April 3, 2014
Rush to convert offices as demand for commercial property hits 14 year high
A new report from commercial property specialists Lambert Smith Hampton claims that demand for office space in the UK this year is set to hit its highest level since 2000. The firm claims in its annual Office Market Review that the take-up of office space could reach 30 million sq. ft in 2014, continuing the momentum from the remarkable 33 percent upswing in demand last year. However, the report also notes that, following the introduction of the Government’s new permitted development legislation in 2013, the number of notifications for conversions of office buildings to residential use jumped 500 percent in the first six months. The trend will act as a further constraint on supply and push up rents as businesses seek additional space for expansion or moves to new property at the end of leases although it will also remove obsolete office space in many less desirable business locations.
March 28, 2014
Google’s new Amsterdam office exposes Tech’s youthful obsessions
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Technology, Workplace design
All images © Alan Jensen and D/Dock
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 19th 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 →