Essay:
Office Architecture

Foreword

Competition organisers

Bee Breeders Competition Organisers, in partnership with ARCHHIVE BOOKS, announces the winners of its 2021 open call for essay submissions on office architecture. This event was run in tandem with the competition Office 2021 Design Challenge, seeking innovative workplace design concepts.

Changing modes of communications, ways of working, and technologies are constantly redefining work and, by extension, the workplace. But the very definition of the office has been especially transformed in the wake of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

This open call for essays sought thoughts, insights, and challenges to workplace design. How are workplaces evolving? What are the challenges of the evolving tendency for people to work from home? What is the relationship between office space and public space? These, and a range of other questions, were addressed by participants from around the world.

Bee Breeders worked with an excellent international jury panel that consisted of: Nicola Gillen, International Partner at Cushman & Wakefield, a global commercial real estate services firm, co-author of ReThink Design Guide; Architecture for a Post Pandemic World 2025 (RIBA March 2021), lead author of Future Office (RIBA March 2019), and a visiting lecturer at the IE School of Architecture and Design, Madrid;  Dr Juriaan van Meel, co-founder of BriefBuilder, an expert in the field of architectural briefing and workplace design, and co-author of Activity-Based Working Practice Guide (2020), Briefing for Buildings (2018) and Workplaces Today (2015); Simeon Siegel, partner at the Turett Collaborative Architects, where he project-manages retail, food service and corporate work; and Hans Toft Hornemann and Terkel Skou Steffensen, co-founders of Aspekt Office, a Copenhagen-based multidisciplinary design studio, specializing in furniture, product and interior design.

Bee Breeders and its jury panel thank the participants for their submissions, and congratulate the following winners for having their submissions selected for online publication.