Archinect - News

Architecture Office offers a different perspective on co-working design

2019-10-02T12:00:00-04:00

With their designs for a new flagship co-working environment "ShareCuse" in Syracuse, New York, Austin, Texas-based Architecture Office aims to reimagine the concept of an office cubicle by creating a "flexible office organization that does not kill the work environment."

While more conventional co-working spaces like WeWork and Cross Campus focus on interior branding and image, Architecture Office co-principals Nicole McIntosh and Jonathan Louie instead focus on understanding workspace typologies to challenge and fine-tune the mold of cubicle design.

Image © Caylon Hackwith

Set in a historic 1928 Syracuse Building within the downtown district, McIntosh and Louie pulled inspiration from the structure's 90-year history as an office space. Rather than using traditional cubicle enclosures that tend to create a daunting uniformity and repetative atmosphere, the duo played with black mesh screens to "filter the appearance of the spaces behind." When looking at the interiors of the co-wor...

Our Cubicles, Ourselves: How the Modern Office Shapes American Life

2014-04-15T13:44:00-04:00

And hierarchies don’t disappear when you place everyone at a communal table or “superdesk”; they persist in more subtle modes of workplace interaction. I suspect that people thrown into open plans might even miss their cubicles. And there are features of cubicles—such as the need to partition wide spaces—that I suspect will continue to be useful and never go away; these needs precede the invention of the cubicle itself.

Read more about the development of the American workplace in Archinect's feature article, Aftershock #2: "Serendipity Machines" and the Future of Workplace Design.

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.

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...