Description

The office building from 1963 up to the present time

The driving force behind the evolution of office buildings in modern times has been the maximisation of profit and efficiency. Status, office organisation and ecology are subordinate to this goal, while technological developments determine the framing conditions. At opposite ends of the spectrum are the two poles that are the determining factors in office organisation and also their spatial realisation: seclusion and openness, or rather the closed cell-like offices and the open-plan layout.

One of the great moments for office workers in the last century, the so-called “American century,” was the discovery of human capital. The assumption is that the efficiency of an organisation can be increased by encouraging informal communication between staff members. Due to the recent change in modes of working, from simply carrying out routine tasks to independent knowledge work, this idea has now become the focus of interest in office organisation. A development that initially came to spatial expression as the “Bürolandschaft” (office land­scape) now makes its entrance in the form of progressive office concepts.

Left: The Ninoflax building in the West German town of Nordhorn (1963) was the first Bürolandschaft (“office landscape”) in Europe, and Dupont’s office building (1967) was the first one in the United States. The Quickborner team developed both projects.

Right: In the New York offices of the TBWA Chiat Day advertising agency (1993) designed by Gaetano Pesce, there were neither permanently as­signed workplaces nor paper. The project was one of the first radical attempts to react spatially to the changes in the work environment. The layout is reminiscent of an office landscape that is more spatially differentiated.

Post-war modernity

In the past, office work was influenced by the principles of “scientific management” as developed by its inventor, Frederick Taylor, for production purposes. Like assembly-line work in the factories, all work processes in the office are subdivided into individual tasks and optimised through standardisation. In the economic recovery after the Second World War, these ideas found their purest spatial implementation in North American office towers. The buildings of the International Style are rendered completely independent of their surroundings by artificial lighting, air conditioning and an impermeable building envelope; they became the standard world-wide.

“Bürolandschaft” and open-plan layout

In Europe in 1963, an innovative concept in office work was born. The Quickborner Team, a firm of management consultants led by Wolfgang and Eberhard Schnelle, tied the advantages of the American open-plan office to the ideas of American theoreticians like Douglas McGregor[1] and made human relations the focus of attention. The arrangement of workplaces in open-plan layouts was determined by workflow processes in the respective organisations. Communication no longer took place vertically on the hierarchical ladder, but horizontally, between the individual staff members. The most significant change, however, was the incorporation of opportunities for informal communication: quiet zones, meeting facilities and ‘refreshment points’ were placed in immediate proximity to the workplaces. Floor plans were designed to reflect the internal organisation and to react to changes in office organisation at any time.[2]

In addition to rapid and flexible organisation, the Bürolandschaft benefited from economic advantages too – the proportion of workplaces relative to building volume was very high. It also seemed to express the spirit of the sixties, a sense of a new era about to dawn, when anything was possible. Instead of sitting in rows facing the head of department, staff could move about at will without spatial or hierarchical restrictions. This was a reflection of social change like the student protests and the questioning of authority.

Cell, combi-office and cubicle

The oil crisis of 1973 was the first blow to the euphoria over technology, and it was a hard one. The recognition that resources were finite revealed the deep, artificially lighted and ventilated offices to be behind the times. Apparently the disadvantages of working in open-plan layouts – lack of privacy, no daylight, high noise levels – outweighed the advantages of the freedom of informality. The Bürolandschaft quickly lost its popularity, but its rapid disappearance cannot be exclusively ascribed to the economic crisis, as the “core and shell” office buildings with their deep, artificially lighted and ventilated floor areas continued in the same way.[3] It is probable that a certain causality could be ascribed to the turn toward political conservatism in Western society, which has become more evident since the end of the seventies.

Norman Foster’s office building for Willis Faber and Dumas in Norwich (1975) set standards primarily in regard to building technology. Apart from having the first point-fixed structural glazing façade, it was the first time a raised floor had been used, even before the PC revolution. The building is also a successful example of sensitively fitting large office areas into a traditional, small-scale urban environment. The building even has a staff swimming pool.

In consequence, office building evolution in northern Europe and in the Anglo-American world began to take two divergent paths. In the welfare states of northern Europe, workers gained ever more influence over their working conditions and enforced general and equivalent ergonomic standards for everyone. As the separate cell-like office with regulable natural ventilation and lighting exactly matched these conditions, it was rediscovered. Since then it has been the dominant office form in northern Europe. At the same time, however, attempts were being made in Sweden to combine the advantages of the open-plan layout, i.e. the possibility of uncomplicated communication, with the cell-like office. In 1978 the first combi-office – a combination of cell and open-plan – was built, the Canon office building in Solna, designed by Tengboom Architects.

In contrast, in the Anglo-American world, the economy remained the driving force in the evolution of the office building. Unlike the ‘made-to-measure’ office buildings of northern Europe, the overwhelming majority of offices were rented, and the investors expected to get a return on their investment after an average of five years.

Here, the route to the combi-office was different. The Bürolandschaft was integrated into the open-plan office, and the opportunities for informal conversation and refreshment zones in direct proximity to the workplaces disappeared as a result, while the separate cell-like offices along the window-frontage once more became status symbols. The development of new office furnishing systems led to the cell and the open-plan layout being combined in a totally different way from that in northern Europe.

In the open-plan layout, the cubicle creates a hybrid spatial organisation running the gamut between openness – public space – and seclu­sion. The height of the room dividers is the determining factor

Cubicles, still widespread today, came into being – minimal room cells, open at the top and flexibly arranged in the open-plan layout to corre­spond to the work organisation. Inside the office buildings, office furnishing systems took over architecture’s role in the creation of space to an ever greater extent. For architects, the planning of office buildings was reduced to the „shell and core“ principle, i.e. the provision of neutral office space. Only the building envelope, the service core and the entrance lobby were defined.

PC-revolution

In the middle of the eighties, the appearance of the personal computer in the office together with the globalisation of international finance in America and England gave rise to a building boom. A large proportion of office space was no longer up to standard and, as a result, underwent a radical renewal.[4] On the lower floors, data cables and other media had to be brought to the workplaces, and the computers and monitors produced large amounts of heat that had to be drawn off. The question as to how buildings were to be cooled, ventilated and lighted be­came increasingly important.

With the construction of the new building for Lloyds of London (1986), Richard Rogers celebrated information technology for the first time. He took into account the various lifecycles of the parts of an office building and turned the core, with the supply cables and ducts, outward in order to react flexibly to changes in technology. Inside, an atrium provided for natural lighting of the deeper office zones

In the Anglo-American world, this development led to more spacious layouts, more flexible buildings with changed storey heights and more modern building services.

In northern Europe, by contrast, the narrow floor plans allowed the supply of services via cable channels in the façade. Building structure did not need to change and the occupant-oriented office concept could be further developed and refined. In so doing, the focus of attention shifted to informal communication and attempts were made to take account of the variety of occupants’ requirements through the differentiation of spatial concepts. Office buildings were transformed into urban office landscapes with public, partially public and private zones, incorporating the different office concepts such as the separate cell, the combi-office and open-plan layouts. Streets with service facilities and simple access ways became differentiated communication zones.

It was also in London that Cesar Pellis showed in One Canada Square, how the classic office tower with its central core and hermetic build­ing envelope absorbs developments in technology without any change in outward appearance

Research into the sick building syndrome made the connection between the working environment and worker performance clearer and clearer, and even in Anglo-American countries, occupant-oriented building concepts began to gain a foothold. The demand for natural lighting and ventilation led to reduced building depth and ecological approaches to planning. Computers were used for the coordination of building services by means of building management systems, and the first sustainable building concepts were implemented in the domain of office building construction.

The SAS office building in Stockholm erected by Niels Torp in 1988 is one of the first office buildings in which the floorspace is subdivided into neighbourhoods. The main access way, which is a ‘street’ and therefore outside the office areas, is lined by a variety of public facilities. The design – which provided for scheduled meetings to be held on the ‘street’ during working hours, and also foresaw impromptu meetings there – led at first to irritation and annoyance

The “new” office

It was not until the middle of the nineties that information technology, together with rapidly advancing globalisation began to give rise to changes in the organisational structure of corporations. The World Wide Web and increasing mobility stimulated by the miniaturisation of computers and telephones have changed the way people think about how global enterprises should be organised as a whole and in part. Office workers have become independent of time and place and at the same time, networking has rendered city central locations superfluous. The key question today is how to integrate information technology and office organisation when the building itself is changing its function. It is transformed from the site for routine process work into an information market place.

The Berlin headquarters of GSW by sauerbruch hutton (1999) is a model of ecological climate concepts. Nocturnal cooling, optimisation of daylight and natural ventilation regulated by the occupants are the first signs of concepts integrating office organisation and ecology

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Originally published in: Rainer Hascher, Simone Jeska, Birgit Klauck, Office Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2002.