When you’re so bored with staring at your dove gray Steelcase office cubicle that you’re ready to smash your head clear through it, just fantasize that you work for one of these companies and have far more imaginative workspaces to fire up your creative juices! Here are the world’s ten coolest work spaces!
#10 Facebook
The office lounge expresses everything about the company, how cool, hip, post-modern and totally Web 2.0 it is. What it doesn’t express is how to turn a Personal Page into a Fan Page, what evil lunatic came up with FBML, and why I have visit Aunt Flo’s Facebook page and see 27 photos of her hysterectomy scar.
#9 Google
Let’s see, what do you do when your stock market valuation exceeds that of many industrialized nations? You blow a few measly million on interior design, but make sure that the sugar cubes in the designers’ coffee are properly treated with lysergic acid.
#8 Mindlab
When the Danish government sets out to use their taxpayers’ money on a ministry office, they certainly don’t sandblast a brick wall and plunk $99 Ikea desks in it. Mindlab’s office is a cross between a kindergartener’s daydream and the leftover sets from Space:1999.
#7 Vormgevers Associates
This office in the Netherlands was built with materials salvaged from the 1628 shipwreck of the Dutch East India Company’s Batavia. No, that’s a complete lie, but I had you going there for a while, didn’t I?
#6 Pixar
The cool office to end all cool offices, what else did you expect from the propeller-heads at Pixar? Too bad that they spent all the money on interior decoration that they should have paid the screenwriters to come up with better jokes for their movies.
#5 Palota
Yes, we just had to take that shipping container thing just a bit further and turn them into actual offices. Not only is it an inexpensive way to construct individual offices but when the company relocates you, your whole office can go with you.
#4 Burnkit Ex-Munitions Factory
When Vancouver agency Burnkit was looking for a funky space, why not pick a former World War II munitions factory complete with shipping containers in the middle of the work area, perhaps still filled with hand grenades? That way they can state that Burnkit provides explosive ideas that are guaranteed not to bomb as they’re dy-nooooo-mite!
#3 Alleyne’s Star Trek Bridge
When UK Trekkie Tony Alleyne decided to turn his apartment / interior design office into a Star Trek Bridge, he… well… went all out. Not only did the expense land him in bankruptcy court, but his wife divorced him. Apparently they didn’t notice there is no currency in the 24th century; and Tony is not Vulcan so his wife didn’t have to wait seven years for him to go through the Pon Farr.
#2 Infosys Slide
When the employees of Infosys hit their lunch break they want to get out of their offices fast, so what better way than to hurtle down a spiral slide down to the foyer? Apparently when you’re fired, they just spray WD40 on your pants and you come to a stop at the unemployment office down the street.
#1 Microsoft’s Ice House
An complete ice house built in Toronto in January 2007 to promote the launch of Windows Vista. Not only did the structures allow the computers’ P4 Prescott CPUs to actually run at normal temperatures for once, but they also displayed I-BSODs (Ice-Blue Screens Of Death).
There’s much to be said about working in innovative and striking office decor like this. Personally, my idea of the best work space is a South Pacific island where my job is to chase the grass-sirt wearing girls with a lawnmower!
