Back to the Office

Able to work anywhere – and in unpredictable times, often forced to – we have a tortured relationship with the office today. Desperate to work again in physically shared spaces, we are also now questioning whether offices – and the demanding, alienating rhythms they impose on us – are needed at all.

Offices themselves labour under intolerable forces too: twenty-first-century building regulations suggest redesigning them every seven-to-ten years, managerial strategies typically shift every five years, and employees churn every two. As a result, offices are torn down, stripped out, rethought and renewed with alarming frequency.

With the future of our workspaces so uncertain, Back to the Office works overtime inside the revolutionary offices of the twentieth century, and asks what endured from their architecture, their materials, and the ideologies of work they embodied. New insights are also revealed about the Post-Covid workplace, sustainability, longevity and high quality architecture.

Using before-and-after photography, archival documents, contemporary interviews and critical essays, this book engages corporations, architects, workers, building managers, regulators and others – all in search of the lessons we need to learn from a very recent time when there was an unambivalent enthusiasm for office life. The book also shows unique over-time development of iconic office projects by SOM, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Arne Jacobsen, Herman Hertzberger, Oscar Niemeyer, Gio Ponti, Le Corbusier, Kenzo Tange and many others, spread across four continents.