Tetris-Like Office Creates Space, Grants
A couple weeks ago, we talked about how your office will disappear. Well, the office for Environmental Grantmakers Association (EGA) takes that concept literally. Its designers Taylor and Miller Architecture and Urban Design incorporated collapsible walls that make the office disappear.
The office’s four interlocking walls house seven work stations and ample storage. When opened, they can be configured as workstations or even a boardroom. When compressed, they create an open floorplan for events and various other purposes. You can compress some of the walls and extend others to create a highly dynamic space.
The walls have an innovative way of working together. From Taylor and Miller:
When occupying the space between two partitions, one can see that the inward faces of each has been excavated with the same shape. In other words, what is a storage box protruding on one side is a recessed storage cubby hole on the other. In this manner, the partitions are bound together spatially; the relationship between them becoming stronger and stronger as they are compressed together… until finally they are collapsed completely concealing the carved space within.
The design is very similar to the LifeEdited Apartment‘s moving wall, which rests on a track and carriage manufactured by Modern Office Systems, whose primary business is large file storage systems. Taylor and Miller sourced their track from Pipp Mobile. Our unit cost about $4500 for just the track and carriage (i.e. not including the cabinet above). Additional reinforcements had to be made to the floors to support the concentrated weight of the wall. While this is a fair amount of labor and money, they’re invaluable in small spaces, where access to all the space all the time makes a huge difference. Why have a guest room 365 days a year when you only use it 20 nights? Why have a boardroom all the time when you only use it a few times a week for an hour or two? The financial and environmental costs of maintaining unused spaces quickly makes a compelling argument for incorporating more systems like these in our interior designs.
Photos by Emile Dubuisson
Via Architizer