This Chair-Free Office Bans Sitting

Today’s post was shared by The Green Workplace and comes from www.fastcodesign.com

Even though it’s now old news that sitting is killing us all, people still sit a whole lot, especially at office jobs. Standing desks are one solution, but office workers often have to take the initiative to request one from their employers. What if, instead, an office’s very design simply ruled out the option of sitting all day?

RAAAF (Rietveld Architecture-Art Affordances), a Netherlands-based experimental studio that works at the intersection of visual art, architecture, and science, collaborated with artist Barbara Visser to design "The End of Sitting," a conceptual office with no chairs and no traditional desks. Instead, the office is filled with faceted three-dimensional geometric shapes on which workers can stand, lean, perch, or even lie down. Viewed from above, the white objects resemble an artist’s abstract rendering of cracked glacial ice more than furniture. They range from waist-height to shoulder-height, allowing workers to change positions throughout the day.

Ricky Rijkenberg

The designers spent 10 days building the labyrinthine "experimental work landscape" from plywood frames and a secret render (described as being "as hard as concrete") at Looiersgracht 60, an Amsterdam-based exhibition space. "The End of Sitting" is part art installation, part psychological study: it’s the visual component of architect Erik Rietveld’s research project, called "The Landscape of Affordances: Situating the Embodied…

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