Search Results for: office design

May 23, 2014

Workplace design and management of TMT sector aped by other firms

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, Flexible working, Property, Technology, Workplace design

The publication of a report last week by the British Council for Offices highlights the wider impact of workplace design trends and commercial property arrangements in the increasingly important Technology, Media and Telecoms (TMT) sector. Not least it suggests that they are having a transformational influence on the way firms in other sectors approach leases, workplace design and the changing nature of work. It is no coincidence that the TMT sector is the one most commonly associated with the employment of the much-talked-about Gen Y demographic, nor that the business practices most commonly associated with this overly-stereotyped group are those that are having the greatest influence in the way we design and manage offices.

May 21, 2014

Supply of new office space in London continues to fall short of demand

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, News, Property

One of the downsides to London’s attractiveness as a business destination, as we reported yesterday, is its inability to provide enough office space to satisfy the rapacious demands of the companies who want to work there. Survey after survey reveals the same thing. Even though London has a healthy pipeline of new offices under construction, it cannot keep pace with demand. The latest survey to make the same point comes from Deloitte Real Estate whose London Crane Survey claims that the 9.2 million sq. ft. of office space currently being built will fall short of what is needed. The report claims that London office space is likely to remain in short supply for two years as the new occupancy levels of offices continues to outstrip supply. The report claims that 2014will see 7 million sq. ft. of Grade A office space delivered, the largest volume for over a decade but nearly half has already been let even before construction is complete.

May 16, 2014

BCO office standards include guidance on provisions for cyclists for first time

by Sara Bean • Facilities management, Flexible working, News, Workplace design

The new edition to the British Council for Offices’ Guide to Specification, which provides guidance on industry standards for workplaces across the UK will contain guidance on provisions for cyclists for the first time. The new 2014 edition to the office standards guide due for publication later in the year, recommends one shower per ten cycle spaces and one cycle space per 100m2, reflecting the evolving face of travel to and from the office environment. Another significant change is to the recommended workplace density, which has been reviewed to take into account the ever more diverse way businesses are now using their workspaces; which includes the adoption of more flexible working patterns. The report states that: “Considering workplace density alone may overstate the demands placed on building infrastructure, or result in over provision if used as the basis for design.”

May 14, 2014

World’s most energy efficient office retro-fit opens in Norway

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Environment, Facilities management, News

What is claimed to be the world’s most energy efficient office building has been opened in Norway. Powerhouse Kjørbo in Oslo is Norway’s first energy-positive building and the, according to its developers, the first in the world to be retro-fitted to produce more energy than it consumes. The building is part of the Powerhouse project, a collaboration between a range of organisations with an interest in developing and promoting energy efficient office buildings. The Powerhouse consortium defines an energy-positive building as any building which generates more clean and renewable energy in its operational phase than was used in its construction and lifetime, including materials, operation and disposal.

May 13, 2014

Workplace design, Facebook likes and the need of companies to be your friend

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Environment, Facilities management, Workplace design

Companies put an awful lot of time and money into getting people to like them on social media these days. While it would be easy to see the like button on Facebook as the primary conduit for this corporate neediness, but it cuts across many aspects of the ways in which companies work, including their relationships with employees and the ways in which they develop new forms of workplace design and management. This is most evident in the tech palaces which are aimed at the same digital natives that firms habitually target with their online marketing, but the need to make customers and employees friends of the business cuts across a wide range of sectors. The workplace is yet another channel of communicating chumminess, and it offers many of the same challenges as social media.

April 30, 2014

BCO’s London workplace design and fit-out award winners revealed

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Facilities management, News, Workplace design

Yesterday the British Council for Offices announced what it considers London and the South East’s best recently completed workplaces at an awards dinner. The winners included One Eagle Place, BBC Broadcasting House and Brent Civic Centre, who will now go forward to the national awards which will be announced in October. Earlier this month, the regional finalists for Scotland, the Midlands and East Anglia were announced. Ceremonies will be held to announce the regional winners for the North of England and South West during May. Yesterdays’ event saw PwC’s One Embankment Place designed by t p bennett crowned as Refurbished/Recycled Workplace, Argent’s One Stable Street office win the small office category, while the award for Best Fit Out of a Workplace went to The Walbrook Building designed by Scott Brownrigg. The renovation of BBC Broadcasting House and Brent Civic Centre shared the award for Best Corporate Workplace.

April 17, 2014

Gallery: Interiors Group completes office fit-out at Instinctif Partners

by Mark Eltringham • Company news, Flooring, Furniture, Workplace design

The Interiors Group has completed a project for the design and fit-out of the relocated offices for Instinctif Partners, an international business communications consultancy now situated at 65 Gresham Street, London. The relocation coincided with the launch of Instinctif Partners’ new name (having previously been known as College Group) so the new design became an expression of the new identity. The office fit-out project includes joinery, the installation of a media wall, bespoke feature walls, reception desk and lighting. The flooring consists of porcelain tiles and carpet from Interface. The backlit reception desk displays the client’s twelve corporate colours on rotation. Leather seating was specified for the visitors’ waiting area. The open plan office is designed as a circular newsroom with a high table in the heart of the space highlighted by an oversized dome pendant. The dining area has been fitted out with LED screens and furnished in white. More →

April 7, 2014

Can building design presage a fall from grace for the world’s tech giants?

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Comment, Technology, Workplace design

At the movies, buildings are often used to denote hubris. The ambitions and egos of Charles Foster Kane and Scarface are embodied in the pleasure domes and gilded cages they erect to themselves. Of course, things then invariably go badly wrong. In the real world too, monstrous edifices have often presaged a crash. The UK’s most ambitious and much talked about office building at the turn of the Millennium was British Airways’ Waterside, completed in 1998, just a year after Margaret Thatcher famously objected to the firm’s new modern tailfin designs by draping them with a hankie and three years before BA had to drop its ‘World’s Favourite Airline’ strapline because by then it was Lufthansa. Nowadays BA isn’t even the UK’s favourite airline, but Waterside remains a symbol of its era, albeit one that continues to influence the way we design offices.

April 1, 2014

Average office temperatures set too high say environmental experts

by Sara Bean • Environment, Facilities management, News, Workplace

The publication this week of the report Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability by the UN’s science panel that argues that the world is “ill-prepared” for risks from a changing climate, but that opportunities to respond to such risks still exist, proves more than ever that the built environment can play a vital role in helping to curb global warming. The most obvious place to start is by turning down the temperature of the office, which according to researchers from Lancaster University’s DEMAND Research Centre, has become warmer in recent years. As reported by Clickgreen, the researchers from Lancaster University say the average office temperature of 22 degrees C is way too high, and by simply turning down the thermostat and asking occupants to don another layer could do much to address global warming. More →

March 31, 2014

BCO report claims to reveal link between green offices and business performance

by Mark Eltringham • Environment, Facilities management, News

A new report from the British Council for Offices claims that building owners could enjoy significant savings in their operating costs of up to £50 per square metre as well as improved staff productivity and wellbeing by investing in environmentally friendly offices and work practices. The research, Improving the Environmental Performance of Offices claims to illustrate the benefits of energy efficient offices and highlight the positive impact they can have on employee productivity. The report calls on building occupiers to focus on key areas such as benchmarking and monitoring their energy usage. The BCO believes there is already a shift in attitudes towards a greater understanding of how offices actually perform environmentally rather than simply how they are designed and that more and more businesses are waking up to specific issues such as how much energy their buildings use outside of office hours. More →

March 28, 2014

Google’s new Amsterdam office exposes Tech’s youthful obsessions

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Technology, Workplace design

Back in the 1990s, when Frank Duffy was one of the august handful of people popularising notions of a changing approach to office design, he categorised four models of the workplace that he foresaw would come to reflect the work done in them, namely the den, cell, hive and club. Back then, the word ‘club’ conjured up images of gentleman’s clubs and Duffy himself described it in his 1997 book The New Office as ‘essentially an ingenious early 19^th Century device to allow the kind of people who are now called networkers to share as supportive an environment as possible’, illustrating his point with an old coloured engraving of upright gents sitting around in a neo-classical, Victorian, smoke-filled room reading newspapers, sipping port and chewing the fat. Nowadays, the word club would appear to suggest something more along the lines of a youth club, as the latest pubescent design of a Google office shows us. More →