City Guide: Offïce buildings

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There’s a Koolhaas quote for every occasion: “People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more, I think that architecture has nothing to do with it.” Both freeing and depressing, this view might be truest of all about office design.

In the 1880s, the technologies of the steel frame and the lift detached office space from the ground plane, giving us the corporate skyscraper. Since that time, downtown office buildings have often been vertical extrusions of their sites, while the lower floor–area ratios on city fringes have allowed more freedom to shape buildings to create distinctive spaces.

Just as technology enabled the advent of the skyscraper, a little over a century later, the advent of laptop computers, mobile phones and WiFi allowed workers to be unshackled from their desks. Things that had previously been important in office design – uniform lighting, the ability to rearrange cabling, orderly positioning of desks to reflect organisational structures – diminished or disappeared. The specialist stuff people needed to do their work – product catalogues, company libraries, paper records, drawing boards, adding machines – vanished, much of it into computers or onto CDs and then into the cloud, and office design became largely about supporting the relationships between workers and their computers (which is fairly easy), and between the workers and their colleagues (which is