The top executives are situated in the middle of the room. The desk of the chairman and creative director of the company looks out on Central Park. Sprinkled throughout the building are meeting rooms and project areas and nooks where employees can closet themselves. Part of the building is elevated above the main floor on a mezzanine, and if you stand there and watch the people wander about with their portable phones, sit and chat in Central Park, and play basketball in the gym, and you feel on your shoulders the sun from the skylights and listen to the gentle buzz of human activity, it is quite possible to forget that you are looking at an office. A vital community, in Jacobs's view, also needs a certain kind of person who can bind together the varied elements of street life.
Offices are no different.
In fact, office designers have become increasingly interested in identifying and encouraging public characters. One of the pioneers of this approach is Karen Stephenson, who runs a New York-based consulting company called Netform. Every name in the company becomes a dot on a graph, and Stephenson draws lines between all those who have regular contact with each other. She likens her graphs to x-rays, and her role to that of a radiologist. What she's depicting is the firm's invisible inner mechanisms, the relationships, networks and patterns of trust that arise as people work together over time, and that are hidden beneath the organisation chart.