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MVRDV settled into their new office headquarters inside the remodeled Het Industriegebouw, nestled in the heart of Rotterdam. Now dubbed by the firm as the MVRDV House, the building was originally designed by iconic Dutch architect Hugh Maaskant in 1952. The new 2,400 square-meter interior is... View full entry
Shortly after starting out in Frank Gehry's office in the early 1990s, Clive Wilkinson founded his own firm in Los Angeles, and has since designed far-reaching workspaces for such big-name clients as Google, the BBC, 20th Century Fox and Microsoft. I spoke with Clive about the evolution from... View full entry
Jvantspijker urbanism architecture has redesigned the main space of an old steam factory in the Delfshaven neighborhood of Rotterdam, to become an open loft office. A central glass meeting room, with a pantry and stairs leading to the plant-filled roof organizes the large warehouse space in a... View full entry
Inspired by the vintage French Citroën Type H cargo van, "La Cabane" designed by independent creative director Julien Franc Wahlgreen functions as a room within a room that can enhance the increasingly common working-from-home experience. Plus, the structure's beach shack or quaint treehouse... View full entry
The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve. — newyorker.com
Corporate America is moving away from conventional layouts where an employee's status is measured by the amount of space he occupies. Instead, more compact, playful designs are coming into favor.
People can do their jobs almost anywhere with their cellphones and laptops, the reasoning goes, so let's make the office a place where people are stimulated by close interaction at their workstations and chance meetings in inviting public spaces such as lounges and coffee bars.
— latimes.com
Hotello is a portable space, packed into a trunk. Hotello contains all the necessary elements needed to work and rest. It consists of a metal structure that supports a translucent and sound absorbant curtain. Hotello can be combined and aggregated in different configurations. — conceptualdevices.com
It is divided into two sections. One of these, the working area, is dominated by its single central desk, which is 12,5 metres long, without any divisions or boundaries. This desk is shared by graphic designers, architects, data visualisation experts, video artists and anyone who the team can share experiences and collaborate with. — domusweb.it
The architects have shared the following images and text about their project with us... The project, designed by architects Anna Puigjaner and Guillermo Lopez, members of MAIO design team, involves the conversion of a space that formerly housed a washing place into an open studio for... View full entry
The original rationale for the open-plan office, aside from saving space and money, was to foster communication among workers, the better to coax them to collaborate and innovate. But it turned out that too much communication sometimes had the opposite effect: a loss of privacy, plus the urgent desire to throttle one’s neighbor. — New York Times
The architects often walk clients through it to show how an open environment works. There’s not a private office or cubicle anywhere, and there’s constant low-level hubbub: people in motion, and gathering into small groups. The tour makes some clients nervous; they wonder how their own workers would concentrate in such an environment. — NYT
Lawrence Cheek examines new trends in office designs which focus on providing employees room to roam and thus to think. Specifically, he looks at three examples the Seattle offices of Russell Investment, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation headquarters as well the offices of the... View full entry
The showpiece is a staircase smack dab in the middle of the first-floor work room that leads to a second floor with a gaping white void painted red inside. Taranta says it's “reminiscent of a large droplet of water ready to fall from the ceiling.” Uh, yeah. If a “large droplet of water” looks exactly like a vagina. — fastcodesign.com
At the end of his life, Robert Propst, creator of the cubicle system, called his invention “monolithic insanity,” yet we seem unable to tread down any other path. Longstanding calls for the Redesign of the Cubicle continue... — opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
