The Virtual Office
Overview by Supervert of the innovative "virtual office" implemented in downtown NYC by advertising giant Chiat/Day. Originally published in Artforum Magazine (January 1995).
"We have an office. But there's no office in the office," says an employee, intending neither a zen paradox nor a Heideggerian tautology, but rather trying to explain the advertising agency Chiat/Day's new "virtual office." While there tends to be little that's properly virtual about virtual reality — it's not a simulacrum that anyone honestly mistakes for the real thing — the very word has come to designate vanguard technology in the popular mind, as though its origins in the Latin word for man (vir) have been amputated and replaced by a new, prosthetic connotation. The realest thing about it may be the hype, and yet Chiat/Day — known for innovative work ranging from the Energizer Bunny to the recent NYNEX campaign ("if it's out there, it's in here") to the falling-bungee-jumper Reeboks ad — has taken a remarkable step forward in the last year, opening two "virtual" flagships: an office in Los Angeles designed by Frank Gehry, and now one in New York, designed by Gaetano Pesce.
Just what is a virtual office? In Chiat/Day's implementation, it comprises essentially two things: an architectural superstructure and a technological infrastructure. The New York space, located in a glass tower in Manhattan's South Street Seaport, not far from the World Trade Center and the financial district, doesn't try to monumentalize the agency or create a cathedral of commerce. Instead, Pesce's design gives the overall impression of a kindergarten playroom: it's happy and warm and colorful and soft and round and funny. Walls apparently made of bricks turn out on inspection to be made of colored video cassettes and remote controls. A puffy pair of red lips — the kind of incongruously and humorously anthropomorphic detail typical of Pesce's designs — surrounds the access window of the Store, where employees sign out cellular phones, Powerbooks, and other supplies for the day. In one work area, desktop Macs are not plopped unceremoniously and unergonomically on old tables or desks never meant for them, but are rather housed in cage-like stations designed specifically to accomodate the often cumbersome configuration of keyboards, monitors, and hard drives; these stations are distributed somewhat randomly — not in hierarchical rows — around the floor. And from no place in the office can one fail to obtain a slice of the smashing 360º view of Manhattan afforded by copious windows.
The backbone of the space, however, is its technological infrastructure. Jay Chiat, head of the agency, balks at calling this the "virtual office," preferring the term "resource architecture." The old kind of office, he explains, is merely a kind of "storage architecture," a place where employees park themselves at little archives of personal trinkets and business files that soon grow obsolete. The new office, on the other hand, does away with individual desks, filing cabinets, cubicles — in short, with any kind of privatized workspace. In its stead, employees are allowed to make up their own schedules and work wherever they want: anywhere in the office, or at home. (They can send work in from their own computers by modem.) The technology thus does not exactly virtualize the space — it's still an actual office, insofar as people work there — but enables employees to become mobile. It's like guerrilla warfare, in that it replaces the trenches and fortifications of desks and filing cabinets with tactics, communications, intelligence, and speed. It's "resource architecture" as a sort of arms brokerage, except that Chiat/Day supplies its ad warriors with cellulars and Powerbooks rather than walkie-talkies and M16s.
There are a lot of dystopian possibilities to be drawn out of the idea of a "virtual" office — a whole Post-Modern Times, with a morph of Charlie Chaplin electronically surveilled to assure that his "motivation" keeps pace with company expections — but what's brilliant about Chiat/Day's new space is that it points entirely in the opposite direction: toward utopia. Etymologically, of course, that coinage of Sir Thomas More's means "no place," and the new office does deterritorialize the workforce. In the Machine Age, F.W. Taylor and Henry Ford sparked an inadvertent architectural revolution: the spaces of offices and factories cemented the division of labor, their tangible structural boundaries reinforcing hierarchical labor relations. In the Information Age, employees at Chiat/Day still have specialized functions, but the tangible boundaries dissolve into a sort of digital decentralization. The office is utopian in a sense Fourier might have recognized as well, an oddly capitalist implementation of a communist theory of work: on one hand, employees become self-organizing, ad hoc teams, still with a job to do but able to decide how, when, and where to do it; on the other hand, Jay Chiat insists that the new workspace is a failed experiment if it doesn't increase productivity. The agency most certainly has not stuck a flower in its hair or a copy of Chairman Mao in its pocket, and its attempt to restructure both its workforce and workplace may well be another instance of capitalism gobbling up what once seemed antithetical to it. Nevertheless, at least experimenting with these hitherto utopian possibilities has the result that, though Pesce may have made the office look like a kindergarten, the employees at Chiat/Day are finally treated as adults.
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