to be tall with large openings to admit light. With the invention of electricity to light interiors, floor plates were allowed to deepen and more ominously ceiling heights were allowed to shrink. That process now needs to be reversed.

It is not surprising that flexible old warehouse buildings should be so popular with occupiers, as their large windows and high ceilings create a wonderful atmosphere. Average ceiling heights of 2.7 m for the showcased schemes are praised in this book, showing how shrunken our vistas have become. Tradition rules that a sensible width/height ratio for offices is 5:1, so a 15 m wide office should have a ceiling height of 3 m, with windows allowing light in at high level. But if there was a 4 m ceiling height, this would allow for a more efficient depth of plan and greater flexibility in the use of a structure.

We might indeed see an era of higher ceilings and better ceiling treatments in offices, as there is a growing belief that knowledge workers need headspace to think, and are intellectually constrained by low suspended ceilings. In this respect, the ‘rolling’ ceiling at BBC Mailbox Birmingham (see Chapter 5) suggests what is possible.

Conversely, average light levels at 400 lux for all the featured BCO projects could well be regarded as too high in the future, as current codes for artificial lighting come under attack from those who regard commercial office space as blandly and uniformly over-lit. Evidence suggests that lower levels of overhead illumination and more dedicated task lighting at desk level could be on the way to make environments less glaringly oppressive and more geared to human need.

This is especially important in the context of an ageing workforce – many knowledge workers are also older workers, simply because they have acquired their knowledge and expertise over the course of a long career. One in two European adults of working age will be over 50 by 2020. Already in Britain there are more pensioners than children under 16. The changing age balance of the workforce brings issues like lighting to the fore, as older workers need better ambient conditions in order to extend their working lives productively. It is not simply that ageing eyes need more light – they need light precisely where it is needed.

Higher Occupancy Levels

In tandem with lower general levels of illumination will come higher densities of occupation. The BCO winners from 2002–08 provide 12 m² per person on average. Future office workers could well be more bunched together. Already the BCO’s Occupier Density Study (May 2009) by Pringle Brandon Consulting / UCL has predicted that organisations will seek to achieve higher density levels in their properties – a trend exacerbated by the current economic downturn. The squeeze is clearly on, reflected in the growing popularity of bench desking systems that support higher densities.

In the quest for greater density, it is hard to argue against the continuing rise of open plan, an approach adopted by so many schemes in this book. Not only is open plan usually more space-and cost-efficient in comparison with cellular accommodation but it also brings the potential benefits of better team-working. That is why so many different UK organisations have sent their employees scurrying into open-plan schemes in recent years – from city workers to civil servants.

But a word of caution here. According to a recent global study Welcoming Workplace (2008), which looked at organisations in the UK, Japan and Australia, many knowledge workers – especially those over 50 – find open plan to be noisy, tiring and distracting and, by itself, not the total solution to the demands of knowledge work. The chief problem is that they are unable to do solo tasks requiring extended periods of uninterrupted thought. In the rush to turn our offices into high-performance nodes for collaboration within the work network, have we forgotten something? Could it be that that knowledge work is not simply about communicating with others but also about deep personal concentration?

Within 20 years, we might well see uniform open plan replaced entirely by a more mixed suite of work settings: dedicated media-rich spaces for collaboration, strictly policed quiet zones for concentration, and also contemplation spaces – areas within the workplace to switch off, relax, rest, recuperate and be alone with your thoughts away from the communal gaze. We might also see more natural and organic bio-materials replacing the dominance of glass and steel to create a more comfortable environment for the workforce.

Towards Greener Offices

Of course, light levels, ceiling heights, space plans, density levels and material choices are all factors in how sustainable an office scheme will be. It doesn’t take a clairvoyant to suggest that green design will be a dominant consideration in years to come. As Paul Finch wrote in the Architectural Review (August 2007): ‘Too many office buildings have lasted for too short a period, have been too greedy of energy use and have proved incapable of beneficial adaptation. The mantras of lightweight construction, tightly engineered structure and minimum volumes have failed to produce buildings either flexible or adaptable or long lasting. They have to go, and all their embedded (embodied) energy with them.’

However, some of the emerging technical responses to the green agenda, such as attaching photovoltaic cells, solar panels and wind turbines to office buildings, could lose appeal in favour of simpler space-planning strategies that use space and time more efficiently to guarantee high levels of occupancy. The argument goes that the more intensely we people existing office space, the more efficient the use of energy to heat and light that space and the less the need to build additional space.

Having more people working in your space to maximise energy use is one thing. Getting them there is another. Urban locations are generally good for efficient public transport links – negating the need for car parking spaces – but polluted city centres can be less attractive for natural ventilation systems and UK commuters already pay the highest rail fares in Europe. Having more bike racks at work is a step forward, but only a small one when there are not enough cycle paths outside and your employees are dicing with death every morning.

What is generally agreed is the need for more sustainable planning in cities, and a way of measuring urban density that encourages development based on a more vibrant mix of living and working in the city. The authors of this chapter have collaborated on a research study at the Royal College of Art, Metricity (2008), proposing alternative metrics for urban density based on such values as intensity and frequency of use, social amenity and economic autonomy.

We need to consider a future in which offices form part of a mixed use, densely populated matrix of land use, giving rise to an urban ambience that people will enjoy and value, and which can change to suit emerging needs.

Inside office buildings we also need to consider the different work settings that the varying facets of knowledge work will require – and the environmental controls that will address the well-being of a diverse and demanding workforce. The BCO winners from the first decade of the 21st century give us optimism that the momentum for change can be maintained.

Contemplation Space: Visualisation By Catherine Greene, Enabling An Ageing Workforce To Relax And Recuperate. Welcoming Workplace Study (2008).

© Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre

References

T. Austin, Building Awareness of Enhanced Workplace Performance. BAEWP project (2007).

F. Becker, The Ecology of the Mobile Worker, Cornell University (1994).

P. Clarke, Metricity: exploring new measures of urban density, Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre (2008).

T. Davenport, R.J. Thomas and S. Cantrell, The Mysterious Art and Science of Knowledge Worker Performance, MIT Sloan Management Review (2002).

P. Drucker, Knowledge worker productivity: the biggest challenge, California Management Review (1999).

P. Drucker, The next society: a survey of the near future, The Economist (2001).

F. Duffy Workplace Trends: Global Arena conference, Tate Britain (2006).

J. Myerson and P. Ross Space to Work: new office design, Laurence King Publishing (London, 2006).

J. Myerson, ed. Welcoming Workplace: designing office space for an ageing workforce in the knowledge economy, Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre (2008).