Keeping the suspended ceiling

In the 00s businesses wanted to look global and corporate. They were escaping from 80s or even 70s offices full of dark veneers and heavy colours. They wanted a neutral, dematerialised look - white, silver, grey, glass, gloss - to express their new dematerialised technological world. And they wanted it to look the same everywhere on the planet. Ten years later they were saying, rip it out! Fill it with hipster junk! Make it look like an old warehouse!

The warehouse aesthetic arose naturally from being a startup in an old industrial building in a poor part of town without much money to do up the surroundings. That accidental aesthetic became a shorthand for organisational and technological change, and a shortcut to behavioural change - let’s all make like a software startup.

Which is OK if you are in a 19th century industrial building, but crazy if you are in a 21st century skyscraper. The surroundings you have inherited are white metal ceilings with luminaires and grilles, drywall partitions, flush glazed office fronts, carpeted raised access floors.

So we spent the last ten years ripping out perfectly good suspended ceilings to create the fashionable exposed services look, and sticking fibreglass fake brickwork onto drywall partitions. It’s not honest and it’s not sustainable. For me, the next frontier is, how do we achieve the cultural and behavioural changes, within the glossy 00s fitout? What exactly do we need to change?

The metal suspended ceiling is perhaps the central issue. It does a lot of good things. It has a major role in modulating the acoustics of the space. It carries all the necessary services - lighting, grilles, fire alarms, sensors, etc. It hides functional but unpretty ducts and wires. But it also imposes a technical and uniform feel - the antithesis of domestic. Can we accept that we are in a modern office, and not in a home, a hotel or a warehouse? Colour change seems like an idea, but it’s vulnerable to fashion (which raises a secondary issue, of how fast fashion should change, and what should remain outside of fashion). Personally, I find black and bronze have continued to look good as ceiling colours over a very long time. What else? Grey requires caution - light grey can look like white, badly lit.

Colours and finishes: Twenty years ago it was a point of pride to be consistent, even uniform. Death by brand standards. Now every room is different to the next and the finishes schedule runs to 100 items. This too is ripe for change. I’ve been wanting to calm things down for six or seven years at least.

Key words:

• Calm
• Adult
• Hospitable
• Warm
• Professional (What is that? A kind of self discipline?)
• Inclusive
• Classic? The 00s thing aspired to neutrality and longevity - it was often very high quality - but classic went out of fashion. Sustainability means honouring that intention.

Our culture loves visible change. It shows we’re alive and growing. So we change things just to make a point. It has to become a point of pride not to change certain things - to stay the same, to keep things for the long term.