In our contemporary urban landscapes, corporate offices often embody the principles of capitalism and rationalism, emphasizing efficiency, productivity, labour and cost-effectiveness. There is arguably no greater example of where function, IS the design brief, than the office and workplace environment. This linear efficiency is not limited to the floor plate, but also the modernist obsession with placing our cities on geometric, operational grids.

The austere minimalism or clinical nature of some office spaces, with their harsh lighting and utilitarian design, can evoke feelings of detachment from the experience of being a human and may create the association of being an economic asset, made for labour and productivity. A lack of fascination, beauty, sensory stimulation, refuge or non-linear form affects our perception, potentially leading to heightened neurophysiological stress and subsequently inhibiting our capacity for creativity, attention, learning and problem-solving. This depressing effect is further exasperated by the sedentary nature of modern office lives, designed to keep us productive and immobile.

Perception is an embodied activity. Movement, touch, and orientation in space are necessary to encode our environment and make sense of them. And yet, very rarely do these requirements materialize in our office environments. Surfaces are clinically smooth, clear-desk policies remove all restorative stimuli from our focal vision and depersonalised of space further dehumanises our experience.

Modern offices can be thought of as one of the most important architectural genres to support and promote innovation, intellectual thought, cognition, learning and creativity. And yet little or nothing is known about how the design of officescapes, office buildings or workplaces mediate  neurophysiological stress and our subsequent cognition. If the future of our economies and humanity is dependent on the product of these environments, shouldn’t we ensure that our environments are effectively designed, managed and operated to optimize the basis of what it means to be a human at work?