Wednesday / October 30, 2019 / 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
The Theatre of Work - Clive Wilkinson, FAIA, FIIDA, RIBA
IIT, S.R. Crown Hall, 3360 South State Street, Chicago
Clive Wilkinson, FAIA, FIIDA, RIBA, president and design director of Clive Wilkinson Architects, will discuss his latest book, The Theatre of Work (FRAME, 2019).
The Theatre of Work proposes an evolution of the relationship between office users and the spaces they occupy. As work processes and community relationships evolve, new collaborative synergies within the workplace are created. The interplay between space and people offers a new kind of theater where parallels with the archetypal theater of the street and the marketplace occur. This emerging new workspace should amplify and celebrate the activity of work and of human community, and in the process, become vital and compelling theater.
In defining this new office landscape, Wilkinson examines global developments in workplace thinking, historical antecedents, the performance touch-points for the new office, and proposes seven humanistic principles that will inform a holistic design process that can bring this concept of theater to fruition. Each of these principles is demonstrated through case studies of the work of his renowned design studio, Clive Wilkinson Architects (CWa), with rich iconography, diagrammatic strategy, and contextual ingenuity. The outcome of this process, with its multiple performative layers, effectively promotes elevating a corporate brief of basic needs and goals to a profoundly human-centered presentation of “work as theater.”
Copies of The Theatre of Work will be available for purchase.
This event was organized by MAS Context in conjunction with IIT. AIA Chicago is an official collaborator for this event; it is also a partner program of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial.
