Onsite Extended

Of course, savvy designers and architects realise that change is on the way. Eve n before the great disrupter Covid-19 proved overnight that workers in pyjama bottoms on their own sofas were just as efficient as those in suits and boardrooms, the landscape was shifting. There are currently 5.5 million businesses in the UK, approximately 4 million more than there were 30 years ago, and the flavour of these businesses is changing, too. The Deloitte Office Crane Survey shows that most of the office blocks constructed in London before 2019 were for the financial sector, whereas since then the scales have shifted in favour of technology, media and telecom. In the 1950s, an average company lifespan was 60 years, whereas nowadays just 12 years would be a good innings. Since companies are changing at an exponential rate, how can office planners keep up? While in theory open-plan allows for more adaptability, collaboration – those serendipitous accidents that produce great ideas – humans are funny creatures who desire privacy just as much as socialising. In fact, according to research conducted by Steelcase, innovators are five times more likely to want to access private spaces – not all that surprising when you consider the rate at which people are expected to learn and rehearse new skills. People’s careers aren’t as linear as they once were, and even if we remain in the same role, new technology is being developed at an astonishing rate. When you consider all this, open-plan seems a ludicrous attack on concentration. The good news for designers is that typical workers simply appreciate good design. Take Second Home in Hackney. It’s full of thousands of plants, organically curved desks, and mid-century furniture. Its façade is made of an ETFE membrane that gives you the impression the building’s been clingfilmed. Everything about the space communicates this sense of ease. Billing itself as a coworking space, Second Home meets hardly any of the specifications that a new office block would have to: it gets boiling hot in summer and requires an extra jumper or two in winter. Nevertheless, it’s always packed. People love it because, well, what’s not to love? What’s more, companies based there create jobs ten times faster than the national average. This is the medium-term future of offices: coworking spaces with super speedy wi-fi – because our new currency is data, and if you can get small businesses going through your network, that’s all the more information you can sell to the highest bidder. By 2035, it will be Gen Z’s turn. They’ll be early on in their careers, the first truly transient ‘work from anywhere’ generation – but just because they can, doesn’t mean they will. Even if it needs to be reinvented by a Zoomer version of Propst, the office as we know it isn’t going anywhere. The human desire to connect is incorrigible, and we’ve all sat through enough laggy Zooms to know you can’t get any work done that way. As such, it’s about time that our offices started working for us.

We’re also quite consistently among the least productive countries in the G7. This isn’t a problem that Smartie-coloured bean bags and breakout spaces can fix. How did we get here? Why do we keeping pumping out these open-plan panopticons, these petulant prisons where we’re constantly observed? Well, as is so often the case, the road to this hotdesking hell was paved with good intentions, ergonomic chairs and Noguchi tables: we’re still living in a 60s fantasy, albeit one twisted by the powers-that-be. Launched by iconic furniture designer Herman Miller, brainchild of star inventor Robert Probst, the revolution’s first iteration was dubbed ‘Action Office’. As its name implies, AO was all about movement. A promotional image of its 1964 debut shows two figures, one by a bookshelf and another standing at a desk. Both are abstracted by motion – but despite our 21st century ideals of speed and optimisation, these adverts aren’t selling faster workers. Rather, these blurred figures evoke an art historical idea of gesture, riffing on the Action painting of Propst’s contemporaries de Kooning and Pollock; looking at another ad from the same series boasting ‘visual triggers’, ‘position in space’ and ‘varied physical attitudes’, it’s clear that this was office planning à la abstract expressionism. Certainly, Propst shared with his artist counterparts a frustration with the status quo. He valued directness and immediacy of expression. ‘Today’s office is a wasteland,’ he said in 1960. ‘It saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort.’ Nonetheless, his modernist vision degenerated into a waste land of cubicle farms, microwaved fish and middle managers, the likes of which would make Kafka turn in his grave. But how did it all go so wrong? The inventor himself blamed the fact that ‘not all organisations are intelligent and progressive. Lots of them are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes.’ Well, sure, but not everyone can make a living turning avant-garde ideas into effortlessly cool furniture and inventions, Propst; in a word, it comes down to money. The reason open-plan offices feel a bit like battery farms is because they are borne of the same rigid, quantitative mindset: packing more people into one space must mean more profit. But, just as the RSPCA has shown that costs for alternative chicken housing systems are practically the same as their cut-price cages, property developers and businesses could probably make more money if they invested in private, hospitable human coops. Of course, savvy designers and architects realise that change is on the way. Even before the great disrupter Covid-19 proved overnight that workers in pyjama bottoms on their own sofas were just as efficient as those in suits and boardrooms, the landscape was shifting. There are currently 5.5 million businesses in the UK, approximately 4 million more than there were 30 years ago, and the flavour of these businesses is changing, too. The Deloitte Office Crane Survey shows that most of the office blocks constructed in London before 2019 were for the financial sector, whereas since then the scales have shifted in favour of technology, media and telecom.

Macy’s, unfazed, continued to build around the building, and Smith sold the building – albeit not to Macy’s – for a record $1 million in 1911. Across the pond, in London’s East End, a similar feud had already taken place – this time between a department store named Wickhams, and clockmakers and jewellers named Spiegelhalters. At the time of Wickham’s beginnings, it had humble roots – but as their business began to take off, they began expanding across the neighbouring buildings on the street. At the time, Spiegelhalters had been based at number 75, and had been since the 1880s. Wickham asked to expand into number 75, with the Spiegelhalters’ agreeing and moving into number 81. But as Wickham’s customer base grew, so did their ambitions. Eventually, they wanted to create a department store to rival the Oxford Street Selfridges, and create their own version across an entire block on Mile End Road. As with Macy’s, Wickham’s came across an issue when the Spiegelhalters’ refused to sell their shop. Like Macy’s, the company decided to build around them – creating what one of the city’s best known facades and also, as described by architecture critic Ian Nairn, “one of the best visual jokes in London”. But beyond the folklore and feud is a much more insidious side to the notion of the holdout. In the face of power and systemic injustice, the fight for your own home is one that has heartbreaking consequences. In the US, for example, the ‘Eminent Domain’ – the right of the state to take private property without the property owner’s consent – has historically been used to forcibly remove residents, often disproportionately affecting African American communities. Recently, however, an organisation named ‘Where is My Land’ is aiming to change this narrative. “George Floyd could have been a millionaire,” states the about section on the organisation’s website. “So could the descendants of the families who once owned thriving businesses in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Ditto for the descendants of the Bruce family of Manhattan Beach, California. “Yet their families did not reap the full rewards of hard work and entrepreneurship. They were deprived of the accumulation of generational wealth over time. Their land was stolen—illegally, violently—by white Americans,” it continues. These stories are the tip of the iceberg. During a time of unprecedented interest in genealogy, reparations, and social justice, Where Is My Land is determined to help Black Americans reclaim stolen land and secure restitution.” The images of lone houses amid building sites or vast developments can provoke disbelief, but they can sometimes also symbolise hope. Maybe the person in that house has fought for what is theirs, or maybe, as in the case of Where Is My Land, they’ve fought to regain something that had been unjustly taken away. As we move deeper into a world dominated by capitalism, we can cling to Holdouts as the last glimmer of hope that the little guy can sometimes win. Whose land is it anyway? A walk through an urban world of pseudo-public space and hostile architecture. For most people, the question of who owns the street they’re walking down doesn’t feel particularly important – but for the descendants of select families, that ownership is everything. It revealed that the true reason was that the motorway had to be rerouted due to a geological fault beneath. Still, the fact that seeing a house in a place that was so unexpected evidently had a lasting impact. Some refer to these kinds of buildings as “holdouts” – the last house standing in the face of development, as a private owner refuses to sell up and move on. Some houses remain, as their neighbourhood is demolished and rebuilt in unrecognisable form, as commercial real estate rises high around it. Mr Wild, rightly or wrongly, was an ambassador of this resilience. Examples are found all around the world. In China, Holdouts are known as ‘dingzihu’s’, or ‘Nail Houses’, where stories of residents who refuse to be trampled by the march of progress often attract media attention. In New York, on the so-called Million Dollar Corner, is a small plot of property next to Macy’s Herald Square at 1313 Broadway. The building had been purchased by Robert H Smith in 1900 for $375,000, which is around the equivalent of $12.2 million in today’s money. He had wanted to prevent Macy’s from becoming the largest store in the world, and was thought to be acting on behalf of the Siegel-Cooper, which had built what they thought was the world’s largest store on Sixth Avenue in 1896. Macy’s, unfazed, continued to build around the building, and Smith sold the building – albeit not to Macy’s – for a record $1 million in 1911. Across the pond, in London’s East End, a similar feud had already taken place – this time between a department store named Wickhams, and clockmakers and jewellers named Spiegelhalters. At the time of Wickham’s beginnings, it had humble roots – but as their business began to take off, they began expanding across the neighbouring buildings on the street. At the time, Spiegelhalters had been based at number 75, and had been since the 1880s. Wickham asked to expand into number 75, with the Spiegelhalters’ agreeing and moving into number 81. But as Wickham’s customer base grew, so did their ambitions. Eventually, they wanted to create a department store to rival the Oxford Street Selfridges, and create their own version across an entire block on Mile End Road. As with Macy’s, Wickham’s came across an issue when the Spiegelhalters’ refused to sell their shop. Like Macy’s, the company decided to build around them – creating what one of the city’s best known facades and also, as described by architecture critic Ian Nairn, “one of the best visual jokes in London”. But beyond the folklore and feud is a much more insidious side to the notion of the holdout. In the face of power and systemic injustice, the fight for your own home is one that has heartbreaking consequences. In the US, for example, the ‘Eminent Domain’ – the right of the state to take private property without the property owner’s consent – has historically been used to forcibly remove residents, often disproportionately affecting African American communities. Recently, however, an organisation named ‘Where is My Land’ is aiming to change this narrative. “George Floyd could have been a millionaire,” states the about section on the organisation’s website. “So could the descendants of the families who once owned thriving businesses in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Ditto for the descendants of the Bruce family of Manhattan Beach, California. “Yet their families did not reap the full rewards of hard work and entrepreneurship. They were deprived of the accumulation of generational wealth over time. Their land was stolen—illegally, violently—by white Americans,” it continues.

Instead, romantic dreams of rural escape began to flood our minds. With the time on our hands to discover what made us feel well, we got to know ourselves better. “So many of us have realised that a lot of what we were doing pre-Covid, how we filled our time, was simply because we’d been conditioned to do it that way, because we were following social norms that told us we should live that way, and everyone else was living that way,” writes psychotherapist Nancy Colier in Psychology today. “Pre-pandemic, we were busy doing a lot of things because it’s just what we did, but not necessarily because it’s what we wanted to do, or for that matter, what actually made us feel well.” People went about this in different ways. In the UK, a mass urban exodus occurred, and in June and July of 2020, there was a 126 percent increase in people considering properties in village locations, compared with a 68 percent rise in people searching for towns. The research, conducted by property site Rightmove, also revealed regional splits too – such as the number of inquiries from Liverpool residents looking for a village property going up by a huge 275 percent in comparison to the year before. But outside of the context of the pandemic, there have been people striving for a more remote existence for a long time, and many of them in a much more extreme way than simply swapping a Zone 2 two-bed for a Cotswold cottage. Back in 2009, over 34,700 people applied for the ‘world’s best job’ in Australia, which would see the successful applicant become the caretaker of a remote island. Others have built their own remote abodes, the most extreme examples ranging from a home on ‘Just Room Enough Island’ (its real name), which is the smallest inhabited island in the world, to the Casa do Penedo holiday home in Portugal, which was built from four boulders and looks like something straight out of the Flintstones. Poignantly, some psychotherapists prescribe solitude as a way to overcome trauma – advising clients to relinquish themselves of the pressure and judgement of daily routine, to spend time focusing on their mental health. When faced with nothing but our own company, we’re challenged to look deeper than the things that simply fill our time. Perhaps this is what we’re all searching for, and the lure of solitude is in fact a call from within: to reconnect with who we are away from the noise of normal life. Open-plan Panopticon: On paper, it’s a hive of proactivity. But the open plan office is more likely to feel like a hopeless hellhole for those who work in it. So what have we learned? A bazillion different surveys have told us that open-plan offices don’t work, but no need to read them: you can feel it in your bones: flimsy, copy-paste partition walls, plastic plants, biccy runs and what Mark watched at the weekend give you the ick faster than you can say ‘David Brent’. The UK – yes, the old stiff upper lip United Kingdom, with our bungee-cord bootstraps – has twice as many open-plan offices as the global average. London contains hundreds of squares, most of which give the impression of being at the public’s disposal. But year upon year of acute budgetary pressure has pressed local authorities to hand control of new developments to private companies; as such, many are subject to shadowy rules made behind closed doors and enforced by independent security services. Beneath a veneer of shallow hospitality, foundational design decisions are deployed to repel those most in need of common space. From CCTV cameras to benches made to discourage rough sleeping, ‘defensive architecture’ telegraphs subtle messages about who is and who isn’t welcome. Unobtrusive it may be, but woe betide the person who misses the memo: if a given stretch of grass is privately owned, then its landlord can implement any number of rules, theoretically at their sole discretion and enforceable by their own staff. No sleeping, no loitering, no filming, no gathering; as is so often the case, it’s homeless people who suffer most from such restrictions – but in 2020, an adjacent section of the population emerged on the sharp end of pseudo-public spaces too. As lockdown ground the UK to a stop, those without access to private gardens spilled into parks and other outdoor spaces. Bearing the brunt not only of the restrictions but public outrage too, the poorest among us were most likely to suffer severe health outcomes as well as the starkest dip in quality of life. The pandemic underscored existing inequalities across myriad aspects of society, illuminating how those facets of deprivation inform each other – but in the race to counter the covid crisis’ continuing damage to the country as well as individuals, have those revelations come too late? What public space really exists today? As of 2022, there remains 1.3 million acres of common land in the UK across more than 9,000 different registrations. Whether owned by a local authority or the National Trust, common land is defined by its availability for use by others; some can be camped on (with the owner’s permission), and theoretically used to graze animals too – a relic of its original intended use, stretching back to medieval times when communities held common plots. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that era of hyper-local collectivism wasn’t to last. Rumbling for centuries but at their brutal apex in the 17th and 18th, The Enclosures Acts took that shared land and used it to enrich the already-powerful gentry. On a human scale, not only families but entire ways of life were sacrificed on the altar of agricultural efficiency and, ultimately, profit; is it any wonder that, as cities are sold off piece by piece to the highest bidder, economists are proclaiming a new era of ‘urban enclosure’? The ‘right to roam’, made into law in 2000, is one of our most ancient; today, it applies to only 8 per cent of England. As ever, the past provides an invaluable insight into the present – so what does the future of public-private space look? For answers, one might have to look beyond our little island. In a Parisian suburb, the Atelier d’architecture Autogérée (“studio for self-managed architecture”, aaa) has claimed more than 5 km square for public use. According to its website, the citizen-run project advocates for ‘micro-political’ gestures…to participate in making the city more ecological and more democratic, to make the space of proximity less dependent on top-down processes and more accessible to its users. The ‘self-managed architecture’ is an architecture of relationships, processes and agencies of persons, desires, skills and know-hows. Such an architecture does not correspond to a liberal practice but asks for new forms of association and collaboration, based on exchange and reciprocity and involving all those interested (individuals, organisations, institutions), whatever is their scale. While the state of play in urban centres and beyond can feel disheartening, blueprints for more equitable ways of running a city abound if only we can commit to imagining them. Claiming tranches of land for the many rather than the few, aaa’s model uses capitalism’s own logic of ownership against it – a kind of inversion of the Enclosures. Precisely where such boundaries ought to be drawn and by whom will always be contentious, but treating the public as an interested party seems a smart place to start. While the balance between public and private ownership has always been a delicate one, with peaks and troughs stretching back centuries, never before has the line been so blurred and yet so stark. No matter who owns a particular square: if it’s at the centre of a bustling city, it sends a message about who is welcome in the community around it. But when that very architecture is calibrated to covertly combat certain uses, people who have no other choices are the ones that suffer. Wolves in sheeps’ clothing, private spaces that look public are liable are to bite those who need them most, hardest. But as organisations like aaa know, that dynamic works both ways – by claiming land for collective use rather than individual profit, thousands of lives are positively impacted in one fell swoop. Following the most devastating blows of the Enclosures, campaigns in the 18th and 19th centuries to rebalance public access to London’s streets and squares were largely successful, restoring what had been essentially gated communities into thriving thoroughfares. Now, what was that about the past informing the future? Masterplanning Utopia: The race to build a better world has never been more frenetic, nor the dreamers so hard to believe. We need smart, sustainable cities, and we need them yesterday. Instead, the last ten years have seen the climate crisis squabbled over by ‘Druids’ and ‘engineers’: the former view proposes we reverse harmful emissions and return to a less planet-damaging way of life. The latter insists we innovate our way out of impending doom. Now, 1.5C of global heating is all but inevitable[1], which puts the Druids out of the running, and so far, the 2020s have been dominated by two new opposing camps – we might dub them ‘Rats’ and ‘Sinking Ship’. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, NASA and Boeing, are all planning to colonise space (Rats) leaving the rest of humanity to sort itself out. For both camps – whether terraforming Mars or turning bus shelters into green-roofed ‘bee stops’[2] – city master-planners have never been more needed. Recently, here on Earth, BIG founder Bjarke Ingels unveiled his masterplan for Telosa, which is bankrolled by entrepreneur Marc Lore, who plans to plonk this San Francisco-sized city down in the US desert, exact location TBC. With typical glamour and spectacle, Ingels’ CGI renderings, predictably, tip Starchitect towards Star Wars: a Peroni pint glass-shaped sky scraper, known as ‘the Equitism Tower’ forms the centre of the city.