Representing 32% of the global population, Generation Z (those born between 1995 – 2010) accounts for a healthy chunk of the workforce (27% by 2025 and rising every year). These are the fresh young minds employers are fighting to attract. With prospective employers’ impact on society (93%) and a healthy work/life balance (77%) the two biggest motivators in deciding where Gen Z’ers want to work, a large part of any new office building’s design brief is green space.
While hybrid working and flexible hours represent the most obvious ways to improve work/life balance for many, because of the missed social interactions and the lack of space or functionality at unproductive home workspaces, the majority of 16-24-year-olds are the only age group who prefer to work from the office.
By positioning natural green spaces on-site, companies can boast their sustainable credentials and provide employees with an opportunity to clear their heads in fresh, socially engaging, outdoor environments, all without leaving the comfort of the office. The following workplaces take matters into their own green hands, opening up roofs, facades, surroundings, and even interiors to allocate office garden space and cultivate a healthy workforce.
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Outdoor Green Spaces Included in the Office Floor Plan
It’s easy to believe things would be easier with a little more space – especially in building design – but it can be just as hard for architects to use a large space wisely and efficiently as a small one. With almost 70,000 sqm to work with, for example, YOFC’s Headquarters in Wuhan, China, easily has room for some outdoor gardens, but making sure all internal areas share effortless access to them can be difficult at such a large site.
Architects Gensler responded to the challenge by arranging five intersecting wings spread out around a central atrium, creating five separate outdoor spaces that connect the structures together. With a large site already connected to a listed garden, meanwhile, the home of Carlsberg beer in Copenhagen, Denmark, respected and enlarged the existing listed gardens at its brewery by creating green spaces, places, and water features along its boundary, and oriented a glass-walled atrium inside the office space to face the public garden.
Without much extra space to include a garden in tightly-packed East Hollywood, LA – where green space is a rare commodity, the architects of Second Home Hollywood, Selgascano, demolished one of the two buildings on the site in favor of 60 individual circular structures. Serving as office and meeting rooms, the glass-lined ‘pots’ are buried to table height, meaning the nature-lined passages in-between – filled with plants, trees, and wildlife, rise up on all sides of the interiors.
Office Projects That Encourage Employee Connections to Nature with Outdoor Green Space
YOFC’s Headquarters / Gensler
Carlsberg Group Central Office / C.F.Møller Architects
Second Home Hollywood Office / Selgascano
Make Space to Breathe Inside: Internal Courtyard Cut-Outs in Large Office Buildings
With workplaces often set in highly urbanized areas, local green space can be hard to find, making a serene lunchtime stroll impossible. So along with helping sunlight reach through into the central areas of larger buildings, internal courtyards also provide employees with private and easily accessible outdoor space. ‘As a counterpoint to its dense, bustling Times Square neighborhood,’ explains its architects, the NY Times Building Lobby Garden Courtyard’s ‘central building location celebrates a serene fragment of the HudsonRiver Valley woodland landscape,’ having individually hoisted each 50-foot-tall, 32,000 pound Birch tree over the 70-foot building facade.
At the Exotic Workplace Garden in Gdańsk, Poland, meanwhile, through the use of sophisticated climate control technology, a covered internal courtyard provides workers with ‘an exotic landscape without the discomfort often accompanying actually being in the tropics,’ explains the architects. Proving workplaces needn’t be restricted by the climate of their respective region.
Internal Office Courtyards With Private Employee Gardens On-Site
The New York Times Building Lobby Garden / HM White Site Architects + Cornelia Oberlander Architects
Exotic Workplace Garden / Malinowski Design Urban & Landscape
Metallic Bellows Factory Office / KSM Architecture
Ecove Centre of Vocational Empowerment / SEZA Architects & Interior Designers
Utilizing the Exposed Surface of a Roof as a Private Garden Space
Any amount of green space brings health and well-being benefits to its guests, but larger urban parks find it easier to block out the sights and sounds of their surroundings, making it easier for visitors to mentally remove themselves from the city. Although rooftop gardens are literally connected to the city, being further distanced from the traffic noise and looming structures at street level allows rooftop garden users to disconnect without straying too far.
At the Kings Cross offices of Meta, for example, a ’42,000 sq ft landscaped rooftop garden and terraces offer a biodiverse space that enhances the well-being of employees and provides uninterrupted views over central London,’ explains architects Bennetts Associates. Meanwhile, an additional advantage of rooftop gardens, as evidenced by the Parliament of Victoria Members’ Annexe in East Melbourne, Australia, is to increase a building’s thermal mass capability and effectively replace the land – often brownfield – with up to 100% natural landscaping, achieving a carbon net-positive effect.
Office Buildings With High-Rise Tranquility on Green Roofs and Roof Gardens
Meta Headquarters / Bennetts Associates
Parliament of Victoria Members’ Annexe / Peter Elliott Architecture + Urban Design
AIRSIDE / Snøhetta
Center of Excellence for Forest Conservation / Architects 49
Letting it Hang: Hanging Gardens on Interior and Exterior Office Balconies
Roof gardens offer an expanse of high-rise greenery with an available surface area that equals a building’s footprint, but when a structure is taller than it is wide, a series of balcony terraces set around its edge can be a more efficient way to not only provide a tall building with more exterior space but can also be a fairer way to distribute it. At BIG’s 1,031-foot-tall supertall high-rise, The Spiral in New York, for example, ‘cascading landscaped terraces and hanging gardens climb the tower in a spiraling motion,’ describe the architects, ‘supplying each office floor with readily accessible terrace space.’
The plant species selected for The Spiral’s exterior terraces were chosen for their specialist resistance to high winds – an important consideration for high-rise greenery. Meanwhile, by positioning ‘multiple tiers of curving balconies, densely packed with unruly plants that spill out over the edges’ around the sides of the Hainan Energy Trading Building’s internal atrium, explains the project’s architects KRIS YAO | ARTECH, the calmer ‘nature-filled spaces provide employees with a sense of peace and well-being.’
Offices With Greenery at Every Level on Plant-Filled Balconies
The Spiral / BIG
Hainan Energy Trading Building / KRIS YAO | ARTECH
Orange Village / Koffi & Diabaté Architectes
Osaka Umeda Twin Towers South / Takenaka Corporation
The above projects with office gardens can be found in this ArchDaily folder, created by the author.
