WORKHOUSE: Office of the Future

The Future Living Project was initiated by Hitoshi Abe and his UCLA A.UD research team in 2013 to extract broad but workable themes from an analysis of the Future’s long history and configurations of contemporary living. Previously, the FLP focused on the domestic environment to consider the developing gray zone between the domestic and office life.

Starting in 2017, with the support of the Okamura Corporation—a leading office systems company in the Japan), the focus of the Future Living Project has shifted to the the workplace, propelling research and continued exploration of the domestic-work gray zone.

WORKHOUSE: Office of the Future examines the office as an architectural type that is as politically, economically, and culturally charged, as it is technical and tectonic. With technological advancements and changes in labor practices, the workplace was liberated from the domestic realm, causing a spatial, programmatic, and ideological schism. This strict delineation of office and house became a key concept of modernization that motivated architecture and urban design practices. Currently, there is a paradigm shift that reunites these two types, creating a gray zone between domestic and work. To investigate this gray zone, the WORKHOUSE Research Project explores coworking–a programmatic phenomena that is under intense critical evaluation, conversation, and experimentation, yet remains indeterminate as an architectural type.

WORKHOUSE: 2017-2018 Research Studio