Working at Waterside.

How does the new BA perform as a workplace? Francis Duffy, chairman of DEGW and world-renowned expert on the importance of design in creating new organizational cultures, assesses the achievement.

It must be very hard to dislike working at Waterside, to be upset by having access to such world-class facilities, to fail to enjoy such beautifully equipped offices, to hate so much purposeful loveliness. The main office street, designed as a social space that brings the airline together, is cheerfully noisy, surprisingly bright and lively, with whole cafes ringing with busy and animated conversations on every side. Quiet, friendliness and order are the contrasting characteristics of the 'wings' of office space on typical floors - each laid out with immaculate taste with the very best, the most modern and the most stylish office kit. The past, for most of us, is another country. For BA staff the past must seem today to be another planet. Is this really the same airline that occupied until two months ago so many offices at Heathrow, that so clearly represented the hierarchical, top down, gravy soaked, quasi-military business culture of so many British enterprises in the '50s and '60s? Long corridors, shades of beige and brown, rows of firmly shut doors must have been extremely pleasant to relinquish.

As much change as you can manage

What Waterside represents in business terms for BA is nothing less than a revolution. It also happens to be an excellent example of a rapidly developing, international movement towards rethinking workplaces at the same time as reinventing work. What all such new ways of working projects have in common are two objectives: first creating greater efficiency through driving down operating costs and, second, generating more effectiveness through stimulating already razor sharp office workers to even higher feats of creativity. The intention is change - 'as much change as you can manage'. Information technology is the principal agent of change. The social method used to effect change is called 'change management'. From the overall shape of the office building to the shape of meeting tables to the use of the cordless telephone - every detail of the physical and technological environment of work is changing too.

Architects who have not been involved in a new office project like Waterside with such high ambitions and such deftly applied managerial resources may not fully appreciate how much effort has been given to redesigning the design process. Design in this sense transcends what some architects wrongly understand design to be: winning the recognition of your peers despite clients who don't see the point and builders who would prefer to be doing something else. At Waterside design means nothing less than determining the future of BA by changing the culture of the entire airline. Symbolically not one of the 2800 people employed there, not even the chief executive, has been allowed to work in the new building without a 'passport' indicating the achievement of certain retraining targets - new skills in the use of information technology, in organizing the use of time and space, in communication. Management's motivation in commissioning the design of the new headquarters is urgent, leading to pressures not totally unlike those athletes face in a training camp, because the business environment of the airline today is constant and unforgiving competition.

What this means for architecture is profound. Those of us with pre or post modernist scruples who have tried to avoid the trap of 'architectural determinism', ie of wanting to believe that architecture on its own has the power to make people wiser, happier or more productive, have perhaps underestimated the more complex, indirect and symbolic aspects of the relationship between buildings and people. The elaborate and highly integrated design process conducted by BA at Waterside has deliberately linked decisions about the physical environment with inventing a new business culture intended to motivate people and to make the best possible use of information technology. BA's systemic approach to designing its future raises some very difficult questions for architects. What Waterside forces us to address is the exact opposite of the modernist claims of untrammelled power for architecture. Instead we should now be exploring the extent to which architects can usefully claim to be capable of designing autonomously.

The design process at Waterside can be expressed as three axioms; first that successful office design for innovating organizations like BA is now impossible without the kind of visionary leadership that Colin Marshall and Robert Ayling have demonstrated; second and conversely, that the mass involvement of practically all the users in the design process is essential; and third that, in managing the project, at least as much weight must be given to the design of information technology and to organizational reinvention as to the design of the physical environment,

Collaborating in changing culture

However, do not assume that architecture, within this new context, loses its importance. The success of Waterside shows that the opposite is far more likely to be the case. Integration of architectural design within a wider framework of social or business purpose gives architects far more leverage than they have enjoyed for a long time. The price that architects have to pay for this greater influence is to learn how to work in a more integrated way with clients and users. Only through close and intelligent cooperation between architects and complex client teams can the latent power of architecture be released - the capacity to be a catalyst of change through the powerful and unambiguous expression of collective ideas and values.

The interiors of Waterside, the light beech furniture, the cool colour range, the neat glazing of the meeting room walls, the transparency of the open plan, the comfortable and supportive team spaces, the ready access for everyone to intimate gardens and to wider views of the reconstructed landscape, the textures, amenities and sounds of the busy stimulating street, are beautiful in themselves. They are better planned and detailed than Waterside's influential predecessor, the pioneering SAS headquarters in Stockholm (also by Niels Torp, AR March 1989). More importantly a lot has happened managerially in the last 10 years. BA's Waterside goes much further than SAS's Frosundavik in laying down a physical, technological and organizational infrastructure to enable the introduction of even more radical ways of working than BA has yet attempted. However, the big feature that both projects share is the brilliant, disciplined and purposeful management of the design process so that every physical element, each design feature broadcasts what must be an almost irresistible, Siren-like message about the critical importance of collaborating in and enjoying a new and changing culture of work.

Architect Niels Torp Architects supported by RHWL.

Project team Niels Torp. Oyvind Neslein, Kirsti Evensen, Harald Lone, Christian Sundby, Heide Tjom, Harald Heie, Johan Kahrs, Guy Tchudi Madsen, Joyce Battersby, Kari Anne Aukan, Trine Rosenberg, John Simpson, Anne-Catrine Creed Bovill, Clair Meadhurst

RHWL project team

Peter Shaw, Carl Quinn, Mike Darvill, Harriet Ziegler, Ashley Davies

Interior design and space planning Niels Torp Architects

Brief taker/space planning consultancy Kathy Tilney, Tilney Shane; Alexi Marmot, Adrian Leeman

Civil/structural engineer Buro Happold

Planning supervisor Halcrow H&S Ltd

Cost consultants AYH Partnership

Mechanical and electrical engineer Cundall Johnston & Partners

Civil/structural engineer for the parkland Halcrow Consulting Engineers

Landscape architect Land Use Consultants in association with Niels Torp Architects

Concrete contractor O'Rourke

Glazed street roof and walls Space Decks

Glass St Gobain

Windows Witte UK

Carpets Interface Europe

Workstations Herman Miller 

Office storage Krueger International

Classroom chairs Fritz Hansen

Street chairs Howe Projects

Cafe chairs Aram Designs

Restaurant chairs Atrium

Photographs Peter Cook