Flexible Commercial spaces

A43 Architecture recently worked with Stio’s creative team to renovate an existing 5,400 square foot space in the heart of the Tetons. The design is a flexible, nimble commercial space that has been outfitted to include conference rooms, breakout spaces, private meeting rooms, and an employee lounge. The design draws inspiration from Stio’s commitment to creating beautiful, functional products infused with mountain soul.

The article below does a great job at exploring the possibilities of commercial spaces, specifically office spaces. A43 Architecture wants to help clients see the potential of any space regardless of size. 

Here’s How Interior Designers and Architects Envision the Office of the Future

Kelly Phillips Badal in The Mind of Design

Hermetically-sealed high-rises with wall-to-wall cubicles will no longer be the norm. But how will the new wave of workplaces look, function, and feel in a post-COVID landscape? 

Physical workspaces are not dead…but they are in limbo. If there’s anyone who can attest to the importance of the office—and can argue for its staying power—it’s architects and interior designers, the people who think about the manipulation of space, light, color, density and more for a living.

“The office won’t disappear, there’s just too much that it provides in the way of building and cultivating culture that doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” says Primo Orpilla, the principal and co-founder of Studio O+A, whose San Francisco-based design firm has designed genre-shifting workspaces for Facebook, Microsoft, Yelp, Uber, Nike, Slack, McDonald’s and more. But from better air quality to spatial needs, there’s tons of changes and challenges that remain an open question about future workspaces. One factor, however, is very clear-cut: “We’ll leave the requirement of fitting as many people into one space as possible behind,” declares Kristie Fultz, a senior interior designer at global design and architecture firm Gensler. “We need space to breathe, to move, to connect. We’ll put people and wellness first.” 

As companies are currently gaming out the best ways to reconfigure their workplaces to align with protocols and practices workers are certain to demand, we challenged Orpilla, Fultz and several other interior designers and architects to dream big about what’s new and next. Here’s what they predict:

Flexible, Modular, Nimble Office Spaces Will Become Industry Standards 

“The assumption is, ‘I need an office, I need a door, I need a wall’—and maybe you do, but probably you don’t,” says Michael Lehrer, the founder of Lehrer Architects in Los Angeles. As so many companies have successfully pivoted to remote work, the full embrace of a blended model where employees choose where they’ll work daily—between a headquarters, their home, a satellite office or somewhere else entirely—is likely here to stay. It’s a shift in thinking that is quickly changing the conversation about spatial needs and planning within a physical office space. “Our programming efforts used to begin with the organization; I believe that moving forward it needs to start with humans and their needs,” says Fultz. The likely result is that flexible, modular logic and building systems will offer a distinct advantage for companies as their physical needs evolve. 

The sheer number of desks available may be reduced in future office spaces, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that a company’s headquarters will shrink. “The amount of time that someone spends at their office is very unlikely to always be at a traditional desk, it’ll be somewhere else, using a different piece of furniture,” says Robert Norwood, a principal and interior design leader at global architecture and design firm NBBJ. He imagines the need for larger collaborative workspaces becoming equally important, if not more, than the availability of individual stations. “The amount of space needed per person is changing dramatically, and it’s going up,” he says. “Before we were trying to put as many sardines in a can as the codes would allow, now it’s exactly the opposite. Even by so much as doubling the space.”

Tom Stringer, the founder and president of Tom Stringer Design Partners in Chicago, believes that regardless of whether future companies opt to increase or decrease their office footprint, a shift toward de-densification will drive decisions. “So many offices have focused on huge spaces for amenities with communal work desks where everyone has exactly 54-inches of work surface before you hit the next chair—and I think that’s history,” he says. “How about smaller amenity areas and larger work areas, where if I’m there for 8 hours, I don’t feel like I have to get a rapid test on the way home?” He also imagines future offices embracing the idea of ‘hoteling,’ where a normal schedule of showing up to the office daily flips to a check-in, check-out as needed system. “I think the office becomes a resource, not a destination,” he notes. 

To read the full article click here.

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