Posts by John Jarvis

John Jarvis on September 22, 2020

The year was 1965 when Art Gensler along with his wife and an associate founded the architectural firm in his name to specialize in corporate interiors. Gensler has since become a global powerhouse and a thought leader in the field of office design. Each year the firm comes out with an annual report, and with each annual report we seem to add to the lexicon of architecture and space design with clever descriptions of the workplace such as neighborhoods, agile workspaces, hot-seating and hoteling. I remember when “workplace strategy” became a thing, and I mostly dismissed it as a version of that old fancy-phrasing trick. For example, a 2005 article in the Journal of Corporate Real Estate defined workplace strategy as “the dynamic alignment of an organization’s work patterns with the work environment to enable peak performance and reduce costs.” Blah, blah, blah. Sorry about that chief, but this just doesn’t quite do it for me.