You are building something new.
What is actually driving this
You are starting from scratch, or settling into a first permanent home.
The budget is small and the horizon is long.
Some of the people have come with you from somewhere else, and brought their habits.
You already know that if this works, the space will be too small.
A new build is the cheapest moment to get this right. If you do it properly now, it will carry you a long way.
What gets decided in the next few weeks
Where, and where exactly.
How much space, against a growth assumption you cannot yet test.
What you sign, and for how long.
How the first thirty people work — which becomes how the first three hundred work.
A shape fixed for the organisation you are, not the one you are becoming.
Early spatial decisions become cultural defaults. Daylight reaching the desks furthest from the window raises measured productivity by 5 to 6%. (Turan et al., 2019) The depth of the floor plate settles how far it reaches.
These things get decided by whatever was available and affordable in a given month. Then they stay, long after anyone remembers choosing them.
There is nothing to renew here. Only to set.
A new build resolves into a new location and a new building, and it is the only situation in which everything is new at once: the people, the face, the infrastructure, the habits, the culture.
That is the largest degree of freedom an organisation will ever have over its own conditions. It is normally spent in a week, by whoever had time.
A new address becomes the front door. The old one stays, and stops being the face.
The configuration decides how much of the organisation changes with it. It is settled before an architect is hired, usually by whatever was available.
The evidence that applies here
5–6%
Higher measured productivity in daylit workspace
Set by floor plate depth, window position and desk layout. All three are decided before an architect is briefed.
12%
Quicker reaction times in a planted office than a bare one
One of the few conditions that stays cheap to change later, which is why the early budget is better spent elsewhere.
0.5–0.9%
Fewer illness symptoms per 1000 ppm of CO₂ removed
Air supply per person is fixed by the plant you install. Replacing it later means opening the ceiling in every room.
Published in full at The Built Review ↗
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