Tomorrow's sustainable workplaces

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The Architects' Journal and the British Council for Offices brought together key figures from the property industry at a lunch at MIPIM to discuss the form that offices would take in the future. BDP sponsored the event.

This is an edited transcript of the conversation that took place over lunch in Cannes.

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• Author: Ruth Slavid..

PARTICIPANTS

The participants were:
Peter Allport, chief executive of Executive Offices Group which works with managed offices.
Trevor Butler, architectural engineer with BDP, head of sustainability.
Mark Cottrell, head of global real estates BT
Adrian Hill, partner Cushman & Wakefield, property agents
Nigel Hugill, chairman of Lendlease in Europe,
Richard Kauntze, chief exec BCO, chair of debate.
Nigel Oseland, director, AMA Alexei Marmot Associates, expert in helping clients to adopt flexible working practices.
Hilary Reid Evans, Head of Sustainability Initiatives, Quintain
Ruth Slavid, online editor and special projects editor
Tim Wells, commercial director Ballymore
Tim Williams, architect and urban designer, director of BDP and heads up the workplace sector

SETTING THE SCENE

Tim Williams

Tim Williams
Where will the office be in 10 years time? I came up with five predictions will raise a couple of eyebrows.

1. Office users will be far more demanding in terms of the kind of space and the kind of energy profile that spaces require. The new generation filling these offices will be creators and coordinators, they will be be developers of information. They will each have very different demands in terms of how that space works but they will share in common a demand for very high energy credentials.

2. I think the form of buildings will change, floorplates will get narrower, floor to ceiling heights will increase, insulation will increase and floorplates will get larger in terms of area but not necessarily height.

3. I think energy will become the principal unit of exchange. It will become more valuable than space and so how buildings work will be energy accountable instead of space accountable. This will affect IT; IT I think will change radically, in terms of reducing the impact that IT has on the energy profile of the building. Laptops take 60W, standard desktops take 250W and PDAs take 15W. This will become hugely significant in the way that control can provide IT to users.

4. In terms of my fourth prediction in terms of new technologies, we seem to be dealing with cases in the developed world and in the undeveloped world that are similar in the sense that on the one hand there is weak infrastructure or no infrastructure and on the other hand no infrastructure. The alternative technologies that we are looking at in the developed world will become very similar to the technologies that we are required to use in the developing world, and theywill converge around the clever use of photovoltaics and green and solar and tidal power.

5. The final challenge, and the toughest of them all as far as the office is concerned, will not come from within the office, not from the demands of users, not from the demands of clever technologies , but in terms of how the office sits in relation to the city. There will be a need for new typologies of how the office works, and how the city works, and how the office works within the city, how it works with residential and retail and leisure, to make the city liveable and enjoyable and a civilised place to work.

We are all going to be living in higher densities, we are all going to be living in mixed use environments and the typologies we have at the moment are outdated and we need to be thinking about new typologies. The answer is not, I believe, high rise buildings with mixed use in them; it's not high-rise buildings with hotels in the base and office buildings in the middle and residential on the top, it's far more clever and sophisticated three-dimensional models of how these activities can work together and make civilised spaces in which to live and work, and that will be driven by the sustainability agenda and with the longer term view that is the biggest challenge for the office.

Peter Allport
We get asked to look at quite a lot of the new towers on plan and see if we can introduce our business into those towers. They are promoted to us as the most flexible buildings of all time and then you find that the floorplates are really wide, they are like football pitches, and we can do absolutely nothing with them.

I think the workplace will become a lot less formal in the future. I think our kids will refuse to work in them. If you have too wide a space you have to have a corridor in the centre and it's totally inefficient. It's absolutely key the percentages of lettable space you have to the space you are paying for, as an operator.

CHALLENGING THE FUNDAMENTALS

Richard Kauntze
The question I am often asked at the BCO is why we need offices at all. We can all work remotely, we can all function in various ways so I would just like to spend a few minutes before we get into detail talking about the overall need for offices and the relationship between workspace and people.

Why do people feel that we need offices? What are offices all about?

Richard Kauntze

Adrian Hill
I think it's psychological, people like to be together. We've looked at all sorts of working clients, at home working, at hot desking. At the end of the day, one of the main reasons for running a business is the human factor, people just like to be together.

Peter Allport
People just aren't self sufficient enough to work on their own full time. Most  people need to work with a peer group in order to survive. People will need to become more self sufficient as technology decreases the need to come together. People will decreasingly work full time in a formal office environment, they will spend time working in different locations, will work remotely, but they will definitely need to come together to keep that social link.

Work is a social activity, people need to congregate together to give of their best, people need to work in competition with each other.

Richard Kauntze
Something that is very different for me is the manifestation of an office. I go to a particular coffee bar before I come to work every morning, and this coffee bar functions as an office, it is an office, it is full of people who are working, who are having meetings, who are doing all kinds of things. OK, it's a branch of Prêt a Manger but it's effectively functioning as an office. It's just not called an office.

Peter Allport
We put a hotel lounge into each of our centres; it's a place where people can work informally, talk to each other. Talk to Charles Handy, who I adore, he talks very much about how people will work in a very different way, how people in the next generation won't accept working in cattle farms, in the open plan environment. The lounge has become very much a feature.

NEW GENERATION

Nigel Oseland
You have picked on a key point there. It's a generational issue. The way that kids work today, how they operate in a university, it's not how we would have operated in a university 20 years ago. you have to look at that to see what kind of workplace they are going to expect in the future.

There is the great dilemma. On the one hand you have got social networks and we are going towards Bebo and My Space, and to people interacting virtually – so does that mean we need less office space. On the other hand you hear all the stuff about - maybe it's the middle to older generation – how we still need to come in for social interaction but also mentoring and training and motivation. It's that that you miss in the virtual environment.

Peter Allport
Let's not lose sight of the need to employ a little simple psychology and actually think about how people feel, about how their customers will feel about the environments where they work.

SWEET SMELL OF COMMUNICATION

Nigel Oseland
But you have to offer people choice. You have to offer people the choice to work in a virtual network environment but also have the opportunity to come in and interact face to face. We're social animals. We talk about smell as the most basic of our senses, it engenders all sorts of emotions and I sometimes feel that particularly when you meet people for the first time, you have to have face-to-face contact.

I think it's also about gesticulation, about having the full picture, and I think you pick up on more of these subconscious signals, you understand all this face to face, then networking can begin.

Tim Wells and Nigel Oseland

MIXED ENVIRONMENTS

Hilary Reid Evans
What you are saying is that it's a complex mix, that because of our human need for affiliation, we will always want to have face to face encounters. Because we need to have cross fertilisation of our ideas, we ought to have spaces where we can interact with people from other organisations.

In addition to that we have got the pressures of environmental change which means that we are living, working and playing in much closer proximity.  So for the office of the future, we are much more likely to find an environment where travel time is much less, where the concept of having a business or an office district is much less, that we will have more of a smaller office unit that fits with what you were saying about floorplates and so forth. You will find more offices integrated into retail exteriors. The whole concept of networking will meet all of those human needs as well as the requirements of climate change.

Peter Allport
The golden triangle in Paris is a far more mixed environment than say the city of London or the West End – the West End is obviously more mixed than the city is, but as you walk around Paris, which we spend a lot of time doing because we are expanding in Paris at the moment, you can see a tremendous mix of retail, residential and offices within a single environment, and it's a much healthier way of being.

Adrian Hill and Peter Allport

THE OFFICE IS HISTORY

Richard Kauntze
Let's get a major corporate take on this. Mark, from BT's perspective, you have been pioneering home working I know. And you have had a very advanced approach on this, you are a huge occupier, a big employer. What's your take on this?

Mark Cottrell
The office as a traditional place of work is becoming history. Almost everyone works in a flexible way, whether that is working from home or just coming somewhere where you plug in your laptop for 30 minutes, and download emails. So I think flexibility is the key driver.

I agree that interaction and communication needs to continue - whether that is in an office environment or whether within a quasi social environment, whatever you decide to call it.

For us at the moment with quite a large office base, we are making that space more flexible and adaptable. So for example at the old traditional telephone exchanges where we no longer need the amount of space that we needed for the equipment, we are starting to make use of that space to convert into just meeting space. So people turn up purely for just face to face meetings. They don't work there – and move on. So it's just building in flexibility into what we've currently got.

In terms of the future, we are adding agendas about sustainability, about retaining and motivating the workforce – people dislike commuting for an hour and a half, so if you want to purely attract and retain and motivate your workforce, you need to provide an environment that works. The last is to make the best use of the technology that is available, and that makes it very easy to work from home, to work from Starbucks or wherever you want to do. That's going to be key.

Mark Cottrell

BACK TO MANUFACTURING?

Hilary Reid Evans
But isn't there a difference between what you're talking about at the high end of technology, where you have the technology available to ensure that your workforce can have that flexibility, and some of the more basic industries - because we are still at heart a manufacturing economy and we have some core industries which are not flexible in that way.

And one of the theories I have is that we will have a multi-tiered marketplace in terms of what's happening with offices so that there will be people who will have the flexibility that you have, because they have the enabling technology, but there will also be people who will be tied to a much more traditional work environment until such time as technology replaces that.

But we haven't got there yet so we're going to need a variety of work environments and a variety of technologies to ensure that they can meet all objectives, which is a total sustainable economy.

Nigel Hugill
I don't think we are still a manufacturing economy. Apart form the high end of the spectrum – aerospace, defence – we make very little.  What do we buy these days which is actually made in Britain?

Nigel Oseland
We are a service economy and I think we are entering now this kind of creative economy. We've shipped out manufacturing, we are starting to ship out our basic core services - call centres are going offshore etc. where we can progress is in this creative innovation economy.

What we've got to do is use knowledge, which is ubiquitous through the internet and the web, and it's what you can do with it. If we want to stay ahead of the game, it's all about innovation and creativity. That's got to be our focus, but I accept there's still going to be a large percentage in the service industry. And manufacturing – I think that's gone.

Hilary Reid Evans
Can I just hypothesize that we are entering a new environment. It will no longer be economically viable to ship very small low-value items across the globe, where the resources will not be available to do that.

So I think we are going to see a sea change where we are moving back towards a more basic economy, where we will be looking again at the opportunities to produce within our own local environment.

And you haven't addressed the issue when you have been talking of agriculture, and what happens with sustainable agriculture, which to turn it full circle relates to what is going to happen with energy supply in relation to the offices. Because I am sure we are all aware of the debate that is going to happen with the area that is available for the production of biomass and biofuels versus the area that is available for the reduction of basic food resources.

If you look at it holistically that is going to make a huge difference in terms of the shape and structure of the office of the future. The type of fuel sources that will be used, the distances that the fuel has to travel and I was talking earlier about hydrogen fuels and about how they may be applied to the office environment. Those things are all structural.

Hilary Reid Evans

FUEL SOURCES

Richard Kauntze
Trevor, you've got some strong views on fuels.

Trevor Butler
Good timing. In terms of energy and renewables, I think we are going to see that this drive for on-site renewable energy, with the exception of solar on south-facing facades, we will see that disappear from the new offices of the future. The reason being that the aquifers are going to be too hot, the transport cost of shipping in biomass and biofuels is going to be exorbitant, just that. And the transport issues.

Actually, since the industrial revolution we have moved power generation outside of our cities and there is a drive now to put loads of combustion plant inside cities, making energy. And the Nox emissions and the CO2 emissions of burning biomass and biofuels in  cities are going to move that more towards the edge of town, with energy derived from waste – organic waste - and there are a number of initiatives in local government of energy from waste, where organic treatment can produce biofuels that can be burnt on the edges away from the densified population. That means the pollution is away from where we are living, and cleaner energy is transported by a network of distribution cables to the buildings that we need within the cities in a cleaner way.

Peter Allport and Trevor Butler

Peter Allport
I feel strongly abut biofuels. Other technologies will overtake biofuels and also, due to the need for food worldwide and to our inability to produce enough food, you will find that biofuels are a complete cul de sac.

I very strongly believe that solar integrated into building materials combined with the generation of hydrogen fuel will be the big way forward, and that buildings will actually become power stations in their own right. That's not very far away and I'm quite invested in these industries and also in the generation of electricity from waste material.

I think you'll find its much closer than most people perceived. The need to kick start farming because of all the imbalances generated by subsidies and the common agricultural policy and all this kind of rubbish basically has led the press to get very excited about biofuels, the US seems to be very excited about biofuels. I really do think it's a very dangerous path to go down, it will ed up in a brick wall.

PUBLIC TRANSPORT

Richard Kauntze
I'd like to move on to how the supply side is reacting to what has happened in recent years. Nigel, I wonder whether you might give us some thoughts on how you see the supply side reacting to what has become the dominant theme? I mean I've been in this field for about 20 years, and sustainability has gripped the property industry like no other subject that I can think of. What's your take on this, on how tenants' attitudes are changing?

Nigel Hugill
You have to be careful when you talk about offices. There are probably many more, but from my perspective at least three clear separate uses now .

One is the small scale, whether it's serviced offices or the café round the corner that is somewhere where you can sit and park your computer and get on with things.

The second is business parks. Most of the offices on business parks are effectively bases from which people come and go. Which is why they have high levels of car parking because most of the people in business parks don't stay there all the time. They are bases for that and one of the things you see developing is that business parks have added an element of warehousing or a certain amount of showcase.

And then there is the third element which has always been the one that has most interested me, which is where the offices are actually the factories. The Bank of America's office in Canary Wharf is actually their factory as well, it is their entire creative output.

I think you have to be quite careful because if you look at the amount of space that Bank of America occupy today, relative to 20 years ago, I am prepared to bet that per capita it will be higher today than it was then, even though they are in open plan offices and their seats are closer together. I am prepared to bet the price of this lunch today that they actually occupy more space, and that's because of the fact that there is a substantial of theatre space in terms of presentations and meeting rooms and for all the technology that is situated in the building.

When I look at what has happened over the last 25 years, there has been this segregation but then if you look at this last element, the office as factory, there has been a clear polarisation and moving towards the location of those round public transport interchanges, in what historically might not have been seen as core locations. Broadgate would be an example, Canary Wharf is growing and the public transport is growing into Canary Wharf, the offices round Victoria.
None of those was seen as prime office locations 25 years ago but they've all been substantial locations subsequently.

Peter Allford
And Stratford will be a successful office location because I've already had four or five Indian companies come to me and say 'we want to put a base in the UK and we want it to be European facing and the train and all the rest of it'.

In the restaurant

Nigel Hugill
That fundamental grounding around public transport is the absolute single factor in all of them, in that last big user category, and therefore I think that a number of the other elements like working from home are very much tempered by that.

And I also think that the extent by which – I'm fortunate I can pretty much live where I want, and my wife chooses to live in Putney because she doesn't want to live in the dense centre, and if I look at another part of the business, building apartments, it is very clear who the majority of those apartments are occupied by. The apartments are typically occupied by people between the ages of 25 and 35 or actually coming back in over 50.

Those are very clear trends and I think that Richard Rogers imposing a Tuscan hill town on families in the middle of cities is quite off and that's why you go back to the public transport because it's for making rational balances in that process. And finishing off this debate is that in relation to the larger scale offices, it's absolutely the case that corporates are prepared to pay for sustainability.

I don't know whether they are happy to pay for it at home in their own houses but they are certainly very happy to pay for it and expect it now and it has become an axiom of corporate expenditure. But so is using the figures on Eurostar, the CTRL since it has opened at St Pancras figures are up again, and why they are up again is because of the fact that businesses are requiring their business users to use Eurostar in order to improve their green footprint.

MAD ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY

Richard Kauntze
How long ago, Nigel, do you think that the major business community in its broadest sense embraced the idea that yes sustainability is the right thing to do, yes its going to cost more, and yes we must pay for it?

Nigel Hugill
Working for an Australian company, I think it is one of the elements that we underestimate about the UK. It is at the core of UK thinking. In a lot of other geographies it is seen as branding as opposed to a basis without which your business won't survive. 

If you look at the Green Building Council here, we set that up and we were oversubscribed within three months. OK we weren't the first, but in America it took them 3 or 4 years to get that same core going. Ours is a country that closed down its coal mining industry purposefully because of the level of carbon emissions. It wasn't Margaret Thatcher, it was the civil servants who rewrote the pricing in order to do that. I think it's absolutely something where we will continue to have a strong place in the world, because I think there is a recognition outside that the UK is very strong in this area.

Tim Wells
I think the trick that's missed is the mixed-use model that Tim touched on, and the fact that from the developer and investor's point of view, if one can bring in homes, workplaces and leisure you can benefit from huge efficiencies, tri-generation etc.

Tim Wells and Mark Cottrell

Nigel Hugill
That I think is one major opportunity, bringing in residential, leisure and office. But you have to identify your users in the first place, you can't tell people where they are going to live.

Tim Wells
Agreed. I think that there is certainly a model there, e.g. in Birmingham, that is doing what the market wants – residential, a hotel and a conference – and if you can create that you can certainly offer opportunities to mitigate the carbon footprint. It's great news for the sustainability.

Hilary Reid Evans
Can I just say there is a danger here, we're polarising here, we are talking about high rise versus low rise, and we are talking about out of town versus city centre development. I think the future will be a blurring of boundaries, so what Nigel was saying about having particular users with requirements and using the Bank of America as an example, I think you will see that they will start to bring in some of their other companies, they will start to bring in some of their affiliates and you will begin to see more of an agglomeration of businesses working together in more of an open environment.

You will begin to see a mixed use where you will see high rise alongside low rise, the way that our planning regime just simply hasn't allowed for. I think a classic example is Toronto where you can see the high rise alongside the residential developments, so people are able to live in the sorts of environments they want to live in alongside the workplace, which you can walk to work in.

Adrian Hill and Hilary Reid Evans

BIGGER OFFICES

Nigel Hugill
In a sense it's the opposite of networking.  15 years ago people assumed it was going to be the death of the office, actually the aggregations are bigger than they have ever been, and the offices are bigger and the occupiers are larger and the floorplates are larger.

Peter Allport
I've never thought for one moment that we would see the demise of the office.

Nigel Hugill
There are more people coming in to a smaller number of offices.

HARD TO LET

Richard Kauntze
Adrian, could we have an agency take on all of this, do you agree with Nigel's view that the demand side is prepared to pay for all this, and is embracing it all?

Adrian Hill
There's no question that the corporate occupiers in the city, and the bigger they are the more true this is, are embracing sustainability for good commercial reasons. They are doing it because it will affect their share price. The fact that they are hoping to attract good people, that their employees are concerned about sustainability, and their shareholders are. So for that reason it has moved up.

By way of example we were involved recently in a very substantial rationalisation and relocation programme which resulted in about a million sq ft of new space, and that client's number one objective was sustainability. They were going to take a new building and that was the most important thing, more important than rate or location. The problem is that there isn't yet a boring trend of paying for it.

At the end of the day, I'm not sure that they will pay for it. What will happen commercially is that they won't take buildings that will become obsolete shortly in energy and environmental terms. No doubt we'll get buildings that aren't acceptable environmentally becoming harder to let and with less potential rental growth and therefore attracting a softer yield. I think we'll be left with a lot of office stock lying around being pretty hard to let in five or ten years time.

Trevor Butler
On that point, if you are building an air-conditioned sealed façade building under the directive, there is no way you are going to get an A rating. The best you are going to get is a D or an E, and you are more likely to be on a G. So this directive about building a good-quality air-conditioned building, to get an A rating, the way it's set up at the moment it's miles away from that. I don't think that's really hit the industry in terms of value, lettability, assets. The latest release on the directive that there's been in the last few weeks, running the model again they are coming out at Es and Gs. And these are best quality.

OLD STOCK

Richard Kauntze
The problem we have with this debate is that the vast majority of the stock is old, the proportion of new buildings is tiny. Starting with a blank sheet of paper you can do all kinds of fancy things, but we have this great mass of stock, much of which is old and inefficient and leaky.

Nigel Oseland
The pace of replacement is considerably faster in offices than in residential. Obviously new development is great, and the kind of sustainability with a big S that brings new buildings into run-down environments.

About a year ago I was looking at some figures and they said there were about 14 million square feet of empty office space in London, and about 9 million square feet of it was old legacy space, the old shallow-plan building stock which the occupier didn't really want. They wanted the new green buildings down in the wharf, but they didn't want to do anything with the old legacy stock. And I think we do need to consider the refurbishment market because that's a quarter of the market. There is a danger if we don't that going forward …

You talked about floorplates, and again, when I looked at it, some of this legacy stock, it's shallow floorplates, it's good for natural ventilation, its built on a planning grid that would allow you to do something to adapt for re-use. So it could be used for offices, for key worker housing, for hotels or whatever. It's on the kind of floorplate that allows that.

Whereas again, when you talk about the large floorplate buildings down on the wharf, they don't lend themselves to this adaptive reuse. I think going forward we have got to start thinking about buildings which are not the typical offices, retail or residential, they are fairly universal in that they can be adapted for whatever use.

Hilary Reid Evans
I think that as a concept that's a very good idea but what we are finding in practice is that outside of the London area, because land values are still such a significant factor in making the decision to refurb or not to refurb, the equation simply doesn't work. So we looked at a number of our office premises that were getting fairly old, and looked at whether we would refurb them or sell them or try to let them in their current condition, and as I said, outside of London the sums don't add up.

Trevor Butler
From an economic perspective you are saying it's better to tear down an old building and rebuild than it is to refurb it. From an environmental perspective it is better to refurb it and not rebuild.

Trevor Butler, Tim Williams and Ruth Slavid

Hilary Reid Evans
As a responsible developer and as a sustainable developer we don't want to tear down those buildings. But if you can't find a tenant willing to pay the necessary rent and service charges, where is the economic argument? We are still answerable to our shareholders.

So what do we do under those circumstances? Do we go at a loss, knowing that our stakeholders, our primary financial stakeholders, are going to criticise us for that act? It's a very difficult situation to be in.

Trevor Butler
I think that with the older stock, generally narrower-plan buildings, you've got a better chance of getting an A rating refurbishing one of those than building a brand-new air conditioned office. So Adrian's point on values, whether that value gets realised, might start to affect that economics. And at the moment the jury's well out on that.

Nigel Hugill
It comes down to the monetary value again, whether we are talking about pounds or talking about carbons. If the shift is more to trading in carbon, the option of tearing down a building is going to become less attractive.

Peter Allport
There definitely need to be some tax breaks in order to make that more bearable, because it's a no-brainer in environmental terms. That's what we should be doing as interested parties, lobbying for that kind of approach towards re-using existing buildings.

Hilary Reid Evans
This is one of the key things that we talk about in my foundation. It's about getting that joined up thinking into the fiscal and planning and other areas. Because at the moment it's acting unfairly, it's just us making decisions which aren't the kind of rational decisions we've been talking about so far in terms of the sustainable development of offices.

Ruth Slavid
So if you're making decisions on a carbon basis, suddenly you're going to start refurbishing your legacy buildings with small floorplates, what are you going to do with your  huge floorplate, air-conditioned behemoths, what's going to happen to that sector?

Trevor Butler
Well, they're not sustainable.

Ruth Slavid
No, so those are going to have to go.

Trevor Butler
We've got to find a use for a floorplate that big.

Nigel Oseland
Which is difficult, we were saying earlier.

WHERE TO LIVE

Tim Williams  
Coming back to your point about people having choice about where they live, not everybody can afford to live in Putney. There are examples, the Barbican is a case in central London, where a reasonable mix is established and the Continental example is much stronger. So why aren't we investing our energies into making dense living attractive to those people who might want to live in Putney. Because that's surely a fundamental challenge to make the city more civilised? To make the cities less congested, less dirty, there's a sort of greening of the city concept there which has got to be, rather than just retreating to Putney, letting somebody else sort out the problems.

Nigel Hugill
Putney was my illustration in terms of having choice. But we have built some of the biggest mixed schemes across the country. It still doesn't alter the fact that I know who my core customers are for those apartments. And what I spend my time doing is trying to make that environment as attractive as possible for my target audience, rather than deluding myself that my target audience is the entire universe.

If you look two generations ago, the residential tendency used to be either drive or get the train out to the suburbs. That's what young professionals did. They used to share houses in the suburbs. Now actually they can afford and want to live on their own or maybe with two of them. When I left university I shared with five other people. If I suggested to my kids that they shared with five other people after they left university, they'd think I was some sort of Martian.

There are very clear society changes in that regard, that I think we have adapted and are adapting to. Personally I regard that as different from proselytising and telling everybody that they should be living in cities.

Peter Allport
Nigel, the middle-aged people will arrive as the transport infrastructure collapses and they have no other way to get to work, and they will have to come and live in your places. That'll happen.

Ruth Slavid
Or you could build offices where they live of course.

Peter Allport
Well, I don't think there's a future in that so much actually. The workforce is getting younger as well, and your key workers, your knowledge based staff, are much younger than they were say 10 years ago, and therefore I think you are going to have to cater for those young people. People don't have families at that point, they are going to want to live in nice environments.

Pre-lunch drinks on the terrace

Nigel Hugill
What you do have is a number of examples where offices have been built because of the identified pools of labour. For example, in Northampton and Peterborough, people moved there because of the strength of the public transport links back to London, and then subsequently offices were built there because of the fact that the employers identified pools of labour who would prefer to travel a much shorter distance.

But it was that way round which again is a huge swap from where we were in a previous era, where you build the jobs and the people will come. Now you build the homes and the people will come and the jobs will come.

BACK TO THE CENTRE

Hilary Reid Evans
We also have to build the quality of the environment. You have to look at the quality of the environment we are providing for people. In future as planning restrictions become tighter in terms of what people do on the greenfield sites, we are going to be forced into a situation where most people are priced out of the traditional home in the suburbs and we will therefore have to provide homes and working places and leisure spaces for a much different target audience to the one that Nigel's just been describing.

And I think that will take place within the next 10 to 15 years as pressures will begin to bite. So you will get the very affluent people living in the suburbs but everyone else will have to live in a much more densely built environment.

A bit like Paris. Look at the way in which you have the most wonderful mix in Paris, where they have people living in very agreeable spaces with green spaces, with access to open areas, but living in the midst of true mixed use.

Peter Allport
That's how you tell the density of residential development in Paris – by just how much dog poop there is on the streets. But in Paris it's the other way round from London. In Paris the centre is more affluent than the suburbs, but in London it's the other way around.

Hilary Reid Evans
These things will happen. It will happen. The drive back towards the centre.

Peter Allport
To follow on from what Nigel was saying, I think decentralisation is a myth. The number of companies that actually up sticks and move from a city centre location to another part of the country, you can count on the fingers of one hand.

 The growth in office space out of town came from companies that were coming from other countries to open offices here, and I take the point very much that people move somewhere because it's a nice place to live, and people take advantage of that population and open offices for them, but if they had built that space in the first place, people wouldn't have moved there.

Nigel Oseland
Those companies that have located in Southampton or Bournemouth are now going to India.

PRIME LOCATIONS

Richard Kauntze
You have to get offices right. I didn't know this until last week, when I was at a conference in the Middle East and one of the speakers mentioned that Ford has their global design headquarters in Soho. Now you have got a company that is as American as they come, that is based in Detroit and has its design centre in Soho.

Now why does it have its design centre in Soho? Because that is where the people that they want, want to be. So you have got this very powerful combination where if you are in a certain field of business, you have to be in a certain part of the world or part of the city, because that is where your pool of labour, which is a finite pool, will want to be. And without those people, you won't have a business. So it's a very interesting combination of factors that is coming into play.

Mark Cottrell and Tim Wells

Nigel Oseland
So maybe the big companies like Ford should be the ones taking up these legacy office buildings and converting them into cheap housing for these young bright things.

Nigel Hugill
I think it's clear that people are coming back to the cities. When you look at some of the major cities – look at Manchester – Manchester is extraordinary. There is a city that was pretty much dead in its centre. The residential population of Manchester had virtually disappeared. And yet through an extraordinary reinvention it has turned itself into a great city. And getting a combination of offices and residential accommodation and restaurants and bars.

The average age of people living in those areas is going to be relatively young. Young people are making a lifestyle decision to live and rent in the city centre. Instead of buying a house they would rather spend the mortgage payments on entertainments and restaurants. It's instant access to a high-quality lifestyle that is a better quality of lifestyle than I had when I shared with five other guys.

Ruth Slavid
People in my office are living with five other people.

Nigel Oseland
So why is it in Paris that the family stays in Paris, and grows up in Paris and goes to school in Paris? Why can't it happen in London? Traditionally we aspire to be country farmers.

At lunch

INEFFICIENT

Nigel Hugill
I think that what we have in this country is a manifestly inefficient use of housing stock. Something like 75 per cent of the housing stock in this country is houses rather than apartments, and 70 per cent of households don't have families. That is a very unequal distribution and that's different in Paris because there was always a much greater propensity to family apartments, so the biggest single element we have and the biggest contribution to affordability is simply the inefficient use of our housing stock.

Adrian Hill
We are building too many two-bed flats rather than five-bed flats.

Trevor Butler
There's not enough apartments big enough for families in the centre of cities.

Nigel Hugill
I'm very straightforward. I build what we can sell. Actually at Stratford we are specifically going to build a large number of family units, and that's because it was always clear from the outset that Stratford would be a great place for families to live.

TOO MUCH DENSITY

Trevor Butler
The other thing making living in cities unpopular is density. The GLA's plans on the number of dwellings it will let you have, aren't creating a pleasant environment or communities. But it is allowing you guys to put a lot in and get a good return.

But are we creating good places? It is too dense. We can do some nice designs and get consent, but you look a little way down the line, how much open space and safety is there going to be in these areas? It's just a question to the Mayor which we have regularly, what can we do about that?

The way the London plan is written, it's encouraging over densification to a level where it's not sustainable in terms of energy, public transport, infrastructure, water, the whole social side of living there on top of each other. But the argument that comes back is, it works in Kowloon and they have to get used to it, so you can get used to it. Paris is relatively low compared to the densities the GLA are pushing, they are extremely low.

Tim Williams
That's an argument about lowering the density in the centre of cities to make them more civilised. It's something that we should be thinking about in terms not of moving people out but of making those cities with typologies that work.

Ruth Slavid
You are saying you should be making cities less dense?

Tim Williams
We should be making them more civilised places to live in, and inevitably we will have to reconsider the densities.

Nigel Oseland
Encouraging height just pushes up land values. Why build more high-density residential plots when you have got all this empty space that is doing nothing? Why not fill that up first and keep your densities down, and use stock that will be sustainable? I think sometimes we focus too much on the new buildings, and let's make them green and sustainable.

Nigel Hugill
Clearly as a society we seem to have an idealised idea of where people want to live, particularly when people start to have families, for a lot of people that means getting out of the centre, getting into a space with a garden and all the rest of it. That seems to be a model that we are very comfortable with.

Adrian Hill
Most surveys have London as one of the most liveable cities in the world; it only struggles in terms of cost, so we must be getting something right.

THE SUSTAINABLE OFFICE

Richard Kauntze
I would like to wrap up by focusing what can be done in terms of offices. What do those around the table see as the most important factor or factors in terms of producing a more sustainable office?

Nigel Oseland
Looking at utilisation studies of offices, they are only about 50 per cent occupied. We look at the number of seats that are occupied over a week, and the average figure is about 50 per cent. We have measured from 9 to 5. So in effect, you have got half the building sitting empty. What I am trying to do is educate occupiers that when they do take on a new lease, a new building, they only need half the space anyway. Let's not build 50 per cent of unused space.

Mark Cottrell
In the average working day, somebody is actually at their desk for 40 per cent of the day. We try to get that occupancy up to 80 or 90 per cent. We try to do that by decreasing the amount of office space, increasing the amount of social space.

Seven years ago we had 17 buildings in central London, we now have two that are occupied. We have fewer people coming into London than we used to have, and with the two buildings that we do have, we have a much higher intensity of use.

SAVING SPACE

Richard Kauntze
How do you as architects help your clients to make the right decisions, and to ensure that they don't have big buildings when they don't need them?

Tim Williams
WE talk about buildings in terms of challenging their needs, of new interesting ways of using the office environment, and the boundaries between where the office starts and finishes are getting vaguer.

Particularly in the urban environment, where the office functions start and finish is becoming unclear, and being creative about how the use of space is leveraged gets more value out of office buildings, using less formal spaces for meeting spaces, creating spaces for interaction which are places can drop in. It's really the concept of the city as applied to offices. In the same sense that as citizens of the city we own the city, so people need to own office spaces in the same way and have the same sense of collective ownership. That's the way we work.

Richard Kauntze
Adrian, do you find that your clients understand this, that they understand it more than they used to, that they don't need x thousand square feet necessarily, that they might be able to take something much smaller if they use it more efficiently?

Adrian Hill
Like you, we are trying to educate our clients. The assumption is that they need what they have got. They very rarely analyse other ways of working when they are thinking of relocating. They are pretty conservative, they generally don't want change. It's pretty difficult, it has to be done pretty carefully.

Tim Wells
To me I think it's the biggest missed opportunity, when a business has the chance to do something radical because they need to refurbish their space or go to new space for whatever reason, and they replicate the working practices that they had before. They may do it in a shinier glossier way than they had before, but they don't look at how the business might change and how they could get more out of it. Some businesses have done it brilliantly; some just don't seem to have thought about it.

Peter Allport
What is certain about the business plan? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Every decision to take office space is based on somebody's business plan. There will be a point in time when they have exactly the right amount of space, but it will be a very small period of time in most cases.

So you have people rattling round in spaces they don't need, people outgrow space and are packed in like sardines. The cost of that change, and if you look at my lifetime, at 25-30 years in property, from the 25 year lease to the 5-10 year lease has been a big improvement, but in today's very fast moving world, the length of the lease is prohibitive.

 So people have to take the wrong decisions, there has to be a compromise, so therefore you need a repackaged space which you can deliver in a way that enables people to manage change. And what's going to be a big growth area of the market – obviously I have a vested interest in this – there's a very big opportunity to deliver space on an outsourced managed basis.

In my early days I used to get laughed out of the room, I used to say treat tenants as customers, there will come a time when they will become king. That has now arrived.

I used to find so often that the management of companies paid no attention to the importance of their space. How often do you find companies that have moved because they have changed chief executive? You will have to change the managers of a lot of companies and educate them to a better and more intensive use of space.

Nigel Hugill
Our utilisation of our commercial buildings is much greater than our utilisation of our commercial stock.

Ruth Slavid
Tim, if you are going to talk to someone who says they need a hundred desks, and you are going to persuade them they need only 50, presumably you are not going to give them half the office space they thought they were going to have, but it is going to be different in some way. I am interested in how it is going to be different.

Tim Williams
What they might be saying to us is they need a hundred desks and they need six meeting rooms, and we might say will actually we can provide you with a different concept of the office which means that the facility for interaction, which is actually what meeting rooms are about, can be provided in this way which gives you those urban elements, which make the experience of being in an office the urban experience that it needs to be, in order to fulfil the basic need which we have which is that we go to work in order to interact.

Richard Kauntze
Are you saying to them that they may need less space overall?

Tim Williams
We are saying that they may need less space, they  may need the same space, but if you do it in this way you can make so much more of the experience, you can make so much more of the interaction. It is the urban concept of work as an environment which I think is the way forward.

Nigel Oseland
I don't want to be down on record as saving space, because I think the days of using flexible working as a way of saving space are over. Most of the organisations I am working with now are using flexible working as a way of bringing in more creativity.

 By this point the noise level in the public restaurant where the discussion was taking place had become too high to decipher more of the recording. The discussion came to an end soon afterwards.