Meridian's Lifetime set applauded as one of nation's best.

Every year, Reader's Digest selects the 100 Best in America. For the 2007 year we were happy to have one of our projects featured as the Best Workspace of 2007.

The award provides us with recognition of what a "great place to work" resulted from our design, the decisions by the larger team (including those that work there) and the process we all underwent.

The recognition brings home the fact that, after architects finish a project, it becomes somebody's home or workspace. The project / workspace itself is Lifetime TV Technical Operation Center, a 50,000 s/f part technical and part office, part creative and part mission critical 365/ 24/7 space.

An unusual requirement certainly, yet we are particularly excited about winning this award because it speaks to the fact that all workspaces are unique, all have to be analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively and there are specific solutions for to different workspaces.

Everyone looks for an efficient workspace as a final product, yet how many organizations are willing to take the time to understand the tasks and complex relationships of the workplace to achieve it? How many designers actually dig deep into what people do and are satisfied with providing spaces with little more definition than--he or she gets an office or a cubicle. Our experience has been that all workers want to work. We also find that frustration with rigid, ill conceived design concepts are a constant drag on the efficiency and morale of a company.

A well designed workspace requires an understanding of the tasks / workflow, the flexibility necessary to make evolutionary adjustments, and most importantly a vision which will tie the two together. To achieve a successful workspace the vision of the company--its meta-purpose if you will, must be answered in hard built facts. The workplace must be branded with a level of functionality that is more than skin deep. How do we achieve this? Look to win-win design decisions that are great both for management and worker, budget and durability, consumption and sustainability.

The Lifetime Tech OP center is a great example of some initiatives that can "travel" to other workspaces. One is the concept of using circulation spaces as more than corridors to get you from one place to the other. Why should 35 or 40% of your leasehold be written off as wasted or a necessary evil? Our approach was to provide appropriate uses to the occupancy and workspace. Short term random meetings were made possible by creating various widths with short term seating--a bench. Space for exhibiting art and creative works which reinforce the brand and are able to evolve were designed on purpose. Providing circulation solutions that help visitors and workers alike with a sense of place and location with the creation of "landmarks", distinct locations in the workspace.

In Lifetime we continued our firm's trend towards re-purposable spaces. Spaces that through the use of operable walls and adjacencies to other spaces such as lunchrooms, conference rooms and--you guessed it--circulation areas can do different things at different times. They can be business uses such as teleconference, a very large meeting, a training seminar, a party to launch a product or a birthday or Christmas party.

While this particular workspace with all its variations lacked a high density occupancy such as a stock trader workspace would, architects and designers can achieve a higher density of occupancy and be more satisfying to the occupants if they addresses the need for flexibility, openness and efficiency. Surprisingly we find the issue of privacy to be one of the most misunderstood in the workplace.

Visually, enclosing workers in cubicles many times results in difficulties of supervision, lack of collaboration and inefficiency. To workers it was more important that their immediate workgroup--team had visual privacy than their own.

Other win-win design decisions are the inclusion of open meeting space for the purpose of collaboration. We have found most meetings can occur without conference rooms--in the open space. This approach acknowledges that people need to meet more often than their supervisors realize and that the meetings are quite short.

At Meridian Design Associates we have been analyzing the results of almost three decades of work in what makes work spaces, work. The recent recognition demonstrates that designing a workplace which satisfies management and worker alike are achievable goals. It also remind us why we became architects and designers in the first place.

BY ANTONIO ARGIBAY, CO-PRINCIPAL,

MERIDIAN DESIGN ASSOCIATES,

ARCHITECTS, P.C.