How Could Covid Rework The Workplace?

Winds in the east, mist coming in,

Like somethin' is brewin' and 'bout to begin.

Can't put me finger on what lies in store,

But I feel what's to happen all happened before.

So Bert confidentially philosophizes to us in 1964's Mary Poppins. Now what happened before in the CRE space is that in the beginning workers lived where they worked. The company town was the original large scale commercial real estate venture. As well company towns were the original pioneers of suburbia. Progressive factory owners fled the filth and disease of the the city for the health and lushness of greener pastures. Francis Cabot Lowell built the first large scale textile mill just outside Boston in 1814.

For a while it looked like the city would give way to the suburb, that is until the skyscraper was conceived as a way for steel rail manufacturers to sell off excess steel capacity in the form of steel columns and beams. The skyscraper, starting with Chicago's 10 story Home Insurance Building designed by LeBaron Jenney in 1884, gave the city a new lease on life. Height was constrained by the absence of mass transit. Only with the opening of the NYC subway in 1904 could enough people be moved to populate the high rise office building - the first of which was the 41 story Singer building on Liberty Street in lower Manhattan completed in 1908.

The original open plan office dates to this period most ingeniously devised in Frank Lloyd Wrights Larkin Administration Building. In the decades which followed the trend was toward lavish windowed C suites on the periphery with the huddled masses in the middle. Originally meant for the more clerical workers, by today even the

engineers and programmers find themselves corralled together much like the assembly workers on the factory floor.

From the 1960s to the 1990s the office cubicle displaced the more open plan office. Robert Probst of the Herman Miller Company researched under what conditions individuals feel at ease, alert, inspired, and are most productive. For some work productivity is greatest in conditions of quiet restful privacy. Other work requires collaboration and is best done by groups in relaxed informal settings. At the same time Probst noted that the worker sitting in the same position at his desk hour upon hour was not a good thing. For Probst it was a question of modulating the time the worker was sitting and standing or moving. Probst never fully managed to cleanse his thinking of 19th century Taylorism: For worker efficiency expert Taylor it was a question of designing the factory floor to extract maximum productivity from the workers body.

Yet the office worker, particularly the office worker involved in design work like engineering or programming, it is not so much a question of his body interacting with the mechanical realm as his brain interacting with the informational or conceptual realm. On that score the body can be something of nuisance, a distraction with its aches and pains. Reclining in repose actually minimizes such distractions, freeing the mind to maximize its concentration. VRT has designed such a place of repose into its cubicle as well as giving it rudimentary storage with shelves, closet and bureau.

Which brings us back to Bert's observation that it has all happened before. Workers once lived on the commercial property itself. VRT believes its high time they do so again - or at least have the option of so doing. More and more workers work from home a few days out of the week to avoid the grueling commute. Why not invert that with workers living a few days at a time in the office ? Now if you think for a moment about travelling, its always better to go somewhere and then stay put for a few days before continuing on to your next destination. Travelling every day tends to exhaust more than refresh. There's no reason this shouldn't be applied to work especially where commutes are long. At the same time this strategy permits for much longer commutes made much less often. Take for instance the situation in NYC. There are not a few who make a two hour long [ each way mind you ] commute to an from Pennsylvania five days a week. With the adoption of the live work pod paradigm, one commutes to work Sunday night, works 3 days until Wednesday night, at which point he returns to PA working from home Thursday and Friday. Who knows ? Maybe another worker has been working from home Monday to Wednesday and then reports to the office for a two day shift. This solves two pressing problems: The lack of affordable housing within the New York Metro area itself. The massive consumption of fuel required in the daily commute. The live work office is the very essence of green thinking at the same time it greatly reduces the stress of commuting.