Architect and Builder November/December 2018 | Page 10

Co-working Trend
By Claire D’Adorante
Director, Paragon Interface
www.paragon.co.za
T
he international trend towards co-working, defined
essentially as shared office space, equipment, and
services, is set to change the office-space landscape
in South Africa, as it is currently doing in Europe and
other developed markets.
As Paragon Interface, an interior architecture company that
has designed some of the largest and most iconic corporate
headquarters of recent times in South Africa, including the
Discovery Campus and Sasol Place, both in Sandton, we are
seeing a growing move towards adopting this international
trend locally.
A recent article on property24.com cited that, as economies
diverge into a plethora of small to medium business
entrepreneurs, and larger corporates realise the need for
flexibility, the recent trend is increasingly towards ‘shared’
or co-working space. However, the fastest-growing sector
here is large corporates, due to the flexibility of short-
term real-estate contracts that can be tailored as business
demands fluctuate.
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Instead of maintaining and staffing a fully-fledged office
building, a large corporate can now simply ramp up or down as
new projects roll in or existing ones are completed. The key driver
here is to cut real-estate costs, especially given the constrained
global economic outlook and increasingly tight margins.
The major benefit of this trend for employees is that it supports
what is termed ‘agile’ working, which is the logical next step of
the open-plan office revolution. While traditional open-plan offices
still tied workers to individual desks, and offered little in the way
of shared services or collaborative working, ‘agile’ workspaces
allow employees to work where and how they want to, with the
full support and functionality required to do so.
There has been a key realisation that office-space design has
to incorporate a social context with the explosion of technology in
recent years enabling this cultural shift. Employees, especially the
younger generations, do not particularly enjoy being confined to a
single desk set-up in a multi-partitioned open-plan environment.
Savvy corporates, on the other hand, are understanding that
not only is this bad for productivity and creativity, but that this
Co-working Trend