Back to the Future Office

The combined impact of the Corona Virus and the climate crisis is already making us re-think property and workplace strategy. In a post-Covid world, centrally-located, high-rise, air conditioned, densely occupied, sealed buildings look far less appealing and will be difficult to adapt to allow for social distancing and infection-control. They are also energy-intensive buildings and are hard to adapt to the net zero agenda without resorting to carbon offsets.

The lower-grade office space that is naturally ventilated with openable windows, narrow floorplates and low rise could become increasingly desirable as it allows the space to be purged, whilst reducing the risks of cross-infection from recirculating air, crowded lift lobbies and busy toilets. These buildings are inherently lower energy and carbon as they are low-occupancy and avoid the use of mechanical ventilation and cooling.  

Of course, the low density means that they can accommodate far less people and will be uncomfortably hot in a heat wave. However, in a post-Covid world, the high-rise, air-conditioned office blocks are going to have to occupied to less than half their normal capacity and those buildings will have to address the risks associated with recirculating air. There will have to be crowd-control measures in lift lobbies and the lifts themselves will be under serious strain if they can only accommodate one or two people on each journey. Meetings rooms and break-out space may have to become desk space. Hot desks will have to be assigned to one person to avoid cross-infection, the compact desk layouts will have to have to be re-configured for social distancing, and desk partitions, often removed in the latest office designs, will have to be re-instated. In many ways, the post-virus world will hark back to those offices of old where everyone had their own huge desk, (their own mugs!) and were shielded from their colleagues by partitions.

Centrally-located city headquarters buildings are often only accessible by public transport with many workers living too far away to walk or cycle. In the short-term, the risks of cross-infection may force commuters to shift to travelling by car, which would be disastrous for air quality, congestion and climate change in our already crowded cities.

The lock-down has prompted the largest pilot for virtual working ever attempted and it has shown that many people and businesses can successfully operate remotely, albeit with some concessions to family life and impacts on people's mental wellbeing. This experiment could be used as a catalyst to move to a radical property model that promotes the use of local hubs for workers who then connect with their colleagues through centrally-located social / meeting hubs or even through the virtual world.

As part of the research for the Future Office book, we held a competition to envisage how we may work in the future. The winning team proposed a future where staff worked from local hubs, close to their homes (or the beach!) and then connected into a corporate virtual space via VR goggles. People would ‘jack-in’ and interact via avatars, meeting colleagues and clients in a fully-branded virtual environment.

These virtual hubs could be set up by the local community and could be the naturally-ventilated, low density spaces described above. The issues around over-heating and low occupancy levels would be countered by being lower-rent, local buildings outside the city centre with flexible hours and no dress code. This would allow people to dress for the weather and flex their working hours to avoid the hottest parts of the day – we may well need to adopt a southern Mediterranean approach to working hours in the future in any case as our cities get hotter.

The local co-working hubs could be created from refurbished buildings, perhaps using restaurant space, some of which may be unviable in a post-Covid world. Restaurants were already toying with becoming co-working space a year before lock-down. Refurbishing buildings will have a fraction of the embodied carbon impacts of demolishing and building new city office buildings, local hubs will encourage cycling and walking with lower impacts on air quality and the planet, and this low-density, naturally-ventilated space would have far lower energy and carbon impacts in operation.

The future of offices could allow us to cherry-pick the best of the past and create a lower carbon, more balanced, healthier future.