Letter from the Editor
Not long ago, architect Thom Mayne visited Azure’s offices, where he joined a panel of other distinguished design pros to determine the winners of this year’s AZ Awards for excellence in architecture and design. It was a long and exhilarating day of debate and deliberation, full of surprises. Among those surprises was the extent to which the 75-year-old Pritzker Prize winner marvelled at the high quality of submissions in the arena of commercial work. Throughout his career, Mayne explained, it has traditionally been residential projects that break the rules and move design forward, the smaller-scale and private nature of such commissions allowing for greater risk taking among both clients and designers. As he noted while poring over the awards submissions, however, the houses in contention seemed safer and less boundary-pushing than much of the corporate and institutional work on view. His amazement provided much food for thought.
Why, if Mayne’s observation is accurate, do so many of today’s commercial projects and especially workplace designs appear fresher, more advanced and more genre-busting than other categories? Could it involve the fact that today’s workforces have different expectations about their well-being, their technological needs and whatever else it takes to perform their jobs? Might the dynamism of office design today also relate to how corporations themselves are evolving, requiring what were once single-industry or extremely siloed entities to incorporate multiple and often conflicting functions and typologies under one roof? Both of these trends – the changing nature of work and the demands of modern employees – are reflected in this issue, which features workspace designs ranging from large-scale operations that combine offices, showrooms and production facilities in a single building to smaller outfits marked by idiosyncrasy and whimsy.
Dynamic though the office category may be, are we sometimes forgetting, in this rush to create workplaces that people want to be in, that they probably shouldn’t be in them all of the time? As Norwegian designer Bjarne Flur Kvistad, whose family-run firm specializes in making offices “homier,” says in our profile of his practice (“In the Familien Way,” page 86), “work is work and home is home,” meaning that offices should be engaging enough to make the working day smooth and productive but not so enveloping that employees rarely step outside, get fresh air, lead lives separate from work. This push-pull dynamic is what makes commercial design so challenging to get right – and perhaps, as Mayne suggested, the sector that will define our time.
Incidentally, you can read all about the winners of this year’s AZ Awards, to be unveiled at a gala in Toronto on June 21, in our July/august issue. In the meantime, set aside your work for a moment and peruse this edition; I think you’ll find it both revealing and worthwhile.