The office has stopped being a given. Now it must be worth showing up for

For much of the twentieth century, the office did not have to explain itself. It was simply where work happened. You had a job, and therefore you had a desk; the arrangement felt fixed, almost inevitable. That assumption has quietly disappeared, and it is not coming back.

The pandemic severed the long-held connection between employment and the office. Artificial intelligence is now dissolving the connection between productivity and human input, automating cognitive work and streamlining how teams operate.

Drawing a straight line between AI and the changing workplace would be too simple. But together, these forces raise a more interesting question for every developer, occupier and designer to consider. Not why people have to come in, but why they’d want to. This question was central to a report we recently published on what we call Workplace 3.0: the third era of workplace design.

The first era was built around efficiency. Offices were cellular and corridor-based, with private rooms for senior staff, shared halls and clerical bays for everyone else. Space reflected hierarchy and the architecture reflected a theory of human beings as inputs to be optimised.

The second era brought openness. Open plans, hot-desking, beanbags and slides: the Silicon Valley campus translated into a design philosophy that swept the industry. But it was, in the end, aesthetic rather than architectural, designed to be photographed rather than inhabited. The New York Times recently declared that Silicon Valley had entered its “Hard Tech Era”: the perks gone, replaced by intensity and AI-driven pressure to perform. The era of the beanbag is over. So, equally, is the era of the desk-farm.

We are now entering a third era, shaped by intentionality. As technology takes on more individual cognitive work, productivity becomes an increasingly weak reason to commute. The office can no longer simply be somewhere people are expected to be. It has to earn their presence.

The deeper argument is about longevity, where the industry has misunderstood what durability means. Efficiency-era offices were built around hierarchy and supervision. Openness-era offices were built around image and cultural signalling. Each, in its own way, was designed to be replaced when the next workplace idea arrived.

A space built with robust materials, adaptable structure and genuine design intelligence does not need to be discarded when the next era arrives. It should be able to evolve. It should need refining every 10 or 15 years, not reinventing every 10 or 15 months. Nowhere is this clearer than at The Harewood (pictured), Mayfair, a building we first designed in 2011 and have now returned to, 15 years on, for JP Morgan Asset Management. The building never needed replacing, it needed careful refinement.

These decisions may sound small. Collectively, they determine whether a building still has a purpose in 10 years’ time, or whether it simply becomes the next thing to be torn out. At MoreySmith, we see the workplace as a living environment, one that draws on hospitality and residential design to create a sense of arrival and give people reasons to move through a building.

As AI assumes a growing share of cognitive and transactional work, attention shifts to something technology cannot replicate: the depth of community created through proximity, mentorship and relationships, something many are still seeking to rebuild after the pandemic.

This is now the irreducible case for the office. Not productivity or policy. Community, earned through design that is thoughtful, generous and enduring enough to make people want to be there.