NL Architects recently completed the project NS Station, a major office interior revamp over 9 stories right on top of Central Station in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The project resulted from a 2011 competition win where NL Architects made the Thick Walls™ system the conceptual core: big shelves absorb the clutter that normally spreads trough the office - wardrobes, bookshelves, flip boards, archive, bulletin boards. And sometimes even the stairs. — bustler.net

The fairly rectangular structure, located just a few feet from the new light rail Expo Line’s elevated tracks in Culver City, gets most of its energy from photovoltaics—a 2,800 sq ft array sitting on top of a shaded parking canopy outside. But what makes it all work are the energy savings: It significantly reduces loads through several low-tech, high-tech, and even revolutionary techniques, most of which were developed with engineers at Buro Happold, whose LA offices are just down the street. — archpaper.com

What constitutes a modern professional workplace is changing rapidly, and Gensler, the San Francisco design and architecture firm, is betting those changes will factor more heavily not only into clients’ interior design decisions, but every single real estate decision they make.

That bet led Gensler to hire a well-known name locally in both design and real estate circles: Robert A. Peck. — washingtonpost.com

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

Nearly half a century after Habitat 67, I worked five days a week in a cubicle in Safdie's latest high-profile creation, the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. And as I stared at a computer screen in my small slice of Safdie-dom, I wondered: What good has visionary architecture ever done for working plebes? — theawl.com