RIBAJ Spec: offices and workspace design webinar

Rising rents in London’s West End – up 14 per cent over the last year – demonstrate a strong desire among the city’s workforce to ‘Go West’ as the famous song puts it, believes Jan-Carlos Kucharek. 

According to Cushman and Wakefield’s London Moves analysis, central London saw strong rental prospects and lower vacancy rates compared with non-central locations last year. This has tightened competition for space and driven rents upwards, with the West End averaging more than £1,700 per m².

It’s clear that the capital’s workers are still seeking the “holistic experience of the living, thriving city”, despite home or hybrid working becoming the norm for many. To encourage office attendance, and avoid the doomsday predictions of a hollowed-out CBD at the heart of cities, the British Council for Offices (BCO) – in its post-Covid research report Towards Experience Utopia – advises designers to treat office staff like customers to be “acquired and retained”.

Recreating the benefits of home working

So how exactly is this achieved? Working from home has many benefits – including the personal comforts of peace and quiet, reduced anxiety and increased productivity.

Effective modular partitioning screens, which can be configured to different workstation setups, are one simple method. They contribute to an attractive office environment for staff acclimatised to the privacy of home. 

At Egypt Post’s New Cairo office base, manufacturer Gemino System implemented a six-phase process, spanning concept, design, and post-installation care. Its system integrates acoustic control, smart tech, and reconfigurable workstation layouts. With seamless detailing (profiles recessed into floor, wall and ceiling) the “most clean design possible” was achieved. As Tomaso Caloprisco stressed, spaces “change continuously and very fast,” and workplaces must adapt.

Adjacent to privacy is of course acoustic comfort. As Ben Hancock, managing director of Oscar Acoustics, explained, acoustic insulation is fundamental to a healthy and happy working environment. In a 2025 white paper, the company asked 2,000 workers across the UK about workplace conditions – with sobering results.

Seven per cent of respondents said their workplace was damaging their hearing, while 47 per cent struggle to concentrate, 36 per cent feel irritated, 30 per cent feel stressed, and 81 per cent said noise affects performance. “These aren’t abstract statistics,” said Hancock. “They’re the daily experience of your team”. The stats provide a wake-up call for all employers wanting to encourage office attendance, and to promote collaborative, sociable and productive workspaces that accommodate the needs of both neurodiverse and neurotypical employees.

Flexible problem solving in central Birmingham

In terms of how architects have solved the challenges of creating these attractive, sustainable and healthy new office environments, examples are not limited to the capital.

One Centenary Way ­– the first building in Phase Two of Birmingham’s Paradise masterplan – is the epitome of flexible problem solving. These offices form part of the ambitious regeneration of Birmingham’s severed city core, on a site shaped by 1960s concrete buildings, highways and the A38 tunnel running below.

Shauna Bradley, partner at Howells, explained how the building enjoys only 200-300mm clearance above this tunnel in some places. The project faced huge structural constraints, which ultimately led to a decision to utilise an exoskeleton structure, aligned along a supersize 12m x 12m grid, and transfer trusses.

Unusually, there was at the time no tenant for the building and, Bradley said, “we didn’t even know how tall it needed to be”, so the grid/exoskeleton “started to dictate what the architecture was going to be”. To emphasise the large 3m spans of the grid, and to avoid the “tyranny of 1500mm window modules”, these commercially viable units were rotated 90 degrees and demarcated by extruded fins.

Challenges like delivering the 38m x 5m, 200-tonne trusses from BHC in Scotland required innovative engineering solutions (for the curious: available on YouTube), such that “the story kept evolving”. Designed as a “naked, honest” building, its visible steel structure also tells a sustainable story: to mitigate sustainability issues, rolled sections and up to 97 per cent recycled steel were used – and the structure is also demountable. Altogether 5,173 tonnes of CO₂e were removed.

The building is crowned by a colour-changing light box; at the base, an inviting reception space breaks the corporate mould, in keeping with the masterplan’s people-first urbanisation strategy.

Drawing on Milton Keynes’ modernist context

Meanwhile, in Milton Keynes, Santander’s new main office, Unity Place by LOM Architects, consolidates four buildings into one efficient 44,000m² campus. “It goes beyond being just a building” for Santander, a major employer in the region, said director Ben Taylor. Rather, it is an ecosystem for both the bank (whose ESG ethos it seeks to represent) and the wider community, including retail, a co-working hub, a 300-seat auditorium, and a public food market. The design balances public access and transparency with secure banking operations.

The building features flexible floorplates, extensive natural light via the atria, an environmental wrap facade for solar control, smart systems, and is all-electric. In terms of sustainability, it is built with a post-tensioned concrete structure, exceeds LETI 2030 embodied carbon targets and achieves BREEAM Excellent.

The offices offer flexible work settings and community-focused facilities, and are open at weekends to prolong the usage of the building, all in support of a modern, adaptive workplace model for banking and beyond. “We wanted to draw on some of the modernist context of Milton Keynes,” explained Taylor, which is known for its boulevards and planting arrangement of trees. Views from the terraces capitalise on this greenery to dramatic effect. 

Back to the capital, with an equally dramatic project, Sam Scott, associate director at AHMM, drew on experiences from Tower Hamlets Town Hall, a conversion from the disused Grade II-listed Royal London Hospital building, Whitechapel, into new consolidated council office space for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.

The project represented a relevant, contextual and sustainable 21^st-century expansion to a 1759 Georgian building, which had already undergone significant changes throughout the Victorian and Edwardian periods: a 1890s portico, Arts and Crafts era operating theatres, nurses accommodation and chapel dating from 1906, and so on.

The upgraded building now accommodates 2,400 staff in an open-plan setting, council chambers and public event spaces. A six-storey extension integrates the original Georgian formal facades into the interior, and public realm improvements engage the public at street level; a work of extreme complexity.

Finally, what of office staff in architecture practices? How can we make their lives easier? According to AEC lead Joe Emanuele, LOM Architects and Santander have utilised CMap project management tools in their construction ventures, which offer strategies for budgeting, risk assessment, resource planning and cash flow management. When these fundamental business operations run smoothly under the bonnet, architects are freed up to do what they do best – designing buildings with perform for clients and occupants alike.