Rohan Silva on office spaces in London
Despite the number of small businesses and startups in the UK getting bigger and bigger, the property industry has failed to keep up. Rohan Silva, former technology adviser at Number 10, is on a mission to tackle the problem of inflexible, unimaginative office buildings, starting with his latest venture, Second Home, an office space designed by SelgasCano for creative businesses in Shoreditch.
A spectre is haunting the city -- the spectre of technology. Developed economies around the world are being reshaped by the information revolution, but the lack of innovation in the property industry means our cities and buildings simply aren't evolving to keep pace.
The internet has dramatically slashed the cost of starting a company, helping the number of small businesses in the UK to explode from 700,000 just a few decades ago to 5.2 million today. What's more, in the Information Age, clustering and physical proximity are more important for innovation than ever, while the innovation cycle is so fast that large corporations are being disrupted by startups at lightning speed.
Despite these seminal changes, the property industry has barely changed at all in the past 20 years. In the main, developers are still churning out inflexible buildings for monolithic large companies on rigid, long leases, with tenants working in isolation from one another, and next to no emphasis on the cultural life that helps spark serendipitous collisions and innovation.
This isn't just an academic problem -- it means life is harder than it should be for millions of creative entrepreneurs and small businesses, with huge negative consequences for job creation and economic growth. It doesn't have to be this way. I believe that it is possible to re-imagine the built environment so that it better reflects the way that companies work today. Here's how my company Second Home is going about it.
First, through radical design. In early 2014, we appointed the Madrid-based practice, SelgasCano, to create a building in east London where creative companies can have their own private, soundproofed studios, within an overall environment that is beautifully transparent and communal. We have 30 private studios in total, enabling teams of between four and 25 people to work around the clock, cheek by jowl with startups operating from the communal space in the centre of the building. Companies occupy our studios on three-month, rolling memberships, and can add or subtract staff on a weekly basis, ensuring that they can respond in real-time to the ever-changing innovation cycle.
Second, we're curating a community. We understand that good things happen when different types of industry and people collide, which is why we carefully picked companies for Second Home that we felt could have a synergistic relationship with one another. (We turned down more than 60 businesses that we didn't think were quite right.) The result? Our studios were 100 per cent full on day one of opening, occupied by a tight-knit and diverse community: global businesses such as SurveyMonkey, Foursquare and TaskRabbit, alongside homegrown innovators such as Cushman & Wakefield's new property-tech incubator and Santander's £100m FinTech fund.
Third, we're supporting wellbeing and creativity. SelgasCano drew on evolutionary psychology to design an environment that mimics the seasonality and fractal complexity of the natural world: there are more than 1,000 plants and trees in our building, every chair and desk lamp is different (all mid-century and Bauhaus originals), and there are almost no straight lines anywhere. In addition, we host a regular programme of cultural events to bring people together, including lectures, film screenings and live gigs, which all take place in our stunning auditorium.
In the words of the Harvard economist Ed Glaeser: 'Cities are our greatest invention' -- they are crucibles of creativity where we come together to achieve new things. It's time to reinvent our urban spaces, and help a new generation of entrepreneurs to flourish in our cities. This is our generation's struggle. I've no doubt we'll rise to the challenge.
