WHY THE END OF ONE OFFICE IS THE BEGINNING OF ANOTHER

London 30 October 2024

Little did the photographer Lewis Hines, who famously chronicled the lives of American workers a century ago building modern Manahattan know that this particular photograph, entitled ‘Cable Connection’ would be so phrophetic. How so?

Well, even as the news reports the increasing stress placed on actual skyscrapers - major refinancing is under way of previously safe bet investments due to the post pandemic scaling back and repurposing of offices in a flexible work era - this photo showed that the cables connecting us to communicate are often outlasting the buildings themselves.

The latest episode of The Nowhere Office features an interview Stefan Stern and I did with Tom Redmayne of Industrious, the flexible office business and he is candid that in the future not all office buildings will survive - something we will be talking about a lot more with corporate real estate experts in the coming months.

This story: of work done to build the industry and business of tomorrow - is taking on a new meaning today. In many instances you can compare and contrast the spend in refurbishing (if not outright demolishing buildings) compared to the distress threatening to engulf some old buildings which cannot so easily be repurposed.

This is a story about the central business district, city centres, about who lives and works and the switch from live-to-work to its polar opposite: work-to-live.

As corporate America continues to issue edicts to its workers to RTO or ‘remote rollback’ - return to office or face losing promotion, or even the job (Starbucks) this will of course impact on the city centres and the associated businessess and of course the office space itself: Starbucks has around 3,700 corporate HQ workers: Presumably they either cannot or won’t get out of a long corporate lease and would rather see the ‘churn’ in those not wishing to return to office in this inflexible way.

We shall see.

The skyscraper, the office block, the office: Its totemic of so much which goes so much beyond the bricks and mortar. It represents a dream of growth, aspiration, prosperity which the pandemic revealed to be full of anguish, toxicity, commuter expense and more.

The end of the office never happened and was never going to happen - but the complete reinvention of it always was on the cards after Covid-19. I remain firmly of this view today.

It’s not surprising that this shock about office usage and the battle to get people ‘back’ is huge: It’s less than a century since the skyscrapers were, to coin a phrase, built to last (9/11 was shocking and unthinkable for all sorts of reasons and it’s fair to say the horror of watching two iconic office blocks come down was part of what made it so unspeakable).

Take for instance this Smithsonian video showing the extraordinary risks the ‘roughnecks’ took to build skyscrapers in the 1920s: 2 in 5 workers were maimed or killed and you can hardly be surprised given there was no health and safety provision at all.

These men were building a dream - for money and thrill which would last, they thought, forever.

You wouldn’t find a middle class man (or woman) working on the skyscrapers would you? So much work is delineated without even being articulated specifically: Class Work War is another story, coming soon.

But the lesson is this: All sorts of fixed models are being dismantled, remodelled. Industrious makes money as much on management of other people’s workspaces in buildings as it does the traditional lease: unthinkable just a few years ago.

What isn’t changing is work or indeed the need to have some kind of workplace. But everything in between? Hold tight on the cables of connection.

Find out more about Workathon here.

And see you next week.