Mr. Aditya Yamsanwar, Co-Founder & Director, Team One Architects (TOA)
There is a point in the career of every architect where you enter an office building, which is completed according to all briefs, on time and on budget, but somehow feels incomplete. Everything is in its place – the lighting is perfect, the desks are ergonomic, the meeting rooms are ample and spacious. Yet people congregate in the hallway rather than at their workstations, they congregate near the pantry rather than the boardroom and somehow end up feeling more comfortable in the lobby than in their workspace. This is where the discussion truly begins.
For many decades now, commercial office space design had been calculated on the same principles as a factory floor – per square footage of space per employee, based on efficient circulation and judged solely by how well it allows movement from the elevator to the desk. Efficiency was the measure of success and everything else came secondary. Yet somehow in between hybrid working and an entire generation of employees who no longer require a desk to be productive, efficiency stopped being sufficient as a measure and the office had to become relevant again through offering an experience a laptop can never provide.
Efficiency Was Never the Real Brief
It answered how many people we can have in here and not why someone would choose to be there. The latter is what matters now more than the former, since the people who will be arriving tomorrow have choices that were not present in the old generation. And if coming to the office is voluntary, then the office itself must offer some value proposition for doing just that.
The Office as a Sequence of Moments, not a Layout
Good hospitality design has known all along something that corporate interiors have been slow to realize, i.e., spaces are remembered not by their plans but by their events. The opening onto light. The café nook that has a different smell than the workstation. The stairwell becomes a means for communication more than just floors to traverse. When we create office spaces today, we no longer design in terms of plans but in terms of experiences: What does a person feel coming through the doors at nine? What do they see during their first break? What drags them out of their chairs at four? Efficiency questions how the plan makes sense on paper; experience questions how the day feels in the flesh.
This is why materials, sound, scents, and light are no longer afterthoughts, add-ons at the end of a project. They start the process from day one right beside structure and systems because these are the things people notice when they come in, long before they think about the furniture.
Designing for Belonging, Not Just Occupancy
An effective office can still be impersonal. Occupancy is a statistic. Belonging is an emotion, and emotions take much more work to draft but are far more important to cultivate. This shows especially in those areas that were always considered auxiliary before – the client’s informal lounge space, the corner next to the kitchenette, the patio that was never booked. It is the place where you will find the true centre of the office, because they are the only areas that are not owned by the calendar. People use them, and when people use something, they stick with it.
It is also the place where the culture is made tangible. The office that aims at collaboration cannot just post its vision in a slogan on the wall – it must create a floor plan that increases the probability of running into a co-worker rather than missing him. The design either supports the culture of the company, or it contradicts it every single day.
The New Measure of a Good Office
All of this is not to say that efficiency is no longer a factor. A building still must function, architecturally, economically, and operationally. However, efficiency is no longer the point; rather, it has become the starting point, the base from which any good design must depart to begin a dialogue. It is not how quickly AI can generate designs that will define the future of architecture; rather, it is how intelligently architects use it to make better decisions that will shape the built environment.
And that is what architecture is all about. Not the number of desks per floor, but the number of reasons a floor gives one to stay.