Taking advantage of the dormant office building sector due to the economic recession, a group of designers at Hickok Cole Architects used the hiatus to freely explore what office buildings in the future could be, and to propose integrated concepts in a variety of areas: MEP systems, envelope, structure, and interior design. We see that office building design will make leaps due to three factors: human need, sophisticated performance goals, and fabrication advances.

Our video shows our own leaps and bounds as we put on the back burner our usual constraints set by budgets and schedule, fees and critical path, to embark on an exercise lacking a foreseeable end. Through tinkering, play, and open source cross disciplinary research, we extrapolated and derived from exciting new technologies that scientists and researchers around the world are working with, to develop ideas on how these could be adapted to office buildings in the future.