From the office as city, to the city as an office

The twentieth century was an era of great personal and private mobility for the inhabitants of the UK. Soon we could be leaving behind our concept the office as well

At the beginning of the last century there was one car for every 4,500 people. At the end there was one car for every two and a half people. In another changing trend, in more recent years many have predicted the ‘death of the office’ – driven in part by the rise of tele-working as a serious alternative to actually travelling to work. On the contrary, the physical work environment appears as important as ever to how organisations perform. Not only does work performance improve if people are happy in their workplace, but office work has become a social activity and the balance has shifted from an overriding focus on management efficiency – conspicuous for much of the twentieth century – towards the human factors of performance and well-being.

Probably the most important aspect of the office is the requirement to be able to meet face-to-face and the need for secure and private club-like spaces for discussion and private matters. The SAS building outside Stockholm for example, completed in 1988, set a trend for ‘the office as the city’.

It was large, based around a covered linear street, and gave rise to a spate of out-of-town campuses across Europe that provided all the amenities of the city inside the workplace.

However the future is the opposite – the ‘city as office’. Companies in the future will be looking to downsize the footprint of their property and make use of city-centre facilities that are publicly available – coffee shops, restaurants, pubs, city parks, library reading rooms. Why add millions to the cost of your office scheme to build a boardroom used once a month when you can simply book a private seminar room in a hotel every month two years in advance? Why worry about the limits of technology when the city is itself covered by a wireless network? The most amenable, attractive and convenient place for people to meet is usually the centre of the city, so we can look forward to an urban consolidation of office property after decades of out-of-town developments and suburban hubs.

Considerable efforts have been made to create a much tighter fit between corporate culture and work environment. A recent book, Good Office Design, published by the British Council for Offices, shows how corporate cultures are changing principally owing to networks and sustainable agendas. The emergence of the networked office depends critically on one factor – the growth of the knowledge economy, requiring the rapid acceleration of networks
to capture, build and share knowledge. Knowledge workers need to collaborate, think and act in a flexible environment. The first identified ‘knowledge workers’ were lawyers, doctors, accountants and scientists. Today the term can be routinely applied to most executive and managerial roles within business, industry and professional services. This is because computers now handle much of the repetitive process and ‘work’ is more dependent on the independent application of knowledge and learning.

Electronic document management allows knowledge to be retrieved from a central source remote from the work station located in a virtual world and retrieved anywhere (including from home), so the workplace becomes a variety of environments tailored to the particular requirements of the business to hand.

Flexibility is the key to future office development and a move away from the tailor-made shell to a more robust and generous building type that can sit within a ‘Spatial Plan’ (which includes transport, density and mix parameters). As people work in patterns that are more flexible and fluid, serendipity within the city and the chance encounter seem hopeful and exciting.

Paul Warner is Chair of the British Council for Offices Urban Affairs Committee, and Research Director at 3D Reid