Soft-Firm distills work and workspace into a wireless booth that can reflect and amplify our natural surroundings, allowing absolute freedom of movement.
In the lead up to each issue, we challenge emerging designers to respond to the Frame Lab theme with a forward-looking concept. With their myriad services, central locations and responsibility to adapt to the times, education facilities are well positioned to serve the greater public off their roster. For Frame 144, we questioned how the rise in popularity of hybrid work models has increased the need for alternative settings to the (home) office. But what shapes should these settings take and what should they offer? We asked three creative practices to share their ideas.
Soft-Firm, based in New York City and co-founded by Lexi Tsien and Talitha Liu, has created remote working spaces that suggest a digital turn to a pastoral and nomadic subsistence. The 'phone booths' are outfitted with power outlets and work surfaces and feature mirrored exteriors that visually embed them within their natural context.
NYC-based Lexi Tsien (left) and Talitha Liu (middle) cofounded interdisciplinary practice Soft-Firm. Tanvi Rao joined the team as a junior designer in 2020.
What’s your view on the notion of the office today?
TALITHA LIU: The office today is a state of mind. While the office space was once an indispensable social and technological infrastructure for work, digital technology now renders it obsolete in favour of devices, platforms, apps and clouds. Access to an internet connection is more important than the physical space of work. The dogmatic grid of the modernist office has been dissolved and diffused into public and private realms. Less office space equals less architecture.
What was your starting point to envision an alternative (home)office setting?
LEXI TSIEN: We decided to look back to the Continuous Monument, a conceptual model for total urbanization by the Italian architects of Superstudio. Developed in 1969 as a critique of the urban planning at that time, this proposal envisioned a single piece of architecture extending as a continuous formation over a grid system and spanning the natural landscape, ultimately rendering the world as a uniform megastructure. We took a cue from the singular unifying act of their Continuous Monument, which nurtures and reflects the natural world rather than obliterating it.
How does your proposal differ from Superstudio’s concept?
LT: Instead of one singular extended megastructure, our proposal sees work and workspace as discreetly atomized pixels of programme. We identified the phone booth as the most irreducible unit of workspace – satisfying basic needs for connection, and visual and acoustic privacy. These phone booths, which are fitted out with power outlets and desk space, can function as remote workstations, dotting the natural landscape. Absent the modernist grid, the pixel unit is stretched into a rhombus – emphatically thin and oblique, giving an illusion of axonometry. Their shape is recombinatory in radial clusters or linear bars, allowing for the grid to be pinched, pulled and distorted, no longer a top-down, totalizing force. We imagine these pixels tapping into light infrastructure; 8G Wireless is supplied through lightning poles and drones deliver our most essential goods with a single swipe.
The booths can be configured in bars or clusters, challenging the modernist grid and suggesting more open relationships among work, nature and each other.
Why did you choose to envision a physical setting, while virtuality has become the dominant mode of experience and communication?
TL: Working remotely enables us to plug in and virtually meet up in any setting as we migrate from platform to platform. And yet, an exclusively virtual world is disorienting and fatiguing. Architectural surroundings can help us to physically ground ourselves and relieve our domestic spaces from the burden of work.
How will your design relate to the natural landscape?
LT: Their mirrored exteriors reflect and amplify their environment so one must move around it to understand its material presence. Thus, the office becomes subordinate to nature.
What lifestyle changes do you hope your concept will instigate?
LT: The extreme atomization of work and our societal shift online is an opportunity to return to nature, rather than exploit it. Like sheep, we will roam the digital pastoral – playing, grazing, working, sleeping – and our impact upon the earth may have a lighter touch. Will the digital nomads among us find food from the land? A radical return to a quasi hunter-gatherer mode of communal subsistence suggests a new frontier that will dissolve the bounds of personal property.
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