Office workers too need human contact. We need face-to-face chats, meetings at the coffee point or by the photocopier – in gossip terms surely the modern-day equivalent of the village pump. How can you have an office romance if there is no office and you’re stuck at home? Offices with the most advanced teleconferencing facilities – supposedly obviating much of the need for travel - are paradoxically always near an airport or a motorway intersection, so that people can get there easily to meet other people. You cannot gossip to a video screen or a Voicemail system.
There is another paradox: often, the big new office blocks, whether stacked up high in cities or spread out low in suburbia, result from restructuring exercises. Typically, a company will have acquired several different buildings during its piecemeal expansion – buildings that are difficult to adapt, expensive to run, and probably with too much space for a trimmed-down workforce. The answer is to sell them off and bring everyone together into one all-new, efficient building or campus. This way, the firm makes year-on-year savings, is able to introduce new working practices, and at the same time gets itself a much higher public profile. When struggling IBM introduced "hot desking" in the late 1980s, the idea that everyone on the payroll did not have to have a dedicated desk was revolutionary. Now, it is the norm.
The expert who has most consistently turned out to be right about office life, right through the 1980s and 1990s, is the London-based architect and space planner Francis Duffy, who acts as a consultant for developers and corporations internationally. Duffy’s latest book, "the New Office", published by Conran Octopus, is both wise and true. His success is to consider the human factors over and above the technological ones. Thus he characterises offices into types, which he calls "dens", "clubs", "hives", and "cells". The clubs and dens are in the ascendant as the old-fashioned hives and cells fall from fashion. Dens are the kind of jumbly "boutique" offices much favoured by advertising agencies, designers and other "creatives". One of the most extraordinary recent examples (though not in Duffy’s book) is the theatrical interior of the Amsterdam-based advertising agency KesselsKramer, which takes the form of a surreal mindscape of seaside, military, suburban and sporting motifs shoehorned into a canalside former church. But then, it’s an unorthodox agency, and so are the British designers FAT (standing for Fashion, Architecture, Taste).
Clubs, however, are the shape of the future for the modem-linked corporate office worker, since these are drop-in places which nonetheless have a strong corporate identity. Just as you find a chair in a club and use whatever facilities it provides, from phones to food, so it goes in the new clubbish offices. You can always find a desk and a screen and a phone point – but they are not exclusively yours, nor are you expected to be chained to them. And in the big sitting areas or the covered street outside with its shops and cafes, you meet people, talk, exchange meaningful glances, decide on a course of action. Then you’re off again into the world outside.
In the case of Niels Torp’s SAS HQ in Sweden and the BA "village" at Harmondsworth near Heathrow, the key to the whole thing is that buzzword, interaction. Wings of offices lead off a central street, just as side-roads lead off a real high street. Outside each cluster of glass-fronted offices is a common area for group meetings. At BA, there is the equivalent of a village green half-way along the central covered street, and even a "contemplation area" within an small olive grove. The typing pool, it isn’t. Everybody is free, but at the same time everybody can be seen by any managing director who cares to take a stroll through his domain. It is more paternalistic than truly democratic.
Adam Opel HQ, Russelheim, by BDP
Compared with how office blocks used to be, this is nonetheless a huge step forward. Technology, in the end, liberates us to be more like we really are. The earliest offices were places bagged at random at tables in coffee houses. Clubs then arrived to provide what nowadays would be called central services. The 20th century made office working a much more rigid affair. But today, inside those glittering corporate palaces and quirky boutique office buildings alike, it’s full steam ahead for the 18th century.
