If you’re embarking on a new office design project, there are two directions you can go: innovate or replicate. New and exciting or stale and boring. Some companies are embracing innovation to the point where they want to show off their new office space to the world, if only to make the rest of us jealous. One of those companies is Facebook.
According to Curbed, Facebook recently opened up its new offices in New York. The company is so proud of the new office design that they’re kicking things off with an unveiling and a feature article in the Wall Street Journal. Facebook’s new 185,000-square-foot office space in the historic Wanamaker Building at 770 Broadway near Astor Place, is “home to 500 employees and engineers. The floors have open layouts, there’s a full service cafeteria and a library, as well as all of the things that one thinks of when picturing a hip tech company office, i.e. gaming tables, exposed ceilings, and custom-made art,” says Curbed’s Jessica Dailey. She highlights a few particular features of the new office space, including:
- Art on the walls that embodies the ethos of the Facebook engineering culture
- A variety of meeting spaces
- An office library paneled in Douglas fir plywood
- Large meeting areas
- Original architecture
In the midst of its own office redesign, Wired Magazine recently took a look at the grim past in an article titled “The Saddest Office Cubicles We Could Find.” According to Wired, “In 2007, WIRED.com (then known as ‘Wired News’) asked readers with particularly depressing office cubicles to submit photos of their plight. People hated their cubicles—and rightly so. They didn’t offer any real privacy, but were incredibly effective at communicating office hierarchy. The hatred of this terrible design was clear: Our gallery of “winners” of the saddest-cubicle contest still holds the record for WIRED’s most popular post ever. Today, WIRED is in the midst of its own office redesign, casting off the last vestiges of cubiclean separation to join the popular open-floor-plan mania that has overtaken offices in Silicon Valley and beyond. In recognition of this pivotal moment in American workplace-design history, we’re resurrecting the long-forgotten saddest-cubicle gallery, and issuing a new call for submissions.”
Going into your own office redesign, the last thing you want is to have one of your cubicles end up on this list. The best way to do that is to avoid cubicles in the first place and go for a much more effective redesign that encourages worker happiness and productivity. The experts at Office Space Planners can do just that for you. Our expert designers and project managers have decades of combined experience and education in the areas of interior design, space planning, computer aided design, drafting, corporate office relocation management, project management, ergonomics and systems furniture. We provide a host of services, including analysis, commercial space planning, project management, and move coordination.
