As a nexus of technology, community, and the locus of our livelihood, the workplace is a topic of perpetual interest in architecture and interior design. The novel coronavirus pandemic, however, has disrupted the workplace in ways that few pundits anticipated. Previously, design firms, industry specialists, and academic researchers speculated on the efficacy of open offices, team-based workspaces, self-employment and co-working, occupant loads, real estate efficiency, mobility, flexibility, communications tools, and artificial intelligence.
In light of the work-from-home orders around the nation, professionals are reconsidering and even predicting the reversal of some of the trends listed above. One trend undergoing reversal is the increase in population densities in team-based, open office configurations. “Densification will take a hiatus,” said Janet Pogue-McLaurin, Gensler global workplace practice areas leader, in a Vox interview. “We’ll shift to, ‘How do we dedensify to create the physical distancing that we now need to have?’” New COVID-19 protocols will require greater physical separation in workplaces via spatial, physical, and temporal means. Workstations will be spaced further apart, conference rooms depopulated, space-dividing partitions erected, and staff issued rotating schedules. For example, a portion of employees will come to the office on a given day, while the rest will work remotely.
Commercial building owners and corporate CEOs are fully aware of the change. Now that office tenants have carried out a largely successful pivot online, companies are questioning their traditional investment in expensive real estate. “We’ve proven we can operate with no footprint,” Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman told Bloomberg. Two Trees Management owner Jed Walentas notes the impracticality of pre-COVID expectations. “If you got two and a half million people in Brooklyn, why is it rational or efficient for all those people to schlep into Manhattan and work every day?” he asked in a New York Times interview. “That’s how we used to do it yesterday. It’s not rational now.”