What comprises a company's culture, physically? News innovator, Quartz, is looking for answers and documenting the process

2016-03-24T14:36:00-04:00

Moving offices can be a pain, but it’s also an opportunity to take stock of how the company has grown and what it could still become. With this move, we’ve put an emphasis on capturing the culture, or Quartziness, that defines Quartz employees and their work: global, nerdy, creative, and so on...This diary is part of a new obsession at Quartz, also called The Office, which is exploring the future of work, from management structures to the gig economy to distributed workplaces to compensation.

From mass-scale organizations like WeWork to four year old "digitally native news outlet" Quartz, the questions of what defines work culture in a largely post-manufacturing, perennially fluid global infrastructural era are still being formulated. Quartz is currently asking how "How do you capture a company’s culture in a physical space?" as they prepare to move into a new office while documenting that process on Medium.

Desai Chai Architecture is designing this as-yet-undefined space for Quartz. Desai is correspondingly basing their ideas not only on the titular physical mineral, but a more abstract notion of what constitutes the company. Citing parallels to Sol LeWitt with the company's tendency to resemble "a structured grid with unexpected deviations," the team has so far defined vital elements of the Quartz culture as incorporating "glitch moments" in an intellectually playful environment. It's a clickable front row seat to the design concept process, as well as an intimate tour ...

The design never stops: WeWork acquires Case

2015-08-05T13:32:00-04:00

In the design process, you design buildings and then you leave them. You don't check on them. Every building we open, since space is our product, we can talk to our members. We can close the loop and continue to make our spaces better and put that feedback into new spaces. -David Fano

Traditionally, an architect's involvement stops once the building is constructed and the red ribbon has been cut. Clients and tenants often go on to populate pristine spaces with their own furniture and paint schemes, often to the chagrin of the original designer. But what if the architect's role could be extended into a kind of perennial interactive process, whereby clients and designers would continue to refine not only the physical work space, but the work processes that go on within them? Such is the potential for the acquisition of Case, an architectural consultancy firm specializing in building information and technology by WeWork, a global provider of co-sharing workspaces.

In an interview with Architect Magazine, new WeWork chief technology officer and chief development officer David Fano describes the pioneering potential for this new relationship, in which Case is able to transform recommendations into directives and then witness the real-world results. This enhances the c...

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What comprises a company's culture, physically? News innovator, Quartz, is looking for answers and documenting the process

The design never stops: WeWork acquires Case