Nicole Langridge

Today, anyone can become a corporation.

What happens when office tropes are mismatched, traditional power hierarchies made off-kilter? Will strange corporate objects get inhabited in new ways?

The project asks what new understandings of living can be generated using the framework of the corporate model. In cities very like this one, corporations are powerful beings with intriguing spaces, strange objects and paradoxical encounters. These strange objects mark precise activities and self-fulfil the language of the organisation. What will these look like when anyone can become a corporation? 

This is an architectural response to the emerging condition of hyper capitalism colonising the domestic and leisure space. So, are our homes the office? Is the boundary between work and life inevitably melded together? Spaces which are domestic, leisure or work could be inhabited and incorporated in new ways to create a hermetic environment.

Plasticised furnitures wrap into the five rooms of the new office, flipping the hierarchy of space and traditional power structure and use of corporate furnitures. Walls, floor, furnitures and objects are compounded together. A 50m-long bed hosts the workers (the death of the desk), an over-scaled water cooler makes office gossip a grand act, the washroom and sauna are incorporated into the office landscape. 

A corporation is a human body and bodies need substance. Light is needed for health and biology. We work in partnership with the sun, it is closely linked to our daily rhythms, health and patterns of inhabiting. Explorations of the impact of sunlight created sunprints to create a logic of exposure. The sunlight levels define five different gradients of exposure and are a basis for the interior conditions inside. The sunprints are translated into a design methodology to incorporate the objects together into one hermetic space each having its own language of geometry.

In hermetic environments, there requires an interior weather. Lighting standards for space and climatic conditions have been the traditional generator of functions. In the new office, sky openings, artificial lighting and ‘fresh air’ are pumped through the break room to generate an interior weather.

The office is like a theatre. The performativity and phenomena of production, the repetition of days and office tropes makes it a theatre of the absurd. Where is work getting done?  The project plays with the ambiguity of space, hermetic environments and the notion of working and living in contemporary society.