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Architecture – Part 2: Material manifestations of our ideals and morals

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Your office purely a functional, clean and sterile environment whereas your house is a warm and cosy place where you can really feel at home. This cliché has influence architecture in the last half century. It has created uninspiring and dull workplaces on one hand and sentimental old-fashioned houses on the other hand.

Escape from reality

The architectural style of our workplaces is greatly influenced by Protestantism. Offices are supposed to be functional and sober places, aesthetics is a secondary value of a building. In the 20th century, architecture was greatly influenced by modernism. Modernist architects believed that buildings should be all about functionality. By leaving out the aesthetics, people were supposed to become happier because they no longer needed to worry about beauty. The purely functional building has proven to be a myth because the inhabitants are always looking for aesthetics. Whereas workplaces tend to look modern, houses are often designed to resemble buildings made in the pre-industrial era. It’s as if the industrialisation went too fast, we still have this feeling of nostalgia when we look at a classic house made of bricks with a triangular roof. In buildings people tend to look for elements they themselves lack. Our home has become a shadow of the past, a dream we escape to after a hard week of labour.

Having a taste that leans towards the old-fashioned is very understandable. After all, when we go on holiday to a foreign country we don’t look for banks and warehouses, we look for ruins and cathedrals. Does this mean we should design our workspaces to look like roman temples? Of course not. Aesthetics in architecture are material manifestations of our ideals and morals. The Catholic Church used to build enormous cathedrals because they felt it would bring them closer to God. If you lack that strong believe then designing your home or your office to resemble a cathedral is probably not the best option. A recreation of something that isn’t truly yours very rapidly turns into a piece of sentimental pastiche.

The ideals of a building

When picking its own working office a company must be aware of the ideals it wants to reflect. In other words what does your building tell you about yourself? What does it tell other people about you? When you enter a cathedral you immediately know you’re entering a religious place, why can’t this be the same with workspaces? You actually have to enter an office before realising what the company does but even then it can remain ambiguous what it stands for until you meet the people.  If an image is worth a thousand words, a workspace can be worth a thousand images. The right building, the right colours and lines can tell you a lot about a company with just one glance.

To understand what the building of a workspace should look like, we must imagine what it would be like if it were a person, one of your own employees: What kind of clothes would it wear? What would be its working rhythm? What would it have for lunch? Would it be a talkative employee? If so, what would be its favourite subject in a conversation? What does it think of hierarchy? How would it greet its fellow employees?

Your workplace, your building

Companies being able to build their own workspaces, doesn’t that sound like a utopian dream? A dream only large enterprises are able to realize. And when a large enterprise orders a specific kind of building, does the architecture serve to reflect the ideals of the company or of the employers? Small companies usually rent an empty office, they can only influence the interior decoration while the employers can only decide on what’s on their desk.

We live in an age where specific types of buildings are being mass-produced. “Orange brick triangles are for living and grey concrete rectangles are for working”. The shapes of our buildings are largely  determined by property developers who are afraid of experimenting with new forms. They prefer to construct buildings according to “what people want”. What they don’t seem to understand is that it’s impossible to know what people want unless you give them a choice.

What are the elements of an ideal working space? It all has to do with the location, colour, materials, construction style and arrangement of light & space. The shape these elements have to take depends on the type of activities of a certain company and their culture. What we need is an architect who can communicate with different kinds of companies, an architect who spends time with companies to understand the different kinds of people and the company culture.

Architecture has the potential of making employees happier and attracting the right people. The style and shape of working places  should be determined not by property developers but by architects who aren’t afraid to experiment. Architects who have knowledge and experience in working places. Architects shouldn’t just spend their time reading books, they should do field research to understand the qualities of a company that can be translated to the working space.

Sandro Algra.B


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