The first of a series of PROOFFLab at Home specials is ‘Work At Home’, a mobile work dormer. PROOFFLab’s spatial investigations into the correlation between the home and the office leads to hybrid typologies that combine both. It’s a rooftop dormer in which assembled functions either apply to working or living. Each special from the PROOFFLab at Home series departs from a specific function segment of an archetypical house. In this case an extended roof and window; a dormer, is the basis for a hybrid work unit. It’s an extra compartment which can be added to the roof of a house, similar to the installment of a regular dormer. Inside, it has a desk, shelving and even a small heater and chimney, and a large window overlooking the vicinity around the house. When you sit high up at your roof desk, you can sway your feet in the bottomless space that stands out from the facade. In this workspace, the independent worker with headquarters at home, has lots of light and a great vista in front of him. The light and space generate a sense of freedom. Not being able to touch the ground with your feet, if only for a minute, can make you feel like a child. This very short instance can still produce a, very brief, carefree moment.

The spatial functions of work are concentrated inside the movable work bubble with some domestic functions added for comfort. Work At Home is an extra limb to a domestic, or other building. Proportions that stay well within official building codes. In fact, the dimensions of the components of the PROOFFLab at Home series are based on official residential setback requirements.

Flexible workers usually work from home, but imagine an colossal empty building along the highway as an indoor office square. The only thing you need to add is your private office. What if vacant buildings everywhere develop growths on their skin when flexible workers catch a work virus and start to set up office with their dormers? The dormer interior is private, this is the worker’s home, but the vast amount of square meters behind it offers publicly shared office equipment. Some office tools are used only ever so often and can be shared easily. Because of its modular construction it can be extended with a private entrance, or another spatial function the owner would rather not share. Or in case of cell combinations, you click units into place like Lego bricks. Work At Home is much like a mobile home that you can transport on a trailer with a car, only, its functional purpose isn’t leisure, but work.

When it comes to product development Studio Makkink & Bey takes on a multifaceted approach. Our designs are the product of a modification process within a context that is constantly redefined itself. PROOFFLab at Home operates as an active development model to anticipate transformations of the work landscape. On this platform we extend parts of a house to accommodate both working and living. PROOFFLab at Home is a sum of these prototype parts.

Of course, research into the spatial organization of work is not only meaningful to the design discipline. It latches onto a broader social movement that calls to revise the socio-economic system. Work and production processes, interdisciplinary networks, the labor market, engagement in urban development, use of information, social and education systems have changed and need spatial updates. On a personal level, the experience of work has completely changed compared to ten or even five years ago.

When working became much more nomadic, because of mobile work tools, the housing of work opened up to a new potential of temporary, moving and adjustable spaces. People started to work during walks and in cars, in parks and outside office hours. These added environments have shifted many boundaries, but in a rather fundamental way it has changed the working – living divide. Domesticity now enters the work space and vise versa. On the road has now become one of our new office spaces.

Our response to these transformations is a spatial composite of architectures that we prepared to withstand big changes. This corresponds to the open source movement sweeping across the globe. The democratizing effect of easy access to building plans and a say in decision-making, more exchange and on demand delivery of materials, integrates engaged ownership into the process. The fact that we have to live within our means and avoid needless manufacturing, necessitates an approach for organizing material and production.

The PROOFFLab at Home modules are presented as a prototype in blue polystyrene foam at various design events. Potential buyers purchase the work hours spent on manufacturing and on the design, the materials and finishes they pick from a catalog and the distribution to their home in a sort of on order architecture. While the unit is delivered at your doorstep, the only intervention needed is making a small opening in the house to insert the unit. When plans change again, the module can be detached and sold or stored. Each round of the PROOFFLab design cycle, we develop a new home – work hybrid. These are extensions of a standard part of an archetypical house. Every hybrid module has its origins in the house and have departed e.g. the roof, the entrance or a wall.

When the series reaches its end, all components amount to one house as a sum of parts. They’re held together by a frame of ribs that follow the contours of a house. With each exhibition of PROOFFLab at Home, the house has grown an extra body part until PROOFFLab at Home is complete. The exhibition space around is a yard with products in it that are curated to fit the theme of the exhibit. It is an active showroom where people can sit and work.

VOORSCHRIFTEN

Stedenbouwkundige voorschriften

1. Het bij het hoofdgebouw behorend achtererfgebied mag als gevolg van de bijbehorende bouwwerk voor niet meer dan 50 % worden bebouwd.

2. Indien er sprake is van een uitbreiding op de begane grond dient ‘Het werken aan huis’ een minimale afstand te behouden van 1 meter ten opzichte van het hoofdgebouw en alle overige bebouwing. Dit om licht, lucht en toegankelijkheid.

3. Wanneer er sprake is van optoppen op huidige bebouwing, wordt toegang verschaft via een extern geplaatste trapstructuur of is de opbouw voorzien van een interne trapoplossing.

4. Het gebouwde heeft een goothoogte van 3 meter en een nokhoogte van 4,5 meter.

5. Het gebouwde is licht gefundeerd.

Bouwkundige voorschriften

1. Van alle wanden is 50 % licht doorlatend, waarvan opnieuw 50 % volledig transparante vlakken is. Deze laatsten moeten over de mogelijkheid beschikken om te kunnen verduisteren.

2. Indirect zonlicht heeft voorkeur op direct zonlicht, transparante glasvlakken bij voorkeur noordgeörienteerd.

3. Het gebouwde is uitsluitend voorzien van één kijkrichting, één focus naar buiten toe.

4. ‘Het werken aan huis’ is voorzien van vloerverwarming en een eigen kleine cv installatie hiertoe.

5. Bij het gebouwde moet ieder onderdeel bij schade, vernieuwing of uitbreiding vervangbaar zijn.

6. Voor ieder onderdeel moet een uiterlijke variant beschikbaar zijn.

7. Van de gebruikte oppervlakte materialen in het interieur is 30 % akoestisch dempend, hierbij meegerekend constructieve

oppervlaktes en bekleding.

8. Het werken aan huis dient voorzien zijn van voldoende natuurlijke ventilatie.

9. Het kleur licht staat in direct verband met de akoestische kwaliteit van de ruimte, deze heeft als norm, zacht.

Interieur- en productvoorschriften

1. Elk oppervlak hard materiaal heeft bij een product een navenant gelijkaardig oppervlak aan zacht materiaal.

2. Een meubel dient ook over een ruimtelijke organiserende kwaliteit te beschikken.

3. Meubels binnen een radius van 1,5 meter tot een lawaai producerend apparaat moeten dit geluid akoestisch kunnen

neutraliseren.

4. Ieder bouwwerk voor ‘werken aan huis’ is voorzien van één nest ruimte tot afzondering en confrontatie, een werkruimte met

uitzicht en een plaats tot ontvangst van klanten, kast of archiefruimte en kitchenette.

BESTEMMINGSTOETS

Wordt het bouwwerk bij een woning of bij een ander gebouw gebouwd?

X Woning

0 Ander gebouw

Gaat het om werkzaamheden in, aan, op of bij een monument?

0 Ja X Nee

Blijft het aantal woningen gelijk?

X 0 0

Heeft het

X 0

Ja

Nee, er komen woningen bij

Nee, er worden woningen samengevoegd

bouwwerk een dak?

Ja Nee

Komt het bouwwerk op de grond te staan?

X Ja

X Nee (op toppen)

Komt het bouwwerk op hetzelfde perceel te staan als de woning?

X Ja

0 Nee

Gaat u bouwen op een erf?

X Ja

0 Nee

Gaat u bouwen in het achtererfgebied?

X Ja

0 Nee (voorzijde van de woning)

Het achterfgebied begint 1 meter achter de voorgevel van het hoofdgebouw (functioneel het belangrijkste gebouw). Als er ook een woning aanwezig is dan kan ook de woning maatgevend zijn. Het gebouw dat het dichtst bij het openbaar toegankelijk gebied (de openbare weg) ligt is maatgevend. Erf dat naast de woning ligt en direct aan het openbaar toegankelijk gebied grenst is geen achtererfgebied. Openbaar toegankelijk gebied is onder andere: wegen, pleinen, parken, plantsoenen, openbaar water en dergelijke. Fiets- en voetpaden die niet worden gebruikt voor doorgaand verkeer, vallen niet onder het openbaar toegankelijk gebied.

Is het achtererf na het bouwen voor meer dan de helft bebouwd met bouwwerken?

0 Ja X Nee

Hoeveel meter vanaf het oorspronkelijk hoofdgebouw of de oorspronkelijke woning gaat u bouwen?

0 Tussen 0 meter en niet meer dan 2,5 meter 0 Vanaf 2,5 meter en verder

X Vanaf 0 meter tot meer dan 2,5 meter

Hoe hoog is het bouwwerk?

0 3 meter of lager

X Meer dan 3 tot maximaal 4 meter 0 Meer dan 4 tot maximaal 5 meter 0 Hoger dan 5 meter

Gaat u ten behoeve van het bouwwerk ook een uitrit aanleggen?

0 Ja X Nee

BOUWWERK

The Slow Car and the campus city

A campus (Latin for ‘field’) is an open space, usually grassy, which is gradually surrounded by buildings until it becomes the heart of a university. The campus begins as a field, transformed temporarily into a building site. Later it becomes a sports field, often performs as a place of political demonstration, and then into a garden. It ossifies in this final form, perhaps embellished by memorial statues or fountains, passed through by generations of students. Occasionally it reverts back to its earlier incarnations, as new groups charge the space with politics again. Later, the whole complex, field and buildings, is referred to as the campus. The university is conceived, we could say, as a field of operations that is deliberately undetermined, defined by its inhabitants through social congress. The campus, says Jurgen Bey, is how the world of work is developing, and, he says, the slow car is part of a series of rethought infrastructures that speculate about the way we make places to work. His ideas attempt to suggest how we might turn the generic into the specific. He has made wall-sized illustrations of massive cranes building modular skyscrapers and themselves being incorporated into the buildings. At their foot are beetle-like cars that form the personal space of this plan. While the idea of the slow car has many obvious and practical effects on road safety, the environment etc, its most interesting potential is social – it is a machine that could transform what Marc Augé would call the non-places of the contemporary world into places more like a campus. Think of an airport. It is a sprawling mass of a building, made completely contingent and defined by security and pedestrian mobility. There is no exterior public space at all. There are shopping centres but no public spaces. There is nothing particular, and no hope of it. But imagine an fleet of moving rooms, places you could sit, sleep, keep your luggage, and use to transport you to a park or a church. If all corners of the place were within reach to every passenger then how might that transform the character of these generic places? How much more time might one want to spend there? Where would the civic centre of an airport be, and what would it look like? The airport is the funnel through which pass the skills, knowledge and talent of any international industry. Imagine if those people could drive themselves to a park, or perhaps into a huge library, teeming with tiny, personalised cars, beetling around like workers in a quarry. This project is an enabling infrastructure of mobile rooms that could make shared spaces in generic places.social – it is a machine that could transform what Marc Augé would call the non-places of the contemporary world into places more like a campus.

The Slow Car at the Vitra campus

Yes or no?

What’s in the Slow Car?

Work Light stems from a product range made for Prooff and is the creative foundation from which Studio Makkink & Bey develops new office furniture and products. These pieces generate visual strategies by enclosing and giving space, offering a double meaning or function. The Work lights’ beams encircle a small area, gently delineating that space. It can also be read as an artificial sky, bringing the outside, inside. At the same time it can be put outside to function as a lamppost for office events in the open air.