AR Reading List 026: the office

Flying in the face of a second wave, many offices across the world are choosing to reopen – propped up to different degrees by screens, one-way systems, and copious amounts of sanitiser. The democratic promises of the open plan – while long known, to anyone who has worked in such circumstances, to be an egregious lie – are no longer viable. The cruel arm of economy nevertheless remains numb to such concerns: reopen or fail.

This week’s reading list looks at the office; an often unglamorous architecture which has had deep significance in the lives of most. The very structures in which capital is produced, office blocks are incredible capital in themselves, defining entire cities – those cities directing national economies – and yet so many are exceedingly banal. Thousands upon thousands of grey boxes, vast swathes of urban real estate will now need to be re-imagined. And while we are rebuilding the office, we may want to rebuild how we think about work altogether.

Register for free to read today and receive the AR Reading List straight to your inbox. Stay safe, and happy reading!

A critical approach to the office, Richard MacCormac, AR May 1992
‘It says something about the values of our society, that it is unable to apportion significance to the office as architecture because perhaps it conjures no feelings of faith, community, pleasure or awe, and it is a revealing insight into our ideas about cities, about work and private interest writ large.’

Why we need a shorter working week, Anna Coote, AR March 2014
‘Time is much more than a unit of exchange. It can be a gift, a sacrifice or an object of plunder. Time can travel faster in old age than in childhood. Unpaid time spent caring for family and friends is just as precious – often more so – than paid time. Yet our economic system assigns it no value whatever’

Typology: Offices, Philip Ross, AR August 2012
‘Efficiency was the guiding principle and ‘time and motion’ were the measures of success. Offices were a celebration of the class divide, manifestations of the roles and relationships between managers and ‘workers’ that defined the corporation’

Spatial generics of the architecture office, Amelia Stein, AR May 2015
‘In the 1950s, US corporate spatial generics – the open-plan, communal tables, breakout zones, fluorescent troffer ceiling grids – became architectural spatial generics’

Reputations: Richard Seifert, Ewan M Harrison, AR September 2019
‘As the capital value of a completed speculative office block was extrapolated from its rent, or in the case of empty offices, potential rental income, in periods of rising rents a developer could sit back and watch the capital value of empty office buildings increase’

Office complex in New Delhi by Raj Rewal, Paul Joubert, AR May 1995
‘Although part of a much greater whole, each block is regarded as an individual administrative and social unit, so that workers can identify with their particular territory’

Ministry of Social Welfare in The Hague by Herman Hertzberger, Peter Buchanan, AR March 1991
‘Instead of views across regimented open office floors, there are vistas up and down of anarchic personal expression and lush planting, all both provoked and controlled by the emphatic architecture’