****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This is an excellent book of inspiration for office design. It features workspaces from around the world, primarily in Europe and Asia but with a few from other locations (flipping through, I noticed Canada, Israel, South Africa and the United States). Most offices are represented by 6-12 pages, although more space is dedicated to a few larger projects (the Google Dublin Campus gets a whopping 38 pages). Each project is introduced in a brief, half-page description of the company, the needs for the space, and the design concept and solution. At least one floor plan is provided for each project; for some projects there are several plans and elevations. The remainder of the project entry is high-quality, full-color photographs of the interior spaces, with 1-4 photographs per page and little white space other than the page margins. The book construction is also of high quality - thick pages, strong binding, and a thick dust jacket.The project descriptions are printed in a thin font with purple ink, which makes them a little harder to read than standard text. Although the floor plans are printed clearly, most are plans for very large spaces and therefore reproduced at a very small scale, so details can be difficult to make out. Page headers include only the book title, not the project title; if you happen to open the book in the middle of a longer entry, it can take a while to find the project description that identifies what you're looking at. The photographs have no captions, so the only explanation is the project description. So this is NOT a book of information to guide someone through an office design project. It is, however, a beautiful, high-quality book of inspiration for anyone seeking a broad range of ideas of what an office space could look like. Highly recommended for students, interior designers, and anyone involved in planning a new or redesigned office space.
