World Plaza, a 27-storey office building, is conveniently located at one of the country’s premier business districts—Bonifacio Global City (BGC). Image © Gensler

The Philippines’ investment grade improvements turned the country into a viable investment site for foreign investors, its status affirmed by credit ratings firms such as Standard & Poor’s that dubbed the country as Southeast Asia’s economic leader. Recently, Moody’s Investors Service has also upgraded the Philippines’ rating to “investment grade” and has also revised its outlook for the country’s debt rating to positive which indicates the possibility of another upgrade in the next 12 months. The real estate boom happening all over Metro Manila and in other key cities nationwide is just one of the many indicators that the country’s strong economic performance will continue.

Daiichi Properties, one of the notable real estate developers in the Philippines and known for its Grade-A high-rise office towers such as The Taipan Place and The Orient Square in the Ortigas Business District, validates the observation of investors about the country. Daiichi has been a significant contributor in shaping the real estate environment in the Philippines since 1992, and the real estate firm’s latest innovative projects and developments certainly put it in a position to air its views on how optimism can be sustained in the industry. I recently spoke with Charmaine Uy, Senior Vice President of Daiichi Properties, on the latest updates and developments.

Sasha Zeljic (SZ): What are the key factors that make the Philippines an ideal investment destination for real estate?

Charmaine Uy (CU): The Philippines’ current economic conditions provide both a very conducive platform and wealth of opportunities for the real estate industry to grow and expand exponentially. There’s just so much promise and potential.

Apart from the investment grade status upgrades by major international credit rating firms Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor’s, prudent fiscal and monetary policies as well as good governance contributed to this viable investment climate.

Another positive development is the Bangko Sentral’s (Central Bank) move to ease out P1.79 trillion from the Special Deposit Accounts, which certainly helps sustain low interest rates.

Groundbreaking for World Plaza recently took place. This 27-storey office building is conveniently located at one of the country’s premier business districts—Bonifacio Global City(BGC). Image © Gensler

SZ: Is the upbeat sentiment of the real estate industry in the country sustainable?

CU: I think the heightened interest in the Philippines will enhance requirements for office and residential space. Even the increasing office space demand from multinational companies and BPOs will sustain the office market. Added factors include strong liquidity of the banking system along with low interest rates and stable price schemes brought about by encouraging economic growth figures.

SZ: What is the role that Daiichi Properties plays in providing the positive outlook for the real estate industry in the Philippines?

CU: An active participation in property developments contributes to the positive real estate outlook, and Daiichi Properties intends to be a part of this growth. Daiichi has consistently delivered high-rise, high-end commercial and residential developments since 1992. The company has so far completed five high-rise Grade A development projects, namely The Taipan Place and The Orient Square in Ortigas Center, Lee Gardens in Mandaluyong City and Regent Parkway and One Global Place in Bonifacio Global City (BGC).

Consistent with its professional track record, Daiichi has delivered and will continue to deliver world-class commercial and residential high-rise projects. With a commitment to achieve only the best in terms of quality, competence and client satisfaction, the company has resolutely forged alliances with respected institutions in the industry to accomplish this purpose.

SZ: What are your upcoming projects in the country? For developers, what is the impact and significance of being LEED-rated?

CU: The upcoming projects and the ones that are in current development are concentrated in Bonifacio Global City, namely One World Place, World Plaza and DP Tower. These projects are targeted for completion between the periods 2015 and 2017. Prospective locators would be multinational companies, notable financial institutions and respected organizations.

One World Place, a 31-story office building, has a lot area of 1,790 square meters. The building has four levels basement parking and six levels podium parking. It features ground floor for retail space, 22-level typical office space and penthouse level, executive office and mechanical deck floor. The facade is covered with fully unitized curtain wall system on all sides with a combination of glass and aluminum composite panels.

World Plaza, on the other hand, is a 27-storey office building located on a PEZA-registered I.T. park in BGC with a lot area of 2,731 square meters. The building has three levels of basement parking and six levels podium parking. It also has a ground floor retail space, 18-level typical office space, penthouse level and mechanical deck floor.

One World Place has achieved status as a Pre-Certificated Gold level LEED project by the U.S. Green Building Council, while World Plaza and DP Tower are aspiring for LEED certification. LEED is a “sustainability tool for transforming built environment,” hence aspiring for energy efficiency, environmentally friendly and socially responsible structures that will result in the improvement of the quality of life not only of its locators but also impacting on the surrounding environment.

World Plaza boasts a contemporary and spacious lobby aesthetically designedto warmly welcome tenants and guests alike. Image © Gensler

SZ: What makes Bonifacio Global City a prime real estate site?

CU: Bonifacio Global City is a strategically located premier business district near other central business districts and the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA). It is easily accessible with multiple points of entry, well-managed thoroughfares and transport linkages. The area has an excellent business climate, abundant labor market, well-planned infrastructures and energy- efficient districts, fully integrated and adaptable utility systems.

The site is truly an exceptionally master planned location.

Daiichi Properties’ partnership with Gensler signifies transformation. Daiichi, with its new logo, intends to be more progressive and bold in its strategic moves. The new logo represents an evolution and the radical change that would set a totally new benchmark for the company. Image © Gensler

SZ: Why choose to partner with Gensler in these projects? What is it about Gensler that makes it the perfect partner for Daiichi?

CU: Back in 2011, following Daiichi’s aspiration to position itself globally, the company hired Gensler to design its third building in BGC known as One World Place. This building subsequently won Best Office Development-Philippines at the Asia Pacific Property Awards held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Over the course of the last two years, Gensler’s relationship with Daiichi Properties evolved to the next level. Currently, Gensler is working with Daiichi Properties on developing our second office tower in Fort Bonifacio called World Plaza, along with integrated building signage and identity. Additionally, a third tower is at the drawing board for Gensler in late October, with the project larger in size and scope.

The competitive advantage brought about by Daiichi and Gensler’s partnership will serve as a progression and innovation not only of our projects’ design and function but also of ideals, prioritizing excellence and sustainability in the service of its clients, investors and partners.

Sasha Zeljic is a regional practice area leader for Commercial Office Buildings in Gensler's Chicago office. With a strong emphasis on research and implementation of sustainable design, Sasha is particularly interested in exterior envelopes and conceptually advanced high-performance building façades. Contact him at aleksandar_zeljic@gensler.com.

Image © Gensler

As technology, Internet, communications, and financial service enterprises continue to invest in network infrastructure to achieve continuous and seamless connectivity, reliability and redundancy are paramount. Driven by ever-increasing demand for bandwidth, the Data Utility is everywhere.

Electricity, gas, water, sewer systems and other basic utilities available throughout the developed world, have a new sibling: data. The proliferation of wireless access and devices, along with increasingly complex content and the push of this content to clouds have contributed to the fact that digital information is a prized commodity. In addition to significant technological advances in wireless access and content to support societal change in the developed countries, the economic rise in the BRIC countries (Brazil, India, Russia, China), Eastern Europe and Africa are also feeding increased demand for data on an unprecedented global scale.

In many instances the design and construction of network infrastructure, including dedicated fiber bands/rings, telecommunications platforms, and hyper-scale data centers, represents the next great infrastructure build for these societies.

Will the past privatization and market capitalization of this Data Utility (via internet service providers, telecommunication industry, and global network providers) shift to a public model, in which utilities own, operate, and maintain data and the networks it traverses?

Other core utilities (ie: electricity and water) are provided by local utility companies and/or regional cooperatives/associations. By nature, data networks extend beyond this local framework and regional infrastructure to a global playing field. Data comprises a universal connected network.

The question facing us is how can we design, regulate and service a prevalent and accessible data utility on a global scale?

Grant Uhlir maintains a strategic design focus coupled with proven senior leadership, project management acumen, and expertise in highly complex project developments. As a Principal and Studio Director in Gensler Chicago, he leads the region’s Mixed Use/Entertainment Practice Area and is a leader in the firm’s Mission Critical Facilities Practice Area. Grant is an active member, and current treasurer, of AIA Chicago Foundation’s Board of Trustees. He is also a member of the Economic Club of Chicago, the Chicago Architectural Foundation, and the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Please contact him at grant_uhlir@gensler.com.

What if this was your workplace? Scottsdale Healthcare Healing Garden Project. Image © Gensler.

Reinventing the Workplace is a recurring blog series in which Gensler designers predict how the workplace will evolve over the next decade. You can find all the entries in this series here.

“What if you could leave work healthier than when you arrived?” That question challenges the very notion of what we expect from the workplace, but it’s a question with far-reaching implications for health, wellbeing, and productivity. Research indicates that “people with high career wellbeing are more than twice as likely to be thriving in their lives overall,” according to authors Tom Rath and Jim Harter in their recent book Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements. Seen in this light, the reimagined workplace has the power to sustain employees not only economically – but holistically.

Rath and Harter go on to say that wellbeing is about “the combination of our love for what we do each day, the quality of our relationships, the security of our finances, the vibrancy of our physical health, and the pride we take in what we have contributed to our communities.” Most importantly, they write, it’s about how these five elements interact.

Using these principles as a springboard, our Minneapolis based team has developed a design strategy for workplace we describe as “Being Well, Working Well.” It envisions the workplace of 2020 as an essential contributor to workers’ wellbeing and a contributor to the vitality of its’ surrounding community. The approach incorporates design at many scales – from the urban scale down to the control of task lighting on the work surface.

Mid-century suburban office parks are a potential setting of workplaces that promote well-being. Image © Gensler

To ground our ideas in a real life situation, we applied our approach to a conventional mid-century suburban office park – a setting that is weakening economically as vacancy rates climb above those of competing urban sites. Often surrounded by residential subdivisions and car-centric retail districts, the once-pastoral and isolated office park provides an ideal place to study strategies for repositioning and eco-reinvention. As we envision it, the office park – once associated with sprawl - is poised to become tomorrow’s transit and community-connected, multi-use, walk-able workplace.

Step one in the process is to create an active campus. An urbanized low impact development retrofit will incentivize knowledge workers to walk to nearby amenities, alternative workplaces, or simply step outside to enjoy the landscape. Ecologically friendly landscape and planning strategies will bring vibrancy to these underutilized gray fields. An added benefit to employers: People who spend time in nature dramatically improve their higher-level cognition, according to the article “Get More Done” in the April 2013 issue of Inc. magazine.

An office park can be transformed into an active campus with infill development that increases the building density; by relocating cars to the edges of the site in structured parking (which improves campus walkability); by introducing bike sharing programs and bike boulevards; and by eliminating surface parking lots and reducing the amount of paved roadways, replacing them with walking paths, pervious paving, landscape, and wetlands.

The current demand for co-working settings may, in fact, set the stage for office developments of mixed uses. By shifting outdated suburban campuses to multi-tenant occupancy mixed with non-office uses, such properties can find new life. Beyond market positioning, however, these transformed campuses can lead the way for a new generation of office parks where wellness and wellbeing are key priorities.

The potential is extraordinary, with more than 60 percent of U.S. metropolitan office space now located in the suburbs. As Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson wrote in Retrofitting Suburbia published in Urban Land, many of these suburban campuses have been leapfrogged by development that has taken place since World War II, placing the office parks in more centralized locations. Tied to mass transit, these older campuses can be retrofitted using lessons learned in the intervening 50 years. We see the potential to update outdated building enclosures, systems and configurations to increase sustainable performance and provide higher quality interior environments with greater connectivity to the exterior landscape. All these improvements support human wellbeing.

Image © Gensler.

Greater movement is a key to wellbeing, with the American Journal of Epidemiology reporting that “people who sit more than six hours a day are up to 34 percent likelier to die in the next 15 years than those who sit less than three hours a day.” Our vision of the future workplace encourages people to get up from their desks and move, resulting in greater health for bodies and minds and the bottom line.

To do this, we propose buildings that incorporate both vertical and horizontal routes. These activated paths are critical design features that drive the placement of adjacent amenity, support and collaboration spaces. Providing amenities such as phone rooms within offices give people places to conduct private conversations, while also requiring them to get up and walk. Low or no-tech meditation rooms can provide a calm place to reduce stress and or do heads down focus work. More active areas for ping-pong tables or rooftop tennis courts only up the ante when it comes to raising heart rates for wellbeing.

Movement can also be integrated into policy and work practices – suitable alternative spaces for collaboration must be partnered with mobile technology policies. Think of small groups of people choosing to stand while they meet and carry their digital work with them, or to pedal while they talk outdoors. Providing dedicated and active collaboration options paves the way to innovation while providing ready opportunities for individuals to keep moving.

Focus work has its place in the world of wellbeing too, because “people who have the opportunity to use their strengths are six times as likely to be engaged in their jobs and more than three times as likely to report having an excellent quality of life,” write Rath and Harter. Focusing and completing a task efficiently give us a sense of accomplishment, which elevates our overall wellbeing and reduces stress.

The advent of a mobile workforce also means that people can frequently do their work in their most comfortable setting – their homes or favorite places. Being able to take your personal things with you, easily, to the place you work best, when you work best, is comforting and feeds social wellbeing. Emerging technologies such as holographic work boards will allow for a mobile existence while maintaining a comforting sense of place. Where, how, with others or alone – work seen in this way synchs productivity, health and wellbeing.

By up-cycling the suburban office campus we transform these latent resources into vital buildings, community assets and the vibrant workplaces of 2020. The being well, working well strategy fundamentally embraces the interrelatedness of places, things, people, time and actions. The workplace and our communities will be redefined by the changing nature of work and how it impacts our whole life.

Team members who contributed to this work: Kate Levine, Courtney Armstrong, Beth Kalin, Tamar Ribnick, Doug Larson, Amy Barthel, Jack Kennedy, Jennifer Stumm, Jennifer Mergen, Aaron Whittkamper, Erik Lucken, Jon Buggy, Betsy Vohs, and Bill Lyons.

Marcy Schulte is the design director in Gensler's Minneapolis office. She leads multi-disciplinary design teams in the conceptual design, design development and implementation of projects for a broad array of project types and scales. Contact her at marcy_schulte@gensler.com.

Megan Gorden is a senior interior designer in the Minneapolis Office, focusing on workplace interiors. Contact her at megan_gorden@gensler.com.

Image © Gensler

After a 10-year research and design party celebrating collaboration, focus is starting to get some much-deserved attention. On-going coverage in the media, and books like Susan Cain’s “Quiet” and Daniel Goleman’s “Focus: the Hidden Driver of Excellence,” are putting focus back on center stage as a desired, valuable, but endangered work activity.

The increasing criticality of focus is almost ironic. For most of human history being prone to distraction is what ensured our survival. Handy physiological traits like keen hearing and peripheral vision ensured we were aware of not just what was happening in front of us, but what was happening beside us or behind us, as well. No matter how deep in thought, our finely tuned senses alerted us to potential danger.

But in the modern working world, the survival paradigm is almost a complete flip. Focus in its many forms—thinking, dreaming, creating, analyzing, composing, imagining, solving—are critical to success in an increasingly knowledge-based economy. The dig is that we’re still stuck in bodies hardwired as distraction detectors.

And we’ve been busy designing technologies that extend our distraction. Be it constant emails or IM’s, noisy coworkers, constant meetings, a buzzing overhead light, someone’s phone beeping, or the thousand other things that disrupt concentration, it’s now a challenge just to get a clear, clean thought in at the office.

The negative effects are felt not just in focus, but in other work activities. Our own research has shown that when focus isn’t effectively supported, people actually collaborate less, learn less and even socialize less. The status quo is not good enough. There is a real impetus to rethink how we behave at work, the role technology plays in affecting workplace productivity, and the spaces we need to be get our jobs done.

At Gensler, we are currently researching how the built environment can not only support focus, but help it flourish in a modern work environment, and strike a balance with collaboration and technology. The mandate to collaborate isn’t going away, nor are email, social media, and other 21st century agents of distraction. Integrating them into the workplace in a manner that increases individual productivity rather than disrupting it is the challenge we as workplace designers and consultants want to take on.

To complement our research, we are interested in learning how you focus. How do you tune out distractions at work? What are your most effective strategies when you are faced with a deadline and absolutely need to concentrate?

Let us know. Hit us up on Twitter, Facebook and in the comments section below.

What do you do to focus? #focusonfocus

Gervais Tompkin chooses to be optimistic. He thrives on collaborations with others and is more likely to diagram it than talk about it. His practice as a leader of Gensler’s consulting practice allows him to work with interesting people on worthy problems globally. Contact him at gervais_tompkin@gensler.com.

Image © Gensler

While every company and organization would like to invest in a traditional and state-of-the art workplace, budget constraints, limited space, and the fact that knowledge workers are an increasingly mobile species can make obtaining a worthwhile return on such a project unfeasible. The proliferation of mobility is an especially critical component of this equation, because as an increasing percentage of knowledge workers choose mobility over tethering themselves to a single desk day after day, traditional workplaces slowly move towards obsolescence. Why invest in a single workplace when your employees (and next-gen talent) would just as soon plug in from coffee shop or hotel or home?

Mobility provides many benefits, but the independence it grants also comes at a cost. Without an office, the nomadic mobile worker lacks the ability to casually interact with coworkers, an activity shown to enhance creativity and innovation. The challenge and opportunity facing the design community is coming up for a way to create physical and virtual environments that attract hordes of mobile workers to one location while still providing a significant amount of flexibility.

Our answer: Embrace the pop-up workspace. Imagine a network of pop-up work communities in available and underutilized public space. Imagine work environments that create virtual and physical communities inhabited by knowledge workers from different backgrounds. Imagine the potential for sharing and innovation. Imagine the civic benefits that will accompany reclaiming unused public spaces for valuable social enterprise.

We propose a system that grants the ability to build workplace community both virtually and physically for the nomadic mobile worker. Borrowing themes and sensibilities found in co-working environments and the “Pop-Up” restaurant and retail culture, we propose a means to organize and temporarily create work hives where knowledge workers may work wherever they desire and, more importantly, meet and socialize with their peers.

Image © Gensler

Our pop-up workspaces will transform wasted public spaces into activity based environments within the urban landscape. Inside of these environments, mobile workers can actively engage open-sourced experiments. Such collaborative consumption within the sharing economy will catalyze a rethinking of the commons as a hub for socializing and incubating ideas. Location Map Availability will provide a window into the look and feel of the pop-up workspace while also displaying what amenities are available at certain times.

Image © Gensler

The pop-workspace will use the collective intelligence and behavior of insects to help humans understand the effectiveness of collaboration and group interaction. Swarms can consistently make good and timely decisions as long as they seek a diversity of knowledge. Grid70 is the hive model of company-to-company working. It is a design hub meant to foster creativity and cross-pollination in a building that houses workers from four different companies.

Image © Gensler

Co-workers have an affinity for seeking out like-minded people as well as people who can offer diverse perspectives. Within our pop-up workspaces community member profiles and avatars augment the possibility for serendipitous encounters via data points that showcase the individual’s background, skills, and interests stimulating discourse around projects for potential collaboration. Lifestyle clusters illustrated through heat maps convey densities of certain populations of people. Mobile workers want to connect with others who share their same vision and philosophical beliefs. Heats maps and sensors will be a driving force of the future of co-working.

Image © Gensler

Image © Gensler

The need for dynamic and easily configurable touchdown spaces is a major design trend in office environments and an area to which nomadic workers gravitate. These areas within the pop-up workspace provide a variety of assembly options for various desired work experiences. Adaptive and evolutionary design not only grants the introvert and extrovert control over their workspace but is also imperative to accommodate the work styles of future generations.

Image © Gensler

The pop-up workspace needs areas designed to host workshops, innovation labs, and events in order to foster collaborative learning and thought leadership in a diverse range of disciplines. Landlords, landowners, developers, local communities, and other stakeholders will want to be involved in dialogues that reanimate abandoned or underutilized public spaces in order to provide opportunities for community benefit and social enterprise.

The following people contributed to this project: John McKinney, Laura Latham, Nick Lawrence, Yongxiao Liu.

Stephen Ramos is a designer in Gensler's Washington, D.C., workplace studio.

Image © Seth Unger

Each October in Chicago, approximately 25,000 people convene at Chicago Ideas Week, a premier annual gathering of global thought leaders created to provoke new ideas and inspire actionable results. Through the cornucopia of speaker series highlighting thought leaders from around the world, panel discussions representing diverse voices, and engaging lab events, the week-long event serves as a global hub for new ideas. It’s an ecosystem for innovation and a playground of intellectual recreation.

This year, Gensler hosted a lab event, ‘Designing a Place that Works’ in our own Chicago office. Roshelle Ritzenthaler, Seth Unger, Melissa Mayer, and Julie Hutchison, all workplace strategists and/or practitioners, orchestrated an engaging three-hour interactive workshop focused on exploring the explosion of choices affecting the future of [work]place.

Findings from our recent 2013 Workplace Survey provided a framework for the conversation, focusing on how choice is shifting the power—and the responsibility—away from workplace leadership and to the individual worker. Participants learned more about how research informs the design process, and how process informs design research. Leveraging a discovery tool, Design Futures, participants had an opportunity to team up to explore a working world around three themes: Renaissance of American Manufacturing, Art of Attention in the Information Storm, and the Quantified Evolution. The result: unscripted and hands-on mind melds based on the perspectives of our diverse and engaging attendees on the future of work and work environments. We couldn’t have been happier to geek out with such a great group of people. Thanks Chicago!

In addition to inspiring others, the Gensler team hoped to find inspiration. One of our workplace experts, Alice Kao, attended an engaging event titled ‘Fueling Performance.’ Though speakers spanned diverse careers and industries, all shared similar insights on how to support and grow talent. This is an important topic for Gensler, because we are continuously focused on improving the physical work environment in ways that facilitate improved worker productivity and performance. Here’s what the presenters had to say:

Renetta McCann, Chief Talent Officer of Leo Burnett spoke about the “Future of Workers.”

Within each person, there are qualities which are not visible to employers. These assets increase value. Humans have a need to create and benefit from their own creations. Creativity and emotions are linked and provide great benefit to employers. Work is not really about labor; people work together to achieve outcome. Learning and training have to be done in real time and must be self-directed.

Justin Rosenstein, co-founder of Asana, a company that builds software to help organizations coordinate their collective action, spoke about how people work.

People should work with clarity of purpose, clarity of plan and clarity of responsibility. Working as part of a single, global community provides more leverage. Employers should focus on flexibility and educating their employees.

Alison Wolf, professor, King’s College, London and author of The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World talked about “signaling” in the workplace.

“Costly signaling” is when we want to show that we are fit, successful and highly rated. Women can signal like men, but signaling is not always a good thing when you are being deceptive. Perception and deception go together. Do not suppress what you cannot suppress; encourage it. Understand what is going on, but look beyond it too.

Keith Ferrazzi, founder & CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, a strategic consulting firm, shared several messages on how to help people work effectively.

People don’t change until their practices change. There must be willingness and capacity for influence. Ask people if they are willing to change. With that question, there must be empathy and vulnerability. People should ask themselves if this change is going to make them more joyful.

Gary Sinise, founder of the Gary Sinise Foundation, talked about programs to assist veterans with career training.

He is championing a ‘Get Skills to Work’ coalition and has partnered with GE to teach vets about 3D printing. The military provides great leadership and teamwork training.

Image © Seth Unger

Alice Kao is a senior associate and studio operations leader in Gensler’s Chicago office and she has extensive experience with corporate and financial clients. She has worked in the New York and Shanghai offices during her long tenure with the firm and has a passion for mentorship and talent development. Contact her at alice_kao@gensler.com and follow her tweets at @AliceKao1.

Melissa Mayer is a director in the analytics consulting team in Gensler's Chicago office. A self-professed Excel geek (colleagues would agree), Melissa seeks to leverage and advance quantitative analysis that informs planning and design decisions.

Image © Gensler

In our current era of ideas, knowledge workers are expected to maintain a steady flow of creative output. Yet many companies are asking their people to maintain productivity while occupying smaller spaces and taking less time.

Unfortunately, these companies are overlooking the fact that worker behavior is shifting dramatically. Consequently, the workplace has not kept pace.

Among the many factors contributing to this is generational differences – particularly the emergence in the workforce of Generation Y (born 1979-1997). Raised in an era when the Internet burst into prominence and portable computing and communications devices became widely available, these so-called Millennials have embraced technology and enjoyed a high degree of both personal and work flexibility and mobility. Those circumstances, some observers say, have also fostered Gen Y’s expectation that the world should adapt to them.

Whether or not one agrees with that characterization, it’s impossible to dismiss the fact that Gen Y is the elephant in the room when it comes to the future of workplace. By 2020, they will comprise over 50 percent of the US workforce, according to a Knoll research study titled “Generational Preferences: A Glimpse into the Future Office.” The proportion of the next largest group—Baby Boomers—will decline to 23 percent.

The result, as the study concludes, it that future workspace will need to provide a consistent, engaging work experience that supports a wide choice of work styles and seamless flow of work, regardless of location.

Our design team took this information and considered its impact on American downtowns, which are fast becoming the preferred location for companies seeking to recruit and maintain young knowledge workers. (We also took into account other considerations, such as the proliferation of new social and mobile technologies, the collaborative nature of knowledge work, and recent findings showing that access to nature in the workplace translates to lower levels of job stress and higher levels of job satisfaction.)

We worked with the premise that, as major cities densify, the opportunity to expand the built environment will shift from land space to air space. In addition, because the building sector accounts for a whopping 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., according to Green Source magazine, we felt compelled to consider a distributed workplace model that takes advantage of built structures, rather than adding the demand on resources caused by constructing and operating new buildings.

The shift to distributed workspaces is already underway. In a 2011 Knoll report titled “Five Trends that Are Dramatically Changing Work and the Workplace,” the authors note that we are already witnessing the diversification of traditional corporate offices to other alternatives. They include non-assigned workspaces, mobile furniture systems with wireless voice and data connections, dispersed satellite offices, and traditional telecommuting.

The report goes on to say that, as companies seek to provide a greater variety of work settings to support collaboration and diversity of needs, “workers will increasingly work in other distributed workplaces: at satellite offices, supplier and customer locations, offshore locations and home.”

That’s where The Cloud Collective comes in.

Image © Gensler

The Cloud Collective, our vision for the future workplace, would comprise a set of parts, each with specific functional characteristics suited to support the types of activities that will dominate knowledge work in the year 2020. Rather than build new tall buildings in urban settings, we propose attaching adaptable work spaces to existing buildings.

We envision these spaces as small, additive capsules that serve distinct roles for knowledge work. They come in three types, each programmed to support a different group or individual need.

• Contemplation capsule. This space would provide a getaway place where focused, individual tasks are executed and then contributed to a larger whole.
• Connection capsule. This module would provide space for small to medium-sized teams to gather to generate ideas and solutions collaboratively and exchange information. We developed a design for this capsule that incorporates pliable walls with integral doors that can be easily adjusted to provide varied levels of privacy.
• Community capsule. This is a “group think” and gathering space that supports large interactions and flexible programs, the type of space needed for team-building, celebrations, and “community engagement” workshops.

In isolation, each capsule has a small role to play. But, in combination, their value for workplace productivity is multiplied by cross-pollinating diverse people and work settings. And, if the parts are located strategically to complement a company’s “home base,” The Cloud Collective should yield other benefits, such as reducing carbon footprint and transportation impacts on the environment, increasing the number of usable, productive hours per day, and amplifying the presence of education, resources and community.

By offering a range of work settings tailored to the modern workforce, these distributed workspaces could create a win-win situation for both an organization and its people. “Organizations are recognizing that giving people the ability to work from anywhere can benefit both parties,” noted a 2012 Citrix workplace of the future whitepaper. “The business reaps the rewards of a highly mobile and agile business with increased productivity and lower costs while people have the flexibility to choose the ideal time, place and device for their work.”

The nature of work is clearly changing. For a society like ours, which is growing its economy on thoughts and ideas, it’s time to adapt to a workplace that allows ideas to thrive in the cloud.

The following team members contributed to this work: Jenny West, John Doyle, Julie Guirl, Alexandria Holtzer and Ron Zhou.

Ronnie Leone is a lead designer in Gensler's Denver office. She thrives on collaborating and listening to clients and transforms their goals and needs through design. She prides herself in building relationships with clients, colleagues and mentoring younger designers. Contact her at ronnie_leone@gensler.com.

This Class A office building (left) and five story empty warehouse (right) both sold for similar prices per square foot in 2013.

Over the course of the past year, the Los Angeles real estate market has shifted. Recent trends reveal that prime commercial real estate markets in the city are in competition with non-traditional neighborhoods, many of which are attracting start-ups with a unique formula of lifestyle oriented amenities. The sales of the U.S. Bank Tower, located on Bunker Hill in central downtown, and The Desmond Building, only five blocks to the south, clearly illustrate this shift in the market.

Although the two buildings are at opposite ends of the class spectrum, they sold for surprisingly similar prices per foot. The Desmond sold for $210 per square foot (but needs another $150 per foot to be leasable) and the Tower for $260 per square foot. To put this into perspective, it must be acknowledged that the U.S. Bank Tower is a prestigious 72 storey Class A office building, while The Desmond is a five storey brick warehouse that currently lacks elevators, bathrooms, heating, and other basic systems necessary for occupancy. Throughout it’s nearly 100 years in existence, the building has served as a car dealership, assembly plant, and, most recently, a department store warehouse. Lincoln Property Corporation, the company who purchased The Desmond, is currently converting the building into creative office space with the potential for new ground floor restaurant and retail space, as well as a rooftop bar.

The logical question in response to these sales is why are tenants and developers willing to pay higher prices for buildings like The Desmond than traditionally esteemed workplaces, and class A office space, like the U.S. Bank Tower? The answer lies in the fundamental shifts taking place within the American economy, as well as the changing preferences of next-generation urban workers.

Historically, white collar companies such as law firms, consulting groups, and accounting firms have driven the commercial real estate market. Typically, they valued the status of high-rise buildings located in central business districts. Their demand for such office space catalyzed the development of districts like downtown Los Angeles. However, in the past decade, professional service and law firms have consolidated into smaller leases and reduced their real estate portfolio. Consequently, the Class A buildings that have long provided workspace for these companies have seen a reduction in occupied space. Currently, there are 161 vacant floors in Class A office buildings within downtown Los Angeles.

Many developers and architects are aware of this shift in economic circumstances, but assume that as professional services firms reduce their office space, companies in the emerging tech, media, and gaming industries would take their place. However, companies within the emerging market sectors are demonstrating that they have limited interest in high rise commercial office buildings. Instead, they’ve been paying a premium for more authentic and flexible space, such as what’s found in low-scale industrial buildings in many cities.

Employees within these emerging market sectors tend to work differently. These generally younger employees value informal, open space filled with personal amenities. They want to work collaboratively in a space that allows them to feel like they’re part of community with a shared purpose. In terms of locale, they tend to prefer genuine urban environments that are easily accessible to a variety of restaurants, shops, gyms, and parks. Tenants recognize the potential influence both space and location can play in attracting, engaging, and retaining top talent. For these reasons, developers and tenants are willing to pay up to twice the rent for flexible low-rise buildings that can be re-purposed and can cost half as much to build.

Due to this market shift, real estate in neighborhoods known for their urban authenticity is in high demand. Districts like the Historic Core, the Arts District, and now South Park are valued for their potential for growth, their close proximity to a plethora of popular restaurants and entertainment venues, as well as their accessibility to numerous freeways, the Metro, and the Downtown Streetcar.

What does this market shift mean for developers? Firstly, it means it would be beneficial for them to be mindful of older buildings like The Desmond going on the market. These buildings have the potential, given the right mix of interior and architectural design intervention services, to be transformed into something else entirely. Secondly, if Class A buildings want to maintain relevance and attract companies in emerging market sectors, they need to re-evaluate how they present themselves to possible tenants.

One possible avenue is to reinvent the ground floor. Since workers today want to feel like they’re in a diverse urban environment, the mono-functional lobbies consisting of a concierge, a bank of elevators, and a small convenience store are opportunities for transformation. we’re proposing ground floor interventions (in qualifying Class A buildings) that turn traditional lobbies into mixed-use environments featuring a variety of amenities, including gyms, bars, restaurants, and co-working suites. Such lifestyle oriented enhancement mixes can create the urban environment start-ups want and reinvigorate the staid image of high rise commercial office buildings. While we believe that creating mixed-use districts in traditional office buildings is a possible solution, there are certainly others.

As we start to notice more opportunities in the upper floors of office towers, we have to wonder; what if hotels, schools, and restaurants re-occupied these obsolete single-use towers all over the United States? How does that change financing structures? Ownership structures? Physical infrastructural requirements? How will new towers be designed to accommodate inevitable future changes? Just some questions to think about as we look to 2014 and beyond.

John Adams' unique combination of design, planning, management, and real estate strategy experience in urban mixed-use redevelopment, corporate campus and entertainment projects give him a uniquely comprehensive understanding of large development projects. Contact John at john_adams@gensler.com.

Chinese commercial office buildings communicate power and corporate culture. They uphold traditional business hierarchies and segregate the executive class from everyday knowledge works. Image © Gensler

When considering the future of commercial office buildings in China, it’s critical to remember how new the industry is compared with that of the Western world.

Forty years ago, long after Western skyscrapers like the Empire State Building were old news, commercial office buildings were still an unfamiliar concept in China. This changed with the Chinese ‘Reform and Opening’ an era of industrialization and state led capitalism which welcomed foreign investment into the country in the late 1970s and early 80s. Western money provided opportunities for entrepreneurs to start and grow businesses. Office buildings began appearing in the city’s major metropolises, but continued regulation of construction by the central government prevented a full-fledged building spree. As the 80s transitioned to the 90s, the regulations began to disappear. Privatization of banks and corporations became the norm, and the demand for commercial office buildings and regional headquarters grew.

Today, China is playing catch-up, trying to build enough square meters to match its ever growing economy and to accommodate the continued migration of citizens from rural areas to dense cities. If China continues on its current path of economic growth, the country will need four times as much commercial office space as the United States has. To supply this nearly unfathomable demand, architects and developers should understand the contradictions and trends shaping the Chinese commercial office building industry. Otherwise they will fail to create workspaces tailor made for China’s unique culture and its growing collection of private institutions.

Transportation systems often dictate layout in Chinese commercial office buildings. Image © Gensler

One trend affecting the Chinese commercial office building market is the ongoing clash between a desire to modernize through design and an adherence to ingrained secular traditions, many of which come in direct conflict with the design community’s current understanding of modernity.

Unlike many corporations in the Western world, which are embracing flat corporate hierarchies that, at least from a design perspective, treat CEOs and entry-level workers in increasingly similar manners, Chinese corporations still embrace stricter and more traditional hierarchical structures. The Chinese executive class remains isolated from common workers, and the two groups only interact in regulated environments. In many Chinese commercial office buildings, the transportation system dictates layout. Executive offices are located on floors separate from that of other workers, and the executives require a separate elevator system that only they can access. Each group has its own gyms, restaurants, and other amenities located within the building, eliminating crossover and constantly reminding each employee of where they stand within the organization.

Many Chinese commercial office buildings contain first-rate amenities. Image © Gensler

This segregated approach to corporate structure and commercial office building design differs from the more modern approach favored by Western institutions, many of which are tearing down the physical barriers between bosses and employees in favor of open environments where spontaneous interaction can and does occur regardless of rank. Chinese corporations may want to modernize and replicate certain practices made popular by their Western counterparts, but a continued devotion to old-school corporate structure (strict corporate hierarchy, little interaction between different classes of workers) keeps them in direct conflict with certain tenets of modern design thinking (open spaces, collaboration trumps separation) that are prevalent in other parts of the world. This conflict is exemplified by the hackable building phenomenon: Western companies are welcoming it with open arms, retrofitting traditional office layouts to accommodate a flat corporate culture, while that type of approach to commercial office building design is 10 to 15 years away in China.

The Chinese remain dedicated to the principles of Feng Shui. Image © Gensler

Chinese companies also remain dedicated to the principles of “traditional and cultural beliefs.” It is not uncommon for a Chinese institution to require its building face in a certain direction, so that it sits in concert with adjacent structures and respects the Feng Shui of the surrounding area. Chinese clients have been known to reject a design if the orientation falls askew by even a few degrees. This is another way in which China’s push for modernity is somewhat inhibited by an allegiance to a traditional way of thinking. In the Western world sustainability, efficient access to natural resources, energy generation and consumption, and a desire to foster well-being and productivity take precedence in the design of a building. These considerations may be increasingly important to Chinese companies, but they still tend to take a back seat to long-established concerns.

Another consequential trend currently affecting the Chinese commercial office building industry is the shift from a developer centric market to a client centric one. In the past, real estate developers set the tone. They worked hand in hand with architectural firms to specify how a building should look, what amenities it required, and where it should stand. Developers understood what clients needed and commissioned buildings with certain specifications in mind. They would then rent the finished product to Chinese corporations, knowing that if a tenant decided to move once its lease expired, the building could easily be rented to another client without undergoing a total renovation.

That model is no longer the norm. Chinese corporations are now taking a more active role in the design process. No longer content to simply buy what developers offer, private corporations want buildings tailor made for them and their workforces. They now view commercial office buildings as long term investments. And because the Chinese prize corporate culture and see it as a key differentiator, each corporation is demanding that the design of its building bring its culture to life and speak to its uniqueness. Chinese companies want everything from the layout of the floor plans to the ornamentations on the walls to reflect the organization’s specific values and aspirations. The one-size fits all office building is a thing of the past. Specialization through design is the new normal, and this is forcing architectural firms to become more comfortable working directly with clients.

Evolution is and always shall be a slow process, and as the Chinese commercial office building industry continues to evolve, the conflict between old and new, between historic preferences and a push for modernity will continue to collide with one another. As architects and designers, we need to be sensitive to the contradictions inherent to this industry. We want to help our clients move forward while staying respectful to the past. We can do this by finding design elements that allow us and the clients to achieve both goals. For example, classical Chinese design embraces time-honored open spaces like courtyards. So introducing traditional courtyards into a commercial building can not only pay homage to a sacred aspect of Chinese design, it can also create a space where a company can foster collaboration and break down hierarchical barriers to cooperation and innovation.

Modernity and tradition often find themselves in opposition, but good design is one way to alleviate the struggle and establish common ground.

Hasan Syed leads Gensler’s Commercial Office Practice in Asia. A design leader with over 20 years of experience in concept design and development of tall buildings, large scale office, mixed use, hospitality, retail and master planning projects, Hasan brings varied international experience and an acute understanding of design thinking to every project he undertakes. Contact him at hasan_syed@gensler.com.

Image © Gensler

Cities are cool. I find myself increasingly fascinated with how attractive city living is for so many new urban dwellers and how cities try to keep pace with re-urbanization and to the push to become more “livable.” With re-urbanization in full swing, the growth of a globally connected workforce, and the proliferation of mobility tools that allow living and working to happen anywhere and any time, we have some choices to make.

Cities will continue to incentivize companies to migrate to urban environments, to capitalize on urban amenities as an extension of the office space, and to build bigger tax bases. These trends beg certain questions. Which cities offer the best core attributes for a safe, productive, and healthy life? Where is the best opportunity for education and culture; professional growth and fulfillment; alignment of values on sustainability, social issues, health and wellbeing? Which place is the most connected with great public spaces, infrastructure, and accessible to the rest of the world?

The world is flat (thanks Tom Friedman). Some cities are taking tremendous strides to recognize the value in maximizing their “livability.” It seems that the nucleus for a good start is a strong and visionary government, a committed and benevolent private sector, and a tolerant and active citizenship. The latter is the key. My partner Dan Winey always says, “You must have the chickens to lay eggs.” Enlightened cities benefit economically and socially from attracting a great citizenry of really smart, creative, and passionate people. We are living during another Renaissance; we are once again in an era of tremendous advancements in art, science, and technology. These are the byproducts of a collective enlightenment among people. They are supported by fast and easy access to information from anywhere in the world. A choice was made to come together in cities because of the value proposition that can only come from the collisions of urban life and networking. So, how do we attract these citizens and make our city the most livable city?

Image © Gensler

It’s all about great urban place making. To make cities livable, we must invest time into reimagining them. We must challenge conventional notions of where and how life’s activities happen; help businesses and governments redefine themselves; and rethink how the spaces (both inside and out) we create can contribute to greater productivity, happiness, and livability. At the neighborhood scale one can look at Gensler’s 5M project, which was all about designing a great neighborhood around how people actually experience the urban realm: from the pedestrian level, from the streets and alleys and from great civic spaces that are accessible and welcoming with a range of diverse uses. Perhaps improvement at this scale is the easiest way to support great urban place making because the footprint is so large. However, you don’t need a huge critical mass or large footprint to be successful in making a great place – after all these are rare opportunities within an existing urban fabric. Therefore, the most likely scenario will be at the building scale.

The 5M Design principles. Image © 5M Project

One of the attributes of a successful urban campus can exist at both the building scale. 888 Brannan Street, a former paper warehouse and battery plant, in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, was such an opportunity. The quandary was what to do with this asset? How can it become exciting and attractive? It really wasn’t just one building; it was a couple of buildings that had been joined together over time, with an abandoned rail line running through it. It had a rabbit’s warren of disconnected spaces, floor level changes, and layer upon layer of intervention over the years. One would describe this as a project with “great potential.”

The positives were a decent history, a fairly recognizable landmark (although its current state was just “that building you drove by on the highway heading towards the Bay Bridge”), solid bones, big central space (often host to high school proms), more than one “destination” tenant occupying the space, and a market willing to invest in authentic space in a urban setting.

888 Brannan's Old exterior. Image © Gensler

The new exterior. Image © Gensler

The latter and the powerful economic force of the Bay Area’s emerging technology sector wanted to see if an urban workplace campus could attract people. But the client also wondered if bringing these people here could help drive the livability agenda. Capitalizing on the progressive workplace notions of the technology community, our design team decided to execute the biggest “hack” of a building in San Francisco to date. We repurposed the place from a former industrial building into a diverse activity based place for work and retail that would be so cool and so fun that it could anchor a new community in the city.

The old courtyard. Image © Gensler

The new courtyard. Image © Gensler

We stripped away all the layers and celebrated the structure of the building with all its scars and patina. We wanted this place to be authentic and less curated. We wanted to respond to demand from “cultural creatives” for a workplace that provided opportunity for interesting things to happen but was still theirs to inhabit as they saw fit. A quick commentary on historic renovation and restoration has its place, and we did quite a bit here (especially on the façade), while allowing the building to show its age (not decay). The result is also a powerful experience and reflection of history that only can be appreciated from the vantage point of today. A shout out to my partner Collin Burry (our lead interior designer) and team who did a great job introducing materials of equal integrity and distress to compliment but not overpower the rawness of the exposed spaces. To that end, we created replica train tracks in the floor of the lobby; they pay homage to the neighborhoods industrial roots. What’s past is prologue.

The lobby at 888 Brannan. Image © Gensler

What we put back was more about the use and program of spaces and not another “timeless” architectural intervention. We were super careful to not cover it all up again. We wanted to be really smart and specific with “the design moves” we made for both impact and economy. The spaces reveal the character of the place, but also offer comfort, vibrancy, diverse experience, and connectivity to the building occupants.

The potential for success at 888 was greatly improved by the true partnership we enjoyed with our client stakeholder group, whom we collaborated with on a regular basis. Our client Dan Kingsley offered the best summary of 888 when he said, “We wanted to try to create the Fourth Place that Richard Florida believes is needed for the creative class companies. 888 Brannan is still an experiment, but so far our tenants are embracing and using our Fourth Place space the way we envisioned it. The real test will be that space’s ability to evolve as the programming needs evolve, and time will tell if we were successful.”

The old loading dock, an underutilized space in the old building. Image © Gensler

Found Space: We converted the old loading dock into a courtyard where tenants can work or relax while enjoying fresh air. Image © Gensler

In the end, it is a wonderful “project,” but I started this conversation about cities and livability. So what I offer is this one step: We build our network one project at a time and hope that through our thoughtfulness we are contributing to a connected city and that projects like this one are attracting smart, creative, and passionate citizens that in turn drive the livability agenda for us all.

Peter Weingarten is passionate about making great places for people. A native New Yorker living in San Francisco, Peter thrives on dialogue and through his extraverted personality is constantly studying the human condition and how society ticks. His practice as a leader in the development of cities and their architecture allows him to passionately pursue sustainability, urbanity, and the evolution of how people live, work, and play. Contact him at peter_weingarten@gensler.com.

A hack-able building in London. Image © Gensler

What will the commercial office building of the future look like? In answering that question we can focus on cutting edge cladding systems or an updated core layout, but we should not overlook the possibility that the office building of the future may not be a new building at all. Mobility, advances in technology, and an ever more global workforce have dramatically changed the way that workers inhabit workspace. Some estimates place office space levels in 2015 at 30% of what they were in 1970. This means that we won’t need more office buildings in the future, but we will need to “hack” the ones that already exist if these spaces are to better meet the needs of future workers.

What is hacked, you ask? A hacked building is an existing structure that has been updated from its original use to incorporate a diverse mix of uses. Hacking represents the most dynamic, pragmatic, and sustainable vision for the future of office buildings and work. Hack-able At Gensler, we’ve been researching the relationship between cities and hack-able buildings, and our efforts have led us to Hack-able speculate that underutilized urban building stock can be transformed into new, functional workplaces. Although there are large global trends emerging in the way that we work, there is no broad statement that can simply generalize what is happening in every city. Local history, existing infrastructure, and demographic trends all determine what the future workplace might be.

Hack-able Chicago. Image © Gensler

Gensler’s ongoing Hack-able Buildings/Hack-able Cities initiative is a continuation of the award-winning NAIOP “The Future of the Office Building” competition started by our Los Angeles and Washington D.C. offices in 2012. The NAIOP competition entry was a fresh way of looking at the way cities are evolving along with a new age of technology. Applying this lens to a multitude of cities will reveal how perceptions and characteristics change depending on city and region.

Starting in early 2013, eight teams began researching 14 unique cities. Phase 1 of the effort focused on the documentation of a city, including history, existing building stock, real estate and a history of work. Phase 2, which started in the summer of 2013, leverages the findings from the first phase to speculate on what an evolved workplace might be.

While there have been reports and studies done on the topic of the changing workplace, this effort is unique due to its comparative analysis of multiple global cities. The method of research is based on interoffice collaboration between economists, analysts, workplace designers, and urban strategists. Data has been pulled from real estate databases and published reports. All teams also collaborated with external experts and partners, from developers and brokers to colleges and local economic development organizations.

Phase 2 of the project wrapped up at the end of 2013, and analysis of the work has just begun. While there was a range of existing building stock (from turn of the 20th century buildings on the East coast and 1980’s-era office towers west of the Mississippi) being “hacked,” two common trends are starting to appear: a move towards re-urbanization and the transformation of office buildings from single use to more diverse, mixed use projects. Several of the projects entailed the hacking of an entire block or district, reinforcing the notion that the commercial office building of the future may not be a building at all, but rather an urban neighborhood or district hacked to serve all the needs of the workforce of tomorrow. It will combine office space, housing, shopping and dining, and education. Prepare for the emergence of the hack-able city.

The project will continue with an interactive website to be launched in the spring of 2014. Watch this space for more info.

Sarah is a project architect in the Gensler Chicago office, working across several practice areas. She is passionate about mentorship of the next generation, and is a dedicated advocate for youth architectural education programs. Contact her at Contact her at Sarah_Jacobson@gensler.com.

Image © Gensler

Ongoing research on the evolution of knowledge work establishes a causal relationship between employees’ ability to focus and their productivity. Workers report having the ability to block out distractions at work are 57% more able to collaborate, 88% more able to learn, and 42% more able to socialize in their workplace. Collaboration and engagement with others stills drives innovation and productivity, but for employees to effectively collaborate, they must first be able to effectively focus.

These findings hold significant ramifications for workplace design. Simply put, if you give your employees spaces where they can put their heads down from time to time and focus on individual tasks, overall performance will increase. Currently, three out of every four workers in the United States are struggling to work effectively. To increase productivity, more emphasis is needed to bring focus back into balance.

The challenge facing companies and other organizations wanting to retool their workspaces to balance focus with collaboration. The cost of real estate represents a significant portion of corporate overhead expenditures, and the percentage will continue to rise in the coming years. To reduce these costs, many businesses are reducing real estate footprints, limiting time in the office to intense and targeted specific activities. Off-site options for work in “third” and “fourth” places look increasingly attractive, and advances in cloud computing technology enable this type of mobility, offering choice, flexible work schedules and mobility.

Yet working off-side, in coffee shops or other public spaces, can also introduce distractions, challenging employees’ ability to focus. The solution, as we see it, to this problem is providing urban retreats to which workers can flock. These restorative locations for focus are integrated into the natural environment. They reclaim small pockets of outdoor public space, providing focus space to mobile workers and simultaneously tearing down the walls between knowledge workers and outdoor stimuli. Research also suggests that employees in workplaces incorporating access to the natural environment experience lower levels of job stress and higher levels of job satisfaction.

If you can support focus, reduce corporate real estate, and connect workers with the wellness of the outdoors, isn’t that a means worth trying?

In Seattle, the city in which we work and call home, we’ve identified four where mobile workers can retreat from noise, refocus on work and restore inspiration:

Image © Gensler

Placed within the Olympic Sculpture Park, molded into the hillside, this work pod provides complete three point privacy and an unobstructed view of the water front. The canopy and exterior side walls clad with sod, blend into the surroundings, while the geometric shape gives simple contrast to the curve of the hillside providing a unique visual form.

Incorporating the space just off Piers 62/63 Park, this smart buoy has a private access dock, much like the house boats that pepper Seattle’s shores. It also has 360° views that include the city, Mt. Rainier, the Olympics, West Seattle and Bainbridge Island. Users can work on the pop up table or sit on the wood deck floor and position the seat as they wish.

Utilizing roof top gardens and views, a series of framed transparent work capsules provide another opportunity. This solution supports workers that need a choice closer to the office in an open environment. The frame element provides a virtual enclosure to the individual, and when it is not in use becomes a sculptural element that highlights spectacular city views.

Taking advantage of downtown connected ferry systems, a series of focus spaces protrude from the riveted steel boats that traverse between islands and the Seattle waterfront. The ferry culture is one of business, networking combined with leisure and site seeing. Opportunities exist to extend the workplace by providing focus spaces that engage nature and natural habitat with an ever changing environment.

While these solutions are tailor made to the city of Seattle, the overall concept of using underutilized public space to support 21st century knowledge workers is applicable to other cities. By tapping into the urban context and finding solutions that support focus and reconnect people with nature, we can give metropolitan economies a shot in the arm. Reinvigorate their distracted workforces is the key to continuing and bountiful returns.

Image © Gensler

Susana Covarrubias is a design director in Gensler's Seattle office. Contact her at Contact her at susan_covarrubias@gensler.com.

SKeysha Starck is a senior designer in Gensler's Seattle office. Contact her at Contact her at keysha_starck@gensler.com.

TechHub's new offices. Image © Rueben Derrick, Gensler

“Pop-up” has rapidly become one of the most pervasive design trends in recent years. It’s about engaging customers where they least expect it. It’s about surprise, wit and the freedom of being temporary. At some level it calls back to our childhoods where our imaginations, given a few essentials queues, could transform any space into a place of wonder… at least for a little while. This trend has given us pop-up shops, pop-up restaurants, but can it be applied to the professional work environment?

As Gensler’s London design team recently found out, it certainly can. And for some clients, this type of thinking is a better design solution than more traditional workplace approaches. This is what happened when Techhub met Gensler and pop-up met workplace.

TechHub, a rapidly expanding London co-working space geared towards tech start-ups, approached Gensler’s design team with an exciting challenge. The lease at their original site was expiring, and they had taken a lease on a building overlooking the famous Old Street roundabout. But it needed a little more than just a lick of paint. The budget was small and the time frame tight. They needed it to be operational in just 90 days.

Gensler’s design team responded with a solution that combines pop-up thinking with raw urban character to yield an energetic yet functional montage of exposed concrete, plywood and glass. And our office’s brand design team contributed a bold and playful environmental graphics programme throughout the space.

Image © Rueben Derrick, Gensler

Environmental graphics are critical ingredients in pop-up design; they provide a rich and engaging brand expression that can quickly and affordably be applied through the space.

A visitor’s first experience of TechHub begins at street level. Colourful lighting placed in the second floor windows creates brand identification and impact. It is visible from the nearby Underground station and the Old Street roundabout. This effectively creates a 60 meter wide ‘sign’ using a dozen common fluorescent light fixtures.

Reception signage was realized in exposed yellow neon. Neon was chosen for its energetic feel but also for its wonderful ambiguity: is it a sign for a Kebab shop or is it the work of Tracey Emin?

The main spine of the working space is organized through the use of colourful graphics that are both identification for the team suites and a mode of wayfinding within the space.

Additional graphics reinforced start-up culture through the use of bold key phrases, references to computer programming syntax and icons of “pure joy” (a gigantic cheeseburger for example.)

The programme was completed within the project’s deadline and budget. The result is a clear demonstration of how pop-up design thinking dovetails with the energetic and dynamic nature of TechHub’s start-up culture. It is a case study in the how environmental graphics can rapidly and affordably transform a space. In their own words, TechHub is now a “Cocoon of Awesomeness.”

Video © Gensler

Wesley has over 10 years of experience as a specialist in wayfinding strategy and environmental graphic design. You can contact him at wesley_meyer@gensler.com.

The central staircase at Gensler's Washington, D.C., office seamlessly connects the first and second floors, allowing the two separate spaces to almost function as one. Image © Gensler

We workplace strategists and designers have learned how to create office layouts that optimize space utilization, flexibility and efficiency. We maximize the choice of settings in which office workers can go about their business. The layouts work pretty darned well on the horizontal dimensions of a building floor and the time dimension: as tasks morph over the hours of a day, our activity-based designs provide alternative work settings. We provide privacy or connectivity, as appropriate, for focus, collaborative, learning or social activity.

But we’re still vertically challenged: we haven’t solved flexibility and connectivity in the critical vertical dimension. I think it’s crucial that we do, and I think a pathway to the solution is readily available.

When I was head of the U.S. General Services Administration’s Public Buildings Service (PBS), we worked with Gensler to renovate our 1917 headquarters building’s floor plates so that they could better accommodate 21st century work. We succeeded in designing flexible, performance-enhancing open layouts—with various focus, collaboration and social workspaces—out of what had been static, double-loaded, closed-office corridors.

Even before the renovation began, my deputy, the chief of staff and I tremendously increased our teamwork and efficiency by moving in together in a makeshift benching environment in my way-too-large office. Both the quality and velocity of our communications and decision-making increased.

But I still had no routine contact with my seven direct reports who ran the national PBS lines of business. Each of them sat with their business lines, which were located on different floors in the building. Except for weekly staff meetings, we did not have routine, face to face interaction. We sought each other out when a problem arose, but we didn’t have the chance to jell as a managerial team by working together on day-to-day issues, nor did we have very many serendipitous encounters. I used to say that my colleagues, even those just a floor below me, “might as well be in Timbuktu.”

Turns out I’m not the only one who feels this way. Thomas Allen, a management professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Business who conducted studies of workspace effectiveness, concluded that people on different floors “might as well be on a different continent.”

The differentiating factor between the horizontal and vertical dimensions is visibility and transparency. On the best contemporary floor plans, everyone can see or sense everyone else’s presence. Chance encounters happen. Communication and ideas flow. But this is hard to achieve vertically: floors and ceilings are not transparent, of course. Nor are elevators. It’s “out of sight, out of mind.”

How can we overcome this vertical challenge? Of course, the answer is “stairways.” But not stairs as we currently design them.

Image © Gensler

The internal staircases that we do build demonstrate the promise. For example, the one we cut through the slab between the first and second floor studios in Gensler’s Washington, D.C., office is eye-catching—and therefore an effective vertical workspace connection. The staircase is completely open. It’s right in your face when you enter the ground floor lobby, and it’s the easiest way down from the second floor, too. The nifty coffee bar on the first floor also makes it a destination for second floor occupants. As a result, the two floors, connected by that staircase, function almost as one.

But internal stairs like ours require a cut in the floor slab, high-end materials, and sometimes structural modifications to boot. This drives up costs. Such staircases also sacrifice occupiable (and rentable!) square footage. Is there a more economical stairway to workspace heaven?

There is. It’s already there, just hiding out, in most multi-story office buildings: it’s the fire stair. Or rather, the fire stairwell.

Modern building codes require that fire stairs be readily accessible to building occupants. Occupant distance-to-the-stairs rules mean that there is even more than one fire stairwell in many buildings. But they have to be enclosed to protect evacuees and to keep them from acting as chimneys, funneling smoke and fumes to upper floors. In practice, that has meant that the stairways are conceived as rarely-to-be-used contingencies, the stairwells bare and unappealing, the doorways solid (they have to be fire-rated) and downplayed.

They needn’t be so. They could be, well, designed. The fire doors can be appealing, with glass panels, glass sidelights and signage. The stairwells themselves could have fire-rated windows to let in daylight and could carry corporate branding.

The doors could even be on “hold-open” devices that would automatically close them in the event of a fire. New York City is considering code changes to allow that. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s interest in stairs stemmed from a desire to promote healthy workplaces and stair-climbing over elevator-riding: not a bad additional reason to promote visible and accessible stairs.

The use of glass to pay design attention to fire stairwells and doors will add some cost to construction, but not nearly as much as slab-cut internal stairs.

Fire stairs are not the only solution. In some older buildings, an existing light well or atrium could accommodate an internal stair without requiring slab cuts; it would not have to function as a fire stair at all. On other buildings, it may be possible to add external stairs, a throwback to the fire escape, only attractive and perhaps enclosed. These stairs would come with their own code and aesthetic challenges, of course.

The point is to get us thinking about the vertical workspace challenge and ways we might meet it. The internal stair solution can multiply daily collaborative workplace connections on a logarithmic scale. We need to do some due diligence on these alternatives, but we need to add them to our workplace design toolkit.

On the left: Exit stair, 41Cooper Square, NYC, Thom Mayne. On the right: fire stair, New York University Department of Philosophy, Stephen Holl. In both buildings, what could have been after-thought stairs are light-filled and inviting, but at significant expense. The challenge is to achieve the effect on more constrained budgets.

Bob Peck, an attorney by training, has been a self-described “architecture groupie” since he stumbled upon an architectural history course being taught in the law school auditorium. He has mostly managed to evade the practice of law and has parlayed his architecture interest into a career in public and private sector real estate. He believes that so long as we spend so much of our time at work, the spaces we work in should actually help us do our work and feel fulfilled. Contact him at bob_peck@gensler.com

In order to enable focus at the office, meetings need to be run in a more effective manner. Image © Gensler

Every week it seems a new article hits newsstands condemning the open office, a system supposedly designed for extroverts which allegedly squanders the potential of introverts. We can all identify with this feeling: the sense that our individual work is under siege by distractions. That’s because it often is. But articles about this subject tend to have a sense of fatality or nostalgia, as if business operations and the economy have condemned us to suffer this loss of focus along with other emotional indignities. That feeling of fatality has been bothering me.

Maybe we are looking at this problem backwards.

About a year ago I started contributing to a research project that involved talking with individuals whose job required them to work through incredibly complex problems, problems that needed one smart person’s sustained attention. We learned that each person has their own unique cognitive style and therefore the ideal conditions for focus vary. This makes sense; some people are impatient thinkers, others fragile focusers, etc. Each person also had strategies that mitigated distraction.

The surprising finding for us? Those we talked to agreed the main focus killer was not ambient distraction (our original hypothesis) but tangible interruptions to their work in the form of emails, meetings, coworkers and informal collaboration. This was as true for workers in private offices as those in open plan seating. Employees felt it was impossible to protect against these interruptions because they came in the form of team meetings or a culture where everyone was expected to be accessible to everyone else.

Sloppy, undisciplined, collaboration and communication are eating focus work for lunch.

Our obsession with communication and collaboration over the last 20 or so years was merited given the increase in globally distributed companies and enabling technologies coupled with the advantages of group work processes. It is likely, however, that these benefits have lulled us into a culture where more collaboration feels better to leaders and managers. More, though, is not always better. With so much attention being paid to the average worker’s inability to focus, we should also be talking about making collaboration and communication more effective and efficient. Agile and lean processes purport to help solve this problem, but unfortunately most meetings don’t accomplish tangible collaborative goals, and unresolved issues spill out into workspace, generating a day of interruptions and distracting chatter.

So the issue is not just the time we are spending in ineffective meetings (which is significant) but these sloppy communication and collaboration vehicles are dumping a load of distraction on top of the scarce time we have left to focus. The objective is not to eliminate the advantages of impromptu collaboration and accessibility but to clean up our collaborative act.

The design industry has also been enabling collabortiv-oholism. Meeting rooms are largely shaped and furnished in a format that encourages reporting. Open meeting spaces consistently are one of the most underutilized and vilified space types out there, but somehow they keep showing up on plans. We create rooms intended for focus, and these rooms get overrun by people doing phone calls. A better understanding of how to balance collaboration and focus will change the way we design, and hopefully it will build more optimism that we can once again reclaim time to have our own thoughts and to do our own work.

I am looking for examples of hyper-effective meeting and collaboration practices. If you have any suggestions please send. One of the best books I have read on the subject is Moments of Impact by Chris Ertel and Lisa Kay Solomon. http://www.momentsofimpactbook.com/ I love their point that traditional, tactical meeting habits can mow down important moments. Hopefully we can find ways to structure our meetings and our spaces to achieve truly impactful outcomes that foster effective collaboration and don’t distract people trying to have a moment to themselves.

Gervais Tompkin chooses to be optimistic. He thrives on collaborations with others and is more likely to diagram it than talk about it. His practice as a leader of Gensler’s consulting practice allows him to work with interesting people on worthy problems globally. Contact him at gervais_tompkin@gensler.com.

Image © Gensler

Gensler's London office recently hosted a panel discussion that focused on the ever blurring boundaries between learning and work environments, and how designers can support this new typology.

The panel of speakers consisted of key individuals from the worlds of learning and work and beyond.

• Dr. Chris Gerry, a former principal at the New Line Learning and founder of The Skills Lab
• Will Bentinck, a London based social entrepreneur and speaker. Bentinck is key accounts manager at Enternships – focusing on getting entrepreneurial work placements, internships and jobs for young people.
• Femi Bola, MBE, Director of Employability and Student Enterprise at University of East London, works closely with employers to give students relevant and immersive employment experiences.
• William Rowe, is the Founder and CEO of Protein Group, an insights agency and quarterly trends publication that works closely with many of the worlds’ most respected brands.

Dr. Chris Gerry started off the conversation by introducing a provocative idea: While we are already living in a highly technological world, the future against this backdrop means certain human skills are becoming obsolete. We are living longer, healthier, more peaceful lives, but this longevity is putting pressure on what we regard as learning and working. Today we are more personalized, measuring ourselves through technology and living in more intelligent, data-rich urban environments. Some governments have designed economic recovery efforts around the idea of increasing manufacturing, but when manufacturing is being done almost solely by machines, we cannot pin our hopes on it. Likewise, advancements in automated systems means that they have become a part of regular lives, be it smart phones and apps, self-checkout at your local store, driverless cars, or Google glass.

This begs the question, what are we all going to be doing with our lives in a few years time? Chris explored the idea of non-cognitive skills being the answer. “Non-Cognitive Skills drive academic success... self management…perseverance… and the ability to work well with other people… but at the moment, school systems pay zero attention to this.” He suggested that we need to change the way we teach content and skills to young minds to prepare them for a future as yet unknown. Chris went on to say that at a recent WISE Conference in December, “83 % of delegates said they thought that school systems need to change dramatically.” He suggested the things we need to explore, and explore quickly, are: space; technology; teaching; time, content and skills.

Chris also touched upon the rather petrifying idea that the acceleration of change is happening so fast that it teaching, and the spaces where learning occurs, struggle to keep up. However, I think few would argue that not doing anything about it is not a suitable answer.

Will Bentinck used the conversation about skills as a segue into what to do about our increasing lives pans; we now have an extended play period at the beginning of our lives which moves into our work life. He also posed the similar question that “we don’t know what the future is really going to be like, so how can we prepare for it? What can we do?” For Will, it all centers around having an “entrepreneurial skill set,” an “enterprising attitude to absolutely everything, with five essential skills; curiosity, versatility, agility, empathy and adaptability.

Mr. Bentinck also talked about an exciting shift that is happening with on-demand learning. Pervasiveness of knowledge, which means we are all arguably as knowledgeable as the next person on any given subject, and that what sets us apart is how we choose to enable that knowledge. What will we do with that knowledge, out in the real world? The reality most students face today is that when they start university, the jobs that exist might not exist when one graduates. And the number of new jobs keeps growing exponentially with daily positions and technologies being added.

Perhaps the five key words identified by Mr. Bentinck should be forming the core of the national curriculum to help students become more adaptable in the future (albeit current) real world. With so many areas of change in the way knowledge is distributed and shared these days, it looks necessary to involve both educational systems and their frameworks to be challenged and re-defined; ideally making them equally nimble as the technologically savvy student of today.

In looking at higher-education in London particularly, Femi Bola, MBE, started with the bold statement that she believes “space can build ambition for our students.” This is why Ms. Bola works closely with employers to help her students gain what she calls ‘cultural capital.’ The background of her students tends to be local; some 40% are from lower socio–economic background, where they may be the only person in their family ever to have attended a university. What Femi needed was “transformational experiences in transformational space,” and this is why she insisted on taking her students off-campus, and searching for available space from local employers that would provide a completely new experience. And she was brave about it! Little by little and through incremental discussions with the likes of KPMG, Credit Suisse, Barclays and the Canary Wharf Group, Femi has achieved an off-campus co-working, co-learning space at many places – including the prestigious One Canada Square in Canary Wharf. The space there is truly inspirational and aspirational for her students, and has proved to be a success and great opportunity for future collaborations and partnerships.

The opportunity to hold an event from the University of East London in these usually private settings has proved to be more than the sum of its parts. “I really do believe space can build ambition, it can build... it can refuel desire, it can foster ambition, and it can really inspire,” Ms. Bola asserted.

To complete our panel discussion for the evening, William Rowe of Protein, introduced the risks and challenges that are being faced by most millennial, those after Generation Y, born in the early 1980’s to early 2000’s, with a fresh perspective. In the past, people followed a prescriptive linear process of university: job, money, house, family, and if you achieved all these you could measure your success and status he noted. However, when job prospects are low, and university costs are sky rocketing people start to ask … “what is the point?”

A survey conducted by Protein of Millennials found that 84% would rather have 10 jobs that last two years rather than one job that lasted 20 years. Of the group they surveyed, 26% are running their own business and a staggering 62% said they would quit their job tomorrow for a life changing adventure.

So how can schools teach in response to this? How do universities remain attractive and how can companies attract, and more importantly, retain the best talent?

With Blended learning, online platforms and creative certification all easily available, it’s the learners, not the institutions that are leading the charge in innovation. But what Will touched upon was that it’s now the brands that are getting involved in the dynamics of change. Levis, Converse, Red Bull and Intel have all set up some sort of skills or learning program that looks to integrate local mentorship opportunities for youth. Some of these new programs and competitions geared towards the creative disciplines help thirsty and talented students get hands-on experience and a level of exposure not usually available in the typical learning environment.

If all of the above is true, and we take in all of these changes in learning in our world today, does this mean the classroom is dead? Do we still need physical campuses? Absolutely, our panelists agreed. We still need physical space to meet and interact as humans, and use our soft-skills. What this physical space is, and looks like, nobody could necessarily predict, however, all agreed there has to be a significant change in the way we begin to better understand the needs of all learners today, in a rapidly-changing society.

So, the challenge to design and provide for these spaces is still a live debate, but we at least have a better grasp on how our lives are being affected, and we can prepare and cater to this dynamic world of constant flux and influences, with the ‘smart,’ adaptable and agile user in mind.

Maria Nesdale is an architect who is driven to design buildings that will withstand the test of time. As regional practice area leader for education and culture at Gensler London she is deeply involved in designing enhanced learning environments that deliver a vastly enhanced learning experience for all levels of student. Contact her at maria_nesdale@gensler.com.

Photo courtesy of Gensler

Last month, Gensler’s London office hosted a roundtable discussion with the British Institute of Facilities Management (BIFM) International Special Interest Group to explore some of the more surprising results of our 2012 State Of Facilities Management Report. This being the document’s second year, we were able to compare findings and begin to understand what motivators and influences affect the way that facilities management (FM), as an industry, is operating.

Not only did the results highlight the changing nature of the workplace, with 68 percent of the respondents planning to implement some form of progressive workplace strategies, but it also provided insight as to how the role of FM in organisations is growing in diversity and scope.

At its inception, FM was, literally, managing a facility, principally what would later be referred to by the industry as “Hard FM”: maintenance, cleaning, HVAC work, etc. The key performance indicators for measuring the effectiveness of Hard FM are quite tangible: Have running costs increased? Are air conditioning complaints down? For some facilities managers, the role is still very much about this activity. But for a growing number of them, there is more and more focus on “Soft FM”: sustainability, transportation, effectiveness of the workplace for employees, and so on.

The roundtable explored this phenomenon further, and the members of the FM community we spoke with had some controversial ideas. Firstly, it was considered by all that the facility (i.e., the workplace), impacted effectiveness as much as IT, HR and other company policies. In that respect, the facility is viewed as a tool that helps an organisation achieve its goals. However, nearIy all recognised that no one within their organisations “owned” workplace effectiveness. There were shared stories about companies that had morphed or created a role within FM that did have a remit for workplace, but how did they measure these intangibles of workplace performance? (This was some of the former “bean-counter” mentality of Hard FM coming through.) The consensus believed that if facilities managers could measure effectiveness of the workplace as well as they could measure efficiency, it could be a powerful addition to their remit.

This lead to the discussion that perhaps the very title, “facilities management,” is too short-sighted and doesn’t reflect the modern FM industry, which looks after not just real estate, but also so much more of the soft aspects impacting staff. Is it time for FM to embrace its softer side? Should the job be called Facility and Employee Effectiveness and Wellbeing Management? And if FM doesn’t own this categorisation, who does?

Finally, we discussed the position of FM at the board level. Consider that operating and capital expenses of a facility over a decade are 1/15th the cost of employee salaries and benefits, according to a British Council for Offices study. With such negligible costs by comparison, is FM important enough for someone involved in it to sit at the board level, or could they Ieverage the facility as a key influencer in improving staff attraction, retention, and performance? HR and IT often sit at the board level, providing services and programmes to improve an organisation. Should FM measure the intangibles of the workplace and be offering solutions to management to affect the bottom line through maximising effectiveness and efficiency?

The purpose of Gensler partnering with BIFM to undertake this survey is to garner a deeper understanding of the issues affecting facilities management. The survey and subsequent roundtable were the first of a number of programmes to the FM community this year specifically exploring the changing nature of the facilities manager role.

Matthew Kobylar is interested in the question "What drives the decisions that companies make about their workplace?" As a workplace strategist and interior designer he is able to explore this question everyday with his clients. Matthew is the Workplace Practice Area leader of Gensler’s EMEA region. If you have a pressing question, why not contact him at matthew_kobylar@gensler.com .

Sound masking technology coupled with thoughtful design mitigates noise at GSA headquarters at 1800 F Street NW, Washington, D.C. Image © Gensler

How do you create a work environment that is quiet for individual focus work yet promotes collaboration?

The General Services Administration (GSA) is the agency responsible for real estate for the federal government. In a recent renovation of its headquarters at 1800 F Street in Washington, D.C., GSA saw an opportunity to create a more dynamic work environment. They knew the renovation could also be a powerful pilot project to test new ideas and demonstrate new strategies to the federal agencies they serve.

GSA administrators desired a more open and energetic workspace reflective of GSA’s sense of transparency and shared organizational culture. So they began exploring shifting towards an open-plan office to support their already highly mobile employees and encourage more collaboration between functions. The existing layout employed a series of cubicles within enclosed suites, whose tall partitions separated employees from one another and impeded serendipitous collaboration between coworkers. They weighed the ramifications of a more open and transparent office layout, hoping such a transformation would encourage workers to become even more mobile and to collaborate with colleagues on a more regular basis.

What worried GSA employees was fear of excess noise and distraction. They didn’t want an open office plan that would detract from their ability to think and concentrate when they worked independently. This fear of distracting background noise is a common dread associated with open office plans. There’s no shortage of articles and reports stereotyping open offices as noise-filled environments which inhibit productivity. Some of these reports make working in an open office seem akin to setting up a desk in the middle of a crowded airport terminal! The truth about noise and open offices is not as dramatic. Creating a workplace that is open, fluid, and relatively distraction free is well within the realm of possibility, as GSA employees would soon learn.

After considering various planning options, GSA boldly decided to move forward and break the long established mold of government workplaces. They created an environment that is open, transparent, and flexible, but also efficient. This meant fewer walls, lower workstation panels, glass walls replacing hard walls, and most employees not having a dedicated desk. But from the onset, GSA administrators made clear the priority to mitigate excess noise in the new headquarters. For GSA, it was a matter of enabling employees to effectively perform tasks deemed critical to their everyday work.

Prior to design, Gensler had profiled the GSA headquarters’ functions using the firm’s propriety Workplace Performance Index (WPI.) as well as using GSA’s workstyle survey findings. According to the WPI data we collected, GSA employees spend 52 percent of their time in focus work which requires concentration. GSA employees also rated focus work as the most critical work activity to their individual job performance. Employees performed the vast majority of this focus work (89 percent) at their workstations or in their offices. Complaints of noise distractions in the old layout were common; employees reported it hard to concentrate when others were having conversations around them. Most employees kept their doors open to remain accessible to one another, but noisy hallways lead to even more distractions. GSA employees told us they wanted a workspace which could augment concentration rather than detract from it. They told us fewer everyday distractions might enhance the quality and quantity of their work by as much as 38 percent.

Mitigating noise distraction requires the combination of smart design and planning strategies and the targeted use of sound masking technology. In the GSA headquarters, noisy public functions and the shared conference center were zoned separately from the quieter work areas for each sub-agency. Each floor was acoustically zoned to cluster noisy activities such as coffee and conference rooms together and separate them from zones where people are working in small teams or as individuals. Great care was taken to locate functions dealing with confidential or sensitive information in the enclosed historic zones and away from major traffic patterns. Enclosed focus rooms and small huddle rooms for two to three people were located in close proximity to open plan areas so as to provide alternate places to take a phone call, work without distraction, or meet with others. These enclosed rooms were then located strategically to block and/or absorb sound in the open office areas.

To revamp GSA’s headquarters into a high performing acoustical workplace, Gensler partnered with ADI Workplace Acoustics. According to the company’s founder Steve Johnson, ADI specializes in “speech privacy in the workplace.” In other words, ADI uses sound masking to cover unwanted and distracting noises. This approach creates workplaces where the acoustics enable focus. As Steve explains, sound masking systems fill a workspace with a soft background sound that covers the voices of neighboring conversations. The “creepy quiet” of most offices actually distracts workers and allows conversations to be heard at great distances. The masking sound reduces individual worker’s radius of distraction: the distance at which sounds made by others cause a disturbance. Keeping the radius of distraction to a minimum allows conversations conducted within one collaborative group to have less impact on nearby workstations. This enables workers to focus and collaborate within the same space.

Design performance can be measured. To achieve the perfect level of ambient noise within the GSA headquarters, Steve measured the radius of distraction from various workstations before and after the addition of sound masking technology. Prior to the renovation, federal workers could hear distracting sounds at distances of 50 feet and greater. Post renovation, the intelligibility of other people’s speech fades at a distance of only 15 feet. This dramatic improvement has allowed GSA employees to not only focus better, but feel that they can talk without distracting their neighbors. Striking this balance to enable both focus and collaboration is a crucial and tangible measure of workplace effectiveness.

But the end-users of the space are the most important gauges of design performance. I recently ran into one of the GSA federal workers who told me a terrific story. He said, “Prior to moving back into 1800F, I was absolutely convinced that I wasn’t going to like the renovated space. It seemed too open and promoted too much mobility. But by the end of the first week, I was hooked on a new way of working. I love being able to get up, and move to a zone when I want to focus quietly and not be disturbed, and other times, sit in a more collaborative zone when I want the energy and buzz of my team around me. I was convinced that I wasn’t going to like the new space, but now I wouldn’t want to work any other way!”

GSA now has an open office plan that nudges employees to collaborate and work with one another while simultaneously giving each person the necessary privacy to work on their individual tasks when necessary. In GSA’s quest for more openness, employees actually gained more acoustical privacy in the process. That is the best of both worlds.

Note: This is the second in a series of blogs about GSA’s headquarters at 1800F Street. The first blog can be read here: “GSA Breaks the Mold for Government Workplace”. This project will be presented at the CoreNet Global Summit in DC in October, 2014.

Janet Pogue is a Principal in Gensler’s Washington, D.C. office. She led the firm’s recent 2013 Workplace Survey research and is a frequent writer and speaker on the critical issues affecting the design of high performing work environments. Contact her at janet_pogue@gensler.com.

Steve Johnson is the founder of ADI Workplace Acoustics. He uses his unique background in acoustics, audio and construction to provide high performing acoustical workplaces. Steve regularly presents a CEU accredited educational program to teach design professionals the key steps to building a successful acoustical workplace. Contact him at steve@adiacoustics.com.

Image © Gensler

This post originally appeared on the blog jordangoldstein.net.

Several months ago, I spoke on a Bisnow panel that discussed the future of Tysons, Virginia, a suburban town that is rapidly becoming more urban. Tysons is clearly a town in the midst of a dramatic transformation. With Metro opening up in the spring and a host of high-rise development projects underway, Tysons is about to be suburbia transformed. It’s an experiment in what happens when the urban fringe extends and meets the suburban edge. The blurred lines create tremendous opportunity for the growth of an innovative and dynamic live/work/play environment.

As the only architect on the panel surrounded by six developer-clients, it was a great context to talk about the design challenges facing commuter towns like Tysons that are becoming more urban with the introduction of mass transit and higher density development.

Working with Macerich and Hines, we’re leading this urban transformation with a 22-story office building that is fast becoming the gateway to Tysons. Tysons Tower, when complete, will be the tallest office building in Tysons. More significantly, the Tower is anchor to a mixed-use development with direct access to the new elevated Metro station and beltway Hot Lanes.

Through the design of Tysons Tower, we’ve tackled a host of design challenges that will likely be encountered by others as Tysons continues to grow and suburban communities like Tysons continue to urbanize.

Here are three issues to consider in the case of Tysons:

When we started the design of Tysons Tower in 2009, we quickly realized that the introduction of Metro would create a design challenge unlike any that we had seen in our DC area projects. With elevated tracks and station platforms far above the roadways, we would need to address two ground planes. There’s the ground plane that is the current network of roadways and sidewalks that serves as the base of all of the existing buildings in Tysons. Then there’s the new elevated ground plane that will be at the Metro level. In the case of our Tysons Tower site, that meant a lobby that would welcome pedestrians that come straight across a pedestrian bridge from the Metro and also those that walk-in from the ground level.

Our solution at Tysons was a 55-foot high by 100-foot long glass-enclosed, grand lobby with two entries: one at the raised Metro level and another at the base adjacent to the road. Escalators and shuttle elevators connect both levels and both entry experiences are memorable paths into the building.

For Tysons’ future, this is a major design issue, especially along Route 7 where the elevated tracks create an east and west side of the tracks.

Designing for the new Tysons offers architects and developers a chance to rethink the object building: one in which all sides of the building are clearly visible and the building can fully interact with the community. In other words, the object building has space around it that allows for greater appreciation of the building architecture and how it addresses the site. We rarely have this scenario in downtown DC, where buildings are more frequently infill or corner sites that have no more than two facades to address the street.

Rather than deliver contextual buildings that become old news from the second they’re completed, architects have an opportunity to design buildings that inject energy into their surroundings and engage the community in these new urban areas. If done right, the object building can weave together form, materials and program to tell a compelling story and be a contributing factor in the brand statement of the new urban town.

When I began the Tower design process with our team, we spent time looking at the architecture that defined the current Tysons. The area was crowded with non-descript low and mid-rise buildings that lack character and felt more like a series of strung together suburban office parks. The new Tysons is envisioned as a vibrant live-work community. Tysons Tower, with its tailored lines and shimmering glass-wrapped skin, is meant to stand apart from this existing canvas. Perched on a raised podium and cantilevered out toward the beltway, the Tower is the object building that uses its base to connect with Metro, with the mall and create an outdoor plaza.

My Gensler colleagues and I have been talking a lot about this concept recently.

An adaptable building is one that is flexible inside and out so that tenants can transform their own environment to their liking over time. While new buildings can build in flexibility, old buildings can be repositioned as more open, adaptable spaces that are easily transformed by tech companies, start-ups and other tenants that need to morph as they grow.

In Tysons Tower, the building form is derived from two rectangular bars set at different angles with a tightly planned core in between. Within these rectangular bars, columns are pushed to the outer edges of the rectangle, resulting in wide-open bays of space that are easily planned.

A key strategy for flexibility is a structural system that uses post-tensioned beams as a primary structural support with lightly reinforced concrete slabs between. In doing so, the area between beams can be opened up, allowing connecting stairs between floors and multi-height spaces to be added with greater ease. Intelsat, an anchor tenant in Tysons Tower, took advantage of this and has high bay multipurpose rooms planned for upper floors and a monumental stair that slices through most of their levels.

Tysons Tower will be complete in June. If you’re driving around the beltway in the DC area, you can’t miss the Tower. Take the off ramp and check out the Tower and Tysons in transformation.

Read more about Tysons Tower, recently featured in the Wall Street Journal.

Image © Gensler

Jordan Goldstein is co-managing director of Gensler’s Washington, D.C. office, where he leads award-winning projects in mixed use, hospitality, retail, education and brand strategy. Jordan’s work spans the globe with current projects in China, Thailand, and Washington, DC. A firm believer in the power of design education, Jordan is an adjunct faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania where he teaches a course in product design. Jordan was also named as one of the “40-Under-40” national industry leaders in Building Design & Construction magazine in 2006 and by the Washington Business Journal in 2011. Contact him at jordan_goldstein@gensler.com.