Inside The Office: References

The research of the current situation of employees inside the office has been basic to reach our main critique of the office space. The research has focused on those films and book that describe the current life inside the office.

Among cinematographic references, we can find many current films which try to reflect the pettyness inside de office. Here we are not looking for the specific office task properly speaking but however, we try to know as deep as possible how office employees life are, apart from this tasks.

The reflection of the systemic dissatisfaction within the current office is a recurring theme in many films, such as Brasil, American Beauty, Fight Club, Network, 9 to 5, ... and, especially, Office Space.

Each of these examples have been interesting because it has allowed us to construct different part of the narrative that we will used top address the architectural proposal.

From Office Space, we can extract the everydayness of the office, the rumours, the routine and the annoying parts of sharing an open-plan office full of individual cubicles.

From Brasil, instead, we focus on the exercise of escapism, that allows the character to satisfy his empty and stupid life inside the dystopian burocratic society in which he lives.

In the literary genre, two contemporary novels describe in detail the current office realm: Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End (2007) and Ed Park's Personal Days (2008). They show how office employees spend their day at work – in a world geared towards competition rather than co-operation, otherness rather than equality, and guarantees instead of trust (Marx,1867). As Ferris' novel exposes, contemporary office workers have to cope with jealousy and dread, petty hatred, exhaustion, and the questioning of personal values and the meaning of work: a depiction of the office as the spiritual focus and centre of our age of complacent prosperity.