3 ms·

Cheaper, but also worse for employee health and morale, is not necessarily cheaper in the long-term. Movable glass walls and partitions address most of your ot

• willyt 13y ago
  As an architect and as a human that has had to work in these kind of offices, I completely agree. But the spec of offices is usually decided by a developer to maximise rental income, not the convenience of the end user. It's pretty unusual for a company to have it's own headquarters built to a custom design these days. In fact, you usually have different architects designing the shell and core to those designing the fit out. The developers architect designing the shell and core will have been instructed to maximise the lettable area based on the assumption that the fit out will most likely be open plan as that what the rental market is asking for. The fit out design will typically be done by the the lessor's architect after the shell and core is under construction. So yes, you can fit out partitions for lots of cellular offices but they will cost you a massive amount of money in rent as you will waste quite a lot of Net Office Area in doing so. Bear in mind that typical Cat 1 office rents in London are about £500 to 700/m2/year. If you really cram people in like call centres you allow about 6m2 per person out of Net Office Area. Boutique corporate lawyers more like 12-15m2. Resulting cost per staff member of £3000 to £10000 per year just to rent their desk space. So a company like Google with a progressive attitude and more money than they know what to do with will fit out to maximise productivity, but most others will fit out to minimise rental costs.