Micro Office With Retractable Couch For The Low Ceiling Office

In previous posts, VRT proposed a micro office / couch design where existed high ceilings of 9 feet or more. Older office buildings often come with much lower ceilings of 8 feet or less. To deal with this challenge, VRT has designed a micro office with a retractable rather than fixed couch. VRT proposes to use industry standard extruded aluminum T slot profile bars. These bars are high strength, lightweight, and offer many options for making connections. VRT's strategy is to configure the bars as a skeleton - much like as is done in conventional wood framing - then sheathe the framework with panels faced with attractive sound suppressing carpeting.

For clarity the built in couch is not shown. The micro office dimensions are roughly 60 inches by 108 or a footprint of 45 sq ft. Adjusting for hallway / access space this conveniently rounds up to around 50 sq ft - not much larger than the footprint of the typical office floor plan. In this way employees who need a place to work undisturbed, removed from the hustle and bustle of the open plan office can be accommodated yet without gobbling up too much real estate.

As well, for tasks as well accomplished lying down as slouched over a desk, a fold up couch easily deploys to create a cozy spacious place to work in repose. For instance, reading, deep thinking, spreadsheet management, document preparation are all tasks where greater concentration comes from lying down to work. In that case the micro office quickly converts as seen in the drawing below.

VRT is much impressed with the convertible quarters devised by the Pullman Rail Coach Company beginning in 1865. The story George Pullman told is of travelling from one end of the country to another having to sit upright day and night, night and day. This he decided will never do - and set out to sketch up plans for cars that convert to sleepers by night. What I never realized is that Pullman owned these cars and staffed them with conductors, waiters, cooks, and porters. Pullman simply leased locomotives run by the railroad companies to

convey the cars around the country. Finally, for railroad buffs, all trains whether freight or passenger used to be fairly short comprised of 7 or 8 cars because braking had to be done individually on each car. The brakemen had to turn something resembling a steering wheel on one car, than scramble over the top to another car and activate its brake. It was only with the invention of the air brake in 1869 by another George, George Westinghouse, that the brake problem was solved and train lengths greatly increased.

Pullman transformed the arduous ordeal of rail travel into a refined a relaxing affair. VRT hopes to bring something of that to the office environment with its convertible micro office. The mechanical mechanism uses extruded aluminum T slots, two pivot points, and a couple of gas tension springs

with built in dampers to make folding and unfolding the couch effortless. This is illustrated in the

schematic below.

In a future post VRT will release more detailed and precise mechanical drawings - at the moment in development with the excellent online CAD program OnShape.com. To get an idea of what

some 18 micro offices with a footprint of 30' by 30' looks like see the complete drawing set featured below.