Open Collections

Akbarnejad, Mahsa

In cities today, people seem to work anywhere and everywhere. For knowledge workers, a chair and Wi-Fi are the only necessities. The office has lost its immediate identification with the office as a room or space in a designated building, where all work tasks are carried out, from writing and faxing to attending meetings. Work has become transportable and ubiquitous, almost a state of mind. Like a bubble of pure concentration that one can turn on and off with or without the help of tangible tools, work is where you are. Where does this leave architecture, if the office building and the office itself are in decline? Does this mean we don’t’ need offices anymore? The short answer is No. In fact, it was in this decade that we saw the emergence of small corporate cities such as Google or Facebook headquarters or the Apple campus. Even companies that did not want to pay for office space recognized the importance of collaboration and face to face interaction. This has led to the creation of shared spaces like WeWork which advertises its space as “dynamic environments for creativity, focus, and connection, it’s a movement toward humanizing work”. Although the office building is hardly extinct, its architecture has not changed in the past decade or so. Office building designs are dominated by optimized core-to-perimeter depths, floor plate square footages, LEED certification, and utilization rates. New ideas about sustainability, information technology, flexibility, or trends in work patterns hold little weight. Fortunately, professional offices, tech firms, design industries, and start-ups are among the tenants creating demand for architectural alternatives. I have studied the history of white-collar jobs, workspace, and workplace trends. That research is documented here, along with a design proposal that demonstrates an architectural alternative to conventional office design. The proposed design is not meant as a definitive or singular solution, but as a conceptual strategy that offers new direction based on changing business needs.

Graduating Project

eng

2019-05-03

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/70053

UBCV

Graduate

DSpace