Over the last year, 6,900 million m2 have been built for office spaces (an increase of 12% compared to the previous year), according to a study by Avison Young that investigates the real estate market of offices in North America, Europe and Asia.
Architects and designers lead the great challenge of specifying materials to build spaces with high levels of comfort and efficiency to transform them into pleasant workplaces that have good lighting, ventilation, acoustics and ergonomics for their users.
In ArchDaily we have published more than 2,500 office designs. During the last year, our specialized team of curators has selected 290 innovative office proposals, detecting 3 major trends that appear repeatedly after the boom in cowork spaces:
a) Landing or transition spaces: open transition spaces, before or after a meeting, whose main purpose is to deliver the appropriate conditions so that participants can socialize. As places for short stays, the design specification usually considers tables and high seats as they can be useful for working sitting or standing, or to support some type of material. The designs also include sofas with higher densities (i.e. which do not sink when sitting) to create a different environment.
b) Work lighting with uniform, localized and mixed systems: The optimum lighting level for a given task corresponds to the highest performance with minimal fatigue. For those in charge of lighting design, the main challenge is to find the balance between installation and maintenance costs with functionality and visual richness. That is why, depending on the space, distribution of work areas and aesthetic role they give to the luminaire, architects specify different types of lighting; uniform systems to achieve regular lighting with the hidden or non-protagonist light source, localized lighting systems to obtain regular lighting with protagonist light sources or the combination of both in mixed systems.
c) Selection of acoustic materials: excessive sound directly impacts the human body, mind and the development of activities. The creation of spaces with an adequate degree of soundproofing improves the quality of life of all users. It is for this reason that architects and designers select materials that meet acoustic standards whose surfaces are capable of reflecting sound waves and isolating enclosures or that can fully absorb them to achieve an acoustically-pleasing environment and facilitate the right conditions for the job.
To be updated and learn more about the most innovative office designs, you can visit our extensive selection here.
