Kettal, a furniture company based in Barcelona, Spain, has focused on outdoor furnishings since 1996. But the company’s latest collection puts its 22 years of experience in organizing outdoor spaces to good use indoors–fixing the hell that is the open plan office, which reduces productivity, enforces sexism, and alienates workers, just so companies can save money on real estate.
The company’s Office Pavilion series offers five different types of “pavilions,” or structures that can better organize open workspaces. There’s the Kiosk Pavilion, designed to create cafeteria spaces, and a Coworking Pavilion, which offers more secluded spaces to work within a bigger, open plan. The Office Meeting Pavillion has whiteboards in lieu of walls, as well as standing desks, while the Conference Room Pavilion looks like an elevated conference room with glass walls and a bookshelf wall. There’s even a bike parking pavilion, which can be placed outside of the building.
The company claims that each pavilion is extremely customizable; each is made of movable walls of aluminum, wood, fabric, and glass–and built to order. According to Kettal, companies can use these pavilions to create rooms and optimize the acoustics of open-plan spaces. “The idea behind Kettal’s Office Pavilions is to give shape to big, open spaces, both indoors and outdoors,” the company says in its marketing materials. If it works for parks, squares, cafés, and hotel lobbies, they say, it can work for open offices.
And while the company doesn’t provide any scientific materials to support the effectiveness of these areas to solve the problems of open office spaces, it does kind of makes sense. Especially considering the DIY ways employees are dealing with those problems already.