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.