The Way We Build Now

Chapter Six

Office Buildings

In its present form, the office building is typified by a block with flat faces and nearly identical floors stacked one upon another. The unity necessary to the design is achieved, typically, not by detailed design with variations on some underlying theme but by the more facile device of extreme geometrical simplicity and the repetition of modular elements. The simplicity reduces the design time. However, a really appropriate and compelling form may be difficult to find, within the given constraints, and the blocks produced by such abbreviated design procedures are not unusual. Typically the floors in an office are required to have a minimum distance between columns varying from six to nine metres, that is from thirty ...