Archinect - News

Can work stress be reduced with adaptive rooms? UNStudio is looking into it

2017-02-14T14:08:00-05:00

Part inhabitable mood ring, part psychological experiment, the exhibition "Work 3.0 – A Joyful Sense at Work" from UNStudio and SCAPE is an attempt to create spaces that make work stress more bearable by testing out adaptable environments in the form of a "fully immersive, modular structure."

This immersive structure, known as a RESET pod, will be on display at the iSalone deal Mobile in Milan from April 4th through 9th, and incorporates input from a neuroscientist, an ambient intelligence technology integrator, and a technologist/interaction designer. The feedback from visitors to the exhibition will help the designers determine what spaces do and don't work for office worker stress mitigation.

Here's the text of the full press release from UNStudio:

Can a space adapt to your stress levels? UNStudio and SCAPE join forces with a multidisciplinary team of experts to tackle stress in the workplace.

UNStudio and SCAPE have joined forces with a multidisciplinary team of experts for the ex...

Do contemporary office designs upend work/life balance?

2015-08-26T13:26:00-04:00

Our world is now ideas driven and our environment needs to be energetic, inspiring and even provocative. Employers also want people to stay longer at work and making the space awesome certainly helps.

Many architects are designing home/work boundary-eroding office designs, which purposefully mimic the comforts of home to encourage creative employees to stay later. These designs have been embraced by a who's who of movers and shakers including Google, Facebook, and Disney. But is this shift toward longer hours a great boost to productivity?

In The New Yorker, Tim Wu cites stories of "people [being] scolded for not responding to e-mails after midnight." He argues that You Really Don't Need to Work So Much, making the case that "in white-collar jobs, the amount of work can expand infinitely through the generation of false necessities—that is, reasons for driving people as hard as possible that have nothing to do with real social or economic needs." What agency should architects take in shaping future work environments?

For more on workplace design:

• "Work on Work" exhibition turns public space into office space

• Considering the future of work at the 2015 London Festival of Architectu...

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...