Designed for Choice

The project began with a simple but layered premise: imagine a professional services workplace that could operate like a real client environment. The design needed to express credibility and sophistication while responding to the way work is actually changing. 

Although the client was fictional, the design process drew on very real expertise. Gensler's Global Practice Area teams—including leaders from Professional Services, Sports, and other sectors—helped shape the design vision, bringing together perspectives from a wide range of project types and workplace challenges. The result is a workplace concept grounded in today's expectations while embracing emerging patterns that are reshaping the future of work. 

For many firms, the office remains a place of presence, where clients are welcomed, teams gather, leaders host important conversations, and culture becomes visible. But it is also a place under pressure. People move through the day differently than they once did. They need spaces for focus, calls, small meetings, larger collaboration, informal exchange, and private discussion. At the same time, organizations need interiors that can respond as teams grow, practices shift, and business needs evolve. 

The Gensler concept treats these conditions as the basis for design, imagining the workplace as a landscape of interconnected settings, each supporting a different balance of activity, visibility, privacy, connection, and movement. 

The project also began with an architectural question: how should positive and negative space relate to one another? 

The team explored this critical relationship of opposites through proportion, rhythm, transparency, enclosure, and movement. Rooms, edges, openings, views, and pauses work together to create a workplace that feels structured and fluid at the same time. 

In this way, the project becomes a useful stand-in for a larger question facing professional services firms: how can a workplace feel established without becoming fixed? 

Choice is one of the central ideas in the project, reflecting the ambition to create a more responsive environment that gives both organizations and individuals greater agency. 

In the Gensler concept, the workplace is composed almost like a three-dimensional collage. Solid and void, transparency and opacity, rooms and openings come together to create a field of possibilities. For employees, that composition creates moments of discovery throughout the day. For visitors, it creates the first spark of psychological choice: the "wow" that invites the eye to scan, interpret, and move through the space. 

The range of settings matters, but the story is really about how these settings relate to one another. Meeting rooms, pavilions, focus rooms, executive areas, cafés, and breakout spaces become part of a larger spatial framework. Each element supports a different mode of work, and together they shape how people move, gather, focus, transition, and connect. 

In bringing the design to life, the Gensler team used Haworth's 4SPACE® system as an architectural framework for shaping the workplace through a kit-of-parts approach. Glass fronts, modular walls, ceiling solutions, door styles, hardware options, solid wall conditions, slim lines, and seamless transitions create a vocabulary for defining space with precision. The system also supports acoustic privacy, sustainability benefits, and a more confident process for design, delivery, and installation. 

In this sense, 4SPACE is both technical and experiential. It provides the precision of a system while supporting the nuance of atmosphere, proportion, transparency, materiality, and human interaction. The result is a workplace that feels intentional and complete, but never immovable. 

The design approach changes the conversation between clients, architects, designers, dealers, manufacturers, construction managers, and trades. When workflow becomes more visible, the discussion expands beyond aesthetics to include adaptability, phasing, reconfiguration, delivery, performance, infrastructure, and long-term value. It invites earlier conversations about what should remain fixed, what should remain flexible, and where investment will create the greatest value over time. 

One of the most compelling aspects of the project was the collaborative process that shaped it. By bringing together expertise from Gensler's Global Practice Areas alongside Haworth Architectural Solutions, the team developed a concept informed by multiple industries, workplace typologies, and emerging patterns of work. This breadth of perspective helped create an environment that feels both authentic to professional services and adaptable to the broader changes affecting organizations across sectors. 

The project ultimately demonstrates that today's workplace no longer needs to choose between polish and adaptability, permanence and flexibility, openness and privacy, or design expression and system intelligence. Instead, these qualities can coexist within a responsive architectural system. Using Haworth Architectural Solutions, the workplace can become a living system—structured enough to support the business today, yet fluid enough to evolve alongside whatever comes next. 

Visit Haworth Architectural Solutions Wall Systems to see how modular interior architecture helps designers shape arrival sequences, meeting spaces, private rooms, and connective environments that support both organizational purpose and human experience.