The feco-forum as an inspiration for architects

New approaches for the AOK office in Stuttgart-Vaihingen

Not only industry, but also the service sector is undergoing change: “New Work” is changing the way in which work is done and where it is done. While employees are increasingly demanding spatial flexibility, the company as a physical location isn’t decreasing in importance, but instead is changing its role.

This is especially true for service providers: Where digitisation renders being physically present in some cases superfluous, personal contact becomes all the more important, especially when dealing with customers. The consequence of this is that office work and customer service merge with each other, and work and representative rooms can no longer be separated.

At our feco-forum, architect Hajo Renner-Motz, together with representatives of AOK Baden-Württemberg took a look at how this symbiosis can be successful in preparation for the planning of the new AOK office in Stuttgart’s Vaihingen district.

From the feel-good to the success factor

For all their functionality, we at feco consider modern workplaces primarily to be places where people should want rather than have to spend time. This is because advancing digitisation is increasingly shifting the focus to the individual and is putting the individual’s freedom and innovative power at the centre of attention. Personal well-being is thus becoming a new and often underestimated success factor in the world of work. For many people today, an attractively-equipped workplace is even more important than a higher salary (Forsa survey 2016).

Indeed, working environments in which employees feel comfortable can increase productivity and creativity by up to 36 percent, according to a Fraunhofer study from 2018. Workspace design is therefore no longer a question of aesthetics and image for companies, but is becoming a critical productivity factor and thus a competitive advantage.

But what exactly is it that makes these environments so inspiring and productive?

The office as an ecosystem

Whether you feel comfortable at your workplace doesn’t depend on one individual factor, but rather on the sum of different sensory impressions: ergonomics, light, colour and space, privacy and acoustics. Above all, good noise management ensures satisfaction.

This is exactly what we’re looking for in our own offices in the feco-forum. The centrepiece here is our IdeenReich. This is where our teams design their everyday work environment and constantly test new concepts and furnishing trends. We have assigned all areas to five different room zones and equipped them accordingly: Meeting, Concentration, Team, Communication and Inspiration.

But anyone expecting to find many individual, self-contained rooms here will search for them in vain. Rather, all the zones are interconnected in a holistic ecosystem. Through the conscious use of functional furniture, room dividers, acoustic walls and our own feco-Systemtrennwänden, we create distance and calm where it is needed, and in this way maintain enough proximity that everything still forms a unit.

Office ideas to touch

We’re convinced that modern working is no longer suited to traditional offices and instead needs space to develop. This applies both to individual personal perception and to the increasingly complex tasks and requirements that make up work today. The challenge is to develop spatial concepts that support creativity, communication and concentration in equal measure and thus make agile work possible in the first place.

In our feco-forum we implement exactly that – and constantly develop it further. To do this, we test ourselves what we recommend to our customers and partners – from furniture trends to new forms of work. But we don’t only want to share our experience with architects, planners and clients, we also want to make it tangible. That’s why our feco-forum with its showroom and our IdeenReich is open to visitors,including to Karlsruhe-based architectural office Metzger Renner-Motz when it was seeking inspiration for the new AOK office.

feco as a source of ideas for the new AOK office

Our IdeenReich was the inspiration for the new AOK office, not only in terms of building physics and aesthetics, but also in terms of workplace design. But first and foremost, inspecting our tried-and-tested design provided the clients and architects with planning security and clarity of execution.

Thus, when the business premises were opened in December 2019, the impression given was that of a “a wellness oasis”, with open teamwork areas, combined with glass sound screens and curtain-type absorbers as well as our fecoplanall-glass construction including sound-insulated doors for customer-advisory offices. Architect Hajo Renner-Motz thus opted for a proven feco concept: functional and at the same time representative, a place to work and feel good – with plenty of space for every work requirement.

Are you an architect and currently planning an office building or looking for new ideas for the office of the future? If so, allow yourself to be inspired by our lively exhibition in the feco-forum or make a non-binding appointment with our system partition-wall and furnishing experts!