by Roger Henderson
In the post-war property boom of the late 1950s and 1960s millions of square feet of new office buildings were constructed. In the City of London alone in each year of the 1960s well over 1m sq ft of office development was started, in some years nearer 2m, with the majority replacing much smaller buildings. These schemes mostly made much better use of the scarce land resource, made the enterprising developers healthy profits, and met an increasing demand for centralised accommodation for the burgeoning finance and service industries.
Critical as we were at the time of the quality of many of these buildings, highlighting their deficiencies when some stood empty for years, no one predicted the speed of their obsolescence. The office building stock was being established and the most that was envisaged happening at the end of a tenancy was a major refurbishment. Now we see these buildings, designed (and funded) to last “for ever”, being demolished to make way for their bigger and better successors. What is their life expectancy? Will they in turn make way for the next generation within an even shorter time-scale?
The cynics will respond: “Only if there is more development profit to be made.” But that is the product of this phenomenon, not the underlying cause — which lies firmly at the door of that hackneyed phrase “the pace of change”. And nowhere has the impact of change been felt more strongly than in the office environment and, to coin a phrase: “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” For, if the predictions made in the 1960s and 1970s were so badly wrong, why should those made in the late 1980s be any better?
Roots of change
Change in the office environment over the past 20 years has been mainly rooted in three areas — technology, social relations and the business climate.
The technological changes have been the most dramatic and have had the most direct impact. They will continue to do so for a long time. However, the effects of social change and of the business climate have been equally profound and, paradoxically, are more difficult to cope with.
As the typical office worker spends as much as a third of his or her working life at, or travelling to and from, the workplace (and at least another third asleep), it is not surprising that social change has had such an impact. The gradual breaking-down of class barriers, the questioning of establishment values and changes in employment legislation are some of the more obvious examples.
These have meant that companies have had to adopt a more flexible and consultative attitude towards their staff, starting to recognise that a productive workforce is an important asset to any business. Higher mobility in employment, once considered feckless, is now becoming the norm, with golden hellos to attract and golden handcuffs to retain key staff. But mobile assets do not enhance the balance sheet and a high-quality working environment may be one way of improving stability.
Similarly, the business climate has changed and had significant effects. The biggest of these is not the expanding economy or the impact of Big Bang but what turned out to be the mainspring of both of these. This was the quite dramatic drive for competitiveness which we, as a consultancy, have witnessed in a broad spread of clients — not so much in terms of cost-cutting exercises, although this did happen, but in management being prepared to respond to market opportunities and challenges.
Traditional, hierarchical responses are left flat-footed in the wake of the multi-skilled task force assembled specifically and uniquely to exploit an opportunity.
Complementary forces
So these social changes coupled with a volatile business climate have (strangely) complemented each other. A much more flexible approach to the organisation of business has developed, with inevitable consequences in terms of demand for different styles of office layout.
Technological developments have, of course, facilitated these organisational changes, allowing access to pooled knowledge and information along with the ready interchange of ideas.
Here, again, the impact on office design comes at two levels. The one can be expressed in purely physical terms — cable distribution, power consumption, heat gain and so on. The other, more subtle, influence stems from the changing nature of the tasks performed within the office.
An analysis of the day-to-day tasks of the typical middle manager provides some obvious answers — reading, writing or dictating, thinking, communicating at meetings and by telephone and so on. That list has not changed for many years, yet today it is incomplete by the significant omission of the visual display unit or terminal. Many managers now have ready access to a VDU and that means that much of their reading is from a screen, and their writing is via a keyboard.
Similarly, what were routine clerical operations, the checking and repetitive processing of information, with the individual’s brain in charge of the production line, as it were, have now been replaced by a quality control operation. The power and speed of the computer “brain” now effectively controls the operation and dictates the pace and style of working.
Instead of 40 or 50 clerks in a department all doing virtually the same thing, working at their own pace with a sense of community and collective responsibility, a handful of specialists now monitor a much higher volume of data manipulation. This routine electronic work is demanding and stressful. A person under stress is much more aware of physical discomfort and likely to be more susceptible to backache, eye strain, sore throats and the rest of the symptoms associated with the latest phenomenon, “sick building syndrome”. The attribution of these complaints to a single cause may be bogus, but the ailments of the individual are usually genuine.
Electronic side-effects
So here we have an important link between the “ologies” — technology, psychology and physiology. The use, or rather mis-use, of VDUs can create stress in individuals and make them more susceptible to physical strain. Ergonomic and environmental conditions are therefore highly important, but so also is the quality of the management of these operations. The design of the rest and recreation areas becomes just as important as the design of the workplace.
Not all electronic keyboard work produces such disadvantageous side-effects. Secretarial work has been transformed by the word processor into being much more varied and, in many cases, more creative. It is only when the possibilities are abused, as can happen when the old-fashioned typing pool becomes a word-processing pool without redesigning the job or the office environment, that “sick building” problems are experienced.
Creative use of information technology is another area requiring special attention in the office environment. It might involve market research, corporate planning, project management or all three. The same circumstances apply in a wide variety of applications.
Typically, a small group of individuals, possibly from different disciplines, are given a specific task. They work on their own contributions and come together regularly and often spontaneously to pool ideas and results and work out the next phase. The focal point of their meeting is often the VDU, so their meeting place cannot just be any available conference room. The project might be a long-running, rolling programme or only of two or three months’ duration. Other project teams or task forces might spring up to work in parallel, feeding on their output.
The facilities required to meet the demands of such volatile working arrangements are complex and not easily met in a cost-effective manner in most office buildings.
Specialised installations
No review of the changing nature of office work would be complete without mention of dealing rooms. Dealing in securities and currencies, and trading in commodities, was, in the past, a specialist activity not normally associated with office work at all. The hectic activity of the Stock Exchange floor or the various commodity exchanges was a thing apart. After a frantic period of dealing the partners would retire to their offices where their various transactions would be processed. Computerised telecommunications and information systems have transformed the process progressively over the past 15 years, culminating in an explosion in demand for specialist dealing rooms brought about by the deregulation of the financial services industry.
Much has been written about the nature of this demand and how it is being met in the large-scale office developments serving the City of London. Such was the precision of the design brief for these installations in terms of size, storey height and building services that many are effectively unusable for any other purpose. As dealing conditions change and electronic systems continue to develop, more numerous, smaller-scale operations may become appropriate. Couple this with the dehumanising, stressful atmosphere of the very large dealing room and a dramatic re-think will be called for.
What does all this mean in office design terms? The rather prosaic answer is that there is no longer a standard solution which can be made to work under all circumstances. The design industry is fond of saying “no need to re-invent the wheel” and trotting out “tried and tested solutions”, not realising that the problems have changed without the implications having been appreciated. Re-inventing the wheel really is necessary if the load to be carried or terrain on which it is to be used changes.
The answer, as ever, must lie in, first, establishing a clear brief covering how the building is expected to perform and how it is likely to be used. Even for a specific user that is not a straightforward matter. When the building is for letting on the open market the task is more challenging, though not impossible. Market research on the source of likely demand in terms of business sectors, and a proper understanding of the changing nature of office work, should provide a sound basis for an authoritative document. The way in which the brief is built up from there will depend on the complexity of the development and the way it is being handled in design terms. In all circumstances, however, the brief must be comprehensive and have authority. It should be the reference point against which all decisions may be judged.
If a design brief contains imprecise information or fudged issues then no amount of creative flair will overcome these deficiencies nor eliminate the risk of building in premature and irreversible obsolescence.