Architectural Record 2015-08

12
ARCHITECTURAL RECORD AUGUST 2015
editor’s letter
All in a Day’s Work
Office design: a constantly changing
landscape for architects.
the workplace is an ever-evolving design challenge. With continuous
upgrades in technology, advances in telecommunications and rising
costs of commercial real estate, space for individual employees keeps
shrinking—whether for assistants or executives. The average allotment
per office worker fell from 225 square feet in 2010 to 176 square feet in
2012, and these days can go as low as 60 square feet. High-walled individual
cubicles have given way to smaller, open cubes, and to benching
and the temporary, flexible desk space known as hoteling.
But these trends don’t necessarily mean that more people only work
remotely—collaboration is the buzzword across many industries—and
that means face time, as architects of offices know. For brainstorming
or serendipitous encounters, they have been designing more conference
rooms, breakout spaces, huddle areas, kitchens and snack bars, lounge
seating, and stadium-style stairs.
Silicon Valley has been an influential leader in the recent move
toward open-plan offices that foster collaboration. And tech companies
were pioneers in creating all the amenities (free meals! on-premises dry
cleaners!) that keep employees at the office nearly 24/7. In this issue,
we’re bringing you an up-close look at the gigantic new Facebook headquarters
in Menlo Park, California, designed by Frank Gehry—a
1,500-foot-long, 433,000-square-foot structure with a huge roof garden
and vast open-plan office space (page 86).
When Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg visited Gehry’s
office early in the design process, the architect asked what kind of
space he was looking for. Zuckerberg threw his hands in the air and
said, “I want this!” Gehry’s simple open office with lofty ceilings, in a
converted warehouse near Los Angeles, inspired the Facebook design—
though the tech company’s enormous size, of course, meant the space
had to be cleverly broken up, so it wouldn’t “feel like an automobile
factory,” as project designer Craig Webb put it.
Architects have long thrived in open-plan offices, often adapting
space in structures originally built for other purposes. We take a look
at some extraordinary conversions for architectural offices, including a
former warehouse for repairing naval gunboats in Copenhagen and a
deconsecrated 16th-century church in Milan (page 74).
The next frontier for architects designing open office space today is
dealing with ambient noise. Acousticians have tended to treat this
problem in the past by masking it with white noise or, more recently,
pink noise.
The current understanding is that what is especially distracting for
workers is being able to clearly hear others’ conversations. (For those
speaking, the problem is lack of privacy. In a recent New York Times
article about open-plan offices, an architect complained that everyone
who sat near him had learned he was having a colonoscopy.)
The newest acoustical technology includes advanced systems of
microphones and speakers that pick up a conversation but scramble the
sound, so that someone a few feet away cannot “hear” it when it is
emitted through speakers embedded in the space. According to Todd
DeGarmo, CEO of STUDIOS Architecture, such systems mean that a
group could hold a video teleconference in an open space without
disturbing someone 8 to 10 feet away. This could reduce the need for all
those enclosed conference rooms, yet such systems are so sensitive they
could affect architecture in other ways, too. For example, a curtain
wall would have to be designed to almost completely block street noise.
Meanwhile, architectural record is moving to new office space
soon, so the editors will be able to test some of these ideas. On July 1,
the magazine and its sister publications, Engineering News Record and
SNAP, were acquired by BNP Media, a family-owned company founded
in 1926, with headquarters in Troy, Michigan. The editorial staffs
will still be based here in New York City. We plan on bringing you the
best in architectural projects, trends, and news, through our print
and digital platforms, as we always have, under the stewardship of
record’s new owners. ■
Cathleen McGuigan, Editor in Chief
PHOTOGRAPHY: © MICHEL ARNAUD