Architecture
The design of buildings as integrated wholes: form, structure, circulation, light, material and the organisation of space to human and institutional purpose. For workplace strategy, architecture is both the discipline that realises the concept and a body of knowledge about what buildings can and cannot be made to do.
Strategy proposes; architecture disposes. Floorplate geometry, structural grids, cores and envelopes bound what any workplace concept can become — and architectural judgement is what converts evidence-based requirements into environments people seek out rather than merely occupy. The strategy-architecture interface, done badly, is where most evidence dies.
- What can this building support, and what will it resist?
- How do circulation, light and section shape encounter and behaviour?
- What distinguishes a brief that enables design quality from one that prevents it?
- How is design intent preserved through delivery?
- Building typology and workplace architecture literature
- Precedent analysis with performance data (rarer than precedent analysis with photography)
- Building performance evaluation
- The DEGW tradition of building appraisal: capacity, adaptability, serviceability
Building appraisal before concept commitment; briefs structured as intent plus performance criteria, preserving design latitude within evidence boundaries; design review gated against the brief through delivery; architectural quality treated as a performance variable, not a taste variable.
Architectural Guidance
The translation of the concept and kit into design-governing guidance: spatial, environmental, acoustic, lighting, thermal, biophilic, accessibility, technology and identity requirements the design team must satisfy.
Architectural Guide Notes
The complete briefing instrument for the design and delivery team: functional brief, spatial brief, design intent, kit, zoning, technology, environmental quality, accessibility, change and project implications — in the form architecture is actually procured and reviewed against.
Stacking and Blocking
The allocation of teams, functions and zones across floors and buildings — converting adjacency evidence, capacity models and building constraints into a spatial distribution.
Taxonomy Spatial Benchmarking
Taxonomy compares spatial supply against current and intended organisational demand — a structured inventory of what the portfolio provides versus what the organisation needs.
Image-led decision-making: concepts selected from renders, precedents cited without their performance records, and architectural ambition substituting for demand evidence. The reverse failure is equally common — strategy briefs so prescriptive they purchase compliance and forfeit the design quality that makes workplaces work.
Systematic evidence linking architectural variables to organisational outcomes remains thinner than the profession's confidence suggests; building performance evaluation practice is the field's best corrective.