before stata, gehry's vontz center was supposed to do the same, the idea being to get people out of their labs and into a social mix where they can share ideas. holl's mixing spaces in his mit dorm were talked about in a similar way.

i think behnisch's genzyme center, too. check out behnisch's website, by the way. the intros for each building type get at some of what you're talking about. check out 'research', 'workplace', 'education'.

seems to me this was also talked about for kahn's salk institute though, so maybe not such a new idea. and, while i'm thinking about it, herman hertzberger talks around this as well.

one of the more famous examples, but not necessarily a positive one, was the chiat day offices in ny (by gio ponti, maybe?) that got rid of offices and became basically a big marketing playground. people could plug in their laptops anywhere and have impromptu meetings. saw it published originally (arch record or p.a./archit), but then heard they had to build offices because people got anxiety-ridden: no privacy, no place to hang pictures of kids and dogs...

ideo has worked hard to make their offices a creative environment, and i've seen several l.a. video studio offices that were tweaking the way people interacted with their environments.

sorry no more specific articles i can think of/link to.

oh, and tschumi's student center at columbia. the central ramp was meant to be a hub for the sharing of ideas.

cool examples - social mixing/break out space seems to be the most common feature architects use when trying to promote innovation. I'm trying to codify this assumption and get more rigorous criteria to justify doing this for 10.7 million sf of r&d facilities we're planning.

i'd say you could also use some of the pretty well-known daylighting studies done with reference to education. daylighting = attention, mental acuity, less sluggishness/boredom, higher test scores. glare = annoyance, fatigue, lower test scores.example.

check for any writing research on variety of textures. i've read something somewhere about the mental activity triggered by textural change, but i don't know where.

one final thing i'd suggest is the opening chapters of stewart brands' 'how buildings learn' - the parts about building 20 (?) on the mit campus. he has a lot to say about how that building - a funky old mess - fostered creative thinking.

it may be that there are just no rules: http://www.thinksmart.com/articles/innovative_space.html

i'm a pretty unreliable source, ultimately, i guess.

are the masters of this, with Frank Duffy at the helm

DEGW, Duffy and Worthington in particular are responsible for a number of books on the new/creative office, and seem to do their best work as space planners rather than architects. Google offices for example.

The difference is that they employ occupational / organisational / environmental psychologists, and ergonomists...

not a bad idea to take the reverse route...find the companies, groups, etc. that have are innovative/imaginative (e.g. google) and use their working environments as case studies.

i was thinking as i was walking yesterday that i do a lot of thinking while walking. my mind keeps pace with my feet; my mind like a juicing brunette lollipop on two jaunting stalks. well, that got me thinking about the peripatetic schools of thought in ancient greece where thought would be conceived to the dynamic tempo of walking. stability would signal readiness to elaborate, to expose and discuss. physical stability was therefore not only a scholarly act but also a political one. then i thought of modern schools and the complete spit between physical activity (the playground, the football field...) and the very unanimal like passive repose required in a classroom. the standard modern mode of learning situates the student in a perpetual student-like posture...always being lectured to. teaching and learning parallel the physics of ballistic missiles; how well can a teacher launch her lessons to reach the minds of her students (this also gives another explanation as to why the separating distance from the teacher is seen as a significant factor in students' acquisition of knowledge).

if you think about it, its quite a funny sort of thought; we travel, as a student body, en masse, to our institutes of knowledge economy to sit our ass still (assuming the mind is doing all the work) for the larger part of the day. typically, to shuffle between one class and the other, corridors are rendered into purely connective spatial tissue between the knowledge cells.

a lot of learning and working is done with our ass on the seat. well, perhaps this is explained by the image of the community of monkeys at repose plucking out each others' flees. we are at our most communal when we are communally at rest. its far more difficult to be walking AND communal; walking underlines how out of synch we are with each other. walking separates people, drives them internally. It is antisocial behavior and so, to walk away, you need permission from the head master ... a "corridor pass".

what these institutes need to encourage is more walking, stop seeing individuality as being opposed to community-building. perhaps, if people walked a bit more, they'd appreciate how out of synch they are with, and different from, each other, and, with each step taken, they can get over their indifference. walk to topple down your indifferent governments.

When I’m still, the thought of death is much scarier, much more of a mythical beast, than when I’m walking. Walking encourages lightness, the lightness of a thought of almost-not-existing; your fat-assed post-its-cloaked “personality” is no longer an issue then.

noctilucent .... you should read Haruki Murakmi's book on running ... I wonder if you two share the same ideas about the equivalencies between mental and physical activity.

perhaps you should look at this at a different way. maybe you wanna look at the idea of "innovative disruption" and the companies who have been successful in this business theory and look at their spaces. i would guess most of them are just your regular crappy industrial office complex buildings with maybe a fuBball table and a lot of mountain dew.

Re Stata Center @ MIT, the book "Building Stata" does go into some description of how they tried to open the ivory tower to improve connectivity and creativity. However, other pieces I have read suggest that the occupants of the glass-walled laboratories have stuck paper on the glass to hide tehmselves from prying eyes.

creativity through sharing of ideas and cut-throat competition for funding do fight against each other a little. maybe treekiller's project won't have this issue?

ok, a lot. that's a pretty major conflict...

Chiat-Day's offices were by Gaetano Pesce. I loved them when they were published (love his goofy work, it's a guilty pleasure), but they did have all the problems Steven listed above.

I also have a problem with Google's offices and the whole notion of "creativity-inducing design". Every time I see those offices I picture a mom at a birthday party screaming at her crying kid "We got you the damn clown and pony! Now get out there and have fun or I'll really give you something to cry about!!"*

It seems like force-feeding the "fun" atmosphere is one sure way to kill it. Functionally, having lots of breakout space for meetings on couches, a mix of table sizes and privacy levels etc. is all great, but why wrap it in carnival aesthetics? I practically worship Google, so maybe I'm wrong.


*Example not based on personal experience - not quite.