FASHION COLUMN

designing the character of co-working

Chic eclectic design of the future blurs the line between work and home.

Avenue Road residence by Clancy Moore (© Fionn McCann)

You’re a young professional and you’re looking for the perfect place to get some work done today: temperature set to your liking, seating of your choice, a quiet or noisy space as you require. Next to a plant, basking in the daylight of a window with a view. It’s you and your laptop with nowhere to go. No office, no coworkers, no boss. Now what?

The world of work is at a crux. Those soon to retire from it require one set of amenities, and those entering it require something entirely different. So long to the landline in a cubicle of yesteryear. The modern workforce is looking for adventure. Inspiration. And that requires switching things up from the 9-5 scene that has dominated work cultures for the last near century. For this reason many turn to their homes, where all factors are under their control - including making the excursion to a local coffee shop to fuel the need for human interaction, or at least coexistence. However, the freelancing life is rarely as glamorous - or productive - as is often depicted. And the cubicles may be gone, but the eclectic vibe of the coffee shop isn’t quite present at the office. Enter the workspace of the future.

You may not know exactly what you’re searching for, but commercial developers do. It was pioneered by WeWork and it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing: co-working space. WeWork may be on its way out, but co-working has latched on and is ready to dominate the market. What does it look like? Your dream apartment. Comfy couches, quiet cozy nooks, artisanal teas and coffees, sometimes beer on tap. Ahhh, this is what you’ve been looking for. You can collaborate with your hip, inspiring co-workers, and then mozy over to the corner chair for some decompressing “me time”, all the while sipping a custom moccachino. It’s designed this way on purpose and it’s based on productivity research and revenue projections. The thesis: the more you’re personally invested in work, the more impossible it is for you to unplug.

WeWork HQ in Soho, New York (Source: WeWork)

Upon first appearance the co-working space is all about the opportunity to collaborate, to network, to create new possibilities. However, look closer at that community of individuals and it becomes clear that for the most part each works in obsessive isolation. Under the illusion of community and in the comfort of a constructed air of “serious playfulness”, the workplace is beginning to look more and more like the home, confusing the line between work space and personal space. Simultaneously, our work has migrated onto our phones, through our laptops, and literally into our homes, further blurring an ambiguity that used to be nonexistent. According to architect and theorist Jack Self, “before the widespread availability of universal telephony the working day was clearly defined because work could only occur at specific locations. There was no ambiguity; you were either at the office, factory, atelier, studio...or you weren’t. Today ‘business hours’ and ‘personal time’ have bled into each other” (Self, p. 7). And this is extremely lucrative because there is very little time that the company’s workforce is not actively working, as emails from phone to phone occur late into the night and over weekends.

What is especially concerning here is that co-working’s creation of an image of community occurs simultaneously with its isolation of individual workers. The marketing manifesto of the co-working space is to provide space for humans to interact. Some even going so far as to claim they provide a space to unwind and de-stress. However, these sentiments will never be what drives the churning cogs of capitalism. Happiness does not ensure the survival of an enterprise; an easily expendable and replaceable workforce does. So why the facade? Contemporary workplaces are designed to promote self-investment in work because “our fear of redundancy coupled with our legitimate sense of personal investment makes it impossible to unplug”(Self, p. 7). The more the office mirrors the home, the more our life collapses to become entirely about work. Who we are is almost exclusively defined by what we do.

Whole Foods Bryant Park, New York (Source: Lighting Workshop)

And there is a certain design vocabulary that is being built to signify this collapse. It is most evidenced in WeWork spaces across the globe, but it is beginning to spread to the home, to coffee shops, even to your neighborhood Whole Foods: a monogomizing eclecticism that deems to make every space a potential work space. It falls into the WeWork design team’s “global playbook, with an added local flavor”, into Clancy Moore’s “serious playfulness” at their Avenue Road home. It’s a trendy design move that can work anywhere, and anywhere it’s working it signifies that you can work there too. Behold the “fashion column”, a stand-alone soldier sheathed in a decorative suit. It appears as a cigarette column with a finish switch somewhere along its length , as exposed structure wrapped in leather panels, as its own shadow cast in parquet on the floor below. The trend is sweeping the globe, seemingly applicable almost anywhere. Why? It personifies the quirky eclecticism that has come to define the workplace of the future. And the more places you can work, the more you’re working.

Westlight rooftop bar by Studio Munge (© Michael Stavaridis)

We work tirelessly, because our sense of self and social identity depend on it, and because it is so easy to plug in from anywhere. A sense of urgency nags behind each email that might be answered by a co-worker instead. They say we are co-working, but aren’t we all competing? A desperate fear of irrelevance keeps us checking in from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed. We have returned to a monastic style of living whereby we are our jobs; a life of perpetual work. The monks worked alone, but they worked for a common purpose - to dedicate the greatest bounty to God (thence were born the concepts of productivity and work ethic). However, today we practice an opposite monasticism. We work together, but we work for ourselves, for our own self image. And, perhaps more malevolently, for our survival in an increasingly neofeudal reality: a regime of extreme wealth inequality, characterized by policies written for and by the acutely privileged.

Waldmeisterweg public housing complex by Lütjens Padmanabhan (© Ralph Hut)

References:

Self, Jack. “Work On Work On But You’ll Always Work Alone”, The Architectural Review Issue 1428. (Feb. 2016). p. 4-11.

PARANOIA PACKAGE

10 Montieth

In today’s experience economy, developers sell lifestyle choice in a sealed-off package.

Take the M or the L out to Bushwick. Wander through the patchwork urban fabric until you come across a bright sea of red, orange, and yellow frames: windows in a tetrising monolith that pixelates itself over the entire block. You’ve encountered 10 Montieth by ODA Architecture. It’s a new kind of beast for Bushwick, and an example of a burgeoning precedent for experiential living that is guiding the hand of new development in the city. 

The rooms are tiny - that bright frame extruded 20 feet back is all that most studio residents are getting. But it’s not the room they’re paying for; it’s the endless list of amenities that builds a communal extension of living space outside of the apartment’s four walls. Gym with rock climbing wall and squash courts, dog run and pet spa, cafeteria, nail salon, art studio, and most importantly a sprawling multi-level rooftop; the listings for these units boast that residents need never leave the building. And the unsettling fact is that most probably won’t. 

We’re living in an ‘experience economy’ whereby a shift from commodity production to the offering of services has led developers to create experiential amenity spaces rather than larger rooms for the storage of accumulated things. The term for this strategy is brandscape, and it was originally conceptualized to revitalize dilapidated downtowns in American cities. Brandscape creates an identity for a place and the people that encounter it by tapping into the unconscious desires of that community. In this way, a variety of services are packaged as a ‘lifestyle choice’.

The brand is no longer a static entity but is instead a living edifice that provides a transformational individualism and identity. However; that identity is not actually determined by the community, but by the participants in the market. It is packaged and sold, and then purchased and consumed by the community that it is constructing. The brandscape suggests that consumption engenders self-realization. For the younger generations that are interested in spending their money on experiences, and in flexible work schedules and environments, the concept of a living space that enables this ideal lifestyle is very enticing. These new types of developments, like 10 Montieth, attempt to participate fully in their residents’ processes of lifestyle creation by offering customized environments and services within the sealed-off space that is under the developer’s control. Every need is anticipated and serviced by the brandscape.

The issue with such a self-sustaining atmosphere is that within the brandscape’s structure of identity creation, there is the creation of the other. Those who do not fit the brand are kept out of sight and out of mind. And in the case that the brandscape is a piece of gentrifying development in a largely ungentrified area, the entire surrounding neighborhood becomes the other. This produces a carceral landscape of surveillance and exclusion, with the outside becoming heavily policed and the inside turning and existing only within. This is eerily present in the architecture of 10 Montieth, which is shaped like an “O” looking in on a central courtyard and turning its back to the immediate context. Residents can avoid taking their business to local laundromats, groomers, nail salons, gyms, studios, and even grocery stores or restaurants, as they have a cafeteria, vending machines, and lounge inside. That late night run to the bodega for a snack is a chance to meet the bodega owner, and to see the faces of neighbors. Instead, the sealed-off space of the brandscape serves all the needs of the consumer within, segregating them from others and contributing to social homogeneity and lack of diversity. 

This is especially concerning in such divisive times. With the rise of neo-liberal models of deregulated governance and socio-economic polarization, we are left with a sense of weak citizenship. Identity at the level of community is simulated by the brandscape, but in truth it is destroyed by a heightened sense of paranoia. Those within the brandscape form a “community” of sameness, with those outside the brand kept at a safe distance. 

Many are practicing a sort of ‘survival citizenship’ in isolation. In an atmosphere where everyone is out for themselves, striving for the ideal lifestyle can seem like the ultimate feat of personal endurance against the many obstacles of modern life. When in fact, most of the general population is suffering from varying levels of debt, poverty, incarceration, and insecurity about economic survival. This struggle occurs in isolation, and in fear of one another. That very fear is a technology of power crafted by the state. It is used during times of crisis or change in order to enable the reorganization of subjecthood. The resulting ‘atmosfear’ brings about a new reality that breeds paranoia and exclusivity.

Those seeking social reform are aware of the divisive strategies that are currently sweeping the globe in the forms of nationalism, xenophobia, etc. However, few are aware of the divisive  strategies implemented by the brandscape at the level of individual lifestyle and identity. The brandscape models social reform as secession from society, promoting brand identification through the experience of a curated lifestyle within the brandscape’s control. Those that are enchanted by luxury experiential living must be aware of this insidious mix of progressive lifestyle aspirations (social reform, experiential living, workplace flexibility) and segregatory behavior. The threat of gentrification is not just the nomadic strife of artists, it is part of a greater neo-liberal stance that threatens to divide and conquer.

References:

Al, Stefan and Krupar, Shiloh. “Notes on the Society of the Brand”. The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory (ed. C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns & Hilde Heynen). SAGE Publications Ltd. (2012). p.247-273.