OFFICE
BUILDINGS
....BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD
The infrastructure of any business is important however maintenance is a component of any building and business. Do the various teams of those responsible for the designing of the buildings actually consult with those professions such as the facilities manager before they construct a building?
This would seem logical in the foundations of ensuring that they know the building from the drawing board through to the building being erected and maintenance is an aspect of this which is vital for staff to feel comfortable in their working environment.
The dictionary definition of architecture is: the art and
science of designing
and supervising the construction of buildings and the style of building or structure.
But do they really have an insight to improve the buildings once people are occupying them?
I was travelling by the London Transport one day on my way to work. When I noticed the differences in the building designs, old and new. The contrast was great between them. I wondered if the people back in ancient days who were deemed by this generation to be backwards in intelligence and only lived in mud huts and caves then how come they built such magnificent buildings whilst "modern" society has a stack them up high policy with such technology to build something equally as beautiful and practical doesn't.
I asked a partner in an accountancy firm why this was, he replied "perhaps we have lost the knowledge", I replied "nonsense, if mankind wanted to find out how it was done they would have done so especially with 3-D Computer Aided Design software being available".
"We shape our buildings' thereafter they shape us" Winston Churchill
For example there are two tall modern buildings and towers in the world which are the 'CN Tower' in
Toronto and the 'Sky Tower' in Auckland. Also the ancient
building which holds the WorldCentre of Vedic Learning in India is 2,000 feet in height
but the base is wider than today's modern buildings and not so narrow. The city that has
the most towers is New York with twenty-eight and the least is London, Las Vegas, Paris,
Jakarta, Perth, Warsaw to name but a few listed.(1)
Definitions of words can be applied many different ways. 1-D is not to be mistaken for 3-D+. Call it bi-laterial thinking.
Now it seems that architects want to build an "Erotic Gherkin" that is a 41-storey tower on the former Baltic Exchange site and it would be overshadowing the Tower of London(2). In the diagram shown in the newspaper it does indeed look like a gherkin but perhaps more like a symbolic dildo and when evening falls upon the sky it would be glowing with office lights left on and give an affect of a.....
But to "Give an Office that Hotel Touch" means to rent just enough
space and all you need by offering small to medium size business somewhere to go which is
affordable and not only concentrating on large 
buildings. As stated that you should "be able
to rent from as short as a month at a time to several years and if you are a start-up
business you can easily increase your space with the telecommunication and information
technology available [from open commercial centres]." They liken it to hotels for
business. (3)
You would imagine this to be a good idea because during down-turns in the eighties many office buildings were redundant without passing the benefit of occupancy to those who really needed it at the time and even now, such as the start-up business in small units within a building block sharing meetings rooms rented to those who need to meet clients in an office environment instead of the hotel lounge or coffee bars etc and or other such initiatives.
Also during the spring seasons I see magpie's birds more often now in the city plus in the past I think I saw what was a kestrel and a partridge bird, never used to. On British television they did a documentary on wild animals from the countryside now living in the urban areas a few years ago, interesting programme. I used to see foxes and squirrels to on a daily basis. Talk about bringing the countryside into the city, better that way than the city in the countryside! Sometimes, people are so busy to stop and notice these wonderful things, pity.
"Architecture is art you can walk through" Dan Rice.
In regards to the office environment I am
still trying to work out if the remedies on offer eg. flower scents in the ventilation
system, soft music, pot plants, colour designing and feng shui in the office is trying to
make people work faster or just better. I once
worked at a company for a short time, they had
piped music in the open-planned office.
The reason they played music all day was because they had us check accounts all day, figures, figures and more figures. I asked the women on the desk how long they had been doing this job for expecting them to say a year or so. Nope, one woman was doing the same job for over fourteen years, no change nothing new. The other had been doing it for well over twenty years and was looking forward to her pension. Somehow, I didn't envisage sticking around that long until there were cobwebs surrounding me, music or no music.
Perhaps it was the lack of planning when designing the office buildings and when forming the company from a business plan was based solely on their own personality and not for successors of the building. It isn't given priority of who, where, how and when the structure would fit into the concept for growth or shrinkage at any given time in a business environment...now where did I put that darn pen?
REFERENCE SOURCES:
(1) Financial Times Newspaper, article on The World's Tallest Building on 15th April 2000 written by Justin MacInerney.
(2) Financial Times Newspaper, article on Erotic Gherkin Given Go-Ahead, 21st July 2000 written by Charles Batchelor.
(3) Financial Times Newspaper, article on Give Your Office that Hotel Touch, 6th/7th May 2000 written by David Blackwell.
(4) Sunday Business Newspaper, article on Excess Office Space Hits City Lettings, 14th November 1999 written by Richard Fletcher.
(5) Sunday Business Newspaper, article on Construction Industry Voted World's Most Corrupt Trade, 13th Feburary 2000.
WEBSITE SOURCES:
Royal Institute of Architecture
Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors
Building Online Magazine
Today's Facilities Manager Magazine
Facilities Management Channel
Interiors & Sources Magazine
Health & Safety Executive Online
American Health & Safety Online