Most of us spend at least one-third of our lives at work. This lifelong commitment to the workspace makes it an intimate extension of ourselves. It might be in the corporate cliché office environment where fluorescent lighting, cubicle desks, recycled air, carpeted floors, chaotic horizons, and surveillance cameras create a forbidding atmosphere. It might, perhaps more fortunately, be in the soft office environment, which pays special attention to what Alexander Rieck refers to as the “soft factors,” the temperature, color, light, acoustics, odors, as well as every design and architectural detail that is emotive of the human senses, social understandings, and spatial orientations.

Workspace is more than air, desks, plants, and people; it now includes electromagnetic spectrums of light and heat, wifi and 5G radio waves, and the blue light of screens. It is a hive of natural and artificial life, presenting a canvas for the architect to consider newly. “The office is not just where we sit nine-to-five and shuffle papers around,” says Rieck, “It is a place of creativity, inspiration, knowledge exchange—and increasingly, a critical site where identities are morphing alongside cultural shifts and the digital renaissance.” When thoughtfully and holistically designed, a workspace can influence the quality of ideas, productivity, and well-being it inspires, as well as the nature of the personalities and the bonds that form inside it. In this way, the workspace might be viewed as a microcosmic city, where it is a foreteller, even an incubator, of the future on the macrocosmic level.

In China Miéville’s science-fiction novel The City & The City, two cities and a secret third law-enforcing jurisdiction superimpose each other. They interconnect and co-mingle but are forbidden from one another. Now that we have entered the sci-fi realism era and technology is moving deeper into every area of life and work, new dynamics exist in workspaces. Like cities upon cities, our digital lives and the wireless networks that support them crosshatch with our physical lives and space. Our social media personas, internet cables, infrastructure stacks, and the waveforms held inside and around them activate the atmosphere when we enter any room with our physical bodies and phones. Zoom’s recent announcement of a feature allowing avatars to attend meetings for us is a trend that will only increase and complexify.

These many factors make the workspace we could once read quite accurately using our senses of smell and sight—newly stratified with layers of data that weave invisibly through the environment. When we add chatbot assistants and soon-to-be AI colleagues, and the worldwide screentime average of six hours forty minutes daily to these factors, a subtle digital architecture that we sense but do not see or smell, emerges. How will architects include these technological materials in their space designs? Will they merge with 2D and human space? Will they be articulated to suit specific environments? Will there be digital-free zones?

Reflecting on established workspace norms, Rieck states that, “Soft factors give space its branding, which imparts a social promise involving membership in the group that works there—humans want to be part of a group. When workspaces foster groups that trust each other through shared experiences that create social bonds united by shared beliefs, workspace becomes a fortress of these beliefs”. According to Rieck, being in an office that builds trust elevates performance on all levels, including that of virtual connection. If, in our daily travels on the internet, where we meet virtual colleagues in environments that defy our five senses, we are learning to be as streetwise on digital streets as we were taught to be on the streets of our physical neighborhoods as children—could new senses be emerging in the workspace, a 6th or 7th sense, that hasn’t been named or studied yet?

In integrating these multifarious elements into architectural thinking and planning, Rieck maintains, “You want to design safe spaces, but you don’t want them to be so predictable that they become boring. We yearn to create a sense of community, but we also thrive on curiosity.” He discusses design experiments with hygge spaces that emphasize cozy, sofa-like corners, where soft factors become literal—and sometimes, too soft. “Do you know what the most ergonomic chair is?” he asks. “It’s basically a wooden stool. It’s uncomfortable, so you can’t sit on it for hours. It forces you to move, get up, and stretch, which is healthy for the body. A cozy sofa, on the other hand, is unhealthy. Variation is key, which is why we’re now integrating virtual activation, immersion, and entertainment into physical spaces, blurring the lines between the ‘unreal’ and the ‘real’ worlds.” Architects are cautious about this approach. “We believe there’s a reality when the screen goes black, and that reality should be something meaningful, not just nothing.”

Workspaces are expanding, and so are we. The intangible features of this transformation, along with the often emotional nature of our responses to an environment, place this realm beyond scientific explanation. If architecture, art, beauty, and science are symbiotic, and the unconscious soft factors and invisible digital layers—perhaps the subtlest aspects of this symbiosis—are becoming louder, they are also becoming more measurable and urgent to address. The arrival of virtual assistants, robots, and automation will significantly change office life and the future of work and cities. “What is work? Why do we work?” Rieck asks, “Is it still a formative part of our identity? The office will become a reflection of what society wants. We already have the infrastructure for this new era of work, so now the question is: in what kind of space or dimension do we want it to happen? If there is no office anymore, the city will become the office; the office will be everywhere.”

Rieck believes that the new frontiers where workspace and the city converge will materialize when we identify how we want to live. If the cities of the future reveal new ways of being and diverse new possibilities of living with artificial intelligence, data-responsive architecture, immersive technologies, and the soft factors of placemaking, branding, identity, belonging, and well-being, they might lead to us living longer, more enchanting lives doing work that inspires ourselves and others, inside architecture that nourishes and heals.

"Let’s assume that by 2050, all energy will be produced without fossil fuels,” concludes Rieck. “Energy will be cheap and abundant, powering industries that are run, operated, and maintained by machines. The question then becomes: what will be possible in such a world? What will work mean for us, and how will work redefine who we are? Will this new era liberate us to greater creativity in workspace designs that reflect our ideas, feelings, and expanding realities—and push the boundaries of our imaginations beyond what has ever been imagined before?"