Productivity, Work, and the Future of the Built Environment

In the decades before our current contemporary moment in architectural practice, this task in delivering that promise was made easy. When imagining a proposal for the public realm, the hope was that it connected people to spaces that inspire wonder, find community, and bring joy to bettering one’s life. When imagining a person’s home, success was discovered through connecting spaces that motivated rejuvenation, respite, and the innate need to celebrate our rituals. When imagining the design of a company’s campus or headquarters office, the aspiration was to connect corporate culture with long-range strategic planning that connected the design with maximum efficiency balanced with a very small number of social spaces designed to provide respite from the stress of work.

Where once there existed singular ambitions that were key to demonstrated success in architectural design, today’s market demands a more nuanced way of thinking which overlays the need for productivity and engagement as another imperative to success for the built environment and its corresponding functional needs. Across the three examples demonstrated above, productivity was only ever imagined to be needed in the context of the office. Now, it is a requirement everywhere.

Over the past four years, the definition of “work” and the corresponding need for productivity in the world of design has been a contentious discussion. The redefinition has been captured through many constructive dialogues, but there is not a widely held consensus on how work adjusts to reflect the dynamic and transforming world around us. To give us bearing: we have navigated a global pandemic; embraced a universal and collective shift toward our reliance on technology to evolve how we collaborate and communicate;

Productivity is always front of mind as we work across a 24-hour, always connected global day. Where the past four years provided us with a revolution in redefining how we work...

Demonstrated geographical differences in workplace frequency between the adoption of hybrid, full return back to work, and everything in-between; and questioned our current leap forward which states that the physical environment must demonstrate a new visual expression that resounds with “…this is where you work.”

The concept of multi-use is not new to design. As architects, we are accustomed to taking a list of endless needs, exhaustive desires, Pinterest influences, performance factors, and operational requirements—known as a program brief—and carefully crafting them comprehensively into plans, forms, and experiences that succinctly address those diverse items into a singular but dynamic physical environment. But what happens when productivity is layered into the equation?

In our global practice focused on workplace, headquarters, and corporate campus design, our energy is frequently invested in accommodating a diversity of work styles to support a wider conversation around productivity. Where conference rooms and water coolers used to bring people together in support of collaboration at work, now social lounges, verdant interior landscapes, and coffee bars have taken their place. Where the office once felt completely foreign from the comforts of our domestic lives, it now is borrowing from the visual cues of home to support comfort and productivity for the new working class.

As office design leans towards shaking the visual evidence of “work” to support the social components of a community to attract people back to the office, all other facets of the built environment are now also heavily borrowing from comfort and hospitality in their thinking to support people feeling productive in working from anywhere. In shaping the future of productivity across the various places and spaces outside of the office where we seek to find refuge while answering our emails, collaborating across teams, and delivering on our professional ambitions, successful spaces are providing that connectivity in remarkable ways.

In navigating a new era of work happening in every place and space we occupy, the need to consider productivity as a responsibility of design is pushing typologies to evolve to accommodate the growing needs of a migratory working population. In the work we are leading globally, we are seeing a proliferation of traditional building and space types that layer in the opportunity to feel productive in environments that never demanded that before. From museums introducing co-working incubators, coffee shops, social lounges, and all-hands spaces, to central parks amplifying outdoor environments with enclosed co-working labs; from hotel lobbies feeling more like a WeWork and less like a luxury escape from our day-to-day lives, and to all of us constantly evolving our home offices, libraries, and personal spaces to blur the boundaries of our personal lives and juggle the work-life integration that is very much real.

The question is: where can we find the silver lining? Productivity is always front of mind as we work across a 24-hour, always connected global day. Where the past four years provided us with a revolution in redefining how we work, the overall consequence is the abundance of “work” visually showing up in all spaces we occupy. Despite all of this, we increasingly need a place to disconnect, shake the pressure of productivity and let new ideas find and inspire us.

It may sound radical, but I personally am doing my best to ignore the need for productivity in the project types I work on while investing in developing the program for the inventive capacity of space to help relax and recalibrate. In defense against productivity, my underlying fear is with work evolving to happen anywhere, we will end up with productivity taking over our built environment. This underlying cultural demand for productivity will remain, so I am focused on spaces and places that bring people joy and connect to their most untapped human sense of awe and curiosity as the first priority. In today’s work everywhere, the most transformative thing we can do is design to capture wonder and inspire spaces that push us to disconnect from the pressures of always needing to feel productive while occasionally following up on those emails.

Guest Contributor

Adam Lantz

CO, CEO and Partner, RIOS

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Guy Marsden

Partner, Architecture

Guy has built his reputation on finding unexpected, progressive and valuable answers to complex problems.

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