In Moscow, 1.5 million sqm of office space are built every year. Thousands of architects and designers meticulously plan the blueprints for a wide range of business centers and offices. And every year there is an exponential rise in the number of people who hate to even look at their offices, let alone work in them… Why can’t we have offices that are comfortable, pleasant, and interesting for the people who have to labor away in them every single day?
Two Big Differences
It was 2004 in the English town of Woking, when the world-famous McLaren Company opened a new technical center: a modern factory for the assembly of automobiles with an adjacent office facility. The building, designed by the architect, Norman Foster, cost $500 million. When journalists asked the management of McLaren, why so much money was needed for an office facility, they were told that the goal had been to create a pleasant, invigorating space for its office workers. That was it – no other reason. (For the pleasant invigoration of the machinists and mechanics on the assembly line, uniforms were designed by Hugo Boss.)
Of course, it is impossible to compare McLaren to the average Moscow firm trying to settle into an office. It is one thing to design and create your own real estate and quite another to rent it. But there may be a moral even in this unfair comparison – the obvious logic used by this particular western company is that the office is a place that should encourage its workers – and it is just not so obvious in Russia.
The modern Russian office sector includes two major categories: richly decorated VIP zones where the management situates itself and plainly designed “open spaces” where the rank and file clerks sit. The VIP zone is built for maximum prestige and the open space for maximum economy. The rank and file also finds itself with a minimum of comfort. Even in the best cases there are only four sqm of work space (and sometimes two, though the average in the West is between seven and eight sqm per staff member,) white walls, bad lighting, a cafeteria, and often a kitchen block with microwave oven where tea and coffee is sold. The Russian office is built so that nothing might distract from the work, and the work itself is to be born like a heavy wooden cross. In Russia, Ernie Zelensky’s book, “Real Success without a Real Job,” was translated as “Success without Office Slavery.” That is, in the West they have “serious work” and we have the continued institution of serfdom. And it is not just an overdramatic metaphor, but a real fact of modern Russian life. Many of our office spaces are simply inhuman.
Whose Fault is it?
To make an office friendlier is a task that demands coordinated effort by architects, planners, proprietors, managers, and even tenants. For now it seems that the participants in this process, like the heroes of Krylov’s fable, “The Quartet,” are simply unable to work together in unison. Oksana Svergun, psychologist and advisor to the human resources director at Metalloinvest, asserts, “The biggest problem I have is with office planners. They obviously don’t think at all about the people who have to work in these office buildings. The deficit of office space in Moscow is such that absolutely anything can find a tenant, completely without regard for quality of design. Managers of large holdings are ready to reserve offices before groundwork has even begun based solely on the location and the cost of the lease. How the building will look and the sorts of services that will be offered are not even thought of at that phase, and yet the long-term leases are already signed. Top drawer managers get their own offices. In my office all the walls were made of glass. To sit in a glass room, on view for all, is terribly uncomfortable. Maybe an office doesn’t have to be cozy, but still it had better be comfortable.”
“If the offices look perfunctory and soulless, it’s the fault of the tenants. Everything depends on the general culture,” says Yulia Borisov, head of the architectural company, UNK Project. “The tenants for whom we design offices usually want an effective and presentable interior for the least money. Only very recently has a general trend begun toward the European approach. Europeans worry more about the long-term management phase, about lower upkeep costs, even about using ecologically-smart materials. In the West they plan and design for an operation period of 10-15 years and some facilities are used even for 20 or 30 years, with only the slightest cosmetic brushing up. In Russia the operation period is 3-4 years – nobody bothers to think any further ahead than that. In the West the difference in office design for managers and employees is minimal. The head of Google, billionaire Sergei Brin, sits with everybody else in an open space. In Russia, the proprietor’s rooms are absolutely luxurious, like private apartments. The ordinary employees get the leftovers.”
What Can Managers Do?
“Any management team, including our own, must create an atmosphere of comfort in the office building, especially when we speak about class A business centers,” says Mikhail Vovshin, general director of Tsepellin. “We consider ourselves to be initiators, ‘locomotives’ behind this process and we are very glad that in a majority of cases we find support from the proprietors of our buildings. In our business center at 32 Bakhrushina, we have paintings made by an artist only 20 years old, Mikhail Levin. They help fight the dry office atmosphere. There’s another project in the works as well – the planning of the lobby at the Volna business center on Prospekt Akademika Sakharova. We will fill it with armchairs so that visitors may wait there for several minutes while they are getting permission to enter. In the lobby there will be flowers and – most important – a dais with an automated grand piano. During the workday the piano will play classical music by automation. We hope to create a respectable and cozy atmosphere, which will please those who work in the office and those who visit.”
The designer who is actually making the corrections to the quite severe interior of Volna, a truly luxurious business center with a general area of 19 thousand sqm, happens to be Ekaterina Anokhina. Looking like an impish schoolgirl, Ekaterina is cheekily reviving the tremendous lobby, which is so massive in its dimensions that it could easily be used to film a King Kong sequel. In order to give this great pompous space some element of coziness, Ekaterina is planning a number of important little touches: vases of flowers, special boxes for correspondence, a system of lighting for the reception area, and so on.
“If I planned an office building,” says Ekaterina, “I would by all means envisage a relaxation zone – a place where one could unwind and socialize with coworkers in pleasant surroundings, perhaps someplace peaceful or even joyful and ironic. In Volna Tower, I offered to do a wall fountain – they have high ceilings there, it would look like a real waterfall. But it was too much for the client. As for the design of spacious offices, rather than a lobby, in my view they turn out so soulless because so often the client asks the designer to do the planning but turns the question of materials and finishing over to the constructors.
How to Do an Office
The humanization of an office space is a very creative sort of calling. Non-standard solutions are even evidence of a company’s creative potential. The very originally-decorated interior at the offices of Restavratsia N was done by the designer, Hannes Obermozer from the architectural center, Archi X-vision. Hannes decorated the offices of the general director, the conference rooms, and even the stairwells with bright wall paper evocative of pop art. With these touches, he not only reduced the monotony of the white offices, but gave a feeling of quality to the VIP zones and areas for the ordinary employees. Such bold decisions are naturally the exception, not the rule. The majority of firms are limited to flowers in the summer and a Christmas tree in the winter.
“We cannot say that big companies don’t worry at all about office design,” says psychologist Oksana Svergun. “There is a cadre of florists who provide offices with flowers, and these flowers are changed daily in the VIP zones. Traditionally, the whole office is done up for New Years and for the 8th of March, and for company parties. Whoever wants to decorate the workplace with an individual style can make use of company calendars, posters, and office supplies with company logos. Some hang up diplomas from business courses and other evidence of their qualifications or pictures from past corporate functions. The old soviet boards for “good marks’ are still around in some offices but it is not a terribly widespread office practice.”
“The management of our company pays special attention to the decoration of business centers,” says Anna Tsyrulskaya, development director for the SlavGrad Group. “It is more difficult to accommodate every tenant. This is why we have some tactics, for example, selecting soft colors for corridors and elevators areas. One of our properties is designed with pictures and sketches of the SlavGrad employees, and this exhibition is changed at designated intervals. The presence of a designer in the company is not a baseless luxury; we rely on a particular taste and style. If one of the tenants wants to decorate their office, we are ready to offer what help we can.”
The Spontaneous Creativity of the Masses
The modern office harshly rejects everything emblematic of the soviet office: flowers on the sill and photo-collages on the walls.
“I see nothing scandalous in the fact that somebody puts a cactus on the computer or work table or photographs in a frame. Though there are companies where anything of this sort is prohibited,” says psychologist Oksana Svergun.
“As an architect, I am a harsh opponent of these personal innovations,” says Yulia Borisova, explaining her own point of view. “Portraits of Alla Pugacheva stuck to the wall with scotch tape do not add to the generally aesthetic. (Similarly a balcony surrounded by glass makes our miserable lives more miserable.) But by experience I know that to fight with this sort of spontaneous office decoration is just useless. It’s our general culture, we are still eastern people somehow and we love the showy bazaar. Though I note that, if the office space was created less aggressively than it usually is, if the walls were not white but pastel and the lighting was softer and not done with surgical lamps from an operating theater, people would feel more comfortable and it certainly wouldn’t spoil the interior.”
Art for Art’s Sake
None of the experts with whom we have spoken has denied that the decoration of an office with works of art is a good thing. “The problem is that there isn’t any commercial ‘art’ in Russia,” says Yulia Borisova. “It is truly a rarity. We have more traditional art, socialist realist art, and conceptual art. It is almost impossible to find sculpture for offices. If we design VIP zones in a classical style, then we hang the walls with engravings. For a high-tech style we do black and white photographs.”
“Metalloinvest has a specialized support program for holdings from the regions,” asserts Oksana Svergun. “The company buys the pictures that somehow reflect the theme of metallurgy. In my office, for example, there was one with a gaunt workman sitting in a locomotive sticking his hand in the coal furnace – fully appropriate for a company using 19th century technology. I don’t think that the company’s prospective clients were happy to see that picture.” At Restavratsia N, the white walls in ordinary employees’ work areas are decorated by the pastels of artist Elena Mukhanova, who paints with big, bold colors in a Russian variation on pop art.
All in the Design
If we look the problem in the eye, we must admit that the first offices built in capitalist Russia, though not really very old, are already obsolete.
“Everything done in Russian office organization was popular in the West half a century ago,” reasons Yulia Borisov. “With the appearance of the personal computer, the cellular telephone, and all-powerful electronic forms of communication, the demands on an office have completely changed. Actually, why will I even demand my employees to arrive at the office by 9AM when they can do 90% of their work at home, not wasting two hours on the road and sending me their work by electronic post? In western IT companies, from 15 to 50% of employees almost never come into the office. They work at home in their pajamas. Their workplace is a laptop and a box for mail. The office is turning into a center only needed for meetings and creative collaboration, with the dull and heavy work done elsewhere. Western offices have more space devoted to conferences, cafes, restaurants – places where people can associate informally, where brainstorming takes place. The office is the place of intellectual recharging.” As an example of an ideal office which still lies beyond the wildest dreams of Russian capitalists, we make take the legendary headquarters of Google in Silicon Valley.
At Google, every employee decorates his work area as he wants, with whatever he wants, be it ant farms or body-building posters. In the open space the work tables are complimented by soft sofas and the halls are filled with air hockey and billiard tables. House pets can come to work, from dogs to black beetles. The vending machines dispense not only tea, coffee, and cool drinks, but ice cream and candy. Certified gourmet chefs work in the numerous cafes and restaurants and cadres of masseuses cater to the employees.
And Google was founded in 1996 by an immigrant from Russia – Sergei Brin. Today the firm is worth $171 billion.