Work At Home
By: Studio Makkink & Bey
Context: PROOFFLab At Home
Presentation: PROOFFHouse at the Salone del Mobile 2013 in Milan
Year: 2013
The first of a series of PROOFFLab at Home specials is ‘Work At Home’, a mobile work dormer. PROOFFLab’s spatial investigations into the correlation between the home and the office leads to hybrid typologies that combine both. It’s a rooftop dormer in which assembled functions either apply to working or living. Each special from the PROOFFLab at Home series departs from a specific function segment of an archetypical house. In this case an extended roof and window; a dormer, is the basis for a hybrid work unit. It’s an extra compartment which can be added to the roof of a house, similar to the installment of a regular dormer. Inside, it has a desk, shelving and even a small heater and chimney, and a large window overlooking the vicinity around the house. When you sit high up at your roof desk, you can sway your feet in the bottomless space that stands out from the facade. In this workspace, the independent worker with headquarters at home, has lots of light and a great vista in front of him. The light and space generate a sense of freedom. Not being able to touch the ground with your feet, if only for a minute, can make you feel like a child. This very short instance can still produce a, very brief, carefree moment.
The spatial functions of work are concentrated inside the movable work bubble with some domestic functions added for comfort. Work At Home is an extra limb to a domestic, or other building. Proportions that stay well within official building codes. In fact, the dimensions of the components of the PROOFFLab at Home series are based on official residential setback requirements.
Flexible workers usually work from home, but imagine an colossal empty building along the highway as an indoor office square. The only thing you need to add is your private office. What if vacant buildings everywhere develop growths on their skin when flexible workers catch a work virus and start to set up office with their dormers? The dormer interior is private, this is the worker’s home, but the vast amount of square meters behind it offers publicly shared office equipment. Some office tools are used only ever so often and can be shared easily. Because of its modular construction it can be extended with a private entrance, or another spatial function the owner would rather not share. Or in case of cell combinations, you click units into place like Lego bricks. Work At Home is much like a mobile home that you can transport on a trailer with a car, only, its functional purpose isn’t leisure, but work.
