How landscaping is shaping the future of workspace

In business, connections are everything; we all know that well connected people, places and ideas are essential to commercial growth and development, but there’s a connection that is often missed when it comes to maintaining a happy, healthy workforce — connection to nature. At Dockside Canada Water, Art-Invest Real Estate, Townshend Landscape Architects and Andy Sturgeon are making this a priority.

Offices of the past have focused on keeping people in, tied to their desks, with high security lobbies, minimal outdoor access and plant life and greenery used only as sparse decoration for monolithic glass buildings. Today, the eyes of businesses and architects alike have been opened to the importance of access to green space thanks to endless research projects that unfailingly proffer quantified evidence unequivocally proving the value of nature in mitigating burn out and improving happiness levels, productivity and office morale. In a study shared by Harvard Business review, researchers at the University of Melbourne gave 150 subjects a simple computer-related office task, and after five minutes the subjects were given a 40-second break where they were either shown an image of nature or a concrete roof. Results showed that concentration levels fell by 8% among the people who saw the concrete roof, but rose by 6% in those who spent the break looking at nature. This is just one example of many that showcase the benefits of workers getting outside during their work day.

With research and evidence like this in mind, Art-Invest Real Estate is committed to creating a new commercial quarter for London that not only preserves existing local ecology, but adds to it, with strategically planned landscape architecture and planting that engages and supports local communities and visitors, as well as workers. The team behind Dockside has assigned the same degree of importance to the landscaping of the area as the architecture of the buildings, bringing both Townshend Landscape Architects and BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group in to work on the masterplan from the very start of the project. Reflecting on the practice’s ongoing collaboration with the Dockside team, Townshend Landscape Architects Associate Oliver Barden says, “They want to do interesting things in the public spaces and the ground floor of the buildings that address the needs of the local communities. We don’t want to create office enclaves anymore, that are only busy from nine to five, Monday to Friday. These areas of our cities increasingly need to work 24-hours a day, seven days a week. We’re imagining spaces around the dock that families will come into at the weekend and spaces next to the office building that will provide sports equipment.” He adds, “It is an office development, but we want it to be so much more than that. It’s a destination. Personally, I got into landscape architecture because I thought I wanted to be an architect, but for me architecture is quite privatised, in the sense that only people that live in that building or are required to work in that building will get to experience it. Whereas the public realm around the outside is a very socially democratic environment.”

Sturgeon, whose award-winning landscape and garden designs can be found around the world in both private and commercial settings, seconds Barden’s sentiments, expanding on how the spaces they are creating together are not ornamental, but are being developed as an invitation to play, stay active and engage with the environment. His work at Dockside is focused on the revitalisation of the eastern dock edge, which will be a central point of engagement for people in the area. He explains, “We’ve designed seating and places to dwell in such a way that it brings people through the design of that layout and down to the water. We’re guiding people and taking them on the journey. In doing that we are facilitating special moments within the landscape, encouraging people to linger. We don’t want to keep people off it. We very much want to do the opposite and bring people into it in all different ways.”

The principles guiding both Barden and Sturgeon’s teams are the same: create a holistically designed place that caters to the dynamic and varied needs of different individuals and communities. Sturgeon adds, “One thing that drives everything that I do is that it’s about creating atmosphere. People talk about placemaking, and for me the main consideration is about the atmosphere, because a development is only going to be successful if people want to be there.” Adding to this, Barden spotlights the cohesion of the ground floor of each building and the outdoor spaces, and the benefits of working without strict thresholds, “The whole approach has been about knitting this place into its context, and a lot of the work that we’ve done with the team is around how you can promote these more social environments. One of the particularly strong points of Art-Invest Real Estate’s brief for the project has been that there has never been a strong line around the buildings and the public realm. There’s an ambition for the ground floor to be very open and public, so we’ve talked about materiality flowing from the exterior into the interiors of windows, creating a cascade to open up to the square. There’s been a blurring of lines between building and landscape, and I think it has been particularly successful on this scheme so far.”

Approaching the project holistically means there has been a fusion of the architectural and landscape design processes, which Barden states brings significant benefits to the development, “In this project there’s been a blurring of lines between building and landscape, which I think has been particularly successful so far. We are working on the ground floors around the buildings, as well as with the architects on the terraces of both BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group and HWKN’s buildings individually. Both architects have a very strong vision for the buildings and they both want to maximise the amount of greenery across all floors, so there have been a lot of productive conversations between us.”

Explore the future of workspace at Dockside Canada Water here.