The living workplace : a conscious work environment for a small publishing company

Abstract

This thesis is about the oneness of working and living, and about the making of workplaces that support and encourage the idea that one's work can be an integral part of one's life. The opening position is that there is a "paradigm shift" occurring in our society which influences the way that we think about our work in relation to our lives. Rather than experiencing work as a separate entity in time and space from our home life, work can be fully engaged in our lives; an activity that requires us and interests us, which helps us to find meaning and makes us care. Our friends and families can know our work and spend time with us in our workplace. Our personalities and actions can be both similar and complimentary in the work environment and the home environment. The search in this thesis is for ways of making work environments that acknowledge our current culture, society, and technology, yet respond to and support this "new" way of working and living. This search involves an investigation into working and workplaces in pre-industrial and early industrial times: an analysis of how ·people worked and how they interacted with the settings in which they worked. This analysis provides clues which are then used to propose ways that a modern building might support an integrated attitude about living and working. The design project is for a small office building in Cambridge, Massachusetts for Linguistics International, a publisher of foreign language and computer science college textbooks, currently based in Boston. Linguistics is a suitable subject for this project for several reasons: books--information-are an important icon of our times and for our society; editing/publishing is a creative process; perhaps most importantly, the project addresses the design of white-collar office work and the office environment, the most common type of workplace in our information-based economy.