Description

Nowicka Stern’s foundational motif for another.com, a British start-up that offers individual e-mail addresses, is “Surf’n’Turf.” This term accurately describes the range of the work environment of an IT start-up; surfing the Internet has been transformed from a leisure activity into office work, and the turf brings leisure into the office. The workplace can be a workstation, but also the lawn. Companies in e-business often give the impetus for new ways of dealing with the workplace. They have enormous growth potential, flat hierarchies, little internal bureaucracy and mostly very young staff, new entrants to the labour market who bring with them a community spirit and the open-mindedness of the university. The shortage of qualified candidates means that e-businesses need to offer more than just financial incentives when recruiting staff. another.com enlists the appeal of the immediate working environment, wanting to leverage its cachet as a company that is ‘in.’

another.com is located in London’s Kentish Town, in an open-plan warehouse. The determining atmospheric element of the forty-strong office is the lawn at the centre. Both natural and artificial at the same time, it is mown by a gardener twice a week, irradiated with ultraviolet light at night, and provided with an ingenious watering system serving the roots directly, so that it always stays dry on the surface. The smell of the grass, its freshness and dampness pervade the office. Sheltered by opaque, lightweight walls, the staff use the lawn for meetings, but also for work or picnicking. Arriving at the reception area, one is already made aware of the company’s unconventionality: instead of leather armchairs to wait in, a row of swings greets the visitor, before he or she is invited to come to a meeting held on the lawn. On both sides of the lawn are located forty computer workplaces set up in blocks of about ten workplaces each. The small company’s various areas of responsibility are distributed between the blocks, four in total. Reminiscent of large workbenches, they have been adapted to the requirements of IT work and are easily and flexibly configurable due to multilevel surfaces that allow easy access for cable connections. A cable location route loops along the ceiling, interconnecting all elements of the office.

While IT start-ups can quickly try out unconventional concepts to the benefit of employees, more established enterprises can do likewise. With the design for another.com, Nowicka Stern has given a simple idea logical implementation and by incorporating a real lawn, created an atmospherically effective counterpart to the virtual work environment.

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