Albert France-Lanord Architects designed an amazing office space for Swedish ISP, Bahnohof. Located 30m underground and was a former atomic bomb shelter.

http://blog.eoffice.net/2010/08/bahnhofs-white-mountain-office/

“You might have expected community-centered t-shirt company Threadless to have an interesting workspace, and you would be right. Above is the company’s Airstream trailer studio where Kristen Studard and Bob Nanna broadcast a live show on Ustream every Thursday from its Chicago headquarters.”

http://mashable.com/2010/09/20/inspiring-offices-pics/

A Toronto creative shop knocks down barriers, one big orange slide at a time http://www.unlimitedmagazine.com/2010/01/officeland-grip-limited/

“There is nothing like a big orange slide plonked right in the middle of an office to obliterate hierarchy between upper management and everyone else. But then Toronto creative agency Grip Limited, home to that big orange slide, has never been a place for hierarchy. Grip, whose clients include Acura, Lululemon Athletica and Labatt, has an unusually linear team, with an astounding 11 partners. David Crichton, one of eight founding partners calls it a “flat structure” in which partners work directly with clients, and therefore with their own designers, writers, interactive and technical staff who put together campaigns. “There’s no corner office mentality. There isn’t actually a corner office,” Crichton says, adding that newly hired president Harvey Carroll has the worst digs in the space – a small, drafty office that no one else wants.”

+ They notice the little things. White Astroturf lines one of the boardrooms. “It deadens sound,” Crichton says, “but it’s also not expensive. We like to do things creatively that don’t involve spending a lot of money. It sends a message to clients that you can be creative without being excessive.”

+ That working-class ethos turns up in Grip’s logo, a bright 1960s-style orange circle meant to show the company’s working-class roots. “I would say the culture here is pretty peer-oriented. Our partners work on a client’s file directly, so that means we worked directly with everyone here,” Crichton says. (Click to see a TV reel of some of Grip’s work.)

+ The non-linear structure of the company lets employees move between departments for rare wholesale career changes within the same company. For instance, a longtime studio manager became a designer and later an art director. One former IT staffer went on to become a multimedia editor/producer at Grip’s in-house production facility. The strategy is to “let people make a career change and then keep them in the company. At the end of the day, [the happiness of] a bigger paycheque only lasts two pay periods. If you provide a place where people like to work and are respected, they’ll be happier and more enthusiastic.”

“Wayne and Geraldine Hemingway, designers (they were the founders of Red or Dead) and judges of Enterprise Nation’s new Home Business Award, have a wonderful shedworking atmosphere, a teepee in their back garden known as Hemingway’s Outdoor Home Office (or HOHO). It has two levels with a suspended communal desk on the ground floor deck. The wood comes from sustainable sources including 10 BT telegraph poles. More details at their website hereand an article about it in Whatlaptop here which concentrates more on the technology they use to work from the teepee and where Hemingway says:”

“I love the outdoors, and to be in touch with the environment. So I have set up an outdoor workspace at home on the south coast, which has electricity fitted, as well as being a wireless networked space. I can take my laptop there to work, and can use scanners and printers if I need to, but still be in touch with the environment outside my home. There is a similar space at the London office – a garden with wireless networking, so we can work outside on nice days.”

Architect who does some amazing space transformations such as a cardboard office! http://coudamydesign.com/

Paul Coudamy

1979, Architecte DPLG live and work in Paris
His work is not confined within a clearly defined aesthetics; it is a transversal approach of different disciplines that results in a polymorph type of practice. Different media are used without distinction: architecture, video, design, space design, clothing… It is a universe where productions are feeding each other and where the different media are possibilities to explore and question.
These productions are opportunities to reinvent everyday objects and relationships to their functions while suggesting poetic and disturbing diversions.