LIVE / WORK : utopian and dystopian visions that don’t seem like science fiction anymore
The trend toward a remote work lifestyle is not new. For many knowledge workers in America, there has been a slow, gradual movement away from the traditional office space popularized in the ‘60s where individuals in suits, wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses, carrying calculators in their breast shirt pockets banged away at typewriters, answering ringing phones, clocking in and out of neat rows of cubicles. Today, we see a much more geographically and temporally dispersed, networked way of working: emerging trends like distributed teams in multiple cities and time zones across the globe, communal co-working spaces like WeWork offering flexible office rentals to startups and large companies alike, companies like Basecamp and Invision abandoning offices all together in favor of an entirely remote / distributed workforce, and the emergence of the “gig economy” and “digital nomads” where new age tech-hippies take on continuous contract work via teleconferencing while roaming the earth like Caine in Kung-fu.
For the most part, before 2020, these trends had been somewhat sporadic — most companies were still renting large office spaces in cities and office parks or building corporate campuses filled with workstations and conference rooms, cafeterias, mailrooms. But in March of 2020, everything changed. When the COVID pandemic hit, suddenly every company, every household, and every individual in America was forced to stop, re-imagine their work situation, and figure out how they could adapt to a new reality in which the office place no longer existed.
At that moment, we were all forced to scramble the fighter jets and adapt to the unexpected arrival of a Live/Work juggernaut in which the boundaries between office life and home life were torn asunder. People adapted, they built ramshackle office spaces out of garages and walk-in closets, turned bedroom walls into makeshift kanban boards to manage parent / kid schedules, they wired up makeshift workstations like something out of the Matrix, and some people even relocated to the countryside or remote mountain cabins to save on rent and avoid the zombie apocalypse. In spite of the insanity of these times, we will eventually get to the other side of 2020.
What is unclear however, is what the other side of 2020 will look like. What impact will this year’s system-shock have on the future of our cities, offices, and work/life culture? What if Live/Work is here to stay? What would a society and environment that centers around a distributed work culture look like? What new modes of living and working can we imagine where the office as we know it ceases to exist?
mixed use urbanism : the rise of adaptive reuse
One of the looming questions facing the post-pandemic world is its impact on the commercial real estate market in our urban centers. For some companies, the COVID pandemic has called into question the purpose of having large centralized offices, especially in major cities like San Francisco and New York, where rents and the overhead costs are extremely high. Ever since companies were forced to shift to a work from home model, there has been a slow, looming exodus away from city centers as more and more companies shift to cheaper and more distributed modes of working.
Because of COVID, many companies have begun to discover the benefits of a distributed workforce: saving on rent and office space, time efficiencies gained when employees do not have to commute, and access to a limitless pool of talent when location is no longer a constraint. Some companies such as Google outlined plans for an extended work-from-home policy for the foreseeable future, while others like Facebook and Twitter announced that they would be shifting to an entirely work-from-home model permanently. Many employees began to move away from expensive cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, to suburban communities or even to inland States in order to save on rent and to afford larger, more comfortable homes with extra square footage for home office spaces, etc.
Real estate analysts have forecasted that the pandemic will result in thousands of vacant and underused spaces across the country (New York Times, Sept 1st, 2020), especially among commercial office buildings and large retail spaces. On the housing front, while the number of homes for sale in more expensive cities like San Francisco have spiked, the majority of cities have seen an intensifying housing shortage, as people have started moving inland seeking larger and more affordable places to live. Nationally, the demand for housing has remained surprisingly strong in many cities. Office space on the other hand may see a shift in scale, openness, and layout, where it may become less about densely packing in as many workstations as possible to maximize headcount, to a focus on providing great amenable places for employees to come together to collaborate, build relationships, connect as a community, and develop their careers.
While it may be easy to see this pandemic as an impending commercial real estate crisis, some investors, developers, and designers have tried to see it as a creative opportunity: a potential impetus for novel mixed-use and adaptive reuse development. It would require re-imagining zoning in many American cities, but there are many benefits that could emerge from redefining zoning and building occupancies in our cities for more flexibility. A shift towards mixed-use occupancies would help to make buildings more adaptable to respond to changing market conditions, reducing risk for developers, avoiding the inefficiencies of having unleasable half empty commercial or residential buildings. For tenants, mixed-use developments also provide a more varied, textured, and interesting urban fabric.
One area that has been hit hard by the pandemic is retail, particularly shopping centers and large department stores. Many malls and department stores across this country have been on the decline, and the pandemic has hastened this trend. At the same time, innovative projects have begun to emerge where developers have found creative ways to adapt old retail spaces to new uses. In New York, the Neiman Marcus store at Hudson Yards, which opened a mere year and a half ago is slated to be converted to office space for a large tech company. In Los Angeles, an old abandoned Macy’s department store was reimagined by HLW as a block of mixed-use offices and boutiques connected by outdoor pedestrian arcades.
The LA design firm Omgivning adapted a historic Sears mail-order distribution center into a mixed-use development including commercial offices, recreation, and retail spaces by carving out atriums within the massive monolithic building blocks to serve as “activity cores” with access to daylight and introducing “interior building facades” for offices and retail.
Mixed office/residential/retail developments are not new, and in many cases, they provide a much richer, vibrant urban experience than corporate office-centric occupancies in business districts which see an influx of office workers by day, and become empty deserted shells at night. In Amsterdam, the Valley mixed-use development designed by MVRDV includes a diverse mix of housing, retail, cultural venues, and office spaces in a single building.
As many office developers are faced with the prospect of large scale vacancies in office buildings, there has been some interest in the potential for converting existing office towers to residential or mixed-use complexes.
Many open office floor plates in skyscrapers could easily accommodate 10 to 12 residential units of varying sizes, which is what many developers look for in new residential buildings. While residential uses would require significant upgrades to plumbing and electrical, offices tend to have high ceilings which could allow for the addition of plumbing and HVAC while maintaining enough ceiling height. Despite the pandemic, many office tower projects in our cities have continued construction, but if more and more office towers see increasing vacancies, it will be interesting to imagine how they might be adapted to serve more flexible occupancies.
Despite the many ups and downs, WeWork co-working spaces, WeLive co-living apartments, and the now shuttered early childhood education schools WeGrow offer some ideas as to what a live-work skyscraper utopia could look like. We Company’s experiments in utopian hipster community building for living and working, often by renovating and adapting existing office floors and buildings to provide flexible and diverse activity spaces seem somehow more relevant now within the context of a post-pandemic world where companies and people are increasingly distributed, but still require social connection and mobility.
Imagine your home was on the 27th floor of the Chrysler Building. Every morning at 8 am, you drop off your kids at the elementary school on the 9th floor, stop by the lounge on the 8th floor for your morning coffee and a bagel while answering a few emails, and then return home to your apartment by 9:30 am in time to join the morning standup call with your engineering team. You head down to a cafe on the 3rd floor shopping arcade and grab lunch with colleagues at noon, then head over to a room in the conference center on the ground floor for a team all-hands meeting that includes a number of coworkers living in the building, visitors from other live/work communities nearby, as well as a few out-of-town guests staying in the hotel suites on floors 5 through 8. The skyscraper as a vertical neighborhood.
smart homes : the great IoT leap forward
It seems ever since the Jetsons cartoons in the ‘60s, we have been forever inching towards a smart home future, one where every appliance is smart, from video calling tv sets, to robot vacuum cleaners, to on-demand food dispensers, to digital assistants waking you up in the morning, to automatic toothbrushes that do most of the work for you.
While the pandemic has had a detrimental impact overall on consumer spending, and put a damper on smart home installation services, in the long run, adoption of smart home technologies are projected to accelerate in coming years (ABI Research, August 2020). Consumers spend more and more time at home, and have begun to invest more on home improvements, including upgrades to internet connectivity, updating furniture and appliances, improving lighting, food prep conveniences, improvements to home security, home entertainment, daily housekeeping and other conveniences.
In many ways, the work-from-home economy has also become a do-it-yourself economy. Consumers increasingly expect devices to be effortless to set up, plug and play, instantly integrated, and natural to use. While many current smart home devices may seem somewhat clunky, and not quite ready for prime time, behind the scenes, you can be sure that armies of device and equipment manufacturers are furiously working to improve smart home technologies and user experiences to make them more simple and elegant for widespread adoption.
In the post-pandemic world, audio and video communications will become increasingly ubiquitous and effortless. With the onset of the shelter-in-place mandate this year, video conferencing via laptop computers, mobile phones and tablets have become a daily norm for most people. However, communication devices are evolving.
Smart display speakers like the Amazon Echo Show, Google Nest Hub, and Microsoft Teams Displays, introduce networked and voice-activated smart speakers on tabletops with the ability to instantly make voice or video calls with devices inside and outside the home. You can even send intercom style broadcast messages to all devices in your household from any device.
TVs likewise will likely be increasingly intelligent and connected. The TV will no longer be just for entertainment purposes, but for communication as well. Smart TV boxes with video capabilities seem like a logical evolution. Facebook’s Portal TV takes a first step forward, essentially converting your existing TV into a giant Alexa-enabled smart display speaker capable of delivering a conference-room-like experience for just $150, using a single compact unit mounted to the top of your TV set. Once security and privacy concerns get addressed, we may see the majority of smart television displays come with built-in video conference and voice capabilities out of the box.
Voice-enabled speakers and smart displays will become more and more ubiquitous throughout the household, like having a phone in every room in the 80’s. They are essentially the new phone but much more, they are the access points to the voice-controlled artificial intelligence of your home, as well as the world beyond.
Already today, anywhere you have an Alexa device, you can simply ask Alexa or Google questions to access any information available on the web, make purchases, access connected smart devices, control environmental conditions like lighting, security, and HVAC, all using natural spoken language. It’s so easy, your great grandma or baby nephew can do it.
Security systems like Google Nest and Simplisafe allow for easy installation of smart devices without the need for a professional installer. Installation is as simple as turning the devices on, entering the wifi passcode, and mounting them to the wall. Sensors and cameras monitor security, fire, air quality, water, and smoke — and can be incrementally installed as a kit of parts as the need arises. During the wildfires in California, with air quality being such a concern, air quality sensors and air purifiers (some of which are wifi enabled) flew off the shelves in hardware stores. These systems are infinitely expandable and upgradeable, built up piece by piece from component elements, and increasingly connected over a wifi network.
In the Live/Work world, the home will become an intelligent organism, with the ability sense, controling environmental systems, accessing information through the network, detecting issues and warning of threats in the vicinity and in the world around us. Within the home, interfaces are becoming increasingly invisible; we simply speak to execute commands and information and content are available via displays on our desks, on our walls, and all around us.
towards more sustainable communities
Despite the pandemic, the months of home isolation, rising social and political unrest, raging wildfires, and multiple hurricanes that descended upon our country in 2020, we might, if we look, spot small green shoots on the other side.
For many in the work-from-home world, daily commutes in rush hour traffic or packed like sardines in rail cars have become a thing of the past. People actually walk outside. They see neighbors and take more notice of the world around them — the healthfulness, design, and quality of interior spaces and the character and nature in the communities around them. Many households have begun to question whether they need multiple cars, and driving seems more about an outing, the destination, rather than a necessary routine or grind.
Access to goods and services in the Live/Work world will continue to accelerate towards intelligent, networked and increasingly efficient delivery mechanisms. The 2020 pandemic has made having an online presence more and more essential. Inexpensive home delivery of everything is becoming more and more ubiquitous. Gone will be the days when people need to fight traffic and hunt for parking spaces in large crowded lots. As retailers accelerate investments in online technologies, distribution of things will become increasingly decentralized, delivery more intelligent and on-demand.
In cities across the world, the sudden break from the commuter and automotive centric model of urban planning has given people a glimpse of what car free cities could look like. As the pandemic accelerated, enclosed and poorly ventilated public buildings gave way to safer, more open and healthy outdoor spaces. Streetscapes formerly reserved for street parking were temporarily converted to outdoor dining spaces to allow local restaurants to remain in business.
Cities in Asia which had been subjected to decades of continuous smog cover saw a momentary respite as blue skies returned. Meanwhile, in the United States, historic wildfires caused the skies to turn a deep burnt apocalyptic orange color for weeks in September, and for a moment, the country felt an intense heightened awareness of the impacts of air pollution on our environment and the effects that it could have on our future quality of life. Cities across Europe began to experiment with car-free urban planning. Milan announced that it would re-allocate streets from cars to cycling and walking after the pandemic, with similar initiatives being discussed in Paris, Rome, and Berlin. California announced that it would ban the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035.
Imagine a world in which the car is no longer a necessity. Imagine if urban planning and infrastructure investments were focused around healthful pedestrian living rather than motor traffic. Imagine if cities were built for people and not cars. Petrol stations would be replaced with parks, four-lane streets replaced with walkable green spaces and open-air markets. Waterfronts would open up as urban freeways are replaced with pedestrian tourism and leisure scapes. Acres of parking spaces would give way to places people would actually want to visit, public spaces for community interaction and social and recreational activity, opportunities for health, creativity, and wellbeing.
Perhaps as we come out on the other side of 2020, as we surface from our bunkers into the daylight and gather and celebrate in our communities, as we are finally able to hug our neighbors and friends, we will emerge a little wiser, a little more humble, with a renewed appreciation for the little things and optimism about possibilities in the world we make around us.
