Programming and collaborating

Arts Council England’s core function of encouraging and supporting the arts will be mainifest throughout the new offices. The national office should be an amazing resource and a place which members of the funding system, the arts community and the public want to be.
Different conditions for viewing and experiencing art will be explored within the offices that will take advantage of the Arts Council’s extensive collections of contemporary art, along with new commissions and installations.
Close collaboration between the Arts Council and the designers as well the involvement of further collaborators, including artists, graphic and media designers, will define a strong and complex character for the new offices.

Making a Place

New and flexible ways of working do not mean that one is relegated to working in a ‘non-place’. As working practices become less reliant on the personal office and become increasingly based around networks and shared spaces, the pleasure derived from rich and characterful spaces becomes amplified.
Construction is the most powerful way to make connections between structures of different ages and to impart a real presence to a place. By engaging with and reinforcing the best aspects of an existing situation, or even making surprising new interventions, construction can have spatial effect and impart a heightened capacity for inhabitation.

The Workshop

The Arts Council offices could be a new kind of workshop, a fantastic industrial space where generous natural light and a solid and robust structure form a background to dynamic networks of activity.
Artists’ projects, graphic and media design and spatial/material design could be integrated in new and relaxed ways in this space; meeting rooms could work as inspiring art spaces, clusters of workstations could become the venue for a symposium. In this way an open organisational structure will accommodate a continually changing pattern of use, constantly revising and renewing the environment and the perceptions of those working within it.

Image without Icon

Icons have a decreasing shelf life in today’s media saturated environment, and the Arts Council national offices will aspire towards a more complex and long-lasting image, one that is formally variable but conceptually clear and rich. The offices will show how the workplace can be a location for art that goes far beyond the conventional corporate office model.