Inteltion Office / Onion

Curated by ArchDaily

Architects: Onion
Area: 170 m²
Year: 2017
Photographs:W Workspace
Manufacturers: Curio, Herman Miller, Herman Miller

Text description provided by the architects. The Inteltion Office is a 170 square meters renovation project designed for the IT consultant company named Inteltion. The company has 60 employees who normally work at the clients’ offices in order to take care of the computer systems. They are present at the Inteltion Office especially when they are waiting for a new client or a new project. That is to say, it is not necessary to design a desk for the individual staff. Each staff works with a laptop computer. Mobility is a characteristic of the Inteltion Company.

Why does an IT consultant company want a design office? The objective of this renovation is to build a space to organise meetings with the clients, to interview new employees of the company and, above all, to have the room for socialisation. This is why the Inteltion Company founder asked for Onion’s design service.

In terms of design, the problem of office syndrome is Onion’s concern. Spending hours working in the same bodily posture is unhealthy either with a computer or a pencil. Onion’s proposal is the design for good health, promoted by the office for the employees.

Onion started the project by observing the stretching exercises at public parks in Bangkok. To Onion, stretching modes of the elderly is more desirable than particular exercise equipments. The tools should be simple, easy to build and playful.

The arrangement of stretching tools is the design of Inteltion Office. These tools are organised by areas, ranging from easy to difficult exercises, namely “finger walk”, “arm wheel”, “spinning chairs” and most difficult of all “monkey bars”.

Inteltion Office / Onion - Chair, Beam — © W Workspace

A continuous iron tube is the dominant feature of the space. It functions as handrails at the office entry, seating and table structures in the middle of the room and exercise bars at the rear of the office. Onion makes use of the existing water and electricity pipes as the ornaments of the office ceiling by painting all of these old and new pipes in white colour.

At Inteltion Office, the objects to exercise with also include the spherical cabinet handles. They are placed a bit higher than normal for the purpose of bodily stretching. The meeting table can be transformed into a table tennis table, above which is the ping-pong balls container lamp. Next to it is a wall of ping-pong balls for the players to count the scores. When tired, employees can take a nap on the raised platform full of pillows, right above the movable file cabinets.