The Sitadel: A literal and proverbial morphable fortress of productivity
There are endless research pieces on open office design, the collaborative workspace movement and what is working and not working. From the Harvard Business Review to Fast Company this shift in the sociocultural fabric of how and where work is being done has garnered a lot of attention. This is all highly subjective and we are strong believers in that there is no one size fits all solution from a design perspective. We also believe strongly that the psychical design of the space is but one of the many factors that contribute to the overall success and user experience in any workspace. That said, we still have a lot of fun designing to try to tackle the nuances of creating an effective ecology of creativity and productivity.
Rapid flux and spatial ADD are inherent to the new work paradigm so we set out to design a piece to accommodate at the Active Collaborative Workspace at Brooklyn Boulders in Chicago.
Meet the Sitadel, a furniture piece designed to adapt to serve the needs of being able to accommodate individual team meetings and brainstorms and collective conference style gatherings on the fly. Groups no longer need to disrupt whatever flow of creativity they may be in by having to change venues. Instead, the design allows the Sitadel to morph from a back-to-back booth arrangement that allows for two teams of four to meet in private to one long conjoint semi-private conference table in the matter of seconds. The piece can also be rolled to sit in different areas in the room with ease.
We could have built this piece without our local build guru Bill Youngs of KTE construction who made inventing this piece an adventure.
