Work Environments: Campus and Event by Harvard GSD

Florian Idenburg

Work Environments Campus and Event

Spring 2015

Studio Report

Florian Idenburg

Work Environments Campus and Event

Studio Instructor Florian Idenburg

This design studio at Harvard University Graduate School of Design is the first of three sponsored by the furniture company Knoll that examines, through research and design, the disruptive transformations that occur globally in environments where work takes place. Understanding the unique position of the office to both register changes within society and to actively reshape traditional hierarchies, tomorrow’s workplace must arrive with a clear attitude and outlook. This studio series attempts to explicate existing cultural trends and perspectives, using this knowledge to speculate on future scenarios and potential responses within the “worksphere.”

Students Caio Barboza, Abigail Chang (TA), Michael Charters, Lauren Friedrich, Joshua Jow, Justin Kollar, Dayita Kurvey, Yi Li, Chenchen Lu, Michael Meo, Tianhang Ren, Yi Ren

With this in mind, the first edition looks at the United States and focuses on two interrelated domains of work: the corporate campus and the industry event.

Review Critics Iñaki Ábalos, John Davis, Talia Dorsey, Timothy Hyde, Michael Kubo, Benjamin Pardo, Gabriel Smith, Kazys Varnelis, Bing Wang, Marion Weiss, Cameron Wu Studio made possible with the generous support of Knoll, Inc.

Foreword

Florian Idenburg

Scenarios

16 20

Nomads in Utopia Lauren Friedrich Dayita Kurvey Michael Meo

GX 2065 Caio Barboza Michael Charters

Alibaba TeX Chenchen Lu Tianhang Ren Yi Ren

The Ranch Abigail Chang Yi Li

32 Laboritas Joshua Jow Justin Kollar

Afterword

Benjamin Pardo

Contributors

Foreword

10 Previous spread: Weyerhaeuser Headquarters.

Above left: Connecticut General Life Insurance Company Headquarters. Above right: John Deere World Headquarters.

explicate existing cultural trends and perspectives, using this knowledge to speculate on future scenarios and potential responses within the “worksphere.” This first edition of the studio, which took place during the spring of 2014 and is the subject of this report, looks at the United States and focuses on two interrelated domains of work: the corporate campus and the industry event. The Campus In postwar America, the automobile and cheap land allowed companies to relocate offices to areas of relative isolation, where workers could produce value in a controlled environment. Suburban campuses spread out across the country, built specifically around certain industries and processes. These corporate campuses were intended to offer comfort, focus, wellbeing, and control. Yet changes in the character of work and demographic preferences are putting the campus model into question. Many once highly productive suburban campuses today stand abandoned, as new generations choose to live in cities and certain companies have responded by returning to their previous downtown homes. In the meantime, new campuses continue to be built outside the city center, reproducing this apparently flawed model. What factors affect these opposing dynamics? Can we imagine a more entropic and resilient version of the labor utopia? The Event Rather than making physical gatherings obsolete, hyperconnectivity has led to a dramatic proliferation of industry wide events, taking the form of conferences, exhibitions, and festivals. Industries are transforming from location-specific to event-specific; a good example of this shift is evident in the contemporary art world. The convention industry has become one of the fastest growing industries, and a lifeline for cities such as Atlanta, Las Vegas, and New Orleans. At these temporary gatherings, deals

Florian Idenburg

Today’s incessant economic dynamics and ongoing technological disruption have made the place of work the fastest fluctuating environment of our time. While suspending judgment on the desirability of this ceaseless uprooting, designers of space, be it architects, office planners, or furniture designers, ought to develop a keen understanding of the effects of these forces. Never before has the workplace—in this case the office—been as open, evolving, casual, and monitored. But apart from the pragmatics around these developments, responsible designers need to develop an ability to situate these changes in a broader social and cultural context, so as to advocate more meaningful environments around the activity that occupies much of our time. The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) understands the relevance of these shifting dynamics, and the need for its students to develop knowledge around the subject. The GSD should be at the forefront of the discussion, as the new work configuration affects people’s mental, social, and economic wellbeing. The furniture company Knoll has greatly invested in understanding not only the workplace of today, but also in anticipating how it will change in the near and distant future. To this end, Knoll has enabled a select group of GSD students to examine, through research and design over the course of three years, the disruptive transformations that occur globally in environments where work takes place. Assuming a strategically broad view, these explorations are intended to follow this investigation across scales and approaches, looking with equal focus at the potential effects of worldwide economic swings and small-scale furniture innovations, the corporate structure and the individual response. Understanding the unique position of the workplace to register societal transformations and to actively reshape traditional hierarchies, tomorrow’s workplace must arrive with a clear attitude and outlook. The Work Environments studio series attempts to

Foreword

12 Student site visit to the now-vacant Freescale campus in East Austin, the focus of the first studio design interventions.

Serving as the linchpin of these paired narratives of the American worksphere, the corporation exists as a primary actor and motivator for innovation, the creator of would-be utopias and the foil for the nomadic individual. An enterprise growing through the input of workers’ energy, knowledge, and time, a corporation tries to employ the best adapted people and have them be as productive as possible at the most efficient cost. This perpetual quest to optimize the workforce is an essential activity within a capitalist system that continuously requires companies to increase profits. In this equation, the workplace is a key component. A well-conceived work environment can reduce costs through optimization and increase productivity through comfort. Many components that define this environment are quantifiable, but since a workforce is made up of human beings, individual sensitivities, such as comfort, pleasure and convenience are also part of this equilibrium. Wrapping together technologies with financial drivers, the corporation demands innovation, while simultaneously relying on systems and order to control output and risk. The work generated through this studio looks for opportunity in the new nomadic work world, exploring both utopias and dystopias, pairing campuses and events, to produce a series of speculations and provocations grounded in historical research, yet eager for change. This report is an exceptionally compact summary of an astonishing amount of knowledge produced over the course of fourteen weeks by twelve students. Extensive research informed five design speculations, situated on the abandoned Freescale Campus in East Austin, Texas. Each of these investigations extrapolates trends observed in contemporary work culture, developing various attitudes, be they idealistic or amoral, to arrive at a clear response. The proposals are presented here as provocative scenarios to inform ongoing discussions of the worksphere-in-flux.

The five projects explored in the following pages are: 1. Nomads in Utopia The abandoned corporate campus is an ideal place to test a new type of work environment, one that is collaborative, bottom–up, hackable, and self-organizing. A roaming army of freelancers gets together on a project-by-project basis. The work undertaken here is not necessarily in support of commercial enterprises in the traditional sense. Rather, it is a place where people come together to solve collective, ideological problems. 2. The Ranch The Ranch’s location on the border of city and countryside is an opportunity for companies and their employees to “get away from it all,” to disconnect, and to engage in collective team-building exercises. Yet this work retreat also doubles as a food incubator and community farm. The juxtaposition of programs is both an opportunity and a challenge. The site is understood as a contemporary cloister, a walled garden, or retreat in the landscape. 3. GX 2065 Big Data governs everything. The only “labor” left for humans is paradoxically generating data through leisure. GX 2065 is a research campus masked as a theme park in which visitors produce knowledge by interacting with a number of themed attractions. The central tower overseeing the park is where the “designers” work to process the harvested data and develop new products. 4. Alibaba TeX The Chinese tech giant Alibaba decides that Austin is the ideal site for their U.S. headquarters. Not only does the compound house a staff of 5,000, it also serves as a testing lab for new technologies and an outpost to study the American consumer. An unabashedly corporate endeavor, the new campus acts as a way to optimize the communication and exchange between the many companies that comprise the conglomerate. 5. Laboritas An educational campus, building on the ongoing privatization and commercialization of the educational institute, Laboritas is a vocational place that produces knowledge and research. It is an R&D center of sorts, a training ground, but also a cult.

Florian Idenburg

are made, products launched, ideas generated, and connections established. This development has transformed the desk-bound worker to a worker-nomad in a vectorial labor continuum. A seamless universe of lounges, lobbies, lecture halls, breakout rooms, and touchdown benches now exists where one roams from hotspot to charging station, from vending machine to valet. What is the landscape of work beyond the office? Will it eventually make the static office obsolete?

Nomads in Utopia

As work continues to become more mobile and the freelancer replaces the career full-timer within the corporate structure, the motives and goals of employees and the employer begin to diverge. With the link between individual, periodic projects and a collective, permanent space growing ever weaker, the worker is left without direct connection to the company, its environment, and longtime goals, a loss of purpose that leaves them often alone, at home or at the coffeeshop, with no clear or collective reason to act. The worker transforms into a nomad, perpetually in transit. In turn, the campus, the company’s heart, becomes a frozen vision, an increasingly vacant memory of a would-be idyllic environment and community of exchange and collaboration. Nomads in Utopia confronts this trend toward the radical splintering of the workforce, conceiving of a design consultancy specializing in discovering and producing new shared motives for both the transient worker and the static employer. Taking cues from the connective, flexible, and fleeting qualities of bottom-up models such as the food truck, the campground, and the Web market, Nomads in Utopia creates a structured environment that is still supportive of an individual’s focus. In this relationship, temporal flexibility serves as the foundation for allowing the personal project to drive the space. Workers need not rely on a single clock or collective calendar, but are rather given the ability to negotiate and exchange whenever is best for them and their assignment. Structuring this new relationship, the campus Nomads in Utopia envisions is organized around three key players: the individual collaborator, the facilitator, and the moderator. These groups work together to identify potential projects, acquire resources and space, manage the relationships between groups, and maintain order. The rules devised for the space enable a sense of freedom on the part of the individual, allowing for the development of a clear response and attitude.

Lauren Friedrich Dayita Kurvey Michael Meo

Focusing on the incorporation and management of play within the work environment, Nomads in Utopia produces a structure that begins with the individual worker, providing them with a “hackable” object set through which they can colonize the empty shell of the corporate campus. Breaking a preexisting building’s floor plan into a subdivided, gridded environment, a board is devised for potential moves. Through the process of personalized spatial growth, an individual worker can increase their stake in the environment of work, shaping their “office” through their negotiation with the shared objects and their surrounding coworkers. Augmenting these basic conditions, Nomads in Utopia further ensures technical and emotional support for a community of workers. Spaces to refuel and park are provided to the entire workforce, serving less as centers of activity, than as key resource hubs. Three new communal environments—the Base Camp, Sn(hack) Shack, and Playground—shape the culture of the new campus. Exchanging ideas and negotiating each other’s “hackables,” the inhabitation of these zones provides space for dialogue and release, opportunities to bring individual workers together to form collective, or at least shared, goals and pursuits. As businesses embrace new contract models as tools to keep costs low and encourage a range of new voices, the office loses its primary responsibility: the consolidation of viewpoints into a collective environment. Embracing the potential of bottom-up organization, in which individual projects aggregate and together reshape and define the space, Nomads in Utopia provides a blueprint for dealing with the extinction of the office. To operate within this new paradigm, the designer must let go of control and specificity, instead offering a loose structure and open attitude to the start-up and freelancer. The workspace here belongs to the workers, and it must remain theirs to interpret and colonize for themselves.

WHAT YOU NEED:

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Excerpts from the “Hackable Stackables User Manual,” a guide to assembly and flexible implementation of the basic building blocks of Nomads in Utopia. CLAIM THIS SPACE!

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Directions for colonization of the campus’s idealized spatial “game board,” covering use of the grid (1), spacing (2), partition system (3), trails (4), and personal space (5).

Nomads in Utopia

18 Above: Model photograph showing the manipulable partition system implemented across the campus. These permit the individual worker to claim and redefine a project space.

Below: Renderings depicting one of the major social spaces of the new campus, the Sn(h)ack Shack. Made up of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;Hackable Stackableâ&#x20AC;? units, this shared amenity acts as a point of exchange for the individual worker.

Lauren Friedrich, Dayita Kurvey, Michael Meo Partial plan of the Nomads in Utopia revamp of the Freescale campus. The new spatial â&#x20AC;&#x153;game boardâ&#x20AC;? is evident within the existing buildings, as the partition system breaks up the gridded space. New pathways connect individual project spaces.

The Ranch

Wall by wall, the cubicles of the office fall, as open concepts, hybrid flex-spaces, and virtual connections clear the space of work of any physical division or obstacle. Yet freed from these limitations, individual employees find themselves paradoxically locked into a perpetual and public work culture, devoid of privacy, exposed on all fronts. Work itself is unleashed, allowed to extend past the traditional, isolated boundaries of the physical office into the everyday spaces of social interaction. In this new paradigm, the employee must be on-call at all times, ready and responsive to emails, texts, and phone calls, redefining the traditional nine-to-five schedule into a continuous effort. The connection between the worker and the surrounding environment becomes a fundamentally strategic one. Coloring the most casual encounter with the promise of productivity and reward, leisure time dissolves into an alternative form of labor, refusing its restorative and reflective role. Work becomes a constant and inescapable part of life. Trapped within this continuous engagement, the employee, exposed and exhausted, must be given a way to withdraw, to balance the drive for connectivity with the need for privacy and personal space. The scenario students developed in The Ranch focuses on this imperative within the context of the dividing lines between city and country, the border between production and processing. A corporate getaway, The Ranch imagines a way to step out of the ubiquity of work in daily life, to re-center and re-engage within the space of a modern-day cloister. Attempting to avoid the blindly utopian vision of the mid-century corporate campus model, whose conception of the landscape was of a pastoral oasis or ideal, The Ranch actively engages the cultivation of the land. Pairing the office with a food production facility, the compound then provides an outlet for the worker to access and experience an environment outside the workspace. Here, the worker engages with the stages of growing, harvesting, and distribution at different levels in correspondence to

Abigail Chang Yi Li

varying time constraints. As bypasser, visitor, or resident, workers are shown the progressive steps involved in production, providing a clear contrast to the familiar culinary work zones of the cafe, the market, and the coffee shop. In contrast with the legacy of past campuses situated in the field, which sealed the worker behind a glass facade, this reinvention devises specific juxtapositions between the worker and nature, using a set of barriers to filter, diffuse, and reveal the multiple relationships produced. Thirteen different types of boundary conditions—physical and non-physical—provide a range of potential exposures, managing views, sounds, smells, touch, and tech. Taking an open view toward materiality, these strategies incorporate and move beyond the typical architectural mediums of glass and metal, to include fabrics, meshes, water, plastics, and earth, as well as Wi-Fi and messaging. The result is an office environment that embraces the potential of connectivity and openness, while offering the means to control and calibrate the level of that connection. Rather than a simple open-and-closed dichotomy, the worker is given options toward the level of exposure they desire. Through the introduction of a companion work environment, a separate, distinct field of production, The Ranch creates a two-sided relationship for workers. No longer do they rely on the difference between office and home. Rather, an alternative form of labor—agriculture—acts as a foil for the traditional white-collar work world, creating a field of potential connections. Rest and leisure can be found alongside production in this getaway. Through the strategic deployment of barriers, the individuals of The Ranch can form a measured and clear response to their surroundings. Design becomes a means of tailoring privacy to the worker, allowing for openness and its concomitant happenstance, but also obscuring or delaying the endless connection to the employer.

EXPERIENTIAL THRESHOLD Sensory Filtration, Visual

3 EXPERIENTIAL THRESHOLD Sensory Filtration, Acoustic

EXPERIENTIAL THRESHOLD Sensory Filtration, Acoustic

EXPERIENTIAL THRESHOLD Sensory Filtration, Technological

EXPERIENTIAL THRESHOLD Sensory Filtration, Visual

Diagrams of experiential thresholds, investigating the degrees of sensory filtration formed through nature, technology, and built interventions. These include visual (1), acoustic (2), technological (3), and olfactory (4) filtration.

EXPERIENTIAL THRESHOLD Sensory Filtration, Olfactory

The Ranch

22 Model photographs showing experiential relationships of inhabitants of The Ranch. Variable barrier types create a landscape of different transparency levels, permitting workers to control their level of exposure.

Abigail Chang, Yi Li Axonometric drawing depicting the new structures and visual relationships within The Ranch. Workspaces and event spaces are juxtaposed with adjacent crop fields.

GX 2065

With technology companies continuing to invest billions of dollars into research and development, competing for a temporary lucrative edge, once-transformative innovations have become seemingly normative, with “game changing” product arrivals a seasonal occurrence. These inventions target a new generation of workers by offering a seemingly benign trade: ease of use and access for information and data. The worker, in pursuit of simplicity and speed simultaneously transforms into a participant in a larger, external organization. This condition of data collection seamlessly links the events of daily life to the space of work, making each fleeting user action potentially useful for the company. Masking the intense and at times relentless culture of work needed to produce these innovations and the mountains of analytics garnered from them, highly staged and celebrated launch events construct simplistic, hopeful narratives, describing a lifestyle of play, creativity, and entertainment. The office appears as a testing ground for these stories, a place to attempt to enact the promise of the technology while discovering its limitations. This disjunction then informs the next updated model—the continuous development of version 2.0. Approaching these concerns with a strong and clear attitude, GX 2065 embraces this perpetual drive for innovation, even as it caters to the imaginations and desires of the consumers. The speculative headquarters for Google X, the search giant’s technological advancement division, GX 2065, is an amusement park of corporate inventions, opening its doors to a willing public, capitalizing on the experience of its visitors, and studying and gathering information. At the same time, GX 2065 provides a playful, if not fully transparent, experience. Work collapses into pure play as overlaid infrastructures support the needs and projects of a new class system of creatives, support, and machines. GX 2065 extends the potentials of its research, interweaving the testing facilities for Google’s

Caio Barboza Michael Charters

varying development projects with the systems of the surrounding city of Austin, Texas. Streets for driverless cars link to the flanking highway, manufacturing facilities abut health centers, and food and water systems seamlessly continue into the office tower and security zones. Connecting these disparate parts of campus and city, GX 2065 reimagines the elements of the office to become more flexible and customizable. In this new environment, the floor transforms into a “malleable spatial division system,” a reconfigurable, mutable ground plane that can be stretched and opened through a field of pistons embedded into the slab itself. The potentials of the elevator/escalator are unleashed, as a “zero gravity magnetic mobile work station” allows access laterally and vertically through a building, transporting workers to individual, specific destinations within the structure. The ceiling becomes an “integrated services system” of cooled beams, infrared heating, magnetic tracks, and machine support, providing the infrastructure for the mobile work station and precise conditioning for the new division system. Within GX 2065, the worker and visitor alike supply Google X with the metrics and responses necessary to continue to push toward the future, as they react to the unvarnished emotions of play. Users and designers necessarily must make choices about connection and transparency. GX 2065 serves to heighten their dilemma, while dramatically accepting and escalating the values and motives of the tech industry. Understanding the desire for personal engagement and experimentation on the part of a user, as well as the needs of the worker for support and processing, GX 2065 focuses the design effort on the integration of multiple infrastructures and communication lines. Access points to the system—portals and interfaces—become the primary zone of exchange between the tech classes. The logic of the project demands that the architect also transform into a systems engineer and user experience designer, incorporating both roles into the final design.

25 Above: Sectional perspective depicting the implementation of new building technologies and elements within GX 2065’s central tower. Figures highlight the variability and personalization of surfaces and transportation.

Below: Patent documents for the “malleable spatial division system” (left) and “zero gravity magnetic mobile work station” (right) show the integration of the individual body into the systems of the GX 2065 campus.

GX265

26 Clockwise from top left: Security and Infrastructure Zone, Materials and Manufacturing Hub, Food and Water Distribution, Car Path, Lobby Arrival/ Suit Pick-up, Health and Genomics Center. These unique service areas are interwoven within GX 2065.

View From Car Path

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Caio Barbota, Michael Charters Model photograph depicts the overlapping relationships of the different systems of GX 2065 and the prominence of the central tower.

Alibaba TeX

Within the context of a global economy, competition and risk multiply, and diversification becomes a seeming prerequisite for participation. As corporations jockey to expand their reach and add users, mergers and acquisitions increase exponentially, leading to the production of a small pack of international conglomerates. Under the umbrella of each of these seemingly monolithic corporations exist dozens of smaller companies and start-ups, each supplying the larger entity with revenue and research. Despite the range of projects and personalities that come along with this organizational strategy, the individual workers in the subsidiaries are caught operating within multiple hierarchies for multiple employers, though often isolated within a narrowly focused firm. Communication and collaboration face obstacles such as language barriers, distance, and confidentiality agreements as directors and owners may be located in another part of the world or limited by varying project responsibilities and knowledge. Seen as a family of invested firms, the subsidiaries of the conglomerate must ultimately compete for affection and funds. The workspace becomes a fundamentally unequal one, in which resources and power are consolidated and distributed from the top down. Reacting to this perceived inequality among corporate subsidiaries, Alibaba TeX sees students suggest a future model for a conglomerate to leverage its diverse personalities and holdings while providing an increased opportunity for collaboration and exchange. In this scenario, the Chinese technology corporation Alibaba arrives in Texas with the aim of creating a more fluid environment for exchange and development. This plan combines established and integral actors alongside start-ups. Reusing the existing buildings, while constructing a series of new structures, Alibaba firstly insures its ability to house its entire corporation on one site. Wary of unintentional hierarchies, the company organizes itself physically around a circle, allowing any member of the larger organization to be

Chenchen Lu Tianhang Ren Yi Ren

given an equal voice. Unlike Norman Foster’s Apple Campus, however, which aggressively avoids differentiation and variety, the final image of Alibaba’s new campus is one of diversity and negotiated experiences rather than monolithic unity, as the disused pieces of the former Freescale campus assign each subsidiary with a unique character and scale. Cutting through the discrete structures housing Alibaba’s corporate ecosystem, a new ring of circulation, meeting spaces, restaurants, support, and amenities provides a shared and continuous link for the community of businesses. Designed to incorporate varying states of permanence, the center of the ring allows for uninterrupted, continuous movement throughout the compound, with temporary destinations, events, and stopping points surrounding this path. Smaller start-ups then act as intermediaries before reaching the large and established businesses that anchor and define Alibaba’s operations. Exploiting the temporal aspect of different programs, the ring allows multiple functions to exist within the same space, forcing users to navigate potential conflict by managing a shared clock. Stairs and ramps allow slippage between levels, as the ring works to increase cross-communication and unexpected encounters. Alibaba TeX proposes a reconception of corporate work relationships, opening up a hierarchical structure to horizontal connections and allowing for overlap and exchange to occur between distinct and, at times, widely divergent enterprises and approaches. Maintaining the diversity and integrity of each subsidiary, the design of the campus focuses less on the specific environment of each company’s workplace than on the circulation and shared amenities that link them together. Within this approach, the design must ultimately focus on producing spaces of negotiation, rather than on providing a singular solution or reductive image.

29 Alibaba.com

AliCloud

AliSoft

Yahoo!

Etao.com

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AliPay

Logistics

The current organizational structure of Alibaba (top), a reorganized, non-hierarchical model (center), a proposed diagram for a more communicative corporate environment (bottom)

Diagram showing the relationship of Alibabaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s subsidiaries within the TeX campus. Individual companies are connected and allowed to communicate through a shared ribbon of circulation.

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Same Space, Different Functions in a Day 1am

6am

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Communication

Library

Entertainment

Workshops

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Conference

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Above: Diagrams depicting the assembly and spatial qualities of the shared circulation ring, highlighting its vertical, as well as horizontal pathways and linkages, and the integration of structures.

6am

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Below: Program diagram charting the varied use of different areas and services within the new Alibaba campus across a single day. Cycles of activity indicate opportunities for sharing.

Chenchen Lu, Tianhang Ren, Yi Ren Collages capturing the transformation of the disparate buildings of the former Freescale campus into the unified structure of the future Alibaba headquarters

Laboritas

Corporations have historically made alliances with educational institutions, providing financial support through philanthropy as a means of maintaining connections and visibility within a larger community. Today, this link has become even more substantial. Taking advantage of the pool of willing and able students at universities, businesses increasingly provide funds for specific research focuses, locate office branches near or on school campuses, and provide internship opportunities for those following specific paths. In contrast, students themselves simultaneously struggle with overwhelming tuition fees and a job market that favors flexibility for the firm rather than stability for the worker—in other words, innovation over longevity. Adding to this frustrating position, educators and legislators across the country perpetually debate the merits of different curricula and methods, placing the student between the aims of businesses and politicians. So while the line between the college and corporate campus becomes a blurry boundary, it still prohibits direct communication and collaboration across it. The student and worker exist as would-be partners, forever separated by the walls of the ivory tower of academia. Capitalizing on the potentials of a corporate work and education merger, Laboritas is a for-profit, contract-based learning institution, in which enrolled students focus their efforts around projects initiated by outside businesses. Interweaving vocational and research-based educational models, Laboritas serves as a training ground for a more engaged, experienced, and prepared worker. Here, the physical environment of the corporate campus merges with the traditional college campus. Paired with the key emblems of a university—the statues, stadiums, and quads—a versatile landscape of service cores and layout types dot the campus, providing the necessary infrastructure for project and office flexibility. The benefits of Laboritas act as incentives for development and further investment. The company capitalizes on a more affordable and adaptive workforce and the school gains

Joshua Jow Justin Kollar

additional funding to potentially ease the economic burden on its students. With the office reconceived as a type of school, traditional hierarchies and social and spatial divisions fall. At the same time, the student/worker demands individual mobility, choice, and direction. The designer must respond through the acknowledgment of multiple learning types, producing a variety of workspaces and integrating a series of key events and drivers. To this end, Laboritas builds its structure around four learning/working types— tactile, iterative, dialectic, and social—devising a landscape of specific furniture layouts for each approach. Combining these four types into a single unit, Laboritas defines a basic and inclusive module for work that may be distributed evenly across the area of the campus within the framework of a grid. Framed by interstitial, informal open space, each module is provided with its own core and access to circulation and ground services. Educational event spaces—gathering and motivational zones, in which employees can obtain new assignments and be rewarded with new credentials—are placed within this field of working units to serve as organizational hubs for the student/workers. As at any university, the day-to-day experience of an individual student/ worker remains distinct and variable. Research and social interests crossover, bringing disparate teams and approaches into dialogue. The development of a worldwide knowledge economy continues to put pressure on businesses to invest in training and development of a more flexible, communicative, and analytical workforce. Education necessarily becomes a focus for a company’s investment and engagement. The designer must respond through the acknowledgment of multiple learning types, producing a variety of workspaces and integrating a series of key events and drivers. Motivated by a desire to learn and experiment, the student/worker can then approach this new office as a space of opportunity, for pursuing collaboration and exchange, as well as play and personal growth.

1 HOW: PROJECT ASSIGNMENT AND PROBLEMATIQUE TYPOLOGY

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34 A dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s worth of experiences within Laboritas, visiting (clockwise from left) a social group workspace, a new statue of Elon Musk, a neighborhood workspace, the plaza level, the forbidden forest, and the library.

Joshua Jow, Justin Kollar Primary Floor Plan 0’

50’

100’

250’

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Plan of the Laboritas campus. Among the field of work/learning units, eight event spaces appear as destinations and hubs of activity for the student body, places to share work and experiences.

Afterword

influence how we think about the workplace today. Historically, architecture studios have concerned themselves with these big questions, using research and projection as key aspects of design. Knoll, too, shares this heritage: Florence Knoll’s Planning Unit firmly placed Knoll at the confluence of spatial planning, modern architecture, and the emerging needs of the office. From then on, we have looked beyond the boundaries of a single piece of furniture to how that object, or group of objects, fosters an interior environment. As a society, we spend the majority of our time at our places of work. The questions that we ask about work (and our relationship to it) are questions about how we live and wish to be in the world, as much as they are questions about productivity and organizational goals. We look forward to continuing this conversation in the next two studios.

Benjamin Pardo

At Knoll, we say that no one can predict “the office of the future,” but today there is one constant we can count on: change. The pace and nature of work continues to change at an energetic clip, driven by technology innovations, a competitive economy, and a diverse workforce with new expectations about the ecosystem of work. Since our founding in 1938, Knoll has understood the variability of how the workplace is defined. As the Work Environment studio explores and critically questions, today’s workplace is under an expanding and ever-changing cast of social, economic and cultural pressures that place into a state of tension what was, what is, and what could be. As a group, these five projects create a critical conversation about the future of work and its broader implications, clarifying and interrogating the trends as well as constraints that

Contributors

Florian Idenburg Florian Idenburg is Founding Partner of SO–IL and Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He is the 2010 laureate of the Charlotte Köhler Prize and a 2014 finalist for the Prix de Rome in the Netherlands.

Benjamin Pardo Benjamin Pardo is Executive Vice President and Director of Design at Knoll.

Colophon

Work Environments 1: Campus and Event Instructor Florian Idenburg Report Editor & Design Duncan Scovil A Harvard University Graduate School of Design Publication Dean and Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design Mohsen Mostafavi Assistant Dean for Communications Benjamin Prosky Editor in Chief Jennifer Sigler Publications Coordinator Meghan Sandberg Series design by Laura Grey and Zak Jensen

Acknowledgments Special thanks to Asa Block, Suzanne Chambers, Bethany Davis, Hugh Forrest, Jonathan Ginnis, Matt Jones, Julia Kaganskiy, Knoll Inc., Benjamin Pardo, Steve Portnoy, Kevin Roche, Karen Stein, Richard The, and Hal Wuertz. Image Credits Page 9-10, 11: ÂŠ Ezra Stoller/Esto Page 13 (all images): Abigail Chang Page 15-16, 21: SO-IL/Iwan Baan The editors have attempted to acknowledge all sources of images used and apologize for any errors or omissions. Harvard University Graduate School of Design 48 Quincy Street Cambridge, MA 02138

ISBN 978-1-934510-55-1 Copyright ÂŠ 2015, President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without prior written permission from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

publications@gsd.harvard.edu gsd.harvard.edu Studio made possible with the generous support of Knoll, Inc.

Studio Report Spring 2015

Harvard GSD Department of Architecture

Students Caio Barboza, Abigail Chang, Michael Charters, Lauren Friedrich, Joshua Jow, Justin Kollar, Dayita Kurvey, Yi Li, Chenchen Lu, Michael Meo, Tianhang Ren, Yi Ren

ISBN 978-1-9345105-5-1

9 781934 510551 >