The Post Covid Office

Geoffrey James looks to the time after the Covid crisis subsides in his latest article at Inc.com. Of particular interest is his discussion on the post Covid office. Geoffrey argues that the pandemic has exposed the inherent fragility of the open plan office. The office of the future must provide its workers more private quarters in which there is some assurance that the spread of communicable diseases can be minimized. Separate from the question of mitigation is the matter of the form the office will take in the wake of employees inured to working in privacy and comfort at home. At home employees are by now used to working reclining on the couch and bed. The astute corporation recognizes this sea change, and the need to lure employees back to the commercial office by reproducing - albeit in truncated form - the comforts of work-from-home. To date, resimercial design has concerned itself with reworking the office to resemble the residential living room. In the wake of the Covid crisis the time has come to haul in the part of the residential ensemble down the hall, the facsimile / resimercial equivalent of the bedroom.

VRT has worked up a scheme for incorporating this missing piece of the puzzle - the piece necessary to fully realize the potential of the resimercial office transformation. An office mock up for a fictional company called Gubbins illustrates. ( Gubbins, btw, is an interesting British term meaning the odd assortment of things you need to get the job done: He had the gubbins to change the flat tire on her car. ) Each micro-duplex has a footprint of 100 sq ft: 7.5 ft x 14 ft for a per office footprint of just 50 sq ft. Adding in 'micro' hallways pushes this up to around 60 sq ft.

It was initially VRT's intent to construct microPods with standard sheet goods - the 4' x 8 ' x .75" Melamine panels popular with CNC knock down furniture manufacturers. However it soon became clear such panels are at the wrong scale to provide the aesthetics and strength necessary. The decision was made to use larger format, much thicker hollow core panels. The challenge was in finding a suitable fastener system, one which provided sufficient strength, allowed fabrication on CNC machinery, and allowed for quick assembly in the field. A system which appears to handle these requirements with aplomb is the Lamello Clamex connector. These fasteners constitute a modern update / simplification of the Rotolocks used to quickly assemble and disassemble display walls used by companies to set up at conventions. The nice thing about the Clamex fastener is that all the necessary fabrication can be done on CNC woodworking machinery:

In this video you can see a number of CNC manufacturers including Biesse and HolzHer offering 3, 4, and 5 axis machines capable of fabricating the undercut slots for housing and anchoring the Clamex fasteners.

In the case of VRT's Micro-Duplex units, components are conveniently designed, fabricated, and assembled from lightweight hollow core panels such as manufactured by Panolite, [ You can read this most informative article about Panolite to get an idea of its great work in the lightweight panel industry, which cites its use by such companies as Artopex, Knoll and Teknion ] and machined to accept Lamello Clamex fasteners as shown below:

HolzHer in particular offers a new CNC machining platform, the 7225, very well suited for working with the larger format second generation honeycomb core panels offered by companies such as Panolite. In this video you can see a hollow core panel being machined to accept Lamello Clamex fasteners. Note that with the Clamex camlock system, joints can be mitred at any angle, convenient for hidden connections.

Several micropod business models present themselves: Sublet commercial office space, install micropods, and then lease them at a premium above costs. Or lease micropods to co-working companies to sublease to their tenants.

Or lease directly to tenants. Or pursue the appealing strategy taken by Industrious Office . As I understand, Industrious bypasses the traditional tactic of leasing large chunks of commercial office space in order to sublease smaller ones at a premium. Rather it partners directly with commercial office space owners in the capacity of property manager in a profit sharing arrangement. In keeping with this arrangement, micropods might be set up in commercial office space for some agreed upon percentage of the profit.