“Let’s get back to the office” is not the tentative anthem anyone thought they’d be mumbling alongside the radicalized political and personal conflicts that have transfixed the country on the news and drawn people to protest out into the streets. As businesses flirt with responsibly or recklessly entering the first phases of restarting the corporate economy, the ground has started to crumble around approximately 36.5 million US citizens who filed for unemployment as of the middle of May 2020. It is clearly and increasingly urgent that many people get back to work and into offices to ensure that they can support themselves and their families financially.
How that happens in a blizzard of racial tension and inequity, with the yawning gap of leadership at the highest levels, and without the offer of immunity from a virus that has claimed the lives of over 130,000 Americans at the time of this writing is not something anyone should pretend to know. However, observations that delve into realms of uncomfortable conversations that many are attempting in the A&D space have started to offer a more honest perspective on topics regarding defensible spaces, a collaboration between the germaphobe and the immortal millennial, and the hypothetical value of prioritizing hospital-grade sanitation methods over texture, warmth and expressively multi-cultural spaces we’ve been developing for decades.
Defensible Space
Some of the most valued citizens, residents, and undocumented contributors to the US economy don’t have to ponder the return to work, because they never stopped. Defensible space for this essential workforce, on whom many have relied these past months to keep them fed, safe, and alive, looks entirely different than the defensible space typically alluded to in the world of the white-collar workforce. For the marginalized yet essential workforce, defensible space is rarely an option. This inequity is deeply concerning, but specifically for the office, members of the essential workforce will provide critical services while also requiring defensible space to protect them against white-collar workers normally occupying the entire narrative of workplace musings such as this. Designing for the invisible has not always been so captivating nor felt so urgent, and when faced with applying inclusive design thinking to the workplace for maintenance and cleaning personnel, there is little discussion on the matter. ‘Back of house’ nomenclature on architectural plans are typically shaded in with a grey tone that tamps down its visibility on the designer’s radar. It has become automatic to overlook those spaces and perhaps the people working in them. There is a good bit of work to do in remedying that imbalance.
There is an abundance of pondering when it involves safe, personal connections for white-collar staff returning to the office. They will likely be offered defensible space as a familiar physical construct, a desk area minimally 6’ wide by 6’ long with panels to define borders that are, on average, 48” or higher. Diagrams for one-way circulation paths, recommendations for when and where to wear a mask inside the office, and suggestions for additional hand-sanitizing locations, are what is best described as hackable, DIY approaches that present largely theoretical hunches about keeping people safe and healthy. An entrepreneurial swing of the pendulum toward private offices and old-fashioned cubicles is underway, even as the additional cost to accommodate the construction and footprint of these rooms carries with it the likely antidote to the unchecked creep of rooms blocking natural light at the perimeter. It’s fairly well established that the higher walls of a cubicle will defend sensitive eyes and ears from passersby and loud talkers, but are unproven to be an effective defense against invisible, aerosolized, three-hour-long lingerings of microbial pathogens.