"If all possible old building stock in Los Angeles was converted to creative office space, that still wouldn't meet the demand for creative offices," a commercial real estate broker once explained to me.

At the time, his company was trying to crack the workplace code: how to cater to the technology sector's voracious taste for converted industrial warehouses and lofts? Established tech companies and startups alike had aligned the rough-and-ready aesthetics of the artist studio with the well-worn terms of Silicon Valley – disruption, innovation, and flexibility.

Read the opinion piece on dezeen.com >