The Office

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided us with an extraordinary opportunity to re-imagine the narrative around what our working lives should look like. As architectural practitioners, our role within the cultural and societal shift will be crucial. Our informed critique and speculative design will have the potential to inform the direction of not only future workplace cultures, but also wider shifts in behavioral patterns.

‘The Office’ acknowledges research projects by architectural practices and ‘think- tanks’ that explored the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on workplace design. However useful, this research was in many cases limited to overtly pragmatic solutions that could be rolled out across generic commercially driven projects. For many, this is where the conversation ended.

‘The Office’ is a reaction against this complacency, against the formulaic, the general and the overall. It is the reintroduction of disorderliness, self- determination and failure into the lives of everyday workers. A figurative and literal urban scaffold, the intention of this studio is to develop projects that perform as a mechanism to inject architectural diversity back into the workplace and re-vitalize public discourse on the possibilities of the ‘future city’.

What is required is an architectural argument that captures the social, cultural and political ambitions of the post-COVID-19 era. Perhaps then, rather than completely reconfiguring the urban fabric of the city, the future workplace line in the gradual establishment of an ideology that seeks to re-engage with popular capitalist objectives, rather than reject them entirely.

Ultimately, this studio will ask: What do you want your future workplace to look like?