There seems to be a growing consensus that we are witnessing a critical moment in office design. It has become apparent that the standardized office environment is unable to keep pace with the changes that are profoundly altering the way we work: the advances in information technology, the growing need for energy conservation, the social and cultural changes concerning the rights of the individual in relation to the working environment, and the increasingly fluid dynamic of new organizational structures.Corporate Fields offers an alternative to the banality of contemporary office design, proposing new kinds of highly collaborative, responsive working environments evolved from an experimental use of design technologies.
Made over a three-year period by design teams working in the Architectural Association's DRL Design Research Lab, the projects have been developed in collaboration with creative companies including Microsoft UK, web designers Razorfish, Arup Engineers, and the advertising agency MßC Saatchi.
In look and feel, Corporate Fields resembles a small-format software manual. It is a piece of design information, offering step-by-step rigorous explanations of the projects through every stage from initial analysis to completed design. This sharing of information is one of the trademarks of the AADRL, a new kind of graduate programme that seeks to reinvent post-professional design education by capitalizing on new design networks and today's interconnected design systems.
In this sense Corporate Fields is dually innovative. On the one hand it sets out radical new concepts of office design. On the other hand it indicates a profound shift in architectural education - a move towards a team-based approach to learning that challenges the traditional Beaux-Arts/Bauhaus model of the student-apprentice trained to emulate his master, the isolated architectural genius.
The book's editor, Brett Steele, is Director of the AADRL. The other authors have all contributed to the teaching in the programme.
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