JAPAN'S BEST-DESIGNED OFFICESConcept
Three offices, and one word carrying all of them
HBA presents three offices in a row, in the same format, with the rooms named one after another: reception, exterior, reception hall, working room, ABW area, ABW area, meeting-room floor, meeting room. The repetition is the point — the same list, run three times, shows what changes between a head office, a second office and a satellite.
The word doing the work is ABW. The company glosses it on the page: Activity Based Working, a way of working in which you choose your environment freely according to the content and purpose of the job. It then adds the part that matters more, which is what the areas actually get used for — not only work and meetings, but breaks, study groups and events.
01 · The head office, Sapporo
The formal sequence
The head office is shown in the order a visitor meets it: the entrance, the building from outside, then the reception hall, then the working room. It is the most conventional of the three, and the only one photographed from the street.
02 · ABW at the head office
Where the study groups happen
Two ABW areas sit alongside the working room, and beyond them a whole floor of meeting rooms. The company is explicit that the ABW areas are not only for work: breaks, study groups and events are listed in the same sentence, which makes them the social infrastructure of the building rather than an overflow desk.
03 · Sōsei Innovative Office, Sapporo
Three ABW areas, one working room
The second Sapporo office inverts the proportions. Where the head office shows two ABW areas, this one shows three, and the working room appears late in the sequence rather than early. The corridor to the meeting rooms is photographed as a space in its own right.
04 · Shinagawa Collaboration Office, Tokyo
Sofas, a bar, darts and table tennis
The Tokyo office drops the ABW vocabulary entirely and names its spaces by their furniture: bench and sofa, block sofas, bar counter, darts area, table-tennis table — and then, at the end, a meeting room and a working room.
The naming is the tell. A satellite office in Tokyo, for a company whose base is in Sapporo, is somewhere people come to meet rather than somewhere they come to sit down; the list reads less like an office and more like a set of reasons to travel.
