Nov. 26, 2023 Ι Bloomberg CityLab
It didn’t take long for Jon Race to diagnose the problem with his new office.
Race, the CEO of the London architecture firm MCM, moved his 50-some staffers to a small co-working space in 2020 — his previous office lease ended just as the Covid-19 pandemic wound up. The new open-plan digs were fine for a mostly remote workforce, but once people started returning to the office in earnest, staffers started to voice a now-familiar lament. “They rapidly found that making Zoom calls next to people in an open-plan office can be really distracting,” says Race.
As a group of designers specializing in workplace environments, MCM understood the problem: The reality of hybrid work called for less room, but more separation — sometimes. They needed modular office interiors that could be rapidly reconfigured and provided a wide range of porosity and privacy for both boisterous in-person meetings and heads-down, focused work.
So in August of 2021, Race turned to workplace furnishings company Spacestor and brought in an “engineered architectural rooms system” called Verandas — a kit-of-parts panel system that’s assembled to create a series of self-contained pavilions. At MCM, these spaces contain small meeting rooms and a library with writable wall surfaces, cork pin-up walls and transparent glass doors.
Verandas hit the market two years ago, joining a trend toward more flexible and mobile interior fittings for post-pandemic offices. At the NeoCon commerical interior design show in Chicago this summer, a host of these rooms-within-rooms were on display. Several manufacturers showed off self-contained nooks for working alone or in small groups, all designed to offer an oasis of serenity amid the open-plan tumult. The designers of Thinkspace’s BuildUp Huddle, a collection of pods that give workers a semi-private enclosure, ask those within to “imagine a forest glade embraced by trees,” while the Finnish BlockO can encircle up to six colleagues in a spacey-looking ring-shaped booth.
Others were space-frame systems for collaboration and meeting, like Okamura’s Lives Post + Beam, which uses fixed or moveable white board and felt panels on wheels to divide space, without full walls.
Without the lead time and long-term commitment of interior millwork and construction, these modular furnishings give companies the ability to define space more definitively than by simply arranging chairs and couches, with more architectural style and high-quality finishes than grim cubicle walls. Their growing popularity signals a shift in how office landlords view their real estate after an extended bout of remote work, as well as the new focus on in-office productivity and mental health that’s emerged in the post-pandemic era. There’s an explicit promise of freedom and flexibility for company bosses and staff — but that comes with the implicit blending of home and work environments that were already muddled by the pandemic.
It’s little wonder that office landlords are so eager to experiment: US office occupancy stats, via Kastle, remain stubbornly stuck around 50%. Empty offices are cratering real estate value in large cities, and a McKinsey report from July that studied nine “superstar” cities in six countries predicted that the value of office spaces would decline by 26% to 42% from 2019 to 2030 — at least an $800 billion hit. In the US, the report notes a drop in the transaction volume (the total dollar value of all sales) of 57% and a drop in the price per square foot of 20% from 2019 to 2022. A recent Bloomberg Markets Live Pulse Survey predicts that office prices won’t hit rock bottom until late 2024 or beyond.
In this environment, firms don’t want to be tied to long leases and the kinds of infrastructure investments that typically come with them, prizing flexibility and mobility above all. And while day-to-day office attendance can be unpredictable, a general preference for working from home — and the comforts and convenience that come with it — has been well established. Add high construction costs to the mix, and that’s a recipe for something that isn’t quite architecture but that can fulfill the same role of nuanced and high-quality space definition.
“If I’m going to be coming into the office, I really need something that’s going to be better than something I had while I was at home,” says Race
This upscaling isn’t just for workers: Employers also still rely on their office environments to signal success. “A lot of clients want these types of solutions to appear very high-end, because they’re an alternative to built construction,” says Christina Piper, vice president of workplace design at JLL.
Spacestor’s Aeonica exemplifies this shift. A collaboration with the architecture firm Gensler, the Aeonica system is composed of just five elements that can be combined to define space with Classical architecture motifs: colonnades, portals, pantheons, forums, rotundas, and cloisters, all abstracted enough to give it a Postmodern playfulness. The elements can be used to define a series of flowing spaces with walls and borders. These divisions can be completely opaque or semi-transparent, like a series of horizontally connected arches that might evoke a Florentine loggia. They’re curvilinear, moderately organic, wrapped in wool, and frankly cozy.
That’s an aesthetic Aeonica shares with many new room-within-room systems, which have a strikingly consistent color palette — an elder millennial mood board of pale pinks, sage greens and light blues. Natural, tactile materials abound: MCM’s Veranda system incorporates petrified moss as an acoustic dampener; other systems prominently display unadorned acoustic felt or use light, breezy curtains to separate space. Wood is another prominent player — Nienkamper’s Toko Meeting Pod offers a dizzying 31 veneer variations. It’s a vibe borrowed from the hospitality and custom home industry; athleisure interiors that are sleek, soothing and informal.
“Softening the workplace was one of the key objectives,” says Spacestor managing director Nic Baxter.
But to lure remote workers off their couches and back to their desks, offices will have to do more than don the interior design equivalent of soft pants. The workplace “needs to become a destination versus an obligation,” says Gensler’s Brian Larcom. “You create a more whimsical approach to it. You’re curious — what happens when you go around the curve? Is there another meeting space? Is there a highlighted aspect that makes this a journey you want to happen?” That kind of engagement and the resulting aura of reflective serenity “actually increases productivity,” he says.
It’s unclear if showing up in an office is actually a boon to productivity, and recent studies have been inconsistent. JLL’s Piper isn’t aware of a firm consensus on the question, either, she says that, in interviews and surveys with clients, many workers returning to the office are reporting a strong demand for more “focus spaces.”
This shift in the aesthetic expression of workplace interiors speaks to an evolving understanding of what kind of space promotes labor efficiency.
A decade and a half or so ago, cutting-edge workplace environments embraced a startup-influenced graphic identity, getting staff jacked up on bullet expresso and street art murals, prizing intensity, dynamism, and frantic buzz with open bullpens and bright colors. At tech campuses and other creative-class thought factories, pool tables and open bars underscored the message that the office can be a 24-7 playground; the ideal worker was constantly moving, talking, and synergizing with their fellow free-agent in-house entrepreneurs.
When offices shut down amid the pandemic and essential functions somehow continued from home, many veterans of these frenetic workplaces discovered an appreciation for the relative focus and serenity purveyed by more domestic environments. When they brought this expectation back to the office, newer conceptions of productivity placed those calming qualities at the forefront.
Manufacturers also say that the flexibility of room-in-room systems can mean more longevity for their wares, and thus more material sustainability. Veranda is billed as “the meeting room you never throw away,” putting it in line with the trend toward record-setting renovation activity, which for the first time in decades outpaced new construction in architecture firm billings. Making your office look and feel more like a yoga studio also reflects the growing interest in workplace health and wellbeing, say designers and industry experts.
There’s a darker dimension to this trend, according to Doug Spencer, an architecture professor at Iowa State University who studies how capitalism expresses itself in the built environment. The aggressive coziness of room-in-room systems further blur the line between work and home so that it’s easier to drift between them: “There is a kind of anti-work rhetoric that neoliberalism has been responding to by trying to make work indistinguishable from everyday life,” he says.
Spencer sees this as part of an ongoing effort to diffuse the drudgery of labor with novelty and the suggestion of adventure, outward and inward. Beyond the endless amenities that traditional co-working facilities offer (rock-climbing walls, electronic music festivals, napping caves), employers and cubicle jockeys can also use the company Radious to rent out offbeat workspaces, such as a series of Airstream trailers, a yurt, or a “psychedelic bungalow.” Such investments might seem extravagant, he says, but they’re “going to be cheaper than a 10% pay raise.”
And while the warmth of modular systems might evoke the comforts of home, their emphasis on “flexibility” and “agility” speak to the office sector’s existential anxieties. “Offices are becoming like massive conferencing centers or a hall for weddings, where you have a bunch of parts stored away in a closet that can you reconfigure on the fly,” says Primo Orpilla, co-founder of Studio O+A, a workplace interiors architecture firm based in San Francisco. Race of MCM praises their ability for “instant fit out,” and the possibility of altering their configuration from day to day. “[It] might not look the same on Monday morning as on Monday afternoon,” says JLL’s Piper.
That’s plenty of time to turn an Omniroom conference space into a coffee canteen or copy room. With a crew of three people, this modular room-in-room system designed by Mute takes 20 minutes per square meter to assemble. With 24 wall and ceiling modules and 26 furniture elements, the system can create a complete enclosure, wired up with integrated lighting and variable-speed ventilation fans (another post-Covid must-have).
So you can give the office a facelift every week — or, if things go south, just just pack it up entirely. “These are modules you can disassemble and assemble in another place,” says Beata Banas, Mute’s marketing director.
For anxious office landlords trapped between tanking real estate investments and a new set of worker demands, such portability is an obvious plus. The inherent flexibility of the modular office will also allow workplace design to swiftly pivot in a new direction, which might end up looking more like the frenzied format it originally defined itself against.
Race says that when these modular office systems were first introduced, the notion of premiumizing the humble cubicle was generally received as a curious idea, one that would be more costly than going with conventional drywall and office furnishings. Now it looks more like a hedge against a very uncertain future.
“The reality that things will change and need to be re-configured is higher up on people’s agenda now,” he says.