For professionals who reflexively pride themselves on their masochistic, Protestant, and self-negating attitude toward working hours, architects have a particularly confused relationship with the place where this work happens. What else are we to make of the repetitive and uninspiring office landscapes they churn out? Designing imaginative workplaces conducive to healthy organizations for life and work seems beyond them. Have they—we—simply given up on the typology?
If so, this abdication is strange, as workplace design is an incredibly active field. Advances in technology and ever-increasing real estate costs have triggered tremendous shifts in the physical, socioeconomic, and cultural spheres of contemporary life. The capricious velocity of this dynamic has left the slow-moving profession of architecture struggling to keep up. Whereas Frank Lloyd Wright designed pretty much everything at the SC Johnson headquarters (1939), down to employee work desks, Frank Gehry gave Facebook a new campus (2015) that is not much more than a vast shed with a general floor plan.