Flexible Coworking Floor
Unbuilt concept study
A 900-square-metre floor plate studying how a coworking space absorbs a tenant mix that changes every quarter without a refit each time.
Plan diagram
How the space is organised
- Floor plate
- 36.0 × 25.0m internally — 900m², the area the brief states, drawn to the scale bar on the plan.
- Fixed services at the edge
- An 8 × 7m core and a 6 × 4m tea point west, three 4.8 × 5.2m meeting rooms north, six 1.2m phone booths south-east.
- 1.6m desk grid
- 96 positions in benches of six 1600 × 800mm desks, with 1.6m of circulation between benches — enough for two people to pass, and to turn a wheelchair.
- Uninterrupted centre
- No partition crosses the field, so it converts between open bench, pods of four, and an event floor by moving furniture.
Spatial strategy
Fixed services — cores, meeting rooms, phone booths, tea point — are pushed to the plan's edge, leaving an uninterrupted central field. Desks sit on a 1.6m grid so any zone converts between open bench, pods of four, and a flexible event floor by moving furniture rather than partitions.
Lighting strategy
A uniform 400-lux ambient field across the open floor so no layout change ever strands a desk in shadow, with switched task lighting at each position. Meeting rooms break the field deliberately, running warmer and lower to signal a different mode.
The question
Coworking economics depend on reconfiguring quickly. Every layout change that needs a contractor is margin lost.
The proposition
Push everything fixed to the perimeter and keep the centre free. A uniform lux field across that centre means furniture can move anywhere without a lighting change — the expensive half of most reconfigurations.