Archinect - News

3XN GXN and British Land share new transformation project of London's Euston Tower

2023-07-13T13:57:00-04:00

3XN GXN, alongside property development company British Land, has announced that they are leading the redevelopment of London’s Euston Tower. Built in 1970, the commercial high-rise was viewed as a cutting-edge office space. However, changing tenancy needs have seen a gradual reduction in its inhabitants, leading to the building’s vacancy in 2021.

The aim for the renewed Euston Tower is to transform it into a pioneering, welcoming, net-zero workspace in the heart of London’s Knowledge Quarter. The project falls in line with the sustainability goals and expertise of British Land, the Greater London Authority and Borough of Camden, and 3XN GXN. As noted in a release, the joint vision for the project sets out to lead the way in low-carbon retrofit and construction techniques, as well as using inclusive design to support the workspaces and local community.

Image courtesy of 3XN GXN.

As stated by 3XN Senior Partner Audun Opdal, “We are proud to work on this highly progressive project and...

10 fresh workplace designs we enjoyed this week

2022-05-07T12:00:00-04:00

In case you haven't checked out Archinect's Pinterest boards in a while, we have compiled ten recently pinned images from outstanding projects on various Archinect Firm and People profiles.

Today's top images (in no particular order) are from the board Working Spaces.

Tip: use the handy FOLLOW feature to easily keep up-to-date with all your favorite Archinect profiles!

↑ First Tech Federal Credit Union Corporate Office in Hillsboro, OR by Hacker Architects; Photo: Jeremy Bittermann

↑ Minneapolis Public Service Building in Minneapolis, MN by Henning Larsen; Photo: Corey Gaffer

↑ Livesport - Dynamic Office in Prague, Czech Republic by Studio Reaktor

↑ Supercell San Francisco in San Francisco, CA by Firm 151; Photo: Jeremy Bitterman

↑ 98point6 in Seattle, WA by Best Practice Architecture

↑ Banco Mercantil in Panama City, Panama by Mallol Arquitectos; Photo: Fernando Alda

↑ Gutshof in Güldenhof, Germany by Heim Balp Architekten; Photo: Francesca Ióvene

↑ Rights & Brands in Stockholm,...

Clive Wilkinson says he regrets the role he played in the Googleplex's design

2022-01-24T17:35:00-05:00

For more than three decades, Clive Wilkinson has been among the most sought-after office designers in the world. He has planned spaces for the likes of Microsoft, Disney, Intuit and other companies seeking unorthodox approaches to work life. But he now has regrets about what is perhaps his most famous work: Googleplex, the tech giant's posh headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

Wilkinson’s statements offer a rebuke to the Silicon Valley culture he played a role in pioneering and now deems to be "fundamentally unhealthy." The $1 billion office complex in Mountain View, California designed by STUDIOS Architecture with interiors by Wilkinson is serviced by a secretive $250 million transportation network and is famous for its plush employee perks that Wilkinson now says he regrets.

"This notion that you can provide everything that would support a worker's life on campus might appear to be extremely generous and supportive," he told NPR’s Bobby Allyn. "But it also has a whole range of potentially negative impacts. Work-life balance cannot be achieved by spending all your life on a work campus. It's not real. It's not really engaging with the world in the way most people do. It also drains the immediate neighborhoods of being able to have a commercial reality."

Relisten to Archinect's 2016 podcast interview with Clive Wilkinson

Wilkinson also stated that he do...

Is it time to pivot away from open office design?

2021-04-30T14:23:00-04:00

Office design has changed over the years, but perhaps one of the most infamous design trends has been the open office layout. Pitched to foster collaboration and optimize space while bringing a new modern edge to the workplace environment, corporate offices across the globe were eager to adopt this design to their office. Since its emergence, the open office concept was synonymous with start-up headquarters, Silicon Valley tech offices, new corporate offices looking to adopt a trendy new work environment for their teams, and more. However, after years of championing open office design, the team at Clive Wilkinson Architects explains why "the open office is dead."

Amber Wernick, an associate at the firm, explained to Fast Company in mid-April that the number of possibilities for appropriate office designs in 2021 increased because of the pandemic. "Once they [the public] were forced to work from home and be away from the office, I think it opened a lot of peoples' minds to what the o...

PARTISANS opens new 11,000 sf studio in Toronto

2021-01-14T13:32:00-05:00

Located in Toronto’s west end in the Geary Corridor, PARTISANS’ new studio space spans a single-level and covers 11,000 square feet, providing ample room for the practice to grow to over 100 team members. The group took a collective approach in designing the new space, pulling from their community of architects, interior designers, researchers, and other professionals.

Photo by Thomas Bollmann.

The original space was a former gear and machine factory and is located in Toronto's old industrial neighborhood, now an area with a thriving arts and music scene, along with some of Toronto's newest restaurants, bars, and breweries.

Photo by Thomas Bollmann.

In addition to four meeting rooms, and 40 desks, an additional 1,500 sq ft is dedicated to the workshop -- a space for research and in-house development, including a 3D printing room and archive and material library.

Photo by Thomas Bollmann.

Social space was an important aspect of the design, introduced to facilitate group brainstorms an...

10 new workspace designs we liked this week

2020-11-06T18:12:00-05:00

In case you haven't checked out Archinect's Pinterest boards in a while, we have compiled ten recently pinned images from outstanding projects on various Archinect Firm and People profiles.

Today's top images (in no particular order) are from the board Working Spaces.

Tip: use the handy FOLLOW feature to easily keep up-to-date with all your favorite Archinect profiles!

↑ Studio a29 Office in Rijeka, Croatia by Studio a29; Photo: Koridor 27

↑ Hoke House in Portland, OR by Skylab Architecture (the firm was also featured in Archinect's Studio Snapshots series)

↑ biro+ studio in Bari, Italy by biro+

↑ Clinton Hill Brownstone in Brooklyn, NY by MKCA // Michael K Chen Architecture

↑ Elysium HQ in New York, NY by FLOAT STUDIO; Photo: Aaron Thompson

↑ MG2 Seattle Headquarters in Seattle, WA by MG2

↑ Salesforce Tower Office Space in San Francisco, CA by Feldman Architecture; Photo: Paul Dyer

↑ Moose Toys in El Segundo, CA by Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney Architects; Photo: Paul Vu

↑ Russian...

From prayer rooms to “meeting pods”, quiet spaces are being revived in open-plan offices

2020-02-19T16:00:00-05:00

More than a decade since the swing toward open-plan offices — and the resulting backlash from workers concerned about noise and a lack of privacy — a host of ancillary spaces are cropping up in workplaces, offering employees an escape from their (sometimes overly loud) co-workers. These private spaces include prayer rooms, wellness rooms and libraries [...] All of which prompts the question: After pulling down the walls that defined yesterday’s workplaces, are we once again putting them up?

10 new workspace designs for your Friday inspiration

2020-01-03T19:40:00-05:00

In case you haven't checked out Archinect's Pinterest boards in a while, we have compiled ten recently pinned images from outstanding projects on various Archinect Firm and People profiles.

(Tip: use the handy FOLLOW feature to easily keep up-to-date with all your favorite Archinect profiles!)

Today's top images (in no particular order) are from the board Working Spaces.

↑ Shake Shack Headquarters in New York, NY by Michael Hsu Office of Architecture

↑ Ray-Mont Logistics in Montreal, Canada by Lemay; Photo: Adrien Williams

↑ Multidisciplinary Design Office in Barcelona, Spain by ROMAN IZQUIERDO BOULDSTRIDGE; Photo: Adria Goula

↑ RigUp Office in Austin, TX by MF Architecture; Photo: Hua Liu and Rachel Deng, Charles Davis Smith

↑ Huckletree West London in London, UK by Studio RHE

↑ Presidio VC Offices in San Francisco, CA by Feldman Architecture; Photo: Paul Dyer

↑ Camp Fenix in Stockholm, Sweden by Anders Berensson Architects

↑ John A. Martin & Associates Workplace in Los Angeles, CA...

Are phone-booth-sized offices the future of workstations?

2019-08-30T08:00:00-04:00

The idea of a workspace has transformed over the past decade, in large part, due to the emergence of co-working spaces like WeWork and Industrious. The shift has fueled the proliferation of the "open office," and the many documented problems associated with the setup. Is the pendulum ready to swing back to a focus on single-person workspaces?

Mitsubishi Estate Co., a Japanese real estate investment company, thinks so and has offered a potential solution to the problem of the open-office: a phone-booth-sized mini-workspace for one. Meet Telecube, the 13-square-foot, soundproof workspace that comes complete with a desk, seat, and power outlets.

In collaboration with office furniture maker Okamura Corp. and video-conferencing software vendor V-Cube Inc, Mistsubishi Estate Co. has unveiled plans to install 1,000 Telecube units by 2023. According to recent coverage from Bloomberg: "The companies are betting there will be enough demand for the mini workstations. Coffee shops in Tokyo ar...

According to WeWork "Buildings equal Data"

2019-03-02T13:08:00-05:00

There are T-shirts floating around WeWork’s New York City headquarters that say “Buildings equal data.” The nano manifesto hints at a conviction that architecture should be shaped by a methodical study of how people utilize spaces instead of unique aesthetic signatures. More than that, correlating digital information with physical structures is good business—it has quickly become a core strategy for the eight-year-old, $47 billion company racing to expand its footprint globally.

Architects today are very familiar with data and its influence over design, construction, and feasibility. However, what else can data teach us? When you're a massive billion dollar company like WeWork, opportunities for turning data into teachable tools coincides well with the company's progressive ethos.

No 1 Poultry in London - WeWork interior; Image © WeWork

Say what you will about the company, regardless of your views their intentions of transforming the tools and perspectives of real estate, architecture, and design is reflective of the decisions they've made thus far. For WeWork, data isn't just a tool but an asset to the company's overall growth and success. "It’s hard to overstate how essential data is to WeWork’s operations. Specifically, architectural data. Nearly four years ago, the company underscored this dependency when it acquired Case, a BIM consultancy whose expertise WeWork relied on even in its early years (it was founded in 2010). With David Fano, Case’s co-foun...

10 fresh workspace designs for your Friday inspiration

2018-11-30T14:44:00-05:00

In case you haven't checked out Archinect's Pinterest boards in a while, we have compiled ten recently pinned images from outstanding projects on various Archinect Firm and People profiles.

(Tip: use the handy FOLLOW feature to easily keep up-to-date with all your favorite Archinect profiles!)

Today's top images (in no particular order) are from the board Working Spaces.

↑ Devon Energy Center in Oklahoma City, OK by Pickard Chilton; Photo: Alan Karchmer

↑ Mafengwo Global Headquarters in Beijing, China by SYN Architects; Photo: BenMo studio / YanMing

↑ Estée Lauder Companies in London, UK by MCM Architecture Ltd

↑ BCG Los Angeles Headquarters in Los Angeles, CA by ShubinDonaldson; Photo: Benny Chan

↑ Stikeman Elliott Offices in Montreal, Canada by Saucier+Perrotte Architectes; Photo: Olivier Blouin

↑ JCDecaux, Empire State Building in New York, NY by Ohlhausen DuBois Architects

↑ The Q Hut in Accord, NY by Coughlin Architecture PLLC

↑ Marc by Marc Jacobs Showroom in New York, NY by J...

Workin' it: 10 fresh office designs worth checking out

2018-03-09T09:00:00-05:00

In case you haven't checked out Archinect's Pinterest boards in a while, we have compiled ten recently pinned images from outstanding projects on various Archinect Firm and People profiles.

(Tip: use the handy FOLLOW feature to easily keep up-to-date with all your favorite Archinect profiles!)

Today's top images (in no particular order) are from the board Working Spaces.

↑ Symantec in Mountain View, CA by AP+I Design with Little Diversified Architectural Consulting

↑ 821 Broadway in New York, NY by Cl-oth Interiors

↑ The Apple Store in Kent, UK by pH+

↑ SSENSE - Extension of headquarters in Montreal, Canada by Atelier Barda architecture; Photo: Adrien Williams

↑ University of Queensland School of Architecture in Brisbane, Australia by m3architecture; Photo: Brett Boardman

↑ LIVE WORK HOME in Syracuse, NY by COOKFOX

↑ Albina Yard in Portland, OR by LEVER Architecture

↑ Kinfolk Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark by NORM Architects

↑ NUA Studio in Tarragona, Spain by NUA

Click here to see...

Microsoft offers treehouses to connect their employees back with nature

2017-10-18T14:54:00-04:00

While Apple opens the doors to their new campus, and Amazon looks for a location for its second, Microsoft has gone in a different direction, building Wi-Fi tree houses so staff can connect with nature.

Microsoft's campus is comprised of 120 buildings spread across Redmond, Washington—a suburb of Seattle—and surrounded by 500 acres of woods. After a recent employee survey found many workers would like to work outdoors more, the tech company has added to their campus by rigging up three high-tech tree houses in Redmond's Pacific Northwest Douglas firs. The company is also currently working on other tech enable outdoor districts around the campus for their employees.

Pete Nelson of Animal Planet's "Treehouse Masters" was recruited to help create the new elevated meeting space. Equipped with Wi-Fi, electricity—every weatherproof bench has a hatch containing a power supply—an outdoor gas fireplace, and a shipping container that houses a barbecue restaurant, the company hopes to boost em...

Tomorrow — Art Share L.A. to unveil their redesign by Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects

2017-06-14T13:56:00-04:00

Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects teamed up with notable non-profit Art Share L.A. to redesign the group's creative art space at the corner of 4th Street and Hewitt, in Downtown Los Angeles' Arts District. Art Share L.A. will officially reveal the new design during an open house tomorrow night, June 15 from 7-10 p.m.

Photo via Art Share L.A.

The open house event will feature a talk by Lorcan O'Herlihy, exhibitions, poetry, and performances. Event is free, but space is limited. RSVP here.

Here's a quick peek of LOHA's redesign.

Entrance. Rendering courtesy Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects.

The redesign for the colorful 28,000 square-foot building features a more flexible, open reconfiguration of galleries, classrooms, a theater, and other multi-functional spaces with live-work studios.

Galleries. Renderings courtesy Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects.

Theater. Rendering courtesy Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects.

Proposed plan. Courtesy Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects.

In case you missed it, listen to Archinect's recent...

Inside the MVRDV House, the firm's new family home-style office

2016-07-22T19:25:00-04:00

MVRDV settled into their new office headquarters inside the remodeled Het Industriegebouw, nestled in the heart of Rotterdam. Now dubbed by the firm as the MVRDV House, the building was originally designed by iconic Dutch architect Hugh Maaskant in 1952. The new 2,400 square-meter interior is modeled like a family home, filled with ample working and gathering spaces that reflect the “work hard, play hard” balance many firms strive for in their office's design.

Now with 140 employees based in Rotterdam, “[t]he expanding MVRDV family needed a new house,” says MVRDV co-founder Jacob van Rijs. MVRDV's new office has “everything that [a] home requires, a living room, a dining room, a sofa for the whole house to sit together,” he described. Surrounded by various creative start-ups and design firms, MVRDV believes they fit right in their new neighborhood.

The Family Room serves as the firm's main communal space for social interaction...

Office Space: Clive Wilkinson on Archinect Sessions One-to-One #20

2016-04-25T15:55:00-04:00

Shortly after starting out in Frank Gehry's office in the early 1990s, Clive Wilkinson founded his own firm in Los Angeles, and has since designed far-reaching workspaces for such big-name clients as Google, the BBC, 20th Century Fox and Microsoft. I spoke with Clive about the evolution from cubicle farms to “serendipity machines” in office design, and his thoughts on co-working spaces. Also turns out he’s not a huge fan of Apple's "spaceship" campus.

Listen to One-to-One #20 with Clive Wilkinson:

iTunes: Click here to listen and subscribe to the new "Archinect Sessions One-to-One" podcast
SoundCloud: click here to follow Archinect
RSS: subscribe with any of your favorite podcasting apps via our RSS feed: http://onetoone.libsyn.com/rss
Download: this episode

Projects mentioned in the episode:

↑ Clive Wilkinson's home at Norwich Drive

↑ Pallota Teamworks

↑ FIDM Annex

↑ "Super Desk" for The Barbarian Group

↑...

A garden is the roof of a meeting room in a loft office by jvantspijker

2015-11-03T11:28:00-05:00

Jvantspijker urbanism architecture has redesigned the main space of an old steam factory in the Delfshaven neighborhood of Rotterdam, to become an open loft office. A central glass meeting room, with a pantry and stairs leading to the plant-filled roof organizes the large warehouse space in a single sweeping gesture, transforming it into a generous and optimistic working space.

The transformed office space is situated in a waterfront factory, called ‘De Fabriek van Delfshaven’. De Fabriek is a multi-tenant building in which a large number of creative offices are housed. In the last two years, this factory has become a vibrant working community where design studios, software companies and progressive small businesses are housed together in one of the oldest areas of Rotterdam.

The central design idea behind the transformation of the office was to keep the scale, transparency and lightness in place and to connect the office to the main atrium of the building. Therefore the central elem...

Need another idea for the Bigger than a Breadbox competition? Check out "La Cabane" by Julien Franc Wahlgreen

2015-02-14T12:00:00-05:00

Inspired by the vintage French Citroën Type H cargo van, "La Cabane" designed by independent creative director Julien Franc Wahlgreen functions as a room within a room that can enhance the increasingly common working-from-home experience. Plus, the structure's beach shack or quaint treehouse resemblance creates a fairly inviting environment to get in the zone.

Built in a Copenhagen duplex apartment, La Cabane (which translates to "hut" or "shack" in English) can be placed at the top of a staircase so the user can walk right into their workspace. Constructed by cabinet maker Gustav Sandegård, La Cabane's wooden flaps can be opened widely to create an extra 2.4 square meters of workspace, letting in natural light and providing enough wiggle room to comfortably house one person.

According to Wahlgreen, opening and closing the flaps becomes a daily ritual that can help the user mentally switch from "work mode" to "family life"/non-work mode. La Cabane's pared down plywood exterior looks l...

The Open-Office Trap

2014-01-08T13:16:00-05:00

The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve.

Big changes are coming to conventional office buildings

2013-09-05T14:04:00-04:00

Corporate America is moving away from conventional layouts where an employee's status is measured by the amount of space he occupies. Instead, more compact, playful designs are coming into favor. People can do their jobs almost anywhere with their cellphones and laptops, the reasoning goes, so let's make the office a place where people are stimulated by close interaction at their workstations and chance meetings in inviting public spaces such as lounges and coffee bars.

HOTELLO. Somnia et Labora. A Portable Office

2013-03-22T19:08:00-04:00

Hotello is a portable space, packed into a trunk. Hotello contains all the necessary elements needed to work and rest. It consists of a metal structure that supports a translucent and sound absorbant curtain. Hotello can be combined and aggregated in different configurations.

Domus visits Maio at their nice Barcelona studio

2012-12-10T13:50:00-05:00

It is divided into two sections. One of these, the working area, is dominated by its single central desk, which is 12,5 metres long, without any divisions or boundaries. This desk is shared by graphic designers, architects, data visualisation experts, video artists and anyone who the team can share experiences and collaborate with.

The architects have shared the following images and text about their project with us...

The project, designed by architects Anna Puigjaner and Guillermo Lopez, members of MAIO design team, involves the conversion of a space that formerly housed a washing place into an open studio for professionals from different fields of architecture and design.

The existing 40-meter long building was a continuous space, with variable sections and extremely poor lighting. Hence, the proposal focuses on the opening of a patio, literally conceived as an outer room, to improve the interior lighting. This outer room divides the 40 meters of the initial space into two areas. The front area is open to the street and left empty to accommodate activities related to the public, such as meetings, events, exhibitions ... - while the rear side houses a 12,5-meter long table and is intended as the main workspace.

The thickness and warmth of the three new, large windows opened in the patio has b...

From Cubicles, Cry for Quiet Pierces Office Buzz

2012-05-20T11:18:00-04:00

The original rationale for the open-plan office, aside from saving space and money, was to foster communication among workers, the better to coax them to collaborate and innovate. But it turned out that too much communication sometimes had the opposite effect: a loss of privacy, plus the urgent desire to throttle one’s neighbor.

Open Doors form Open Minds?

2012-03-19T14:07:00-04:00

The architects often walk clients through it to show how an open environment works. There’s not a private office or cubicle anywhere, and there’s constant low-level hubbub: people in motion, and gathering into small groups. The tour makes some clients nervous; they wonder how their own workers would concentrate in such an environment.

Lawrence Cheek examines new trends in office designs which focus on providing employees room to roam and thus to think. Specifically, he looks at three examples the Seattle offices of Russell Investment, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation headquarters as well the offices of the architectural firm be hind the first two examples, NBBJ which occupies two 38,000-square-foot floors of a midrise office building it designed in 2006.

Design Crime: An Office Shaped Like Lady Parts

2011-09-28T12:05:23-04:00

The showpiece is a staircase smack dab in the middle of the first-floor work room that leads to a second floor with a gaping white void painted red inside. Taranta says it's “reminiscent of a large droplet of water ready to fall from the ceiling.” Uh, yeah. If a “large droplet of water” looks exactly like a vagina.

New Ways of Designing the Modern Workspace

2011-08-05T20:08:31-04:00

At the end of his life, Robert Propst, creator of the cubicle system, called his invention “monolithic insanity,” yet we seem unable to tread down any other path. Longstanding calls for the Redesign of the Cubicle continue...

Archinect - News

3XN GXN and British Land share new transformation project of London's Euston Tower

10 fresh workplace designs we enjoyed this week

Clive Wilkinson says he regrets the role he played in the Googleplex's design

Is it time to pivot away from open office design?

PARTISANS opens new 11,000 sf studio in Toronto

10 new workspace designs we liked this week

​From prayer rooms to “meeting pods”, quiet spaces are being revived in open-plan offices

10 new workspace designs for your Friday inspiration

Are phone-booth-sized offices the future of workstations?

According to WeWork "Buildings equal Data"

10 fresh workspace designs for your Friday inspiration

Workin' it: 10 fresh office designs worth checking out

Microsoft offers treehouses to connect their employees back with nature

Tomorrow — Art Share L.A. to unveil their redesign by Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects

Inside the MVRDV House, the firm's new family home-style office

Office Space: Clive Wilkinson on Archinect Sessions One-to-One #20

A garden is the roof of a meeting room in a loft office by jvantspijker

Need another idea for the Bigger than a Breadbox competition? Check out "La Cabane" by Julien Franc Wahlgreen

The Open-Office Trap

Big changes are coming to conventional office buildings

HOTELLO. Somnia et Labora. A Portable Office

Domus visits Maio at their nice Barcelona studio

From Cubicles, Cry for Quiet Pierces Office Buzz

Open Doors form Open Minds?

Design Crime: An Office Shaped Like Lady Parts

New Ways of Designing the Modern Workspace

From prayer rooms to “meeting pods”, quiet spaces are being revived in open-plan offices