We are made to work. Sure, our thoughts might wander to the languid summer afternoons of our youth, we may pine for the empty hours of vacation, or resent the grinding minutes of our ceaseless weekdays. But humans are most fulfilled when we are at task. The desire to produce is a gift of genetics, an heirloom passed from parent to child across our eons. It is the ceaseless engine behind our dominance as a species.

Stop and consider the fuel. Tally the hours spent in the arms of a lover, the days wandering a far-flung metropolis, holding your father’s hand, being immersed in Tolstoy or Steinbeck—the sum total will pale in comparison to the ocean of time put toward earning a wage. We spend more of our conscious lives at work than doing anything else. The common number is 90,000 hours—one-third of our existence.

No wonder occupation is wrapped up in our sense of agency. Jobs often define us, place us in history and society, and become a shorthand for who we are—especially for creative types. When it’s good, our work is an expression of all our skill and experience. Who can verbalize the brilliant wholeness of seeing a project to completion? The feeling of a final period on an essay, the last stroke of a paint brush, or definitive swipe of a plane. It goes beyond pride.

But right now, we are struggling to understand the evolving nature of work, and our growing dissatisfaction with it in the digital age. There hasn’t been such a drastic, irreversible change since the Industrial Revolution. And, like the generation caught in the wake of that great shift, we wonder what exactly the future of work will mean for us. Before the pandemic, we asked a dozen forward-looking designers and architects to imagine the workspace of tomorrow.

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When Florence Knoll Bassett passed away in 2019, we reflected on how her creative ingenuity revolutionized post-war workplace interiors through a multitude of architecturally inspired classics for Knoll, her namesake office furniture company.

We also asked design industry leaders, such as Suzanne Tick, Dorothy Cosonas, and Yves Behar, to reflect on Knoll’s legacy.

Tucked away within Google’s sprawling Silicon Valley campus is a building unlike any of its neighbors. It’s welcoming by design—a double-height atrium, flooded in sunlight and anchored by a sculptural birchwood staircase, immediately greets those lucky enough to enter. Access is highly restricted. Inside, more than 150 industrial designers, engineers, and sculptors are busy collaborating to envision how the brand’s consumer hardware products will look and feel years into the future. The environment is relaxed yet energetic, clearly tailored to optimize creative thinking. Glass windows, employed throughout, let staffers peek inside the Color Lab and Materials Lab, in which a cornucopia of artfully arrayed objects suggest what colorways, materials, and craft techniques are top of mind.

The operation is led by Ivy Ross, vice president of hardware design and user experience, whose laid-back enthusiasm shines through Google’s recent spate of light-hearted, approachable home tech products. For example, the Google Mini Home, available in an array of pastel colors and delicate speaker fabrics, eschews convention—its rounded contours seem to resemble river stones more than a traditional audio apparatus. This subversion is intentional, yet doesn’t seem too off-brand considering Google’s colorful logo and playful daily Google Doodle—a foil to the stark, pared-down minimalism of Apple, the brand’s biggest competitor.

“What wouldn’t attract me to the Bradbury?” asks Josh Wyatt, the CEO of NeueHouse, who recently inaugurated the coworking space’s latest outpost, its third, inside the famed building in Downtown Los Angeles. “What the area has been missing,” Wyatt argues, “is a well-designed space to work and think.” The new location, which features interiors by DesignAgency, combines the building’s original architectural details with softer flourishes to evoke a thoughtful, all-encompassing getaway for the creative set.

The designer James Ludwig holed up in a 20×15’ room at Steelcase’s headquarters, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to zero in on an idea he’d been mulling over for nearly a decade: to create an office chair that operates as seamlessly as an appendage, like an arm or a leg. From behind closed doors and paper bag–covered windows, Ludwig and his team attempted to combine simplicity with superior materials and performance in an intuitive, elegant seat. They told no one about the project, which even had a code name: “Q.” The result is Silq, a game-changing seat poised to dramatically up the experience of working for desk jockeys around the world.

Centuries ago, European artisans organized into communities around their crafts to control production, rates, and quality, as well as cultivate political influence. As these great craft guilds rose in cities such as Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Brussels, they built for themselves headquarters in ornate halls, expressions of the skills of those within. Those practices come to light at the great hall of Zaventem Ateliers, a design cooperative and creative playground in Brussels where guilds steered local art, architecture, and craft for over 300 years.

Blitz is an award-winning architecture studio known for disrupting the status quo of design for the world’s most innovative and industry-changing organizations. Founded in 2009 by Seth and Melissa Hanley, the firm offers a wide array of design solutions, including architecture, interior design, graphics, and branding, for a range of typologies across workplace, hospitality, retail, and education.

Surface Says: The word “blitz,” meaning an energetic and concerted effort on a specific task, well represents the spirited architecture and design firm that bears this name. By applying a fresh, human-centered design approach across various scales and typologies, Blitz brings the personality, culture, and values of each client to life in physical form.

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