The office: offices change constantly as new management theories and communication systems transform the nature of work. While some new employment environments enhance workers' lives, others are distinctly sinister.

All workplaces now tend to the condition of the office. Even in factories, developments in automation and information processing ensure that work is in general supervisory, rather than laborious in the old-fashioned sense: no longer do people have to haul slabs of red-hot metal around, or exert brute energy to hew ores with pickaxes.

But paradoxically, many offices now tend to the condition of the early twentieth-century industrial workplace. This is particularly so in the case of call centres, the building type which (unless we are unlucky enough to work in one) we all try to ignore, and which are rarely seen by outsiders (never previously in these pages for instance). Typical call centres have rows of operatives ceaselessly talking into their telephone headsets while crouched over computer screens. Supervision is Benthamite, with supervisors able to command large numbers of people with a glance. Call-centre workers are the galley-slaves of the twenty-first century, who power the system from which the rest of us derive much benefit.

No wonder that, using comparatively cheap modern telecommunications, such work can easily be exported. Scarcely a week goes past in Britain without news that hundreds of call-centre jobs have been relocated to the Indian sub-continent, where English-speaking labour is much less expensive, and work can be conducted in really cheap factory-like spaces. (And hardly a week goes past without a telephone call from someone with a slight Indian accent trying to sell you something, usually a financial service, that neither you, nor the speaker, quite understands.) Of course, there are exceptions from the norm, for instance DEGW's centre for Egg in Derby, where the semi-industrial volume is enlivened by banners and punctuated by spatial events in which people can rest or change their work-modes in meetings and training sessions. The building is claimed to have reduced the very high rates of staff turnover and absenteeism common in most European call centres (though not, as yet, Asian ones).

The Egg centre attempts to give a sense of individuality and stability to individuals toiling in the featureless, arid endless plains of so many contemporary workplaces. The notion of personal place is being eroded in conventional offices. Developments in communications technology have enabled the evolution of hot-desking and its descendants. Crudely, hot-desking, which began to emerge in the early '90s of the last century, recognizes that many of us spend a lot of time out of the office, therefore the space we occupy and the electronic machinery we use can be much more economically deployed if the organization arranges to have fewer workstations than staff, who have to use whatever is available when they arrive.

Abolition of personal space

Personal space is abolished. No longer can people have their reference books and photographs of family and chums, nor flowers, nor any other indication of individuality. Now, there are efforts to make workplaces more particular, while not abandoning the economic benefits of new technology. In a recent book, (1) Jeremy Myerson and Philip Ross categorize recent trends in creative office design as 'narrative, nodal, neighbourly and nomadic': distinct, but overlapping approaches.

By 'narrative', Myerson and Ross mean workplaces which 'tell a story about a company and its brand through an experience or journey through interior space'. (2) All is marketing: workers are expected to live and breathe the brand. Constant visual stimuli are provided to promote 'a service ethos'. One of the examples Myerson and Ross illustrate, the offices for the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency in Los Angeles by Shubin + Donaldson, is liberally decorated by such slogans by Ogilvy as 'We sell or get fired'. I suppose the same applies to most offices, but few have to rub the message in with such violence. It is true that if editors of the AR stop writing, they will be asked to leave, but it does not seem necessary to emphasize the fact by sticking up posters saying 'Scribble or go'. (In any case we have no walls in this office, so there is nowhere to display slogans.)

In the nodal office type, Myerson and Ross suggest that fixed points in space provide hubs for business 'the physical manifestation of the organization in an increasingly virtual world' (3) places in which the often mobile staff can come together for meetings, training, mentoring and all the other rituals of bureaucratic capitalism.

The authors suggest that in 'neighbourly' offices 'social interaction is encouraged rather than frowned on'. (4) Such a place is apparently designed as a 'complete corporate society' with a 'repertoire of town squares, garden fences, entertainment zones, quiet spaces and lively bars' which increasingly mirror the 'dynamic of the modern city, with its chance encounters, its colour and bustle'. Clearly, Myerson and Ross are inhabitants of Renaissance Siena or Parisian flaneurs from the 1920s. But it's clear what they mean, and the office as neighbourhood is the richest, in human terms, of the four types they describe. Much work has been done on the type in the last two decades, notably by Scandinavians like Ralph Erskine, Niels Torp and Pekka Helin, who have evolved forms of what they call the 'combi-office', in which the whole of human life is encompassed. From the public street and piazza, through the court for small communal and group sessions, to the private study. The most recent inspiring instance of such an approach is the brilliant Genzyme Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Behnisch, Behnisch & Partner, in which a very wide variety of working places is united and illuminated by a marvellous, ever-changing, column of light (AR April, pp59-65).

All-consuming neighbourhoods

There are two problems with the neighbourly office. The most obvious is the fact that, to create a successful one on a large scale really committed clients are essential--organizations like Genzyme, or SAS and BA (which commissioned Torp to make two splendid headquarters buildings--ARs March 1989 and August 1998). But such clients are rare. The other problem is that such organizations tend to be all-consuming. Because their buildings are often in the suburbs, or even in the countryside, the owners can organize the whole lives of their workers. It is unnecessary and sometimes difficult to leave such buildings during the working day; they provide everything, from shops to cafes and restaurants.

New communications systems, such as mobile telephones and the internet, allow staff to escape from such spatial confinement. The fourth category of new office types identified by Myerson and Ross is the 'nomadic'. Offices, they say, 'are no longer dependent on location'. (5) They are 'geographically distributed across the spectrum of people's lives--from home and high street to airport lounge and serviced club', in other words anywhere a machine can be plugged in. The drawback to this kind of office life is that it can trade space for time. You may not have to go to a particular place at nine o'clock every day (environmentally, a most expensive and absurd form of behaviour, wantonly increasing consumption and pollution), but in return, you are on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A further problem is that the nomadic office tends to do away with the only real reason for having centralized workplaces: direct human interaction, both intentional and casual.

Except in call centres, where the old rigid hierarchies largely pertain, and for which there seem to be few remedies save the cosmetic, offices ought to be places in which people can be creative, both as individuals and in groups. In this respect, the neighbourly office type seems to be the most promising. It has a distinguished history, ranging from at least Herman Hertzberger's 1972 Centraal Beheer to the Behnischs' Genzyme Center. In the latter, a powerful environmental imagination is at work (though its effects are somewhat curbed by a stolid masterplan). The future of the office as a building type will surely emerge from an imaginative interaction between the aims of maximizing enjoyable human creativity and the need to create buildings that can live in creative harmony with the planet.

1. Myerson, Jeremy and Philip Ross, The 21st Century Office, Laurence King Publishing, London, 2003.

2. Ibid, p17. 3. Ibid, p85. 4. Ibid, p131. 5. Ibid, p199.