Search Results for: office design

April 28, 2014

New collaborative office design for Petronas HQ in Italy

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Company news, Workplace design

Building work has begun on the new 17,000 sq. m. European Research & Development Headquarters for Petronas Lubricants, the global lubricants manufacturing and marketing arm of Petronas, the Malaysian oil and gas company. The building has been designed by architecture, urbanism and design practice Broadway Malyan. The office – located in Santena, just outside Turin, Italy – is part of a major investment into Petronas’ overall research capability and will be home to a community of several hundred scientists, researchers and new product developers. It is expected to play an important role in supporting Petronas’ development and refinement of fuels and lubricants with a particular emphasis on an office design that encourages collaborative work.

April 3, 2014

Rem Koolhaas to create office design for new media centre in Berlin

by Mark Eltringham • Architecture, Company news, News, Workplace design

An office design by Rem Koolhaas’s architecture practice OMA has been selected for the new Axel Springer media centre in Berlin. The firm claims the design will encourage collaborative working and strike the right balance between the needs of people to work priavtely and with others. The new building will sit on the site of a section of the Berlin Wall. It includes a 30 metre high atrium, described by OMA as an ‘open valley’, with a series of interconnecting terraces, work spaces and meeting areas. The atrium opens up towards the existing home of multimedia company Axel Springer and deliberately references the distinction between the old and the new by associating so closely with Zimmerstrasse, a main street which was previously synonymous with the split between East and West Berlin. The ground floor level also contains studios, event and exhibition spaces, canteens and restaurants.

July 19, 2013

Dual source lighting schemes illuminate the way ahead for office design

by Shane Cohen • Comment, Facilities management, Lighting, Workplace design

Too bright, too dull, too much glare – lighting (alongside air conditioning) is often one of the most contentious factors in a workplace. Office workers need illumination to read, write, type and interact. Yet many workplaces get it wrong and fail to consider the downsides of poor lighting, and as such staff will suffer from eye strain, headaches and postural problems, leading to sick days, not to mention lost productivity and mistakes. Eighty per cent of office workers experience at least one negative effect from poor quality lighting, according to researchers Bruskin Goldring, and 68 per cent of employees complain about the light in their offices, according to a study by the American Society of Interior Designers.

June 4, 2013

Facebook shares details of New York office design by Frank Gehry

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, Property, Workplace design

Facebook has announced details of its new headquarters in New York. The social media giant has signed a ten year lease on a 100,00 sq. ft. space over two floors of a building on Broadway. The office design will be carried out by no less a figure than Frank Gehry who is already masterminding the development of the company’s global HQ in California. From next year, the new building will be home to Facebook’s regional engineering, design, sales and marketing functions who will move from the current office on Madison Avenue to the new site which is reportedly on the fringes of Manhattan’s ‘Silicon Alley’. The new building dates from 1906 when it was designed as a department store. It is already home to AOL and the Huffington Post.

May 23, 2013

New report offers latest evidence of link between office design and productivity

by Mark Eltringham • Briefing, Knowledge, Workplace, Workplace design

So, does workplace design have any impact on productivity and business performance? Well duh. So why are we still trying to convince managers when there is so much evidence and experience to prove it. The latest study to demonstrate the link builds on decades of research and adds further compelling evidence in a debate that should have been over a long time ago. In this report, workplace strategist Nigel Oseland and the Atomic Weapons Establishment’s estate masterplanner Adrian Burton describe their research quantifying the effect on worker performance of improvements to the office environment. The question these reports always beg is why the argument still has to be made.

May 17, 2013

Colliers uses Bucharest HQ to showcase office design for Generation Y

by Sara Bean • Architecture, Company news, Workplace design

The Bucharest office of property consultancy Colliers International has been revamped to showcase an office design model that the company claims will meet the needs of the next generation of employees. Colliers has worked with architecture studio Prographic and drawn on its own studies of Generation Y and their needs to create the space. According to the firm, the prototype office will incorporate the newest technology, the latest thinking on workplace design and space planning and set new standards in sustainability. As well as Prographic, Colliers International worked with suppliers including ASUS, Techo, Bene, Bittnet Systems and Saint-Gobain to create its vision.

May 14, 2013

Will the Great Trade Association Merger have any impact on office design?

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

Anybody who has been working in and around the facilities management sector for any length of time will know that the FM profession/discipline (delete as appropriate) regularly undergoes protracted periods of existential angst about its role. It strikes me however that this is actually quite an easy question to deal with because the answer is the same as it is for similarly amorphous professions such as marketing. It all seems to depend on who you are and what you are trying to do. That’s the twist. The average facilities manager, like the Urban Spaceman, doesn’t exist. I might think that but it won’t stop the associations and institutes currently working together to establish a new super-body for FM in the UK having to continue the debate.

May 10, 2013

The biggest challenge is building flexibility into an office design

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

The design of offices and the furniture that fills them matters because of what they tell us about how we work, how organisations function and even what is happening in the economy. If you want to know what’s going on, take a look at the places we work and the things with which we surround ourselves and how they change over time. Because the way we work changes so quickly, buildings need to have flexibility built into them so that they meet our needs today but anticipate what we will need tomorrow.In his book How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand outlines the process whereby buildings evolve over time to meet the changing needs of their occupants.

May 6, 2013

Office design goes to the movies. Part 9: BladeRunner

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Workplace design

[embedplusvideo height=”146″ width=”210″ standard=”https://www.youtube.com/v/yWPyRSURYFQ?fs=1″ vars=”ytid=yWPyRSURYFQ&width=210&height=146&start=&stop=132&rs=w&hd=0&autoplay=0&react=1&chapters=&notes=” id=”ep3143″ /]

Ridley Scott was one of the pioneers of a film aesthetic that mashes the past with the future, the grime and the gleam. It was a pioneering idea at the time but it’s familiar now. We now accept that the future looks a lot like the past and that goes for the office design in this scene. BladeRunner is also a film about dreams. The dreamy setting here is a telling contrast to the dirt and sleaze in the City below and the scene in the office in which Deckard (Harrison Ford) interviews the classic femme fatale Rachel (Sean Young) also supports the unresolved notion that Deckard may be a replicant himself. Clearly the workplace smoking ban had been repealed by this time, but then where would a femme fatale be without a cigarette? Even if she is an android.

April 17, 2013

Office design goes to the movies. Part 8 – Brazil

by Mark Eltringham • Facilities management, Furniture, Technology, Workplace design

[embedplusvideo height=”146″ width=”210″ standard=”https://www.youtube.com/v/mS5WLkb_Cxk?fs=1″ vars=”ytid=mS5WLkb_Cxk&width=210&height=146&start=&stop=132&rs=w&hd=0&autoplay=0&react=1&chapters=&notes=” id=”ep3153″ /]

A prescient film when it comes to modern office life, the workplace depicted in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is that particularly 1980s modish mish-mash of futuristic technology and grubby antique with more than a nod to the offices of the past, present and future. Nevertheless he was able to anticipate both the current obsession with shared desks, the battle for resources and space (above) and the fact that people will sometimes use technology to do anything other than work so long as the boss doesn’t notice (below). Even the exposed pipes that were once so daring can now seem a routine or even hackneyed element in an office design.

April 9, 2013

Office design goes to the movies. Part 7 – The Apartment

by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Facilities management, Workplace design

[embedplusvideo height=”151″ width=”220″ standard=”https://www.youtube.com/v/x356ll3hTxg?fs=1″ vars=”ytid=x356ll3hTxg&width=220&height=151&start=&stop=&rs=w&hd=0&autoplay=0&react=1&chapters=&notes=” id=”ep9389″ /]

In which Jack Lemmon exchanges the crushing uniformity of the open plan for a corner office as a reward for allowing senior managers to use his apartment as a venue for their infidelity. This is from 1960, the pre-cubicle, pre-VDU world of large ranks of serried workers in an open plan office with only the privileged few allowed any degree of privacy or the wherewithal to display status. many ways, the layout has much in common with the way many offices are designed now. Office design may have moved on in the past half century but some things are always with us.

April 4, 2013

Office design goes to the movies. Part 6 – Playtime

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

[embedplusvideo height=”192″ width=”220″ standard=”https://www.youtube.com/v/Qifl9saFtSw?fs=1″ vars=”ytid=Qifl9saFtSw&width=220&height=192&start=&stop=&rs=w&hd=0&autoplay=0&react=1&chapters=&notes=” id=”ep6472″ /]

One of the few films to address office design as something worth commenting on per se. A film in which M. Hulot stumbles around a modernist dream of Paris, all glass, steel and cold straight lines. People inhabit box like apartments and box like office cubicles which separate them from each other and, by implication, life. The film was produced in 1967, shortly before the cubicle was popularised in real offices. In the sequence in which M. Hulot visits an office building, he gets lost, gatecrashing meetings and ending up in a gadget trade show which is furnished in a virtually identical way to the office.