The Legacy of Office Landscaping: SANAA’s Rolex Learning Centre
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Abstract
In this text I relate the Rolex Learning Centre (RLC) at EPFL in Lausanne by Japanese architects SANAA to the historic example of the Bürolandschaft [office landscape] invented by German management consultants Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle in the late 1950s. In doing so I posit the RLC as the most advanced and most elaborate contemporary example of a workplace architecture that mirrors the post-Fordist knowledge economy.
The text introduces the world’s first Bürolandschaft Buch und Ton for the Bertelsmann corporation: the design’s political aspirations and the economic context in Post-War Germany, its cybernetic design method, as well as strategic design decisions. I then discuss the interior economy of EPFL’s new architectural icon and how its interior economy differs from the political and organisational aspiration of its post-war Europe inventors.
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