[Photo: Nicole Mason]
BY KATHARINE SCHWAB
Open offices are here to stay, regardless of the science that decries them. That’s because, like it or not, they’re the most cost-efficient way to cram as many employees as possible into a space. Does that mean we’re doomed to deal with the noise, lack of privacy, and dearth of in-person interaction that comes with typical open offices, or could design mitigate these ills while preserving the functional benefits? Is there such a thing as a less evil open plan?
The interior design studio Casework attempted just that with its new office for the design and technology agency Work & Co in Portland, Oregon. The firm’s design features smart acoustics to keep things quiet, a communal cafe-like kitchen and library, and a total lack of typical office gimmicks that might keep people around after-hours. The result? While the office’s layout is still an open plan, the ethos is decidedly anti-open office.
“We didn’t want it to feel like a typical office space,” says Casey Sheehan, a partner at Work & Co who worked on the redesign of the space. “We wanted it to feel more warm and almost like a hotel lobby or a home–a gathering place.”
At first glance, Work & Co’s new digs are more extreme in some ways than your average open plan–while partners and senior leadership do sit with everyone else rather than having their own offices, the desks don’t really belong to anyone in particular. Instead, they were designed to be modular and to shift so that the company’s designers and developers can sit with their teams as they move from project to project. To combat the noise that comes from everyone sitting in the same place, Casework’s founder and creative director Casey Keasler installed a wooden slat system that sits over the main work area as well as in the kitchen and conference rooms. “You want to be able to hear soft music but not the person 20 feet from you having a conference call,” she says. The wood adds an acoustic buffer and visually enlivens the space, which used to be a warehouse.