At some point during the Milan Furniture Fair, we all need a little distance from the hustle and bustle in the halls and the sidewalk extravaganza in Brera. An opportunity to catch a breath is presented by simply taking a walk through the city. All of a sudden, you pass by the impressive Feltrinelli Building near Porta Garibaldi, the headquarters of Microsoft Italy. And then you remember precisely how this building was celebrated five years ago, as a novel approach to the concept of New Work, as interpreted by Herzog & de Meuron. You recall how you literally devoured the details of this project, how everybody hungered for it - such an intense desire to understand the office work of the future! Architects and clients have certainly pushed the limits in this regard, creating playful interiors with carpets reminiscent of tennis courts. Or places of encounter that resemble lofts, alternating with creative corners featuring elaborate greening. Where team members can withdraw into what seems to be very small houses. With public spaces on the ground floor, intended to seamlessly enmesh work and city life. In between, all the modular, movable, flexible workstations. Ample daylight. Plenty of open space. Many solutions of various kinds. All of this took place not all too long ago. Still, this - excuse me - tomfoolery and all the workstation blah-blah-blah appears weird and outdated, at least on an afternoon in the year 2022. And the Feltrinelli Building almost seems like a museum. The office as a place of work and the concept of New Work itself have veered off course in recent years, due to the pandemic.
If you will, coronavirus lockdowns have both accelerated the related developments and cannibalised them. Office people and their bosses had to basically rethink everything over night. Change in the work environment became an imperative of public health policy. Remote work in the home office transformed from goodwill offered by employers to the status quo of labour. This paradigm shift occurred so quickly that neither was any kind of shape or form designed, nor any theory formulated for it. The workplace of the pandemic era was, in most cases, a construction designed by amateurs. Software became the spatial first responder, the ersatz architect. Without it, remote working would have been impossible. It also simulated workplace environments, such as in the case of countless video conference programs. They were supposed to replace what everybody experienced as the greatest loss of all: a framework for communication - a shared space established by a company building, even those obviously devoid of inspirational design.
Software programs such as Zoom may very well be a useful tool for communication. They are still pretty much the exact opposite of a visionary place of encounter or a creative hub. A real space for shared experience, where thresholds are low and encounters are serendipitous, brings people together. In contrast, to this day, the virtual meeting room is defined by controlled entry, discipline, heterarchy. At home, hardly anyone can feel the team spirit, everyone gets tired rather quickly and creative dynamics are hard to come by: An experience that confirms what the architects of New Work have been telling us all along - a good team needs good space. Whether this means a dramatically hip dive bar-type hangout where graffiti artists spray the word "subway" on walls, devoid of any meaning - as demonstrated in the Feltrinelli Building, by the way - is a matter of discussion. The cannibalistic horror of remote work, however, revealed its true face during the persistent and repetitive lockdowns. Things were going steady and everybody got used to it. Exemplary employers shipped ergonomic chairs and cubicle walls to private addresses. Desk, chair, wireless network were optimised. More than that was simply not required. Until very recently, the architecture of New Work was based on the assumption that offices had to be remodelled into a kind of boutique hotel, facilitating valorization through various additional features. The coronavirus office did the job with only the barest of essentials. Still, the workplace became an organic part of your home, which already provided the benefits of everyday life and advantages posed by family members present and opportunities available for time-out. All the while, elegant office buildings stood pretty vacant, endlessly consuming rent and power. And suddenly people who had never wasted a thought on the matter discovered how relatively easily they could embed work within their lives. The great eureka moment was when all parties involved realised how much they needed the office: not much at all.
This insight resulted in the greatest possible shock for the modern office, following a century of success. We shouldn't forget that its reason for existence was derived from what can be described as a self-fulfilling prophecy: Neither was anything tangible produced there, nor did new tractors come rolling down the factory lane. The space itself was injected with meaning. Who happened to be at an office, was simply at work. This remained true for decades and required no further explanation. In the popular series "Mad Men", the lead character, Don Draper, embodies this meaning in an exemplary way. As soon as he enters his firm's skyscraper, he becomes functional, his fame increases without much ado. Here is where he can manifest his power. Beyond the office realm, spending time with his family or drifting through the nighttime city, Draper the hero appears permanently uprooted, the carpet of significance is pulled away from under his feet. The stone the fixed office routines, the bing the elevator makes, the hierarchy, the size of desks, the number of windows and how blonde the secretaries were supposed be - they all firmly rooted employees within an entirely artificial structure enshrined in space. While digitisation questioned all of these old codes, coronavirus completely tore them apart. Such is the arguably weird situation in the summer of 2022: Once a return to the office seemed safe, many completely forgot why they needed to do so. Sure, if you assume that the pandemic was no more than an interlude, office space remains a necessity, now and in the near future. However, in many lines of business, this will be a "can" rather than a "must". Goodwill offered by employees, so to speak, to be able to assemble there. The space required for this purpose will likely decline significantly. This offers an opportunity for planning buildings that are smaller, located closer to the city centre and are more appealing. Beyond that, New Work architecture is certainly well advised to introduce into new office spaces anything a home can't offer. The task is, thus, less to provide opportunities for table football, roof terraces or debonair loungescapes. Instead, architecture should trigger strong feelings for the brand and the company. The potential for identification of employees with the company they work for is lost at the home office desk. The Munich-based office CSMM elaborated on this notion within various office projects in a rather exemplary manner. For the sports startup Freeletics, for instance, the lockdown offered room for growth. They built a headquarters in Munich that places the focus on the everyday experience of trying out and using the brand's own products. As a result, the spaces resemble a mix between a gym and a spa. Similarly, brands should provide their spaces with an enhanced brand character. This obviously excludes exchangeable boutique workspaces. Instead, this calls for work environments that immediately and effectively remind the occasional office-goer what the actual deal is. In other words: The Feltrinelli Building would have to evoke a specific feeling for Microsoft. Further, it is important for the transition between home and office environments to be as seamless as possible and to support creating hybrid teams working nearby and from afar. Perhaps this is the only thing that remains certain in a time full of uncertainty: Eight hundred years ago, monks created something special, working in their secluded scriptorium - an unbreakable unity of book, desk and human. It is now ancient history.
