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An update on workplace product now months into covid, with a Manhattan and Brooklyn perspective - thread
We have seen spaces and landlords that would’ve only considered leases months ago shift to management agreements. This is not just a theory, it’s happening.
This comes at the drastic reduction of TI and free rent which has increased downward pressure on the product that can be deployed by reducing budgets and timelines
What’s the ‘right’ design for an office space that will only exist for 2 or 3 years instead of 15?
Can we really take a year to design and build something that will only be used for 3 years?
There’s an ethical aspect to this question that people aren’t considering. Waste, and the planet.
Construction is footprint-heavy and as such it is a poor tactic for deploying temporary environments. We must start asking ‘how long does this space NEED to last for’
Life expectancy is now a variable input instead of the previously assumed ‘given’ of infinity (or at least 20 years) in commercial interiors
This is a huge change for any design team dealing w physical environments. Changes the whole downstream system.
Specifying environments that require on site construction becomes a morally questionable decision. This gives off site and prefab product a big leg up but only as long as those products are engineered to be taken apart as easily as they come together
@trycanoa we use ‘life expectancy’ ‘carbon footprint’ (and its several variations) ‘deployability in weeks’ ‘reusability’ ‘recyclability’ ‘cost’ ‘distance from source’ ‘plastic content by volume’ ‘assembly time’ ‘disassembly time’
and many more variables, individually and aggregated to a whole design configuration in order to make decisions
We are building out a framework for construction-free workplace design and deployment to help drastically lower the barrier to fast deployment of fully operational, healthy and sustainable spaces.
And this is not just for us. We hope to bring this to architects, engineers, designers and more so that they can more effectively deploy their own kits or configurations
We believe in open source, so that’s likely the method by which we’ll deliver this
Architecture and engineering specs and drawings ARE software. They should be delivered as such
Finally, Traceability and supply chain matter. Those who repeat ‘means and methods of construction are not in my scope’ are part of the problem
