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Freedom at work: Medibank Place

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Freedom at work: Medibank Place

If the Google office style represents an haute couture moment in commercial interiors – inspirational and extravagant, yet unbearably self-conscious – then the new Medibank headquarters in Melbourne’s Docklands shares some of its playful flare, yet represents a rather more grounded evolution in workplace design. As seasoned designers in this field, Hassell has carefully calibrated a balance between step-change innovation and common sense. In doing so, it has created a rare hybrid of social interaction, business innovation and space efficiency.

This is rare in a world of office default settings – beige felt dividers and grey carpet tiles, ceilings dropped to minimum heights and a Hobson’s choice of cellular coops or noisy barns. This, despite the many heroic twentieth-century attempts to rethink the office, from Frank Lloyd Wright’s early open-plan experiments, to the brief popularity of Bürolandschaft (“office landscape”) in 1960s Germany, to Richard Rogers’ 1970s machine-like Lloyd’s building in London. So many exemplars, yet as Ricky Gervais so bathetically portrays in The Office , the standard commercial property market remains doggedly obsessed with cost reduction and blithely ignorant of the virtues of value-adding.


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