Best Workspaces Award 2022

Back in October last year, we reported that the SIP Scootershop headquarters had been nominated for the Best Workspaces Award 2022. Now the international jury has decided and our building, which was designed by Archtitekturbüro Ott from Augsburg, has been awarded in the category „Office Buildings“. We are very pleased about this.

SIP Scootershop founder and CEO Ralf Jodl: „Receiving the prestigious Best Workspaces Award confirms our efforts to provide modern and creativity-enhancing work environments for our employees. We are proud and happy that our intensive planning and thought processes have now been recognized by this award. And of course we also congratulate the architects from Augsburg, who perfectly implemented our visions.“

Best Workspaces

is the first international architecture award for intelligent working environments. Callwey Verlag and its partners bring together the best workspace interiors judged by an independent jury of experts and connect decision-makers, planners and manufacturers digitally and live. The vision of the Best Workspaces Award is to unite all those concepts on one platform that are also internationally pioneering. The Best Workspaces Award was offered for the first time in 2020. This year, 2022, the winners and honorees will be presented for the first time in a comprehensive yearbook. 50 office projects impressed the jury with their design and innovative concepts in the categories of working environments and office buildings. They are documented in detail in the book with texts, plans and pictures. The jury awarded one first prize, five commendations and 44 awards. Twelve products were also honored as the solutions of the year. Partners of the competition are the BMW Group, the architecture magazine Baumeister, the platforms baunetz interior|design and OFFICE DEALZZ, and the office magazine OFFICE ROXX.

Wood, concrete and glass create a real vintage atmosphere in the offices.

About The Best Workspaces Award

The title already indicates this: Instead of places, this architecture award deals with spaces. If you take a closer look at the historical development of work per se, you quickly realize that over the course of the last few centuries, people have allowed themselves to become more and more fixed: White-collar workers and civil servants spent their weekdays at the counter or at a fixed work table - then in front of documents and behind the typewriter, today at the computer. In this way, a veritable culture of one‘s own place developed in the individual or even open-plan office. It consisted of an established swivel chair, personal desk decorations, comfortable office sandals, a green plant, and the sacred coffee mug with an inscription. But the interior design hardly played a role. Colleagues and customers met across the desk laminated in office gray, via telephone and fax, or in the PVC-covered hallway - filing racks and neon lights everywhere. Now, however, we have arrived in the 21st century and are pleased to note that occupational psychologists and physicians, ergonomists and organizational scientists, but above all architects and designers as well as office furnishers have intensively taken up the phenomenon of the workplace and are continuously transforming it into a completely new quality. This becomes strikingly clear when one looks at the projects submitted for this competition.

Apart from the aspects of the external working place, which the increasingly used digitization makes possible comprehensively or in combined form and will probably continue to perfect, employees and companies or institutions are of course still dependent on the territorial office. However, the way they deal with it has changed. Above all, new hybrid forms are emerging in which producing is combined with a loosely relaxed position or the factual-functional room furnishings are combined with elements of a homely ambience. Informing, thinking, writing and designing as well as communicating are given new, flexible „places“ - spaces that are to be thought of in a staggered manner: starting from the immediate place of activity at the individual table or laptop, they develop centrifugally and, with increasing openness, become ever larger, more expansive. The next conceptual dimension of the workspace is directly surrounding contact and collaboration zones, from multispaces or office landscapes to active-based working, expanded by supplementary functional areas on the floor. This is followed by additional offerings in the building - via the inclusion of the urban environment to virtual extension via digital technologies. Via large screens and VR glasses, even the whole world can become the office. If that‘s not a remarkable evolution!

At the same time, practical knowledge is becoming more and more reflective, planning principles are becoming more demanding. The contemporary creative questioning of the quasilegislative definition „employee equals fixed work desk equals fixed work location“ alone calls for flexible office floor plans and digital communication technology with which one can be integrated from the adjacent building, from home or, for example, also from the Far East. Added to this are the competencies of the flanking institutes and researchers, and here the concern of the planners and those associated experts is for an incomparably larger portfolio of architectural aspects than two generations ago. While the specific optimization of effectiveness or occupational safety have long been conventional planning parameters, those involved today are reflecting on much more: modulated light zones and controlled room acoustics that promote concentration and performance enhancement by means of absorbers or noise-canceling technologies, suppression of stressors, or interior design offerings for professional and social communication or interaction. Consideration is also being given to an environmentally compatible energy balance or the use of recycled materials. Part of the progressive spatial and temporal organization of work are offers for temporary recovery phases in creative relaxation zones, café bars and gyms. It has long been obvious that not only the health of employees, but also their inner attitude and ambition are relevant for an optimal work situation. Here, interior design makes a significant contribution through subtle to clearly perceptible effects on the work situation. Cognitive and neuroscience as well as spatial psychology confirm the effectiveness of even small design improvements such as the pleasant tactility of surfaces or the greenterior principle - the atmospheric and climatic inclusion of plants. In sum, the task of competent interior design for workspaces must be to develop a holistic design concept, and this is a thoroughly professional, highly complex challenge.

After all, as already mentioned above, a large number of very different parameters have to be taken into account: the factual conditions of the architectural shell, the specific requirements of the respective work processes, the type of work in terms of presence and interaction, the inclusion of customer areas or the integration of communal and leisure facilities, daycare centers, etc. It is not for nothing that we now speak of working worlds.

Fifty awards were determined from the diverse and demanding submissions, which were divided into the categories of workspaces for interior design and office buildings. Of these, five in turn received recognition, and one project was awarded 1st prize as „Best Workspace“. The list of criteria for the workspace interiors was flexibility. Collaboration, communication, concentration and well-being. For building construction projects of the office building type in commercial or mixed use were judged: Innovation factor, timeliness, design and dialogue with the surroundings. In addition, twelve very different workspace products received recognition. Anyone who now delves into the documentation of the Architecture Award presented here will not only find a detailed presentation of each individual award-winning or prize-winning project or product.

At the same time, they will also find an aesthetically committed and conceptually exciting portfolio of current working environments, cleverly combined with valuable references to designing offices and relevant manufacturers, whereby the core aspects of the new office culture listed above are clearly illustrated here and there. The interviews attached to each project are also instructive. In them, the architects and those involved on the client side comment on functionality, choice of materials, and their attitude toward atmosphere and spatial-homelike quality.

Last but not least, we should not forget the building owners involved here - companies and decision-makers - without whose commitment an appropriate and sustainable work culture based on building, space and equipment would be unthinkable. People are sensitive to problems of the future and want to transform in a meaningful way. That is why the willingness to discuss and the inspiration of both employers and designers are noticeably growing - undoubtedly a good development. And it is exemplary, because after all, the Best Workspaces are ultimately about us, the people.