From the office to the post-pandemic worksphere / Dall’ufficio alla worksphere post-pandemica

The recent pandemic has definitively challenged the organisational models orchestrated by Management Science for tertiary work and, consequently, the spatial typologies in which it was carried out. From the pyramidal hierarchy that prevailed throughout most of the 20th century (Fontana 1981), we have moved on to matrix-type management, and then to network-based management (Allen and Henn 2007). Since the end of the 19th century, offices all over the world have seen a succession of organisations of environments such as the cellular office, the open space, the Büroladschaft, the combi-office and the networking office (Forino 2001): Each of these has proved revolutionary in its own way compared to the one immediately preceding it, but none has become overriding; rather, they have often coexisted in the same professional environment, showing how work interiors can be fluid and variously adaptable according to the needs of companies, managers and employees. The most recent transformations of the workplace, then accelerated by the pandemic, can be traced back to the global financial crisis of 2008 as well as to the almost total use of information technology (Forino 2013). The reduction and/or rotation of desks - not only understood as 'workplaces', but also as physical locations where work is performed -, preconized by Gaetano Pesce in a well-known office project (Chiat/Day TWBA, New York 1994-95), has been invariably adopted in many companies, while in 2012 the Italian government compressed the availability of individual spaces in new buildings for the tertiary sector with a special regulation (L.135/2012, art. 3, Spending Review 2) (Forino 2012). On the other hand, the improved quality and speed of online connections have enabled valid forms of telework (Butera 1995), but they have also guaranteed ubiquitous workers and freelance professionals to operate in places other than offices, such as bars, libraries, hotel rooms, airport and railway station waiting rooms, or by temporarily renting themselves in the co-working offices that now dot every city (Forino 2016). Finally, if the relationship between the latter and the workplace had in the past clear boundaries regulated by a synchronic temporality (h 9-17), it has gradually dissolved not only in reciprocal spatial and formal influences (Forino 2019), but also according to an agitated elasticity of time and place (Duffy 2008). The pandemic seems to have accelerated the processes of crisis and change already structural to the world of work over the last twenty years, opening up new scenarios densely permeated by spatial and digital delocalisation. The nomadism of many knowledge workers (Drucker 1993) has suffered a setback, due to the interruption of connections between one country and another, or between one city and another, during the forced lockdowns, while for others the only possible relocation has been their own homes, often inadequate to sustain the daily rhythms of their commitments, both because of restricted or inefficient spaces and because of the daily intrusion of the family, which is also forced to be stationary. Despite this, the productive flow of knowledge workers has not only not stopped, but has actually increased in the hybrid panorama of work that personal resistance to Covid-19 has progressively nurtured, notwithstanding the psychological stress and physical fatigue of each (Dahik, Lovich et al. 2020). From the inconsistencies brought to light by the pandemic reality, however, interesting stimuli emerge for a new managerial culture - until recently substantially disinclined to smart working due to control issues -; for the adoption of different organisational models such as, for example, the flipped workplace which, borrowed from today's educational systems (Bergmann and Aaron 2012), develops a different relationship between individual and collective work (Bennett, Spencer et al. 2011; Nedervel and Berge 2015); for the study of new proxemics due to physical distancing and such that one can imagine low-density operational backdrops; for the permanent adoption of signs and health devices to safeguard those who will also attend the office. In this perspective, another worksphere (Antonelli 2001) already seems to be taking shape, no longer defined only by the physical place where work was and is experienced, but expressed by the set of social, psychological and economic conditions surrounding it, by the increasingly advanced technological tools, and by the other places where people work. From the more interconnected confines of a remodelled home environment, it will not lock the human being into a mobile, transparent individual bubble as imagined by Hans Hollein in his Mobiles Büro (1969). Instead, it will seek to maximise relationships of reciprocity and collaboration between colleagues - where and when they can meet in person - and to enhance the workplace within, "the workplace that is inside people: their training, their work and personal histories, their aspirations and potential" (Butera 2020, 83), in line with a cultural movement that will accompany the fourth industrial revolution. Architects and office designers are tasked with creating inclusive frames for the post-pandemic workplace.