The Office of Good Intentions: Human(s) Work - Softcover

Idenburg, Florian; Suen, LeeAnn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3836574365 ISBN 13: 9783836574365

Publisher: TASCHEN, 2022

Synopsis

Immerse yourself with architects Florian Idenburg and LeeAnn Suen as they journey through a wide-ranging collection of the objects, systems, and buildings that have occupied the American office space since the advent of the internet. Through stories and speculations, Idenburg and Suen expose the relationships between space, work, and people, and explore the intentions that have driven the development of office design for working humans.

In twelve essays, this book examines the spatial typologies and global phenomena that have defined the office in the last half century. Topics include the return of the work club, the rise of the corporate festival, the way of the charismatic guru, the shattering of the time clock, and the design of playgrounds for work. We cycle through Frank O. Gehry’s radical, playful spaces for digital nomads in the advertising world, stagger under the weight of stacks of punch cards, feel the fit of our bodies in the Aeron Chair, answer the phone in Hugh Hefner’s bed, and scroll through Lil Miquela's feed. Photographic essays by Iwan Baan provide a visual post-occupancy report on a range of canonical office projects, such as Marcel Breuer’s IBM campus in Florida and the Ford Foundation’s urban garden in Manhattan. Four intervening catalogs offer collections of experimental workplace products, augural advertisements for office building components, digital office components, and renderings of speculative workplaces; each catalog bridges the reality of the office and how we imagine its alternatives.

This book is a theoretical backdrop for architects as much as it is for businesspeople and employees. With curiosity and skepticism, it looks at the spaces and solutions that have been designed for human work, tracing the transformation from work to occupation, from punch cards to “playbor,” from today’s lived experience to tomorrow’s unpredictable, imagined futures.

About this title

About the Authors

Florian Idenburg is an architect in New York and founder of SO – IL (together with Jing Liu). Over the years, SO – IL has been thinking about the future of work, collaborating with Knoll on a series of workspace pieces that contemplate an office without desks. Idenburg further led a series of research and design studios at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design that explored the architecture of work through the lenses of tech, corporate research and development, and government work.

LeeAnn Suen is an architect based in Boston. She holds an MArch from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she contributed to the inaugural volume of Oblique, the Journal of Critical Conservation, and served for three years as an editor of Open Letters, a bi-weekly publication addressing topics in architecture and design through letter writing. She contributed writing to Portman’s America and Other Speculations (2017) and research to the Oxford Bibliography of Postmodern Architecture. Her writing and research explore issues of property, colonization, and occupation in human society.

After studying photography at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, Iwan Baan followed his interest in documentary photography, before narrowing his focus to record how humans interact within their built environment, like in his work on informal communities, such as his images of the Torre David in Caracas – a series that won Baan the Golden Lion for Best Installation at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. His work has been exhibited in the Museum of Modern art, the Architectural Association in London, the AIA New York Chapter, and appears frequently on the pages of architecture, design and lifestyle publications all over the world.

From the Back Cover

Déjese guiar por los arquitectos Florian Idenburg y LeeAnn Suen en un viaje por una amplia colección de objetos, sistemas y edificios que han definido el espacio de oficinas estadounidense desde la llegada de internet. A través de la historia y la reflexión, Idenburg y Suen exponen las relaciones entre el espacio, el trabajo y las personas, y exploran las intenciones que han impulsado el desarrollo del diseño de oficinas.En doce ensayos, este libro examina las tipologías espaciales y los fenómenos globales que han definido la oficina en el último medio siglo. Los temas incluyen el regreso del club de trabajo, el surgimiento del festival corporativo, el camino del gurú carismático, la ruptura de los horarios y el diseño de áreas de juego en el lugar de trabajo. Recorremos los espacios lúdicos y radicales de Frank O. Gehry para nómadas digitales en el mundo de la publicidad, nos tambaleamos bajo el peso de montones de tarjetas perforadas, sentimos cómo encajan nuestros cuerpos en la silla Aeron, respondemos al teléfono en la cama de Hugh Hefner y nos desplazamos por el feed de Lil Miquela. Los ensayos fotográficos de Iwan Baan brindan un informe visual posterior a la ocupación de varios proyectos canónicos de oficinas, como el campus de IBM de Marcel Breuer en Florida y el jardín urbano de la Fundación Ford en Manhattan. Cuatro catálogos intermedios ofrecen colecciones de productos de lugares de trabajo experimentales, anuncios proféticos de componentes de edificios de oficinas, componentes de oficinas digitales y representaciones de lugares de trabajo especulativos; cada catálogo conecta la realidad de la oficina con cómo imaginamos sus alternativas.Este libro es un telón de fondo teórico tanto para arquitectos como para empresarios y empleados. Con curiosidad y escepticismo, analiza los espacios y las soluciones que se han diseñado para el trabajo humano, rastreando desde la transformación del trabajo a la ocupación, de las tarjetas perforadas al "playbor" y de la experiencia vivida de hoy a los futuros impredecibles e imaginados del mañana.

Edition details

• Publisher: TASCHEN
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3836574365
• ISBN 13: 9783836574365
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 592