Future Offices examines the evolving nature of the office as a spatial asset. Rapid changes in culture, technology, and society have upended longstanding notions of offices and the nature of work itself. While companies and capital around the globe have become increasingly consolidated, labor vis-à-vis technology has become increasingly decentralized. The office, traditionally a key spatial interlocutor between labor and capital is caught in an awkward position with typological considerations for architecture.
What should the future office look like? What is the future role of the headquarters? What does the office’s changing role mean for urbanism? The works collected here provide frameworks for understanding the complex and multifaceted nature of contemporary work, manufacturing, and commerce, and they aspire to influence new ways of conceiving architecture at multiple scales. They speculate upon a future where offices acquire new facets as resources of space, knowledge, and production that participate in local and global economic and cultural contexts in new hybridized forms. At the heart of this is a recognition that the new ways in which companies integrate into in society should be reflected in architecture itself.
Ali Rahim is Professor of Architecture and Director of Advanced Architecture Design (MSD-AAD) at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. He is Co-Director of the New York and Shanghai based architectural firm CAP. Mr. Rahim has served as the Studio Zaha Hadid Visiting Professor at the University of Applied Arts (die Angewandte) in Vienna, as the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor at Yale University, and as a Visiting Architecture Professor at Harvard University. Mr. Rahim's books include Future Airports (2020), Asset Architecture 1, 2 and 3 (2016, 2017, and 2018), all published by ORO; Catalytic Formations: Architecture and Digital Design (2012), published by the China Building Press, Beijing; Catalytic Formations: Architecture and Digital Design (2006), published by Routledge, London; Turbulence (2011), published by Norten and Company, New York. He has a forthcoming book on design research titled Catalytic Forms, which is to be published in 2022. CAP Founded in 1999, is known for futuristic designs using digital techniques and the latest technologies for the design and manufacturing of architecture. Projects include commissions by The Museum of Modern Art [New York]; Reebok Shanghai, Lijia Smart Park, Chongqing, Wenjin Hotels, Beijing, NJCTTQ Pharmaceuticals, Nanjing, AMEC Technologies, Nanchang [China]; Samsung, Seoul [South Korea]; and IWI Orthodontics Clinic, Tokyo [Japan]. Other contributors: Verda Alexander Patrik Schumacher
