Before the Covid-19 pandemic forced most office workers to indefinitely take their work home, the New York-based WeWork had a dramatic rise and fall. With a widely-reported, botched IPO in 2019, the office space company’s ascent was emblematic of an unprecedented alliance between data, finance, real estate, and architecture. This volatile blend of ambition earned it the notorious reputation as a multibillion-dollar “unicorn” and a Hulu special documenting its “shamanic” leader, Adam Neuman. Overvalued at $47 billion, investors pulled out in 2019, and the company’s rapid decline was compounded by white-collar workers’ widespread adoption of ad-hoc home offices.
Now, as people are increasingly—though unequally—vaccinated in the US, they are venturing out again. First to restaurants and bars, though the office may be next. WeWork is trying to lure them back to their desks.
In May, the company’s CEO, Sandeep Mathrani, sought to shame people into returning to work (and to paying their WeWork membership fees again, presumably), arguing that the “least engaged workers want to stay home.” This is not the first time that the company has been caught up in controversy related to its membership. Early in the pandemic, it continued to charge its Washington, D.C. customers for their rented office space, even as the CDC and local government officials urged people to stay home.
Now, the company is offering an initial first free month of membership in New York as an additional incentive, recently introduced a touchless coffee dispenser, and is hiring architects, designers, and other roles again. Does this mark a return to the shared office?
Architecture, tied as it is to the construction industry, has its ups and downs. WeWork’s model subsumes multiple functions and markets under one publicly-traded company: user data and sciences, real estate and investing, and design and construction. Before the unicorn’s bust, Metropolis Magazine argued that the company was changing the way architects work as “correlating digital information with physical structures is good business—it has quickly become a core strategy for the eight-year-old, $47 billion company racing to expand its footprint globally.”
While it turned out that it may not have been as good a business as everyone thought, the company is still changing the role of the architect. Nevertheless, the media largely reports WeWork’s relationship to the profession of architecture through its top hires.
WeWork tapped Danish starchitect, Bjarke Ingels, as its Chief Architect in 2018.
Back then, Ingels was the image of a swashbuckling entrepreneur. He
was able to parlay billions of developer dollars into TED-inspired
conscious capitalism combining environmental impact and community
through the use of seductive narratives, punchy diagrams, and slick
renderings. He even partnered with WeWork to start WeGrow, a
“conscious entrepreneurial school” in New York, which closed in
2020 after a mere two years in operation.
It turns out that
environmentalism is only one of Ingels’ schticks, as he was also
caught posting selfies with Brazil’s right-wing president, Jair
Bolsonaro, after traveling to the Northeast of the South American
country to discuss a tourism “masterplan.” WeWork
confirmed that Ingels was no longer their Chief
Architect in 2020.
For WeWork, architecture is but one component in a worldwide proforma. As architectural labor is absorbed into global companies, the volatile nature of their employment may be compounded.
While Ingels may be
gone, WeWork is again hiring architects and interior designers.
Working in house, they will be part of a company that uses staff
designers to generate shared offices according to data-driven
formulas, similar to what Keller Easterling dubbed “spatial
products” in her 2005 book, Enduring Innocence: Global
Architecture and its Political Masquerades.
For WeWork, architecture is but one component in a worldwide proforma. As architectural labor is absorbed into global companies, the volatile nature of their employment may be compounded. The company’s future in the office space market of New York remains unclear. For now, WeWork has shifted its efforts south of the border with its largest investor, Soft Bank, partnering with the ex-CEO of Uber Brazil to ramp up its portfolio in Latin America.
10 Comments
Weird how the media always focuses on the wacky CEO instead of the more interesting architect co-founder -- WeWork has done a lot of good for redesigning work, and ideally suited for post-pandemic work life. Though they should be converting more of their larger office spaces to even smaller, isolated bubbles. Their current CEO is right -- in-person work is more productive, not that you have to be in-office 5 days a week.
Their current CEO is right -- in-person work is more productive
there are countless articles that refute this, with data. here's one:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
also- please tell us how wework has revolutionized anything other than finding a new avenue for absurd sums of venture capital money? i see nothing other than a trendier version of the open office plan, one that still comes off as quite stale.
If you think educational services are really 83% more "productive" than perhaps you will believe everything as long as its in a pie chart. So why are parents and kids begging schools to go back? You think remote work is a good long term solution? Perhaps that is great if you have a big house with a private office space. Most people don't.
your original comment was in regards to office work. education and work are two different things, evidenced by the fact that we work failed miserably at the former and less so at the latter.
(also, that first "bar" chart is about jobs that can be done at home, in the case of education it is a job for a teacher but not a student.. the productivity numbers are different.)
"WeWork has done a lot of good for redesigning work, and ideally suited for post-pandemic work life."
WeWork didn't invent the shared office or do anything that hadn't already been done, in some cases better, by others. They just had the most funding and the best personality cult to capture the zeitgeist. A lot like Apple, really.
They'll be fine as an office outsourcing company - all-in-one services from building management to design. Not as exciting as the tech company they pretended to be but it could be a solid if modest venture.
Comparing remote work to remote school is not right. Younger kids can have severe developmental issues when studying from home. The same cannot be said for Office workers. The whole going back to work paradigm is driven by old-school managers and owners who are tired of seeing leased spaces empty for 15 months.
God, I wish this company got Fyred, so we can have a festival.
WeWork was AirBNB for office space, with the underlying properties designed to become a personal real estate fortune for the jackass that SoftBank threw billions at.
When that kind of money is flying around the one thing you can be sure of is that only crooks and liars are involved.
Anything done solely for money is guaranteed to be shit: every aspect of the world's largest Banana Republic proves it.
Would take your sensitive information, or that of your customers and vendors to a bacchanal beach beer and pizza party every day?
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.