What should the brave new world of work look like? The corona pandemic has raised this question with unprecedented force. In fact, architects and entrepreneurs have been looking for ways to merge their lofty ideas with the reality of working people into an office symbiosis for decades.
In their book “The Office of Good Intentions. Human(s) Work”, Florian Idenburg, LeeAnn Suen and Iwan Baan traced the results of this search. In twelve visually powerful essays, they examine the spatial typologies and global phenomena that have shaped the office over the last half century – from the abolition of the time clock to the design of workplace playgrounds.
From Meta to IBM
Their path takes the authors, among other places, to Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. It went down in office history as the MPK20. A 7.6 meter high ceiling spans an open-plan office full of exposed cables and art installations. Every wall and every surface should have the charm of being unfinished.
At the IT and consulting company. IBM, on the other hand, took a different approach. The heart of the neighborhood in Boca, Florida, is a hexagonal courtyard with an artificial lake in its center. A geometric pillar construction is the hallmark of the Y-shaped building. This form of ground floor design is the trademark of the responsible architect Marcel Breuer.
The people behind the work
Florian Idenburg is an architect based in New York and co-founder of SO – IL (with Jing Liu). For years, the company has been dedicated to the future of work and has designed a series of workspaces based on the idea of an office without desks.
LeeAnn Suen is a Boston-based architect with an MArch from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. There she contributed to the first volume of Oblique (Journal of Critical Conservation) and worked for three years as editor of Open Letters, a bi-weekly publication that deals with architecture and design topics in the form of letters.
After studying photography at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, Iwan Baan initially worked as a documentary photographer before specializing in photographing people interacting with their built environment. He became famous for his photos of informal settlements such as the Torre David in Caracas – he received the Golden Lion for the best installation at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale.
The book “The Office of Good Intentions. Human(s) Work”, published by TASCHEN Verlag, 592 pages, price 50 euros.
Source: Stern
