Working Without Walls:
Let Us Learn from Our Larger Cities
By David S. McIntosh
The marketing guru Seth Godin has a thumbnail sketch of the history of
economics. In the agricultural era the way to get rich was to have the biggest
farm. In the industrial era, it was to have the biggest factory. Today, in the
information age, it is to have the biggest idea. And the biggest idea of all is
continuous innovation. Like sharks, businesses need to keep moving if they are
to survive.
Despite what one sees in the movies, innovation is not a solitary activity. The
telephone was invented in downtown Boston. The Internet was invented in a
handful of university towns. Innovation is a social activity, something that
happens in communities. What is it that makes communities, both virtual and
physical, the engines of innovation? Looking specifically at cities, one finds that
they provide the same conditions that drive evolution in nature. Evolution is
driven by four principles or conditions: diversity, self-directedness,
recombination, and selective pressure. Each of these conditions is to be found in
successful species, successful cities, successful organizations, and successful
offices.
Diversity is different from scale. Cities get their liveliness from their variety, not
their size. A block of Stalinist flats is little more than, to paraphrase Le
Corbusier, a machine for sleeping. A neighborhood is a reflection of all the
hopes and dreams behind every door and curtain. Jane Jacobs described an ideal
city as one that has offices and shops and factories and homes and parks all
mixed in with each other. In that way, neighborhoods have some activity around
the clock, making them safer and more pleasant to live in. Great cities also have
diversity of talent. What makes London different from Leeds is the sheer number
of different people who could possibly end up working together for some
reason.
Self-directedness is a fundamental principle in biology. Individual creatures
decide for themselves where to get food, when to rest, and with whom to breed.
No one is directing all the day-to-day decisions. Although many corporate
executives and most architects might not like to admit it, office workers operate
in the same way. They do their work and their socializing in the places it is most
effective. Design can influence work patterns, but only up to a point.
Recombination is the heart of evolution. It is just as certainly the heart of
innovation. Just as no new species arises without ancestors, no new idea is ever
really new. Innovation occurs when two previously separate ideas are introduced
to each other. Being able to download a page from a Web site is conceptually
not that different from making a telephone call and hearing a pre-recorded
message. Both evolution and innovation occur more quickly when there are
more frequent and more varied recombinations.
Selective pressure rewards the fittest at the expense of the less fit. The phrase
“nature red in tooth and claw” captures the more ruthless aspects of capitalism,
but it also overlooks the sunnier side of evolution. Species, or companies, or
even ideas that are better suited to their times and their environments are more
likely so succeed. Change in an ecosystem or in a corporation happens more
quickly if the rewards for succeeding are greater than the rewards for failing.
Even if this sounds a bit Thatcher-ish, in purely objective terms it is true. The
greater the rewards for succeeding and the greater the penalties for failing, the
more quickly will change happen.
These four factors—diversity, self-direction, recombination, and selective
pressure—are what drive evolution in nature. The more of each that is present,
the more quickly change will occur. The same is true for cities. One hundred
years ago, those were the qualities that helped New York become the largest,
most important city in the Western Hemisphere.
It would be helpful to look more closely at the city as a metaphor for the office.
A great city has many of the same features as a great office. They both support
a diversity of: people and uses. They have the amenities that only a certain
density can support. They give people the chance to personalize their spaces.
They have efficient transportation systems. And they are most beautiful when
they mix a common palette of building materials with the variety and
customization. Moscow has a unifying palette—concrete—but it lacks the
infinite variety that characterizes London.
Finally, and central to this argument, is the fact that great cities and good
buildings have the ability to evolve over time. Stewart Brand’s classic How
Buildings Learn documented the buildings that people like to live in or work in
are ones that can simultaneously show their age and adjust to the times. As
families grow, what they need in their domestic space changes. As the nature of
work changes, the configuration of people, machines, and spaces changes, too.
One change that both cities and offices will need to react to is that the very role
of the office has changed. When everybody is able to be connected online with
their offices, colleagues, and customers, they can be working from anywhere in
the world. The office is no longer needed as a factory for white-collar work.
Instead, the office is becoming primarily a space for convening and
collaborating. One can imagine managers explaining to their new employees
that “Home is where you work; work is where you socialize.”
Working Without Walls, page 2
Two implications of this transposition are that location matters more than it
once did, and that focus of office design needs to change. As offices are
increasingly used for convening, they will be more often built in large cities or at
large transportation hubs. Occupancy cost per square meter becomes less
important than convenience. The ability to get the right people together is what
is critical. At the same time, the focus of office design will move from efficiency
to effectiveness. If innovation is the engine of success, then offices need to be
designed to foster innovation and adaptiveness. The healthiest ecosystem is the
one that can best evolve, and the same is true for the office.
Large cities are more often engines of growth than small ones, and the same
can be true of office spaces. By bringing together more people, with greater
diversity and more frequent opportunities for recombination, large offices can
drive innovation. At the same time, two other lessons from nature would be
helpful. Good design in nature is almost always fractal in some sense. Fractals
are those patterns that show the same level of complexity at any level of
magnification. The branches on a tree are quite comparable to the branching in
a twig. In both city planning and office layout, fractal design implies a mixture
of uses at both the overall and the neighborhood levels. There should be both
central storage and local storage. There should be a dining district and more
local options. Strict separation is the path to sterility. But design based on the
patterns of nature and the needs of humans can create a groundwork for
growth.
When E.M. Forster wrote “Only connect” he was talking about “the building of
the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion.” Good
working spaces provide for both prose and passion, for both efficiency and
innovation. Like great cities, work spaces are hubs of commerce, in trade, ideas,
or power. And like great cities, great work spaces are the ones with the ability to
evolve.
Working Without Walls, page 3