Century 21, better known as the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, promised a glimpse into a utopian future. Sadly, it was a vision that was all too fleeting. After the fair moved on, the district it transformed fell into decline, leaving a legacy – the UFO-inspired Space Needle and a monorail – that verged on sci-fi kitsch. In recent years, efforts have been made to breathe life into the area, starting in 2004 with Frank Gehry’s Musical Experience Project. Its latest…

Spanish designer Tomás Alonso needs his space. Part of the Okay Studio collective, he shares a huge building in north London that affords him a sizable workshop area, a space that is integral to his design approach, since it enables him to test and tinker with every stage of the design process. “It is very important to be able to make things with my hands to understand,” says Alonso. “A lot of the things I work on are based on…

In the sprawling corporate environs of the Regent’s Place development near Great Portland Street sit the green – literally and figuratively – offices of property group Lend Lease. With the help of architect Woods Bagot, its award-winning interior – which apparently features eight plants for every worker – has achieved a measure of distinction among the strip-lit identikit offices surrounding it. Gazing up from the building’s ground-floor atrium to the company’s three storeys, the visitor first notices the stiff green…

Nic Marks, master statistician, is on a mission to make the workplace happy. This undertaking falls into the wider remit of Marks’ work, heading up the Centre for Well-being at UK thinktank NEF (the New Economics Foundation). The centre, set in a converted outhouse in Vauxhall, is the largest centre implementing applied wellbeing in the world. Inside, researchers innovate to promote social change. The driver for the centre, launched by Marks ten years ago, was the will to put the…

Despite most Londoners’ somewhat phlegmatic approach to the Olympic Games, there’s no doubting the significant impact they will have on office life. Says Peter Hendy, London’s Transport commissioner, commenting on this summer’s events as a whole: “Large parts of the city will operate pretty much as normal but with so many cultural and sporting events taking place on the doorsteps of workplaces across our city, the transport network will be busier than usual.”   That’s something of an understatement. Granted, only…

The all-white New York office of bicoastal US production company Logan – it has one foot, as it were, in the Big Apple, the other in Los Angeles – resembles a stylish film set more than a workaday workplace. And more specifically Logan’s offices recall the set of a futuristic movie like the 1965, black and white sci-fi classic Alphaville or – by strange coincidence – Logan’s Run, the 1976 flick starring Jenny Agutter and Michael York, which featured pure…

For the curved barrel-vaulted ceiling of the Central Motorway Police Group’s new headquarters, architects the Weedon Partnership specified 260sq m of Armstrong Ceilings’ RH 215 metal micro-perforated planks, with factory-applied acoustic fleece. With the refurbishment of an existing garage block, Armstrong Ceilings also fitted 600sq m of Ultima dB and OP mineral tiles on the ground floor of the building, with a variety of edge details and acoustic properties. www.armstrong-ceilings.co.uk

Quorum business park near Newcastle-upon-Tyne has specified 200,000sq m of Rockfon Koral ceiling solutions for use in its newly built offices. Rockfon systems were chosen for the project as they can be installed in unoccupied, unheated buildings without suffering detrimental effects from moisture changes in the air, and because they offer durable, lightweight yet hardwearing tiles. Made from stone wool, a natural and renewable resource, Rockfon ceilings are recyclable and offer high fire safety and acoustic properties. Very low VOCs…

The state-of-the-art Hollingworth Business and Enterprise College has been built with an economic minimum of just five partition designs to fulfil a range of specific criteria. Knauf Drywall, working with dry lining sub-contractor Horbury Building Systems, was able to simplify the project specifications and streamline inventory requirements with a range of drywall constructions developed specifically for the education sector. The Knauf Drywall partitions feature 45dB to 63dB resistance in the music classrooms and drama studio, fire integrity from 60 to…

The inspiration for Milliken’s Urban Collective range came from an awareness of the changing urban environment and the changing definition of beauty. The collection includes five designs – Fifty Percent Grey, OnBloc, Fringe, Dissident and Citizen, pictured. These designs have highly textural and dimensional aesthetics, incorporating the fractured elements and broken structure of a dilapidated cityscape. The development of the ideas behind Urban Collective prompted Milliken to look at its product design in a different way, using recent investment in…