Feature
The coronavirus pandemic has created a sudden shift in how we live and work, with social dis- tancing guidelines significantly changing how we occupy and think about the spaces around us. This shift has initiated a greater awareness of the relationship between our environment and physical health, with questions beginning to emerge and challenging workplace design. By looking at our recent designs, we can get a strong sense of what the post-COVID-19 office may offer, and how retrofitting can help us to get there.
New solutions inspired by recent design
The evolution of the office saw individual offices become cubicles in the late 1970s, before morphing into the open plan office we see today. Office space was reduced further in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis in a bid to reduce overheads, shrinking by 8.3% between 2009 and 2018 according to Cushman &
Wakefield. The rise of co-working spaces, fueled by startup culture during the digital revolution, has caused occupational density to increase further -- across WeWork’s global portfolio, the shared office company provides just five metres squared per occupant.
COVID-19 has the potential to alter workplace once again... Flexible working, smaller office hubs, and new technologies may well become commonplace, and how we interact with these spaces may also change.
New footfall routing, partitions, and a transition away from open plan design could be one way of navigating a demand for reduced density in the workplace. However, one of our recent projects, 70 Wilson, suggests there are possibilities beyond simply increasing distance between desks.
Footfall monitoring systems were installed to automatically track the flow of people in and out of the build- ing. Repurposed, these systems could prove to be increasingly valuable in the wake of COVID-19. Occupa- tional density could be monitored on each individual floor, for example, with display panels installed around the building to highlight areas with a high concentration of people and encourage building users to modify their behaviour accordingly.
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