This is awesome. A lot of good comes from colocating office work into a central building so the outlying areas can be used for "life affirming" purposes.
Housing, parks, churches, restaurants, entertainment etc.
We should want more "lone wolf" office buildings like this in every city.
When we were searching for space this was our preferred choice. We wanted a large single floor space with offices on the perimeter. Each office would have a glass wall to see the open space. This way, as you said, people can see what is going on. Searching for office space is hard, so we ended up where we are and made the best of it. We still get the offices on the perimeter and the glass wall, but separated by multiple floors. Maybe we just put Dropcams everywhere so people can see when lunch is ready :)
Kind of sad given that it's a pretty nice, clean place with some fun stuff to do downtown. Maybe it's a lack of vision given that it's a bit more, as stated, on the conservative, suburban side. The company I work for is helping redesign some office space just outside of town. The "branding" efforts are trying to tout it as a tech-friendly building with stereotypical signposts - yoga, cycling, etc. At the end of the day, it's a suburban office campus, with little to no good access to public transit, and not near anything walkable when you want to get outside the buildings.
I don't know if anyone has studied the benefits of this but I have to say it's so nice to just be able to walk out the door of the office at lunch and wander around, sit on a bench, etc. Escape for 45 min - 1 hr and be refreshed. I think that's the appeal in more 'happening' city areas, even if we don't acknowledge or necessarily know it consciously.
I don't think it should be offices though, it deserves to have lots of people moving through.
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