The title of Veldhoen + Company’s project journal for Macquarie Group’s One Shelley Street in Sydney is It’s Not About the Building. The publication details the financial giant’s revelatory move to team a Californian interior designer with a Dutch workplace strategist to win the battle for talent through progressive workplace practice. Ostensibly, it turned the bank from a corporate filing cabinet into a MacBook overnight.
The journal summarises the cultural impact of workplace design, along with a healthy dose of marketing the virtues of Activity Based Working (ABW). At the time, this was the go-to model for offices but have things changed 10 years on? While ABW is now commonplace in large organisations, there is a more nuanced discussion around agility and which ‘agile’ spaces are conducive to productive work. Most companies adopt sharing ratios of their work points, based on long-observed data that points out that spaces are often at 70 per cent capacity and rarely full on a day-to-day basis. There are furniture and spatial solutions for everything and, while many of these are gimmicks, some, such as the small video conferencing rooms now prevalent in most workspaces, have enhanced the ways in which we interact.