With all the technological innovation that has occurred in recent years, and after the experience of the pandemic period, we can safely say that the concept of the workplace is undergoing a major overhaul in terms of both the physical spaces themselves and the value that we attribute to them. The office understood in the modular sense, divided into separate rooms, which was considered prevalent until the end of the 19th century, is a model that derives from Vasari’s design of the Uffizi (1560-83), in which the configuration of a sequence of communicating rooms simulated the processing of hardcopy documents. But even with Louis H. Sullivan, whose grasp of technology made possible the shocking architectural innovation of the skyscraper, the structure of the offices remained anchored to the model of the “cellular office”. It was not until Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Larkin Administration Building that we finally saw a move away from the older model divided into separate rooms, toward what we would now call an “open space” design, lacking interior partitions.

This was certainly the first significant change to the working environment and it opened the way to experimentation through the 20th century with illustrious examples that go from Eero Saarinen to the contemporary models advanced by the Spanish Selgascano Studio with its Second Home project.

Over the years, area has dealt a repeatedly with the topic of workspaces, each time approaching the subject from a different critical perspective, but here, with this issue of area interior, we’d like to focus on the interior transformation of these environments. In the last few years, offices have become increasingly similar to domestic spaces. The first examples of the Google Headquarters actually infantilized the workforce, turning the office into an enormous playground, but this was soon found to have the effect of hyper-stimulating the employees, due to the presence of an unending diversity of activities.

In the 21st century, the model of the “separation of spheres” has been definitively abandoned, after reigning supreme for the entire preceding century in which the 24 hours of the day were strictly divided between 8 hours of rest, 8 hours of amusement and 8 hours of work because, thanks to the introduction of new technologies, we have become more interconnected everywhere and can interact with the maximum facility with people spread over every continent. In short, at this point, the office is no longer a closed container but, more are more, a space without borders.

The risk, now widely experienced, is that the world of work, that of our home life and our free time are too often mixed, as Jeremy Myerson, academic and emeritus professor of the Royal College of Art, brilliantly illustrates in the interview he gave our magazine. He describes in detail how this trend is causing the eradication of those physical and mental limits that are necessary between our work life and what is meant to be our private life. The office in the years to come will certainly not disappear, but it will undoubtedly have to undergo a radical change. Its structure will no longer be a repetitive, mind-numbing sequence of rows of identical desks, but will have to be a place that permits a dynamic flow of the work day composed of periods of greater concentration and others of relaxation and socialization, networking and exchanges of ideas.

The projects we propose in this issue attempt to illustrate this new scenario, through the presentation of various types of office systems, ranging from the more standard and traditional model to more complex combinations of mixed spaces where the work-relax alternatives are more obvious.