When things get back to normal (whatever that might mean), will everything have changed, or not very much at all?
This post argues that the office ion its current form can’t and won’t survive an era of social distancing. As long as physical distancing is required, no part of modern office design can work effectively, reversing its social value as well as its physical utility;
The “corner office”, blocked off in an open-plan space for senior bod, no longer has social capital when the main reason people work in an office is because they haven’t got the space at home to work remotely.
The post stresses how little physical change there has been to offices in the last half century, though in doing so perhaps understates the degree of social change which those physical structures have absorbed. But the more immediate question is whether the current hiatus in office life will be a driver for more radical change and the argument here is that it will be, both by choice and by inexorability.
All that makes it interesting to read alongside Matt Juke’s post which argues to an opposite conclusion.
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