This project involved relocating the office to a newly constructed building for an advertising company. Although the new building is a typical office building, it directly echoes the thinking behind COVID-19 and beyond: the curtain wall behind the columns can be opened and closed for ventilation, each floor has a terrace, plus light is available from almost four sides, and one can see the greenery outside the windows. Our idea was to design a state where various functions are connected in a gradient manner, taking advantage of this good ventilation and light environment.

Today, after the COVID-19 and with a better communication environment, people bother to go to the office because it offers more opportunities for interaction and more fulfilling options than at home. We created a matrix based on two axes: individual versus team, focus versus relaxation, then studied the floor plan to create a state where they interrelate and work together in a large open room instead of individually arranging these conflicting environments. We studied the lounge and office space layout to ensure the maximum one-room space, and arranged the U-shaped office space to surround the lounge. The east side of the U-shape is an area for individuals to concentrate, and the west side is an area for teams to relax. We designed it in such a way that these areas transform gradually toward the center of the U-shape.

We wanted to allow individuals to choose where they want to be, depending on their mood and disposition, but still leave some nooks for interaction. Therefore, we dispersed fixed functions used by many people, such as the library, kitchen, lockers, and private rooms, to avoid creating areas where only a limited number of people go. In addition, each area has furniture of different characters depending on the situation, such as stationary seating for individuals and free-address shared desks. We had another central theme when developing this project: an office building typology.

The office building is very systematic and prioritizes efficiency by using square units of the free-access floor system, the ceiling system and so on. Furthermore, one customary practice in the Japanese real estate sector is the tenants' obligation to restore the property to its original condition when moving out. Any significant change from the existing interior would have to start with discarding the free-access floor units, ceiling units, and carpet tiles that had just been restored to their original condition by the previous renter. We are not required to create a uniform office landscape in this case. Besides, while being part of a wasteful cycle is not agreeable, devising a new system from scratch is also disconcerting.

Therefore, we set out to conceive a design that would leverage the existing office and real estate system as much as possible while rethinking it as a material and converting it into furniture such as tables, partitions, and kotatsu, a new upcycled design was proposed.