ABSTRACT
Office design is at a turning point. For many decades, especially in the developer-dominated Anglo-Saxon world, office users have been passive. Vendors have concentrated on perfecting the delivery of buildings at most profit, least risk and maximum convenience for themselves. The buildings that result can satisfy the relatively simple demands of highly routinised and unchanging organisations. Re-engineering office work is leading to experiments in the intensification of space use- time sharing the office. This is hardly good news for developers whose enthusiasm in the late 1980s modernised the British office stock, but led also to overbuilding. Architects must get closer to the users, at both tactical facility management level and at a strategic level. A good building is an elusive thing, but it is one which satisfies organisational needs at reasonable cost and without unnecessary effort, and in which the inhabitants are happy to work.
