Marta Nowak’s “Restless Office” will have its opening reception Friday at Hopkins Hall Gallery, featuring four main architectural projects. Credit: Courtesy of Phillip Arnold
“Restless Office,” an exhibition by Marta Nowak, will have its opening reception Friday in the Hopkins Hall Gallery from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. The exhibition is free to attend and is open Aug. 25 through Oct. 10 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Nowak, an assistant professor at Knowlton School of Architecture and registered architect, said the gallery will include her work over the past six years covering her studies of the role of office spaces in a post-pandemic world.
“‘Restless Office’ is an exhibit that looks at a new type of office, hopefully an office of the future, in response to the current conditions of the office,” Nowak said. “We know that the hybrid workplace has been accelerated by COVID. A lot of people now work from home. So there’s a big architectural question about the role of the office building itself.”
Nowak said she believes the key to reimagining the office is to focus more on human needs, flexibility and mobility.
“We want the buildings to be more sustainable and at the same time adaptable to human needs or their occupancy,” Nowak said. “There’s a few recurring themes of what I believe would be the best strategy to shift toward that flexibility. One is really tackling human scale and really thinking about the smallest architectural interventions that then can be multiplied throughout the office.”
“The other one is building mobility,” Nowak added. “Anything that can help us with flexibility, moving things around and additional building intelligence.”
Quinn Schreiber, a master’s student in architecture, helped Nowak build and set up the exhibit. He said he found it compelling working with Nowak and learning about her studies.
“As a student, whenever you have the chance to work with faculty, it’s always interesting to see their vision of what architecture and what space is,” Schreiber said. “I think particularly in [Nowak’s] case, with office space and the modern workspace – and how kind of volatile it’s been – I think her idea of, ‘How can a space shift to work for us, rather than just kind of being a vessel for us to be in?’ is really interesting.”
Nowak said the idea rose when she was working at Google and the problems of the office space were revealed to her.
“Before coming to OSU, I was working at Google as an innovation officer,” Nowak said. “That’s where I was exposed to all the problems of the workspace. A lot of these kinds of questions came from industry. Before that, too, I already started the research and I was interested in the combination of architecture and technology, and that kind of naturally then lingered and went toward applying this type of investigation towards a specific topic.”
Nowak said the exhibit includes four major projects.
One is “Zero Gravity,” which is a self-balancing chair that is able to move around for different comforts. Another is “Parti!Wall,” a moveable inflatable with a robotic component. Then, there are the “Pods,” which are moveable pods that you can do work in or rest in. Finally, they have “Drift Room,” which is a scaled model of a device that would allow people to subdivide a room into different spaces.
Schreiber said out of the four, the “Drift Room” is his favorite project because of its importance to the conception of the exhibit.
“I think [Drift Room] is kind of the backbone of the project,” Schreiber said. “I think it’s the one that embodies the concepts the best. They all have threads that attach them, but the drift room is just the one that I have the most experience with and the one that was kind of the inspiration for the gallery.”
Schreiber also said the exhibit should make students raise their expectations about office and classroom spaces.
“In an optimistic sense, I think [the exhibit] should show that architecture is for people,” Schreiber said. “So, I think people should expect more from the spaces they occupy, especially in an academic sense, where every class might call for a different space. I think there’s a lot more exploration to be had there and I think it’s definitely an interesting concept to push further.”
Nowak said the overall goal of the exhibit and its projects is to push for a more revolutionary way of thinking about workspaces.
“I think the goal is to really make change in the office,” Nowak said. “A lot of companies suggest more of an incremental change in improvement. I think these projects are more radical ideas of how we can fix or adopt different ways of thinking about it, and I think that’s what it is. It’s just about pushing, pushing the field and really thinking outside of the box a little bit more.”
