The Future of the Office

In this two-part series, LoopNet is exploring the experiential office concept as a method to entice employees back to the workplace once the COVID-19 pandemic subsides.

In part one, LoopNet’s discussion with a workplace strategist largely centered around how experiential offices could be implemented within a single tenant’s space. In part two, presented below, architect Aaron Schiller of Schiller Projects focuses on how the experiential office concept could be applied to entire buildings.

“It’s pretty much the opportunity to network the urban experience within the office place.”

Aaron Schiller

Can you tell me a bit about yourself, your background and your company?

I’m Aaron Schiller, founder and design head of Schiller Projects. We’re about seven years old. We’re built differently than a typical architecture firm. Everybody generally has a bachelor’s or a master’s degree in design and architecture, but I look for people with diverse backgrounds in fields such as mathematics, politics, English, writing, music — things that give them perspective beyond architectural design.

Who are some of the office tenants that you’ve worked with?

At the start of COVID, it’s now on hold, we completed plans for an entire new headquarters for the sales and marketing divisions of CBS. In 2018, we delivered Boies Schiller Flexner’s new headquarters at 55 Hudson Yards. We’re also now co-designing the new building for the United States Attorney’s office in Lower Manhattan

What, to you, does the term experiential office mean?

The way it’s currently being used, it’s essentially being picked up from the notion that, in order to survive in retail today, you have to offer more than a product. On a basic level, the way it’s been pushed by experienced people in the office sector is to say offices need more services. We have to bridge residential with commercial, which some higher-end buildings had already started to do [pre-pandemic].

So, on the smaller tenant and smaller investor and boutique building side, it’s pretty much the opportunity to network the urban experience within the office place.

What does that mean? New York City, for example, is one of the few places in our country where you can get everything you need to go about your [workday] in a two-block radius; that’s not generally replicable in most other places in the United States. So, how do you service all of that in a mid-sized building?

It’s extremely collaborative, and things that would not exist [because] one company [does not have the] capacity to provide them are provided via the landlords and tenants working together to create spaces for other operators to come in.

Another way of understanding an experiential office is by defining what it’s not. It’s not a place where you go to spend your day doing your solo work by yourself. It’s a community center. What does a community center need beyond open space? It needs the capacity to program that space; to deliver coffee, gym services, childcare services.

“If you’re making people commute, then people want to come in for an advantage they can’t replicate in their house.”

Aaron Schiller

So, you’re talking less about what’s contained in any one tenant’s space and more about common amenities for multiple tenants?

I think that’s phase one of it. A smart, midsized landlord would think about how they could create a more permanent version of a WeWork, where the building’s layout encourages intermixing, but you still get your own spaces.

For example, say I’m a young architect, I have a small firm, we need third-party accountants and I just discovered the company down the hall specializes in accounting for young creatives. That is a WeWork story that’s been told over and over again, so how do you codify that for long-term tenants within a building?

From the tenant perspective, it’s more about what you’re getting rid of than what you’re introducing. Many of us go into our buildings, we close our doors and we communicate digitally for the remainder of the day. That’s the thing that people want to see go away. Because if you’re making people commute, post the realization that a lot of commuting is artificially driven, then people want to come in for an advantage they can’t replicate in their house. So, how do you get them to come in? You provide them with spaces for interaction that don’t exist in a digital landscape.

How would you say that interaction is fostered within a single tenant’s space?

It’s different for every culture. But companies like Boston Consulting Group have tried an incomplete version of it. They have a large, dedicated amount of amenity square footage where they come together and overlap, and it’s surrounded by breakout spaces and training centers. And if someone wants a private desk, they check into it with their iPhone. Maybe post-COVID, that means a private office and there’s a sanitary policy. But it probably doesn’t mean a [permanent] space where you put up pictures of your kid.

“The creative office was highly open and ambiguous. The experiential office is highly curated.”

Aaron Schiller

Is this merely a new name for “the creative office,” which was the concept behind companies trying to enhance collaboration even before COVID-19?

The trends of [densely-packed, collaborative spaces with fewer private offices] all were generally unified by the single target of efficiency. How many people can we fit in an envelope? COVID has put the brakes on that. People don’t want to do it. Now, you might not be taking either more or less space, but you might be rotating 40 percent of your team in on a given day.

For example, many law firms continue to build offices for attorneys that don’t even come into the office. That seems a bit absurd in terms of your spend on the space. So, why not spend that money on things that attorneys find will make them more effective and efficient? Training centers, library spaces with attendants that can help them do the research that they need to do and collaboration spaces. Maybe all the spaces aren’t spaces of constant communication, but they do allow for quality work to happen in a unique environment.

Meanwhile, in terms of your actual workspace, you’re either hoteling if you’re in the office, or maybe when you need to sit down and write a brief, you’re doing that at your home office.

Correct. The technology needs [to create this environment] require a good amount of spend for most companies. And there’s the politics of [whether workers will] accept not having a dedicated office [or workspace], and that will continue to take a long time [for many people in the workforce] to completely accept.

But there are ways to do that without making it feel like hoteling and they can be powerful. You have to consider whether an average employee would prefer their own office, or instead, their own small conference room with a mounted screen in which they could host meetings.

There’s also a concierge aspect built into this: the office support staff has the capacity, depending on your comfort level, to track you around the office, check in with you. And what allows for this kind of concierge service is the fact that there are fewer employees in the office, so there’s more money to spend on a per-head basis. Instead of everybody getting a basic level of service every day, 40 percent to 50 percent of people get an elevated level of service on a given day.

If you want to draw a line in the sand between some of the critical — and by critical, I mean consciously positioned — differences between the creative office trend and the experiential office trend: the creative office was highly open and ambiguous. The experiential office is highly curated.

The creative office was not a new thing in the 90s or 2000s, but really began all the way back in the 1950s with architects like Kevin Roche and designers like the Eames. It was open, flexible workspace where people can self-define their daily workflow and their habits. And the ethos was let’s not overdesign what can happen in the space, because flexibility is the premium. And that even included cubicles and offices — it manifested in a lot of ways, but the way most people thought of it was, “okay, I just put in open space, and that means I’ve successfully created the opportunity for flexibility.”

Well, you’ve also successfully created noise pollution, and unless you mitigate that, you don’t create comfort. So, when it was done well, it really worked; when it was done poorly, it really didn’t work. And that drew a major reaction against the open office concept in the last decade. Mostly from the bad examples, I would argue.

If the premium is on flexibility and open space, and the problems were that we didn’t properly consider noise pollution and visual distraction, the experiential office space is a place where you can go where there are specifically designed zones where you can limit noise pollution, and you can increase focus. Or you can scale it back the other way, where I can go, “I do my focus work in the morning, but my afternoon work’s collaborative.” And maybe somebody has the reverse pattern and they can fold into the quiet space and I can fold into the more open space.

And, thus, it’s a curated set of opportunities. It’s not all flexibility for flexibility’s sake. It’s really, “let’s identify the spectrum of conditions that work for my culture, my tenant, my office or my combination of tenants” and provide those types of spaces, from a library to a private study space to a café and maybe in the middle of it, we can all come together.

“Not all these spaces need to be loud; maybe some need to be really quiet.”

Aaron Schiller

What are some of the amenities you’re envisioning for experiential offices?

I tend to like the library/study example, because while we all have Google, there are businesses that do deep and heavy research, and some of that research can be quite complicated. If you’re paying staff to assist in that already, utilizing better-trained staff that can assist with that process on-site could be a more powerful form of collaboration between hierarchies within an office space. That example departs from the idea that when we say experiential, we just mean a café. Not all these spaces need to be loud; maybe some need to be really quiet.

And are you imagining that kind of space as a shared amenity for multiple tenants, or would each tenant have their own space like that?

I think it’s industry-specific, because security will continue to drive a lot of things. For instance, we’re starting this week to redesign the United States Attorney’s Office in Lower Manhattan. And it’s still very much to be determined what their capacity to work from home and remote places is, based on the sensitivity of the criminal investigations they lead.

What are some of the other examples you’ve seen, either in practice or in the planning stages, of experiential office amenities?

One example that was happening at the class A office level pre-COVID — and was heavily challenged at the time, but might come out looking better in a post-COVID, experiential environment — is Norman Foster’s building in Hudson Yards, 50 Hudson Yards. It has Facebook, a major law firm and BlackRock. BlackRock’s floors have 15-foot clearances from floor to drop ceiling in window height, so huge amounts of light. You would think if you took out half a million square feet of that kind of space, you wouldn’t need any building amenities. Well, the building’s actually designed to focus on the landlord-provided amenities. If you’re a core tenant you go in on the ground floor, you then take an elevator to a higher floor, to the “sky lobby.” On that level is a multiplex, as well multiple conference rooms and a tiered stadium seating center. All of which are available to rent for any of the tenants in the building. They also have a café and numerous vendors. You have to be a tenant to get passcoded into the space, but after that you’re in the gilded hall — an exclusive club within an office building. That idea was really roundly criticized when [developer] The Related Cos. unveiled the building, but it might end up being a big success post-COVID.

When do you think peoples’ comfort level with these types of amenities will enable them to really manifest?

2023 and beyond. The idea that you’re going to draw the tenants back simply because your building creative space is underselling the length of vaccine delivery and then comfort level. But, once they feel comfortable, I think people are going to rush back, because everyone wants to be back together. Six months ago, that would have to been harder to predict, but I think now it’s pretty clear that there’s a universal feeling: we want connectivity and opportunity again.

“Real estate is no longer conceptualized as a product, but as a service. And everybody has to get on board with that in order to attract tenants.”

Aaron Schiller

How will the experiential office benefit real estate owners?

It benefits real estate owners, because real estate is no longer conceptualized as a product, but as a service. And everybody has to get on board with that in order to attract tenants. If you think about it that way, then you can say, “yeah, it might take me some more work, but I have a lot more opportunity if people think about me as a service, because I can integrate, I can acquire and I can deliver product via services on a much more frequent basis. I don’t just sign a lease every 15 years for space. I’m selling people services all day long, every day.” A side benefit is that it’s an opportunity for landlords to catch up with the WeWorks of the world; to look at what made sense about that model and what didn’t, without falling prey to the hype of it all.

How does an experiential office concept benefit tenants?

For tenants, it’s networked access. Forever, landlords in New York City have been like, “this is a great building for lawyers, or this is a great building for finance people.” That’s generally how commercial real estate has been pitched, as single-purpose buildings. But no lawyer wants to be in a building full of lawyers; they want to be in a building full of potential clients. That’s where you want to be.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.