In talking to employees we found that organic, flexible environments are even more relevant today. But, you may ask: Is this wishful thinking? Just another case of designers falling in love with principles divorced from reality? We think not. We therefore asked whether we could reinterpret the spirit of the “office landscape” for a modern workforce. If anything, the desire for adaptability has only increased during the digital age, thanks to multiplying modes of working that have replaced the 40-hour desk job. These “veal-fattening pens” (Douglas Coupland’s term) borrowed only the physical form of an officeless layout and none of the emotive or aspirational qualities of the original open office concept. Our biggest fear was that space constraints would constrain our thinking, just as economic optimizations degraded the original 1950s open office concept, Bürolandschaft office landscape, which broke the strict grid of offices and hierarchy into organic layouts and furniture systems focused on the individual, to the drab cubicle farms of the 1970s. feet) that needed to accommodate the work of as many as three R&D teams. The constraints our team faced were precisely those behind the plague of cube farms: a very limited space (2,120 sq. The grand opening of an open-office innovation lab at Equinor this June was a proud moment for our Places practice because it was the manifestation of months of intense thinking about how to succeed where so many others have failed. Yet we keep designing and building them-frog included-because the economics and collaboration potential remain compelling, if elusive, design goals.
Despite the utopian visions that led to their inception, real-world open offices-those fishbowls and theaters of distraction-have proven only to reduce efficiency and increase stress, as their grid-like layouts reinforce our interchangeability.
The science is in: open offices have failed.
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