A sense of place

This week, WeWork launched its latest attempt to recover from that awful TV show with Jared Leto. Also, bankruptcy. 

WeWork Go are phone booth-style office pods that will begin to pop up in airports, convention centres, and even cafes to allow people to work privately wherever they happen to be. 

It’s the latest example of how our sense of place is becoming increasingly blurred. Of course, working wherever you can balance a laptop is nothing new, especially now the connection to an office has forever been changed by the pandemic. But it goes far beyond that. 

In New York, design trends are pushing restaurants to look more and more like offices, driven by the novelty of spending less time in our actual offices.

Across culture, third spaces are back in vogue. Rather than silently sipping terrible coffee in Starbucks, today’s third spaces are inviting participation and interaction. Options include gyms, which 37% of Zoomers use as a place to socialise, fancy apartments with leisure facilities, or even online platforms such as Patreon or Discord.

Even Australia’s first new cathedral to be built in over a century will also feature education facilities, community services, and a bookshop.

Our homes are now our offices, our offices are now restaurants, our gyms are the pub, and pubs are hosting thrift markets. 

It’s enough to make you wonder where the hell you are. Which makes the news that cinemas are enjoying a resurgence, with attendance in the US and Europe up nearly 16%, a little less surprising. 

You can’t do much else in a cinema than what it’s there for (aside from, you know). It’s part of the reason they’re so susceptible to societal changes, but also a strength in feeling profoundly familiar and unchanging. Until WeWork inevitably tries to put an office pod in one, at least.