Does your building make business sense?

The origin of your business or entrepreneurial venture has been a creative idea. Some years have been spent in developing that idea, in seeking capital, in marketing the idea, in learning to focus and in making the idea a long-term goal. Through all this, your business has nested itself in one, or more than one physical environment. This may have been a garage to begin with, an office in a commercial building, two floors in an expensive location in town and today, you may be a company with its own building or about to occupy its own premises. If you have the time, it may be worthwhile today to do a Post-Occupancy Evaluation of the building and to ask yourself and your team – Does our building make business sense?

 

What a Post-Occupancy Evaluation exercise does is to watch and photograph how the building is used, comparing what actually is happening against what was intended. This process is best started by interacting with the people who are going to use the building six weeks before it opens, to record their expectations. One would go back within the first six months, when they’re still new to everything and feeling all the uneasy elements. For an existing building, one would work towards understanding how the company has changed in the recent years. Has the building been able to accommodate that change?

 

As the company grows and as its people take on new roles, they perform their tasks differently and may interact with newer groups of people. This generates new patterns of circulation within the building. It can be useful to do a mapping of these patterns; to identify which spaces are utilised more, which spaces are becoming redundant. In some ways, the design of a building can be compared to the design of a city. Does the ‘City as a Tree’ Plan work better than the ‘Open city’ Plan? Do people and spaces within a business organisation work better as branching clusters that expand as work expands? Or, do work environments perform better when they are constantly adapting themselves within a multi-layered random grid?

 

The Open Office plan primarily uses modular furniture. How often has this furniture been disassembled and reassembled again to adapt to a new functioning within a group or within the many divisions of the company? After some years of operation, we tend to forget that the modular furniture that made our Open Office is flexible furniture. It is furniture that can make many permutations and combinations of layouts. It can be changed anytime to a new grouping of people or to new circulation criteria.

 

You could discover that the Company’s budget for Facility management is able to achieve more than it did previously, after you have a record of the way your building works. What is the history of the facilities within the building? What are the behavioural patterns of your employees in the context of their work environments?

 

A part of the Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) would be to study how many Company Executives or Researchers who are meant to collaborate across the various divisions interact with each other informally as a result of the spatial organisations that they are given to occupy. For instance, does the building enhance the social capital of its occupants? Does it bring them face-to-face unintentionally so that there is more trust and familiarity? You would know that your building makes business sense when your key resources – human, financial capital and social capital are supported by a built-environment that is watching itself so that it can learn, grow and adapt to the Company’s present and future.

 

References :

Alexander, Christopher, Pattern Language (Oxford, 1977)

Brand, Stewart, How Buildings Learn – what happens after they are built (Penguin Books, 1995)

Christiansse, Kees, The Open City (International Architecture Biennale, Rotterdam, Oct 2009)

 

Kiran Keswani

The author is an architect based in Bangalore. You can email her at : kirankeswani@rediffmail.com