In this post, Julie Zook and I sit down to discuss some key headlines of our recent co-edited book, The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture, which was published open access with UCL Press on 22 March 22. Health as social, hospitals as social We conceived The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture in late 2019, just…
Joanne K Rowling is a genius for many reasons. The world of Harry Potter that she has created is fascinating for adults and children alike. It is also a world that has become the subject of research – there is an annual Harry Potter Conference in Philadelphia, where literature scholars debate the paternal atonement of…
While I normally write about space and buildings and how they are used, I want to blog about blogging today. More specifically on getting students to blog. There is a lot of interest in academic blogging, so it’s time we think about starting the next generation of academics – our students – early and get them to…
A couple of weeks ago, floor plan and seating arrangements of the 250 people running the General Election campaign for the Labour party were revealed in the Guardian. The article outlined teams and their tasks, where they all sat and how the war room operated on a day-to-day basis. It is a fascinating account of life inside a…
I’ve recently read Scott Berkun‘s excellent book ‘A Year Without Pants‘, where he reports from his experiment of working for Automattic (the wonderful guys behind WordPress). He was tasked with the introduction of team structures into the perceived chaos of an entrepreneurial, DIY-minded and bazaar-like organisational culture. The book is remarkable on various accounts: It…
This last post in the series ‘ Five Things You Might Not Know About Offices‘ will focus on the issue of workplace configuration, more specifically it will look at open-plan offices. The open-plan office has taken a battering recently both in the media with headlines such as “Open-plan offices were devised by Satan in the…
This week’s blog post of the series ‘Five Things You Might Not Know About Offices‘ will look a bit closer at the activities of people in offices; more specifically, it will focus on movement. There isn’t really a myth to be dispelled this time, I rather want us to take a fresh look at how…
Myths and common preconceptions about offices and workplaces abound. We are almost constantly bombarded with supposedly new ideas about management, workplace design, workplace trends and the general debate on the ‘future of the office’. Quite often it is merely terminology that is reinvented (‘Agile Working’), attempting to add a new sparkle to old (and possibly…
Last week saw the opening of the newly refurbished Tate Britain, which was much acclaimed by art and architecture lovers alike. The Millbank riverside main entrance was re-opened and the central entrance space underneath the rotunda was transformed by Caruso St John Architects into a stunning three-storey space connecting the lower ground floor via a spiral…
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal on ‘The New Science of Who Sits Where at Work‘ highlighted some interesting facts about behaviours of people in the workplace: the fact that 40-60% of our interactions are with immediate office neighbours; that bringing people from different teams and departments into close proximity can increase productivity;…
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