Changing places

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Cleaners in an Empire State Building office in December 1946. Designed by the firm of Shreve, Lamb & Harman, the Empire State Building was built in 1930 and its interiors reflect the early stages of office design.

The shape of the corporate office has changed dramatically over the last 50 years. Where has office design come from and where is it going?

A hundred years ago, the offices of businesses such as banks and major trading houses were very much the product of the rigidly hierarchical social structures of the time.

Their stately wood-panelled corridors and heavy, tightly closed office doors contrasted strongly with the clerks' floors, which featured little perimeter definition between workspaces.

Eighty years later, the concept of the open-plan office had taken off. Although senior management still tended to hide away, the rest of the firm was generally to be found sectionalised into their divisions in desk clusters, separated by half-height screens.

Where privacy was required, small meeting rooms were incorporated into the floor plan, along with the conventional boardroom. From an interior design point of view, the removal of the traditional solid walls posed a number of issues to be resolved.

Many of these had ramifications for the industry's technical suppliers.

New products had to be developed to absorb and dampen noise between the desk clusters or cubicles. Furniture morphed away from discreet pieces, with the development of modular systems that could be quickly and easily reconfigured and added to as the company grew or the work environment changed.

Storage options were revisited to make use of the dividing surfaces and free up the new smaller, contained desk areas. Power supplies came together at multiple smaller points, rather than one major outlet, keeping cable runs shorter as desks were added or moved.

From the 1990s, colour schemes started to change too, along with furniture and artwork selection for lobbies and breakout spaces. Where once designers were making fashionable choices - many of which dated within a few seasons and had to be continually refreshed - branding and brand values became increasingly important instead.

Company colours started to become the anchor-point for interior schemes, which subsequently gained a shelf-life as long as the brand itself.

If you wanted to speak of quality and dependability to clients and employees, leather upholstery and strong forms underscored the message, while squishy sofas in textured fabrics broadcast approachability and a willingness to listen.

Twenty years further down the track, today's corporate office is, in some ways a natural evolution from these early open plan environments. In others, however, it is the start of completely different trend.

Five years ago, at the international Corenet Global conference of corporate real estate professionals, business strategists from many of the world's leading companies were predicting that the office of the future will be small and efficient, housing only critical central facilities for a payroll that will largely work remotely.

And they appear to be on the money. Such alternative workplace strategies (AWS) started to rear their heads at the end of the 1990s and are becoming progressively more widely adopted.

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