Yes, we can: coworking spaces up their game

Not just hubs of industry and knowledge exchange, the latest cohort of coworking spaces serve as social platforms, too. And all gloriously analogue.

By Studioshaw and Peter Smisek

August 20, 2019 | 10:00 pm CUT

Please be seated: new coworking spaces encourage the sharing of ideas through increasingly considered informal settings. Shown here, the Kindred Coworking Space in London, designed by Studioshaw. Photo: Ed Reeve

With more and more people working as freelancers or in small, dynamic companies, developers and architects are increasingly building coworking offices that double as social hubs by providing spaces with varying degrees of formality. Because coworking spaces are designed to be more flexible than traditional offices, they can also often be more easily accommodated within existing buildings.

Going East has chosen restrained tubular steel and wooden furnishings for their renovation of Fosbury & Sons Boitsfort coworking space in Brussels, which helps to showcase the building's unique concrete structure and facade panels. Photo: Jeroen Verrecht

Such an approach is also more environmentally sustainable, as is the case with Fosbury & Sons’ Boitsfort coworking outpost in Brussels, refurbished by Going East. Located within a concrete, brutalist office building originally designed by Constantin Brodzki, the designers have chosen to open up the structure’s plan and strip out any superfluous decorations, instead revealing its robust construction. The refurbished office now houses 600 people across 250 companies around a series of open-plan coworking offices, suites, and offering everything from parking, meeting rooms to a shared restaurant and large-scale artworks displayed in communal spaces.

Alda Ly's and Chiara de Rege's all-female The Wing coworking office in New York contrasts pink accents with an otherwise harmonious colour palette of pastel colours, terrazzo and pale wood. Photo: Tory Williams

In New York, architect Alda Ly and interior designer Chiara de Rege converted a Soho loft space into The Wing, a social club and coworking space exclusively for women. Featuring an enfilade of spaces connected by arched doorways, the office incorporates generous communal areas with colourful, upholstered furnishings, open-plan as well as private offices, an on-site café, as well as a pump-room for new mothers and colour-coded library featuring books by female authors.

London’s Replica House Studio by Surman Weston is currently used as a coworking office, but will later be converted into a residence without the needing any further structural adjustments. Photo: Wai Ming Ng

In North London, architecture practice Surman Weston have converted a small, Victorian church into a temporary coworking space. Now called Replica House Studio, the design leaves the ground floor free and inserts two mezzanines within the rafters, separated by a void, on either side of the building's rectangular footprints. The interior is painted white in order to provide a calm and versatile working environment, while two colourful, stained-glass screens provide added privacy for the spaces upstairs.

Designed by Studioshaw, the Kindred Coworking Space in Hammersmith, London, marries the old-world ambience of a social club with modern furnishings and a focus on a more informal kind of sociability and well-being. Photo: Ed Reeve

Meanwhile, in the West London district of Hammersmith, Studioshaw has converted a Grade-II listed Georgian townhouse into the Kindred Coworking Space. The ground floor of the three-storey structure contains a publically accessible restaurant, while open-plan coworking spaces that can be used to host events in the evening are located on the middle floor. The top floor accommodates a series of private studios that can be used for work, but also as spaces for meditation and yoga. A historic Georgian colour palette of dark blues, greens and greys is combined with contemporary furnishings and such fashionable materials as brass and marble to create a stimulating office for Kindred's members.

Yes, we can: coworking spaces up their game

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