The strange death of the inspiring workplace

Constant Change, by TONy CRAGG at ONE CHURCHILL PLACE

In the early 2000’s, I had the best job in the world. Nothing could top it. I was working on a project team with some brilliantly talented people to commission, design, project manage and fit-out a new global HQ for the Barclays Group. The CEO’s brief was “create the best building of its type in the world” and we went on one of those crazy trips to the US and Europe to see other marquee global head office buildings. We met the teams who designed and built them and then hired the very best developers, architects, interior designers and workplace planners to take us from a “hole in the ground” to cutting the ribbon in about 38 months.

The team worked with HOK, a genius workplace thinker called Dr Frank Becker, we hired Jack Pringle (who became President of RIBA) to plan the space and design the interiors and he brought in Martha Schwartz to design five interior garden spaces for connecting, collaborating and entertaining. The CEO, Matthew Barrett, opened One Churchill Place in 2005 and I had the pleasure, privilege and life-changing opportunity to own the work stream where we invested in five major modern art-work commissions to bring some colour, creativity and wonder to the meeting rooms and office spaces. I spent some time with the greatest living British artist Tony Craggs in Wupertall while he created a signature piece called Constant Change for the building entrance. If you roll forward from those halcyon days to 2020, then the idea of spending over £200 million on the fit out of a million square-foot skyscraper probably now seems bonkers. In fact, the whole idea of a company having an Office, let alone a grand palatial and light-filled “World Headquarters” probably sounds so twentieth century, it would never now get the go-ahead.

So, just this week I was in an online discussion about the death of the office and, in particular, the increased rarity of that precious resource: a dedicated “Meeting Room”. I remain hopeful that the Barclays building has not yet been ruined, but elsewhere offices have gradually morphed in the last decade from owned, serviced and valued corporate destinations into something very different indeed. For many of us, it’s been a gradual degradation. Corner offices were the first to go. Then printers. Then ALL offices. Then “allocated” desks. Then Meeting rooms. Then the bookable “hot desks” simply became spots for presentee insomniacs. Then open plan spaces were turned into collaborative “hubs” with dehydrated pot plants and tired looking bean bags. On-floor kitchens have morphed into shared printer rooms, sans paper. Canteens were leased as “franchisee opportunities” and coffee became £4 a cup. And then WeWork bought the building and an allocated chair became £250 a month + VAT, though the lobby area was transformed into a convivial bar, with cold beer on tap, so we can network with others in the building who, like us, had no where to actually meet, sit or work. The Office as was is now like a fondly remembered Sony Walkman. A treasured thing of the past.

Perhaps the answer is to follow this change trajectory to its ultimate conclusion and simply skip the nostalgia of the office as ‘place to work’....and we should simply just meet in a good pub...and stay there?