JAPAN'S BEST-DESIGNED OFFICES01 · The definition
No fixed desk, and a clean one at the end of the day
Free address means there are no assigned desks. You pick a seat each morning, and you clear it when you leave. NTT DATA, whose Toyosu headquarters holds around ten thousand people, treats it as a management decision rather than a furniture one.
“Work floors have no partitions, and the company is rolling out clean desks and free-address seating — nobody owns a desk; you sit where the day’s work is.”
02 · Rolled out floor by floor
A pilot office, then the rest of the building
NTT DATA rebuilt one floor of its Annex as a next-generation pilot office — free address to cut cost and CO₂, with layouts tuned for working together — and is introducing the rest floor by floor.
03 · By division
OBAYASHI lets each team arrange its own floor
At OBAYASHI’s Shinagawa head office the 22nd floor is the standard work floor. Free spaces and one-person booths are arranged to suit each division, and free address makes it easy to talk with many people.
04 · The loose version
HAKUHODO calls it fuzzy address
Not every company goes all the way. HAKUHODO uses what it calls fuzzy address — not fixed seats, not fully free seats, but a loose system that lets each person design their own way of working.
pixiv takes the opposite route to the same end: most areas are free address, and the standout is a wooden arch that, seen from above, is one long connected desk.
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