Can Happiness be a Design Principle?

When given the task to design a new office building in a rapidly gentrifying but still industrial neighbourhood, we asked ourselves: what are offices really for? COVID has accelerated cultural tendencies that were already with us into full waves of new behavior and the office is now being asked to be so much more than a space to hold our various office functions. And we think that— post-COVID— rather than retreating entirely from the office, we will be asking it to be so much more. It will be a flexible hub of activity and a place to touch down in a multi-layered eco-system of workplaces. It will be a source of community, a social place, a wellness place, and a performance space. More and more, it will be recognized that the office is just another one of many stages and backdrops for us to live out the fullness of our lives. It will be another place to pursue happiness. And as Shawn Achor has expressed, “Perhaps the most accurate term for happiness is the one Aristotle used: eudaimonia, which translates not directly to ‘happiness’ but to ‘human flourishing’”.

With this in mind we turned our collective studio minds to the task of visioning what this place of human flourishing might be and how it would react to the realities of our industrial site and its intensive zoning parameters. Through an examination of programmatic amenities, spatial mechanisms encouraging social connection, and a radical biophilic approach ensuring that nature was always visible and accessible wherever you are in the building, we began to shape the building.

Take a look at the results: