64 OFFICE DESIGN
unprecedented success, reaching sales of $5bn by the turn of the century. Today, Action Office is available from Herman Miller in the Americas, Middle East and Africa, though it is currently unavailable in Europe or Asia-Pacific. Action Office took managers out of corner
offices, and it took over the world of the office. Propst always saw the overall impact of creating an arena with people having access to, for example, more than one workstation and some storage, as well as ease of conversation. Its success was underpinned by understanding and responding to: the purpose of the organisation, support of individual performance and self-expression, the role of facility planning, and the art of ‘what if’ speculation – what Propst called ‘pre-gaming’. And he appreciated the potential and recurring conflicts: geometry versus humanism; the need to make changes with as much ease and grace as possible; the right to be different within an organisation. Nevertheless, questions of privacy and security, enclosure and access were never far away from the discussion. But this was an infinitely flexible sub-architectural system that would provide a sense of place and purpose for the individual without sacrificing executive and staff privacy. Its success was in its simplicity. Te partly enclosed offices that could be configured, became known as cubicles. At the same time, in 1967-8, Roland
Gibbard at Yorke Rosenberg Mardall (YRM) devised interior partitioning and furnishing systems for Boots’ head office at Beeston, UK – a low-rise two-storey building designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM). Surrounding the inner courtyard on the upper level was a continuous open-plan office area planned by SOM. Te brief was detailed and specific as Boots emphasised the scheme had to allow for individual departments to contract, expand or be replaced with a minimum of disturbance. Tis resulted in a bespoke system of 1,300 workstations and desks made up from purpose-designed kits of interchangeable components, giving great flexibility within the discipline of a module of 1.8m. Privacy for managers was achieved by the use of carrels of two sizes to the same height of freestanding filing and storage systems – a ‘carrel’ being a medieval monastic term for reading areas in a library and Gibbard’s name for cubicles. Everything was oak. Closed offices were glass-fronted, with internal screens of bronze glass. It was the most sophisticated, elegantly detailed, and successful demonstration of burolandschaft in the UK for the next two decades. It was also almost certainly the most expensive. In 1969-70, Bruce Graham at SOM
designed the largest cigarette factory in Europe at Hartcliffe, Bristol, together with a five-storey head office building, for tobacco manufacturing company WD&HO Wills. Like Boots, it featured similar high-quality
interiors by Gibbard and Terry Addison’s team at YRM – but at a significantly lower cost per head. Move on two decades and we arrive at
multinational ad agency WPP, where it had became evident that the management and utilisation of office space was critical to the success of the overall business, and had a fundamental impact on the effectiveness of people at work and thus profitability. At the time, its 40 companies, including fellow ad agency J Walter Tompson (JWT), which it had acquired in 1987, occupied the equivalent of two and a half times the Empire State Building – 558,000m2
. Te company needed to make the best
use of that space, a fact accentuated with the purchase of the likes of Ogilvy Group in 1989, which only made matters more acute. Tere was just too much space. Shortly after the JWT acquisition, Martin
Sorrell, the group chief executive at the time, instituted the WPP Space Program that drew together real estate managers and advisors, and a team at WPP subsidiary Business Design Group (BDG) led by Alex Redgrave. Its brief: to devise a workplace strategy and guidelines to deliver cost-effective real estate solutions that met individual business needs, manage and reduced total real estate costs, mitigate real estate liabilities, assist in overall planning, achieve best practice and, lastly, enhance the working environment for staff. And to do that at a time when the workplace itself was rapidly changing to reflect advances in technology and working practices. For over a decade BDG had said it was ‘putting design to work’ for its clients ‘to improve efficiency in the workplace’. It was its raison d’être – to accelerate and sustain the performance, productivity and satisfaction of people at work. Now it had to do it for every part of its parent company. Tere was to be a great deal of rationalisation: flexibility became paramount. We all need a place to work, are often
aware of shortcomings in our working environment, but do not always have the vocabulary to articulate exactly what it is we want. Te Space Program gave people the opportunity to be involved before the defining and setting of the strategic and operational objectives, the critical success factors that WPP demanded. As key performance indicators for
buildings became integrated into company business plans, its ideas were implemented almost immediately by BDG with the relocation of JWT in Milan and Ogilvy in Brussels, both designed by Lydia Randall. With a global footprint spanning more
than 100 countries, the idea of developing state-of-the-art campuses in the world’s top cities became essential for the overall success of WPP, to enable flexible working and seamless collaboration across marketing disciplines and agencies. With over 100,000 employees, 68,000 are today based in 47 campuses, most of which have been designed
by Randall, and by 2020, work on WPP’s campuses accounted for 60% of BDG’s turnover. Capital expenditure on campus projects and real estate has now dropped, yet the process of restructuring and consolidation will always continue, as it always does with large, sprawling multinationals. As WPP faces what has been dubbed ‘its Kodak moment’ – the disruption to business caused by AI – the need to make the best use of its various properties around the world will always be essential. Te commercial property market has
revived since the pandemic. Rising office rents in the UK have been attributed, in part, to a half million square metre shortfall in the supply of new or substantially refurbished office space in London. Some
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