A/Typical Office Mobile

Concept

A/Typical Office

2019

A proposal that redefines the office typology. In the age of decentralized work, the workspace is undefined in both existing and new construction. In the first, coworking spaces like WeWork amount to formulaic interior fit-outs with little spatial invention, reducing architecture to the scale of furniture. In the second, buildings like the Apple Infinite Loop Campus employ a totalizing and relentless design, fostering only generic identities of the companies housed within. These recent developments fail to calibrate exterior form with interior organization and risk surrendering to the banality of the open office plans they were supposed to replace.

Situated somewhere between existing and new, this project takes eight identical existing mid-rise buildings in Brooklyn, New York, and utilizes several design operations to transform the hyper generic open office plan into a diversity of specific work spaces. In wanting to reclaim the sign, identity, and spatial organization of these finger buildings, the intervention adds only what is subtracted, keeping the complex at a net-zero, working with its existing mass to maintain its square footage. This activates ideas of memory, presence of absence, and produces new and distinct types of office spaces on an otherwise homogeneous underlying substrate.