Communicating architecture: the rise and demise of nomadic work at one of NAB’s signature buildings
Creators: name: PECK, Jonathan
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 470108
subject: Organisational, interpersonal and intercultural communication

description: This thesis explores architecture as a medium of corporate communication, focusing on the design, construction and occupation of a single building, 700 Bourke Street, one of National Australia Bank's signature corporate properties. It seeks to answer the questions: What kinds of agency can architecture have in transforming an organisation's work culture? In what ways is this agency apparent?

'Organisation' is increasingly viewed as constituted by communication in the social sciences. If  architecture is considered a medium of communication, then it follows that architecture, too, can be constitutive of organisation. A building such as 700B may tell us much about what an organisation is; by observing the myriad and changing meanings people associate with it, and by discerning and analysing the codes, norms, and rules that they use to make sense of it, we may better, and more deeply, understand emerging and changing power shifts, and gain new perspectives on the relationships and social boundaries that underpin them. 

The question is often asked, how can 'bricks and mortar' keep up with the pace of modern changes? They don't, but people do. People change their relationship with the built form and with the intentions of the design. They interpret aesthetics in new ways. Their reading of socio-spatial boundaries change. This thesis seeks to understand those micro-level dynamics. In answering the research questions, I take the position 700B is both a form of communication and a subject of communication, and something in between as well, an agent of communication. As a form of communication, I analyse the messages that the designers meant to convey with their design, the assumptions about NAB's culture that underlay those messages, and the attempt on the part of NAB's senior leadership to operationalise a specific corporate aesthetic with transformative goals. As a subject of communication, I analyse the spatial references in the conversations and discourse of people working in the building, noting the codes and protocols that they developed about the building's use. As an agent of communication, I draw on Latour's Actor Network Theory's (ANT) definition of 'agency'; I analyse 700B not as passive container, a static symbol, nor even a spatial abstraction; but as an active agent in the way people at NAB made sense of their world from 2013 to 2018.  

This perspective requires a particular understanding of the relationship between communication, organisation and space. As a theoretical foundation I reference a specific hybrid of Lefebvre's spatial conceptualisations and Cooren and Fairhurst's interpretation of Communication as Constitutive of Organisation (CCO) theory. Drawing on both Lefebvre's triad and CCO theory, I demonstrate the theoretical value of considering architecture in organisational sense making. I do so with an ethnographic analysis of a portion of workers in 700B over two periods, observing and analysing how they make sense of the building and create protocols and rules for sharing space in it. Comparing micro-interactions over two periods I am able to discern shifts in power dynamics between individuals and teams. Why is this important? Because architects, workplace consultants, change managers and commercial property managers still profoundly underestimate the complexity of organisations when seeking to 'transform' work cultures. In NAB's case, they assumed that 700B's aesthetic would trigger certain responses from workers, yet their attempt to operationalise this aesthetic largely failed. Analysing people's micro-level responses to and relationships with architecture on the floor at 700B helps us understand why this happened. 

The lessons, I argue, are timely and transferrable. As organisations start to plan their post-Covid workplaces, they are also highly topical and useful.  The research contributes to understanding the communicative agency of architecture in shaping organisational behaviour, demonstrating that this understanding requires an analysis not just of "lived" or "perceived" architectural design - the acknowledged limits of spatial consideration in much organisational analysis - but also of conceived space, and the manner in which architectural concepts are formulated, communicated and perceived in organisations.