Workspace Evolution
Theoretical review on the role of Workplaces for Cities_Andreas Marx
During the last decades the nature of creative jobs is dramatically evolved. The increasing flexibility of work styles influenced the way designers, artists, and professionals in general approach their daily activities. With growing computational power of mobile devices, and virtually ubiquitous access to internet and cloud services, jobs are being separated from a determined location and time. This shift is having significant consequences for the way traditional workplaces function. To reflect the fast-pace changes of the work systems, office spaces have gradually incorporated new functions and activities, including areas for socialize and relax, flexible working spaces, and open zones where traditional spatial hierarchies are abolished. Offices seem to have a tendency to relate to other urban public spaces, such as squares, coffee shops, and lobbies.
If, on the one hand offices are patently trying to reflect a structural change in the nature of work by becoming more open, connected and global, studios, on the other hand, seem to mainly concentrate on the activities carried out in them. Studios are creative spaces where ideas are born, are developed and tested, and have been given life. They are also the place where reflection, iterative thinking process, and design production take place. Design-related activities in the studio usually expand to become places of socialization, with exhibitions, display and public events. Contemporary studios embody the variety of task and activities that characterize the creative and professional work today.
Working Interiors, Offices and Studios_Andrew Tang
The built environment for working has evolved over the years, as organizational principles, working conditions, and aesthetics adopt technology and the new culture in the workplace. Not everyone works in an office but among the various kinds of workspace, the office typology is still the most predominant. From reception desks to cubicles to meeting rooms, many hours of the working economy take place in the office. Interestingly, the designs of office interiors vary so much today that one would question the idea and definition of an office. Discussions about the optimal office have gone back and forth from maximum flexibility to collaboration to privacy, and a few timezs over again. Perhaps, the underlying trend of the new office isn’t found in traditional office buildings but rather in an adaptive reuse of space that suits the culture of new businesses. In a time where much takes place in the virtual space, the physical office offers people in a varied working culture an increasingly important part of human social contact. What is the office evolution and how will the history of office interiors manifest itself in the 21st century?
