The Office Needs to Go
Social and conventional media are jubilant about the resurgence of the workplace—the re-filling of office buildings, the collateral uptick in retail spend, and the resumption of daily commutes. What a travesty.
To begin with, I am an architect—one who is ardently committed to making and enjoying places of creative incubation, social immersion and yes, productive purpose.
With that said, the office was—and remains—utterly broken as a typology. Or, at the very least, due for a massive upgrade.
A v2.0, in line with the fact that our Machine-Age vision of humans as units of productivity was not only selling us short as creative, multi-faceted beings, it was forcing us into cages no one would choose if it weren’t for the stranglehold of capitalism and the hegemony of the corporation.
That’s because the overwhelming majority of places of work were forged in response to an Industrial Age, which depended on brute labor to fuel it and demanded that workers shed their innate polymathic tendencies and instead choose a singular path of specialty. Like workhorses, we allowed our overlords to put blinders on us, convincing us that a narrow focus was the only path to “winning” at life.
