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Architects: DDAA
- Area: 1512 m²
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Kenta Hasegawa
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Manufacturers: Nakamura Corporation
What is an office? After the COVID-19 craze, online meetings and remote working have become the norm. Thanks to the improved communications environment, we can work from anywhere. The boundary between home and office is blurring, and the meaning and function of an office are becoming increasingly difficult to define.
Working from home eliminates commuting time and allows more freedom of time, but it also blurs the boundaries between public and private life and makes it difficult to switch between work and home life. While we celebrate freedom from cumbersome interpersonal relationships, we also crave interaction with others. Some people want an environment where they can connect with others and talk to someone, while others prefer to work in silence alone. Some like to play music, while others find earplugs help them concentrate better. Some prefer a bright space, while others prefer a dark one. One's concentration depends more or less on the time of day, mood, and physical condition, so an environment dedicated solely to efficiency may not be the right environment for the task. It is better to have a place where you can change your mood because if there is only one place to concentrate and work, the place itself will become boring. Still, it is not easy to disperse one's working environment across several locations. People may want different environments depending on their positions. While supervisors must oversee the entire staff, staff members may not always perform well when constantly being watched. While one wants to relax and behave more freely, one sometimes needs to feel moderate tension.
In short, social diversity is only increasing, and the time spent working in an office is highly dynamic. To address this complex situation, can we consider an office within a wider gradient that includes many different options, including outside spaces, instead of grouping offices under a single concept? HAKUHODO Gravity is an advertising company specializing in the fashion, luxury, and lifestyle industries. In thinking about their new office, the client raised the keyword "mingle." Mingle means to bring people together, to meet and create something, to mix them without compromising their individual qualities, to unite them, and so on. I thought the term perfectly describes the state of several colors intermixed like a freshly made café latte or a pattern created by marbling.
This project involved relocating the office to a newly constructed building. Although the new building is a typical office building, it directly echoes the thinking behind COVID-19 and beyond: the curtain wall behind the columns can be opened and closed for ventilation, each floor has a terrace, plus light is available from almost four sides, and one can see the greenery outside the windows. Our idea was to design a state where various functions are connected in a gradient manner, taking advantage of this good ventilation and light environment. Today, after the COVID-19 pandemic and with a better communication environment, people bother to go to the office because it offers more opportunities for interaction and more fulfilling options than at home.
So, we started by listing possible ways to spend time in the office to expand the options. For example, the list includes the following:
- Work in a private room like home without worrying about others’ eyes
- Work in a shared space with someone
- Make a mess
- Observe the work of those next to you
- Brew coffee or tea in the kitchen
- Laze around and relax
- Stretch out your legs
- Chat
- Glance sideways at other teams in action
- Take a break in the "back," like a smoking area
- Discuss around a large table
- Hold an event with a large group of people
- Shut yourself up in a small space, and so on
These are just a few examples, but when I looked objectively at the options listed here, we realized they could be summarized along the axes from individual to team and from concentration to relaxation. We studied the floor plan to create a state where they interrelate and work together in a large open room instead of individually arranging these conflicting environments. In addition, because the project was for a new building, we had to determine details related to the interior work to be performed by a construction company designated by the building owner, known as B Construction, at the very beginning of the planning process. So, we decided to reduce the scope of B Construction by minimizing the number of partitions and separating spaces using furniture. The lifespan of the interior is extremely short compared to architecture, and the possibility of conversion is scarce. Looking to the future, it makes sense to minimize the interior work as much as possible and use furniture to compose spaces. The cost of the B construction is often unreasonably high.
First, we studied the lounge and office space layout to ensure the maximum one-room space. The lounge is located immediately outside the elevator, and the U-shaped office space surrounds the lounge. The lounge is open to all, and a meeting space is located between the lounge and the workspace, which also serves as a line of security with access from either side. We adopted the U-shape office layout to create a space where the two polar environments - individual versus team or concentration versus relaxation, become one continuous space instead of existing side by side. The east side of the U-shape is an area for individuals to concentrate, and the west side is an area for teams to relax. We designed it in such a way that these areas transform gradually toward the center of the U-shape.
While the east side of the U-shape has stationary seating for individuals, we preferred to have a large table shared rather than a cluster of smaller seating areas. Furthermore, we designed the table in an organic form and arranged the plants so that lines of sight do not intersect. On the contrary, the west side is a place to relax with team members. There, several functions of different characters are distributed around free-address desks. To avoid making significantly different impressions on the east and west sides of the building, they are assembled around large, organic desks. This one also features plantings serving as temporary partitions so lines of sight do not intersect.
Again, an office is the result of a complex state of affairs. One wants to mingle but does not want to be disturbed. We wanted to allow individuals to choose where they want to be, depending on their mood and disposition, but still leave some nooks for interaction. Therefore, we dispersed fixed functions used by many people, such as the library, kitchen, lockers, and private rooms, to avoid creating areas where only a limited number of people go. For example, placing a special private room where people can concentrate besides the administrator's seating area encourages mutual interaction. Instead of creating a library-like room, we built bookcases to fill the walls of the free-address desk area so people naturally turn to them. The kitchen sink has faucets usable from all directions so several people can use the water while conversing face to face, rather than washing dishes side by side like in a conventional office kitchenette.
Furthermore, since this office building has a pleasant environment with plenty of greenery visible from the windows, we decided to create some special seating near the windows. The seat arrangement lets various people pass through while they search for special seats, sparking lively conversations with those in fixed seating. For example, private cubicles about the size of tiny manga cafe cubicles are inserted between the curtain-wall mullions. They are incredibly confined yet rich private cubicles that provide views out of the windows. In addition, the booths, about the size of a diner's booth, can accommodate up to four people, and the partitions are adjusted to a height so one's line of sight does not intersect that of others when sitting. A corner with a good view of the greenery has a kotatsu (low table covered with a duvet and a small electric heater underneath the top). The kotatsu provides an environment where people can stretch their legs and work, hopefully as a device to gather people and trigger spontaneous interaction during lunchtime and after work.
Rationality of office buildings - In addition to the question of what an office is and what it means to work, we had another central theme in mind when developing this project: office building typology. It provides a highly intense affordance that encourages people to work. Naturally, it is very systematic and prioritizes efficiency. Typically, the floor uses 500mmx500mm square units of the free-access floor system cover the floor, which facilitates routing of electrical, LAN, and other wiring under the floor to all seats, and is finished with carpet tiles that can be removed easily in parts and minimize the sound of footsteps. The ceiling system, consisting of 600mmx600mm square units, has air conditioning, lighting, and fire prevention equipment arranged in a grid pattern, making it relatively easy to rearrange the partitions in the future by replacing only the necessary sections. While these systems are designed for efficiency, at any rate, they also tend to yield stereotypical office landscapes that are uniform and stereotyped. While these systems allow residents to bring their furniture and move in immediately without doing any interior work, it is hardly flexible enough to accommodate unexpected requests.
Furthermore, one customary practice in the Japanese real estate sector is the tenants' obligation to restore the property to its original condition when moving out. The practice is for tenants to ensure the minimum necessary amenities are in place before moving out so the next tenant can start operations as soon as possible. It is like setting a zero point, in other words. While this practice, like the office building system, is well organized as a system, it is woefully ill-suited to individual solutions and irregularities. Any significant change from the existing interior would have to start with discarding the free-access floor units, ceiling units, and carpet tiles that had just been restored to their original condition by the previous renter. While the system itself is admirably well organized, we are not required to create a uniform office landscape in this case. Besides, while being part of a totally wasteful cycle is not agreeable, devising a new system from scratch is also disconcerting. Therefore, we set out to conceive a design that would leverage the existing office and real estate system as much as possible while hacking into it at the same time.
First, we requested the building owner and the contractor to stop ordering carpet tiles they originally planned to order for B Construction, identical to the existing finish. Our idea was to rethink the free-access floor units as a material without discarding them and convert them into various types of furniture. In any case, it was a way to avoid waste of resources by not discarding as much as possible. Specifically, our design converted the existing free-access floor units that had initially covered the lounge floor into furniture, including sofas in the lounge area, partitions between the lounge and office area, and a small kotatsu in the office area.
Resin fixtures - In this project, we designed many furniture pieces, including drawer knobs, door handles, partitions, hooks, cabinets, desks, and chairs, to name a few. One of DDAA's obsessions, or characteristics, is to construct everything entirely using only the colors of off-the-shelf products and materials as much as possible, without matching the colors by painting. Since the client is an advertising company specializing in the fashion, luxury, and lifestyle industries, we selected materials often used in the fashion context, such as the rope at the entrance to the private booth and the MA1 flight jacket fabric used for the handles. This time, the only items using paint are resin fixtures. We wanted to create something that would symbolize the concepts of "gravity" and "mingle." The top two shelves of this three-tiered shelf have holes in them, through which the resin, blended naturally with pigments of several colors, drips down, creating a gravity-induced expression on the second and third shelves. In other words, the fixture features a "mingling" of various colors induced by "gravity."
