The European Office

Architectural Review, The, June, 2000 by Francis Duffy

By Juriaan van Meel. Rotterdam: 010

Publishers. 2000. NLG49,50

Doctoral dissertations aren't supposed to be readable. Nor are they expected to be directly relevant to the real world, let alone to that highly specialized part of it we call architectural Practice. Jurian van Meel's beautifully produced and elegantly illustrated account of the underlying reasons for the differences between office design in the UK, Germany, Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands demonstrates, among many other things, that both these commonly held expectations can be completely wrong.

Juriaan van Meel trained as an architect at the Technical University of Delft where he stayed on to conduct this research. The method adopted is a series of comparative case studies of typical building forms, floor plates and workplaces set in the context of a thorough comparative analysis of urban settings, market conditions, labour relations, culture and regulations in the five countries studied. The great advantage of the technique is that a strong sense of the diversity of European office design and business cultures quickly becomes apparent. Glib generalizations about working conditions, whether emerging from the European Commission or, for that matter, from Millbank Tower or from the Tory Central Office, can now be tested against a critical framework. Two complementary weaknesses emerge: there is not quite enough operational or social detail about the individual cases nor is there a complete, theoretical explanation of why the differences have emerged and how they are likely to develop.

Of course, that is asking rather a lot of single dissertation. Karl Marx himself would have been hard put to defend himself on both counts. What heads of schools of architecture might be interested to observe is that this dissertation, written directly in clear, jargon-free English, is only one of a series of PhD dissertations on similar architectural subjects, carried out with comparable sophistication, now emerging from what has become the most impressive school of architecture I know, either in North America of Europe. What architects in practice will be delighted to discover is that architectural research, relevant to their day to day concerns, can it seems, at last, be conducted in a University, even if it has to be a Dutch Technical Institute.

Francis Duffy acted as advisor and external examiner far TUD on Furriaan van Meel's disseration.