Future Offices

Rapid changes in culture, technology, and society have upended longstanding notions of offices and the nature of work itself. While companies and capital around the globe have become increasingly consolidated, labor vis-à-vis technology has become increasingly decentralized. The office, traditionally a key spatial interlocutor between labor and capital is caught in an awkward position with typological considerations for architecture. 

What should the future office look like? What is the future role of the headquarters? What does the office’s changing role mean for urbanism? The works collected here provide frameworks for understanding the complex and multifaceted nature of contemporary work, manufacturing, and commerce, and they aspire to influence new ways of conceiving architecture at multiple scales. They speculate upon a future where offices acquire new facets as resources of space, knowledge, and production that participate in local and global economic and cultural contexts in new hybridized forms. At the heart of this is a recognition that the new ways in which companies integrate into in society should be reflected in architecture itself.