DCB Montana, Ljubljana

BAX studio opens up the compact volume of a new office building in Ljubljana with its sensitive design of voids, views, light and textures.

If we had to choose the building type that most influenced 20th century architecture, office buildings would probably come before residential architecture. The simultaneous intensive development of new forms of intellectual work and the modernist architectural paradigm gave rise to an infinite urban landscape of systematised, artificially illuminated open plans, trapped in an infinite grid, where, behind the neat lines of desks, or within a mass of identical office cubicles, ladies with up-do hairstyles diligently pound away at their typewriters. One thinks of the French director and comedian Jacques Tati’s surreal 1967 comedy of modern life, Playtime, in which he portrays Monsieur Hulot, lost in the hyper-consumerist mid-century modern Paris, unsuccessfully searching for a way out of a business skyscraper full of anonymous, impersonal corridors and office cubicles.

Just as serial industrial production in the early 20th century was characterised by the Ford conveyor belt, so the space of the intellectual production process was characterised by the free floor plan. While the conveyor belt has not changed significantly since those early days, the organisation of the workspace has undergone a tumultuous architectural evolution. It is precisely the isolation and lack of informal interactions among people working within rigid Tatiesque floor plans that leads to the development of an internal public space that becomes one of the essential building blocks of office buildings. The open cross-section featuring multi-level spaces, internal balconies, piers, corners, terraces, lifts and staircases, intersected by the views, voices, informal meetings and gatherings typical of an outdoor public space, gives shape to the internal structure of the standard late 1920s office building. One of the structuralist extremes, where interactions among employees are certainly not lacking, is of course the Centraal Beheer office complex in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, by the architect Herman Hertzberger, which opened its doors in 1972.

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