JAPAN'S BEST-DESIGNED OFFICESConcept
Subtracting desks
The arithmetic is unusual enough that the company leads with it. In the move to Tokyo Midtown Yaesu, the number of working desks and the number of meeting rooms were both cut to half what they had been. At the same time 1,225 square metres were added — to spaces that are not desks and not meeting rooms.
The company ties this to a working style it calls the new-way-of-working compass, under which the combination of place and time, and the way a job is approached, is left largely to the individual and the team. A company that means that does not need a desk for everybody on any given day. What it needs instead is somewhere to sit when two people want to talk, somewhere to take a call without a room, and somewhere to eat that is worth walking to — which is roughly what the 1,225 square metres became.
01 · Tokyo, at the lobby
The second floor
The office lobby on the second floor is where the Tokyo building starts, and it is deliberately open rather than transactional.
02 · Tokyo, the working floor
Booths instead of rooms
Single booths for web meetings are set among the desks, which is the practical half of halving the meeting rooms: most calls no longer need one.
03 · Tokyo, the twenty-third floor
Where guests are received
The upper floor carries the reception rooms and a café lounge — the two things a head office still needs a fixed place for.
04 · Osaka
Entrance, reception, solo work, canteen
The Osaka office is shown the same way. A ground-floor entrance and reception rooms, a simple reception area for shorter conversations, a solo work space on the fifth floor for the days that need concentrating, and a canteen on the fourth.
