Working life

Architectural Review, The, April, 1997

There is an almost uncanny similarity between many contemporary expressions of the world of work and the metaphorical arid plain of much Post-Modern thought where everything has equal value, so there can be no directions or pathways. It is no accident that Deconstructionism emerged in the philosophy schools at the same time as received perceptions of space and time began to be dissolved by the revolutions in communications and capital flow. In many ways, the workplace is the arena of contemporary life in which these developments can be seen most clearly.

At the moment, the most obvious instance of the effects of such forces on environments for working in is the hot-desk office, where no-one (except perhaps the few at the very top of the pyramid) has a regular workplace, but each takes a desk as and when it is needed. In some ways, this can be seen as a welcome release from the highly disciplined offices of the first part of this century, with their ethos and layout derived partly from (in our terms) quite primitive industrial organisations, or from military command structures (a strong pattern in an era when two mass wars were fought within a couple of decades of each other). The hot-desking system allows the organisation to maximise the use of its plant, and it can permit individual workers to work flexibly, using centralised or distant facilities as they need them. Ernst Giselbrecht's media centre at Bregenz, Austria (p73) is a case in point, where the journalists use the most up-to-date portable computers connected to headquarters whenever occasion demands by systems of communication so efficient that they could not be anticipated even a decade ago. In effect, the workplace is where the lap-top is, a mobile world in which differences between the individual's space and time and those of the organisation are blurred in a way new to most office workers: in the open-plan prairie of hot desks, individual behaviour can be scrutinised with even more efficiency than the prisoners who were observed in Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon,(1) and the activities of out-of-office workers can be surveyed electronically with almost equal precision. At the same time, work in general moves and changes from country to country with ever increasing freneticism as capital chases low-cost labour(2) round the globe. This is the placeless world of Post-Modernism.

Manuel Castells calls it 'the space of flows' which, he says, 'is not the Orwellian prophecy of a totalitarian universe controlled by Big Brother on the basis of information technologies. It is a much more subtle, and to some extent potentially more destructive form of social disintegration and reintegration ... social meaning evaporates from places, and therefore from society, and becomes diluted and diffused in the reconstructed logic of a space of flows whose profile, origin and ultimate purpose are unknown'.(3) This analysis is very worrying and can lead to the kind of fashionable nihilism embraced by architects like Koolhaas and Eisenman, which in many ways is no more than a whole-hearted celebration of the new values. Plainly, the espousal of the new system and abandonment of traditional human values and notions of place have brought the faux avant-garde much fame and work.

The example is copied by thousands of lesser talents, and now has some of the uncriticised influence among students which PoMo enjoyed 10 or 15 years ago. Such uncritical worship of new technology and organisations resembles that of the interwar Modern Movement. But there is a crucial difference: then, most architects had a burning belief that technology and industry could be harnessed to create a world that would be better for everyone to live in. Now we are frightened of the potential of technology and the mighty market. Together, they are more powerful than any individual or even nation: the harsh choice appears to be between collaboration, or resistance to organisations indifferent to human values which, though (as Castells points out) do not employ murder and torture like those of dictatorships (or at least only in remote countries), are as powerful, and perhaps ultimately more destructive of the spirit of the individual and society.

Yet however powerless architects may feel, however marginalised our traditional concerns with place-making may seem, we are not bound to despair. Castells argues that 'the issue ... becomes how to articulate the meaning of places to this new functional space [of flows]'.(4) He suggests the need for 'symbolic marking of places', and the cultivation of local societies linked to generate a broad social framework - using the communication systems of the space of flows for human ends. David Harvey, the most comprehensive analyst of the Post-Modern condition, believes that there is hope in the increasing 'recognition that the dimensions of space and time matter, and that there are real geographies of social action, real as well as metaphorical territories and spaces of power'.(5)