Tumblr Office – Great office low budget?
Great video from Tumblr discussing the advantages of having a well thought out office, especially on employee morale. According to Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp, a company doesn’t have to spend a lot to have a great office. Conference rooms with plush chairs, ice cold beer on tap and Tommy, the office Pomeranian, all help Tumblr attract talented employees. At eOffice we provide a stylish, well designed office environment with all the tech you need at a very low price. Perfect for doing work and impressing clients. Check us out here if you want to know more.
Microsoft Office Space – The Garage
These pictures are from Microsoft’s campus building which is a huge office complex. Though the complex features many distinct parts, one of the coolest is the Microsoft Garage. The Microsoft Garage is an office space with a twist, its not your conventional workspace. It is in fact the place where Microsoft encourages its free-form grass roots inventions. The space is called the Garage because it actually has two giant garage doors!
Australian Real Estate Office Space
McAllister Alcock Architects is the Australian architectural firm behind this cool office space. The space is the office space of an Australian real estate firm, according to the architects:
Conversion of an existing warehouse to create a new St Kilda office for an established Real Estate Agency. The existing bland box was ‘re-skinned’ with a new facade of perforated pre-weathered ‘Coreten’ steel. A landscaped screen provides a green outlook and ‘signposts’ the building. Additional floor area was created by inserting mezzanine spaces within the existing building volume, while maintaining the existing lofty ceilings over the ‘public’ areas.
[via Office Snapshots]
Freelancing Madrilenos choose co-working over home offices
The economic crisis sees freelance Madrileños opting to “co-work” in a creative, social alternative to the home office.
Utopic_Us is a shared-usage space for rent behind Plaza Mayor, in the center of Madrid. It has an open floor plan, flexible for its office space, events, galleries and classes. Currently, 100 “autonomos,” working for themselves in creative fields, are sharing workspaces in two old wholesale storage facilities. Co-workers include bloggers, jewelry designers, architects, IT programmers, painters, sculptors, audio and visual engineers, and publicists.
When SmartPlanet was visiting, some members were hosting business meetings with clients in the shared workspace.
“Our space is generating new energies. It is a hybrid space that gathers characteristics of a lab, an education centre, a studio, a living room and kitchen, where a variety of ingredients are mixed and experienced in innumerable ways,” as it is described on their official marketing.
For a monthly fee from 75 euros for ten hours a week to 250 euros for unlimited access, Utopic_Us members are able to use the office space, equipped with WiFi and phones. Members also receive discounts for the Utopic_School.
“It’s a factory of transforming ideas,” said Raimond Garcia, in his native Spanish. Garcia is a Ruby Web developer who has spent the last year working at Utopic_Us, following five years working “in pajamas” from home. He is also going to teach a workshop on Ruby there next month. Garcia said, working at Utopic_Us “is much more social. There’s an equilibrium of men and women, a lot of synergy, and the networking is impressive.”
Compared with the cost of renting their own office space and paying for their utilities individually, members find great value in their investment.
Santiago Vallado is owner of DF Produciones, a one-man video production company he has been running out of Utopic_Us for the last six months. He does not think the 250 euros he pays each month is too steep. He said in Spanish that “It’s not a lot of money and it has so many more things,” than working from home or renting an external office space.
Before coming to Utopic_Us, Vallado spent two years managing his business from home, saying, “It’s basically annoying. A thousand distractions. You work longer hours, but less efficiently.” He uses Utopic_Us for networking, already having made videos for some of his co-workers’ marketing projects. He described Utopic_Us “like a multinational office space” filled with people sharing different experiences and ideas.
Vallado added that he likes to bounce ideas off his colleagues during 15-minute breaks spent playing ping-pong and soccer.
Utopic_School features workshops that cost anywhere from nothing up to 650 euros. Some topics covered have been motivation, sustainability, experimental methodologies, and digital technologies, to name a few. The communications manager Olivia Czetwertyrski described Utopic_Us’s business model as focused on learning, seeing, feeling, sharing, and getting to know people and new ideas.
Czetwertyrski is one of seven staff members. She started with Utopic_Us as a co-worker 18 months ago. Czetwertyrski is now employed by the company itself, in charge of internal and external communications, working with the different brands, events and accounts that use their office space. Some events included Reebok, Hendrix, Brugal and public relations for the Community of Andalusia, Spain.
The current facilities have space for about 150 co-workers. They hope to expand their business model to other cities inside and outside Spain. They are even looking into offering visa sponsorships for co-workers to travel to other future Utopic_Us locations to work.
“There´s a lot of things we can do better and a lot more we can do,” Czetwertyrski said, also in Spanish. This included creating storage space for the small business owners to use. “Poco a poco,” she said, which means little by little or step-by-step.
With small businesses looking to decrease costs and increase innovation, co-working is already popular in the United States and Great Britain. Utopic_Us is the biggest official space in Spain, but it certainly will not be the last.
By Jennifer Riggins via SmartPlanet
Jakarta Office Space
This Jakarta Office Space is called the Agung Sedayu Centre, it was designed by Rotterdam based Kuiper Compagnons. Though inspired by the Indonesian culture and tradition the building will nevertheless be contemporary and sustainable. At the heart of the design ethos is Ying & Yang – the two buildings will twist and rotate around the central core which encompasses the elevator and staircase.
The design concept is also heavily influenced by nature – the form of the building is such so as to avoid the sun from the facade, while natural ventilation is used to reduce mechanical cooling. What’s more rainwater is collected and recycled through a simple system placed on the horizontal roof.
Milan Office – Fornari Fashion
The Fornari Group has had their Milan office redesigned by Giorgio Borruso Design, a Californian architectural firm. The Milan office is located in the Navigli section of the city and measures at around 35,000 square foot. The building previously housed a historical porcelain workshop. The Fornari Group is a family business turn Italian fashion power house, they started out in the 40s manufacturing footwear. In the late 90s they then went on to become a fully fledged fashion, design and lifestyle brand.
The office is open plan, maintaining an airy and welcoming feel. This is partly achieved by the embellished rounded corners and curved edges, yet the soft wavy structures are tempered by the hard concrete floors and partly exposed steel. The designers also had the intention of making the walls, floor and ceiling inter-mesh to such a degree that they weren’t clearly distinguishable, so that where one ends the other begins. According to Giorgio Borruso such a design gives the “illusion that there is no gravitational force; that you can walk on any surface; you can rotate the system ninety degrees, and it still works.”
Ecological Office
Stanislaw Mlynski designed this Ecological Wall as a project for a competition organised by the National Taipei University of Technology School of Architecture. The building is essentially an ecological Office block. The competition was international in scope and so the submission had to be something quite spectacular. The structure is covered with organic vegetation, allowing it to absorb CO2 and move it into the plants.
According to Mlynski:
“I proposed to create structural wall using organic waste containers. I believe that arrangement of elements, as well as their shape have potential to create shelters for animals, gather water, reduce CO2. The solar system has the aim to ensure energetic independence.”
In essence the Ecological Wall aims to accommodate vegetation into everyday life. It creates an organic space within the urban setting, allowing everything from the food and water we consume to the very fabrics we use to develop all around us. This design is truly inspiring, not only does it look beautiful but it creates a vehicle by which we can incorporate organic materials more into our daily lives, allowing us to live in both an urban and environmental surrounding!
Futuristic Office Space
Christian Pottgiesser revamped the office space of two Parisian companies, Pons and Huot. His aim was to create an alien and extra-terrestrial feel for the office space. The office space was originally a 19th century industrial hall, and was refurbished by Pottgiesser in order to create a large open work area that was funky yet functional.
The brief was to create a futuristic and unconventional office space, therefore Pottgiesser came up with the use of Plexiglas half globes to cover the private workspaces. Apart from looking really cool, the globes also have a more practical function as they help conceal noise and give the occupier a sense of privacy.
We think this office space is truly great. It has a light and airy feel, something helped by the vaulted ceilings and vegetation, while at the same time encouraging privacy where needed. That said, cleaning all those Plexiglas surfaces to keep them finger print free must be an unenviable task!
[Pictures via Christian Pottgiesser]
London Office Space- Angel Centre
Wade Scaramucci is the lead architect of the new Angel Building office space in London, which was designed by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris (AHMM). The building is on the corner of London’s Pentoville Road and St John Street, and has had a complete overhaul – so much so that Scaramucci has been quoted as saying “I wouldn’t call it a refurbishment – it’s really more of a reinvention.” The old Angel Centre was a typical 1980s office space in London, a building which was very much disliked by the surrounding Londoners.
AHMM had two key ideas they wanted to implement for this dated office space in London. The first was to strip the building back to its concreate frame and extend towards the street. They also wanted to create a more seamless synergy between the inside and outside. The opening was therefore made into a promenade type area, from street to atrium. The office space looks great, modern, sleek and elegant.
London Office Space – Goldman Sachs
A section of the Goldman Sachs office space London is up for sale for an estimated sum of £300m. The office space in London, which acts as their regional HQ, is located on Fleet Street. This central location is very close to the river Thames, and is therefore a highly sought after premises. The building was the former office space of The Telegraph, and was put into receivership when the owners (Jesta Capital) defaulted on their loans in 2010. The 370,000 sq ft chunk of prime real-estate is highly likely to attract foreign investors who are looking to invest in London while the British currency is relatively low.
A spokesperson from Jones Lang LaSalle’s City investment team, who are tasked with marketing the property, recently told Property Week that:
“London is a huge focus for real estate investors globally at the moment. In 2010 London was the largest commercial real estate market for investment activity globally, generating £10.8 billion of transactions, of which £7.3 billion was overseas money. The London market is probably the most liquid international property market at present and we expect Goldman’s HQ to appeal to a wide range of investors from the US, Middle East and Asia Pacific.”
