Corporate cool: gray-flannel offices fading with times.

Don't think of it as an office, think of it as an incubator for inspiration.

That's the message a growing number of Los Angeles architects and interior designers are sending clients, as technology, corporate downsizing and changing social attitudes transform the work environment.

So far, the trend is most noticeable in the more creative industries, such as advertising, entertainment and publishing. But moves toward communal space, flexible facilities and offbeat use of color and form are making inroads to more staid businesses as well.

"People are beginning to realize that a very regimented environment, like a very regimented management structure, isn't that productive," said Jeffrey Daniels, director of the architecture and interior design program at UCLA Extension.

"To the degree that (these designs) can be linked to improved satisfaction and productivity by workers, I doubt it's just a fad," he said.

Little to no research has been done linking increased productivity to whacky designs, Daniels said, but nowhere has the perceived connection been more warmly embraced than at advertising agency BBDO West in the Saban Entertainment building in Westwood.

The agency's 40,000-square-foot space, designed by L.A.'s Beckson Design Associates, incorporates aggressive cubist angles, plenty of glass and aluminum, and a checkered floor in hues reminiscent of a plaid prep school uniform. Together, the asymmetrical elements give the impression that - Zip! Pow! - things are happening.

At the same time, "It says to you, 'Get loose,'" said BBDO West CEO David Lubars.

Lubars commissioned the redesign after taking control of the company in 1994, in an attempt to erase the stodgy office layout that the previous management had fashioned.

"This design was to be a solution for morale problems that existed," Lubars explained.

Ceilings with exposed ventilation and water pipes, erector set-like desks and an open stairwell in the middle of the bi-level facility replaced an office of grey walls, grey carpeting and a grey granite logo in the lobby. A ping-pong table and dry-wipe walls that invite graffiti helped complete the effort.

At $45 per square foot, the project cost about half of what a typical "power statement" redesign - with traditional elements like wood paneling, marble or granite surfaces, and multiple private offices - would run, according to Michael Beckson, a principal in the architectural firm.

Beckson's firm has designed the offbeat offices of Rhino Entertainment Co., United Paramount Network and Ogilvy and Mather, making him something of a godfather in the field locally.

To some employees, an alternative office is itself an employment perk.

"It's inspiring to be in a place that's different and beautiful," said Vincent Joliet, a producer at Pytka, a television commercial production house in Santa Monica. With deadline editing work often bunched into near-24 hour shifts, Joliet said, the office's personality makes spending time there less arduous.

The Pytka office includes a miniature forest in the lobby and hundreds of suspended small lights simulating a night sky.

"I'm not sure being in regular offices we would do as well," Joliet said.

While acknowledging that alternative designs are not for everyone, Beckson and other designers say that what's considered a traditional office today is itself a relatively new beast.

Before the late 19th century, offices were largely austere enclaves where clerks sat scribbling in books from dawn to dusk. Only with the rise of the Industrial Revolution did offices transform into places of machines, departments and an assembly line approach to paperwork.

With the ascendence of the personal computer - and the condensing of communications, data storage and productivity tools into a single device - the paradigm is changing again, designers say.

The modem and PC let workers accomplish much of their grunt work at home, so offices are becoming more venues for people to gather and interact with colleagues than to pound out paperwork.

"It's beginning to be that an office is not so much for access to information but access to other people," UCLA's Daniels said.

Private work space will still exist, but in the new designs, it is shrinking and becoming communal, a style referred to as "hoteling."

"We've been working on custom interiors in small nodes of space a little bigger than a closet," explained Edan Bird, an architect at Tierra Sol Y Mar in Venice. The spaces can be used by different people at different points in the day, Bird said, offering workers temporary privacy.

"They're sort of working cocoons," Bird said.

To be sure, the trend has its detractors. At Goldmine Software in Pacific Palisades, where twentysomethings dominate the 80-member staff, the office look is defined by traditional desks, cubicles and admittedly sober artwork.

"I went to the corporate headquarters of (restaurateur) Wolfgang Puck a while ago where my friend used to work," said Gregg Steiner, a marketer at Goldmine. "They had a funky, colorful, really great office, but they just downsized and my friend got laid off. So what did it do for him?"

Steiner said Goldmine's profit sharing program, vacations and health insurance provide more motivation than a hip office would.

"I don't think people look to their office for inspiration," he said.

Further, not all companies that do dabble with looser designs will embrace the most extreme trappings of the trend. But increasingly, the style is being seen throughout the business community.

Rona Rothenberg is a staff architect for Fireman's Fund Insurance. When the company needed to renovate its Woodland Hills offices, Rothenberg tapped Beckson Design for the job.

The result, she said, is an insurance office with flair.

"I wasn't sure at first, but when I worked with them I saw professional, creative design," Rothenberg said. "They made it look contemporary, with splashes of color in the finishes in a way that I had not seen before. I'm trying to encourage my designers in other regions to follow that suit."

Similarly, Cook Inlet Energy Supply's Century City offices are in the midst of a redesign, in part to be distinguished from the conservative competition.

"There's a functional reason in that we're growing so fast, we've outgrown our current space, but we also want a happy place to work," Cook Inlet President Gregory Craig said. "You can make a plain-jane space, but we'd like to have something that's exciting."

A 1995 survey by the International Facility Management Association found that 83 percent of companies expect to incorporate alternative-office strategies in the coming years, from hoteling to telecommuting to open-space office designs.

"What we're trying to show is that the way your office is designed will affect the way you think about your work," Tierra Sol Y Mar's Bird said. "And that's not necessarily a radical idea."