It all sounds rather abstract and parts of the talk were a little tricky to get my head round! Though I have to say that Professor Conroy Dalton was an excellent, engaging speaker and the rather high brow subject matter was made far more accessible because of her use of interesting personal anecdotes and clever props!
My ears pricked up when she mentioned that she had spent three years early in her career working at Foster & Partners HQ in London. She used her experience here to illustrate the way companies use of building space can reflect the social hierarchy prevalent in an organisation. She showed us images of the open plan office of Fosters & Partners (see below), one large space with thirteen huge tables that the whole company did their work from. The ethos behind this shared space being that everyone at Foster & Partners was entirely equal. That everyone worked together in one huge shared space on huge shared tables to reflect a kind of meritocracy. Even Norman himself had a desk at one of the tables in the shared space to prove this very point (though he only occupied it a couple of times a month!)
HOWEVER she explained, in a very entertaining way, how the layout may have been open but the way in which the space was used very much showed the hierarchy of the company. The building itself fronts onto the River Thames ( as you can see in the above photo), the side fronting the river has a glass wall with amazing river views. In reality your status within the company was very much reflected by where you sat. Important people ie team project leaders, partners etc sat at the ends of the tables with the amazing river view with the 'lowest of the low' sat away from the glass at the end of the tables where the photocopier and toilets are situated! But further to this there existed status attached to where the table you were situated on was located in relation to Storming Norman himself. Obviously only those pretty high up the hierarchy were allowed to occupy space anywhere near the big boss and infact Professor Conroy Dalton pointed out that although in theory everyone was the same and could mix freely no one actually attempted to interact with Norman himself, and in fact when she on several occasions attempted to do so his PA would stop her! Further to this it became apparent that mobility within the office was never along the side of the building with the spectacular rivers views, no indeed if staff needed to move from one end of the office to the another they invariably took the path via the photocopier and the loos! So in fact the hierarchy of the company was created not by physical walls but by the use of space and the social network.
Professor Conroy Dalton has spent eighteen months studying the Seattle Public Library and the social network created by the use of the building. She illustrated this with a complex structure of numbered balls linked together with rope. Each ball represented a social space that could be moved to, unencumbered, from another social space within the building. The ropes representing links between the spaces ie the various paths it was possible to take to each zone. Obviously some spaces can be reached by many paths especially those toward the centre of the space and some more tucked away spaces were less accessible with fewer paths. The connections between these spaces repesent a possible social network within the space. To illustrate the difference that can exist between these spaces and peoples varying experience of a building, she used the example of two people being at the same party. Two people can be at the same party but their experience and enjoyment of that party may be totally different. One person may only know the host and therefore only has one connection, so their enjoyment is going to be fairly limited. If the other person knows several people who also know several people then they are likely to have much more fun from the party experience.
As her final point Professor Conroy Dalton gave an amusing anecdote about a presentation she had attended several years ago in which a female architect revealed her designs for a school for autistic children. She commented how the architect was a fantastic speaker showing great passion for her building, describing with great sympathy and enthusiasm how her proposed building would be fantastic for these children etc etc. However when asked by the professor at the end of the talk if she had ever visited the school since it's completion to evaluate how successful her design had been she gave a withering glare and responded "and why on earth would I want to do that?"! In fact even though on the face of it this may be hard to comprehend as surely human curiosity at least would prompt us to examine the success or otherwise of our design, the threat of litigation in the event of unforeseen problems with the building prevents many architects form revisiting their creations and this sadly this attitude is in fact common place.
The talk ended with a light hearted look at a 'fame' style video taken from Seattle Public Library, the library is full of people carrying out their usual business, reading etc when a solitary dancer starts dancing amongst the crowd soon to be joined by a whole group of dancers!
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