The Marc Jacobs office was designed to be returned to.
Office design in a post-open-floor-plan world.
Over the weekend, I saw my friend Levi Shaw-Faber at a friend’s wedding. After catching up about our summers (he contributed to Feed Me’s East Hampton flamingo investigation earlier this year) and which cocktail route we were taking at the wedding reception, I wanted to hear about his new design project: a complete office redesign of the Marc Jacobs International Headquarters in New York. Levi joined Audrey Hughes earlier this year to form their new architectural studio, Faber/Hughes.
“The question of how to get people to *want* to return to the office has been discussed over and over since the pandemic – ideas about adding home comforts to the workplace, creating a balance of shared and private workspaces, always accompanied by the buzzwords ‘collaboration’ and ‘flexibility.’” - Faber/Hughes
We talk about offices a lot in Feed Me — returning to them, assembling them at home, having sex in them, and the absurd new features employers are adding to them in hopes that employees will stay longer at work. I was excited to speak to someone who was building a ground zero for a creative team. I asked Audrey and Levi to tell me more about the project, and how it reflects the current environment of returning to the office and how physical spaces can foster creativity:
“There have been some growing pains in the world of office design as it has attempted to reconcile the pre-Covid obsession with the open floor plan and the post-Covid trend of “hoteling” or “hot-desking” where employees who come to the office a couple of days a week post up at any available desk. The question of how to get people to *want* to return to the office has been discussed over and over since the pandemic – ideas about adding home comforts to the workplace, creating a balance of shared and private workspaces, always accompanied by the buzzwords “collaboration” and “flexibility.” We think there’s a piece missing here – you need an office that people are proud to work in — a space where employees feel valued, a space customized to the company's way of working – not a generalized room of hot-desking where there’s no sense of ownership over the space.
