Work + Life is an ever changing that is on the minds of most businesses. Employers are using the idea as a recruiting tool, as they are trying to catch up with the needs of the modern family and the changing global work environment. The big idea is to create a work life balance, can architecture can help solve this? Can the built world be reshaped to allow the idea of balancing these worlds and to proliferate and change the way we inhabit space?
Changing concepts…
House
The modern family: The want for the modern man and woman to have a family and have the ability to be a part of their lives. The home office has been in existence in many forms throughout history of our built environments. One can see this exemplified, on a main street in New York, where the pizza shop sits below the family living quarters. This allows the family unit to be together with through the unconventional hours of running a business. What can we can learn from this example and re-shape it to be brought into the modern world?
The home is a space to explore this idea. In the US, where there is still so much frontier to conquer, the home is the essential space to be rethought. The proposal is a sustainable home that connects the family with work, and the family with the outdoors. The checkerboard plan creates space for program, and equal space for light and green. This connection to the outdoors is essential to well being. The checkerboard creates a separation of space, but keep visual connection.
The home is connected through a central spine. Work is in the street facing that keeps the connection to the outside world allowing for any potential client or colleague to feel comfortable entering your work space, without passing through the home. It creates that needed division, while keeping the primary family close to one another. Kitchen and living spaces are at the core of the home, with visual connection to the family activities as well as the outdoor courtyards. The sleeping spaces are located in the rear in the home. The home can continue to be added onto in this checkerboard programmatic set up. It can be expanded, it can be implemented in the city block or along the country road.
Tower
The home is, and could become a community. The proposition needs to answer: Could there be a tower that will allow the work-life world to fit into our cities? Could it be a living ecosystem? What could this look like? Child care+family+work+entertainment+…What is needed for the family?
People can choose to have their experience inward or outward facing. The central vertical park will give all users an experience and work space which (may be small) can be sensationally fulfilling.
The building is an integrated system. A designed space and an open source community. It will need spaces for privacy and larger public areas. The tower would need to find areas for collaboration and use some of these ideas in the office and the public space to create opportunities to interact.
2019 – ongoing
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