How the tech industry is redesigning the future workplace
First, the technology sector gave us Google’s bean bags and Facebook’s feted ping-pong tables.
Now these companies are raising jousting skyscrapers into the Silicon Valley skyline.
Facebook has just this month moved into new headquarters designed by Frank Gehry, designer of Spain’s Guggenheim Museum.
Its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, describes it as the largest open-floor plan in the world. Atop it lies a nine-acre rooftop park.
Google, Amazon, and Apple are also creating their own new colossal headquarters.
Google, searching for more space, will move shortly into its new “Googleplex”.
Apple’s “spaceship”, a vast watchstrap fashioned like a flying saucer, has already attracted the moniker of ‘death star’ from the unkind.
And Amazon’s Seattle glass-dome biospheres, planned to open in 2016 and 2017, play none-too-subtly on its name.
Each is a stab at capturing an imaginative futuristic high ground – and employees – from competitors.
But they also hark back to vaunted tech structures like Bell Labs’ buildings and MIT’s Building 20, hastily erected in 1943, but flexible and forcing people working on very different projects to meet.
Tech has grown out of the garage.
The audacious scale of these spaces is a bid at bettering the odds of the serendipitous encounters – bumps in Silicon Valley vernacular – which helped Building 20’s occupants share ideas across specialisms.
Shiny new workplaces are springing up from San Francisco to Shoreditch and Shenzhen.
It ‘s not just technology behemoths who have embraced this way of working. The BBC’s new Broadcasting House, for example, encourages hot desking, with 460 workstations in its open-plan newsroom alone.
But this brave new world of work has critics.
For some, open plan spaces suggest managers on the room’s sidelines, watching workers huddled in the middle like prey on the African savannah.
Flex desk
Seattle architecture firm NBBJ is behind the Google and Amazon buildings, as well as the new Guangdong headquarters for Chinese internet titan Tencent.
Offices are moving away from the idea that time at a desk is a measure of how productive you are, says Ryan Mullenix, an NBBJ design partner, and the chief designer of the new Google building.
And more broadly, away from ideals of industrial efficiency associated with early twentieth-century American mechanical engineer Franklin Taylor.
Sometimes a longer walk to get coffee may be better than a shorter one.
“It’s who you see on the way to coffee, and movement which charges your brain, which is really valuable and part of work,” says Mr Mullenix.
The social side of work may soon be the only reason we have office buildings, says Scott Wyatt, NBBJ’s chairman.
“Getting together with people in teams is where innovation happens, and makes us happy,” he says. “You’re not going to be happy holed up at home doing all your work.”
“The company which gives the employees the choice at any given moment to optimise their effectiveness is going to win,” says Mr Wyatt.
And a recent all-night hackathon, where ideas are developed, sponsored by NBBJ produced an app to let employees find available working spaces nearby, arranged by variables such as light, ambient noise, and the number of people around.
Crucial in all this is the new mobility which stems from more portable devices and cloud computing.
“If you sit at your desk for more than twenty minutes, you start getting stupider,” says the chairman.
His architecture firm posts maps next to lift doors, suggesting outdoor walking routes for meetings of various lengths.
Source: bbc news