Habita Coworking Office | PAB Architects

Pınar Gökbayrak, Ali Eray and Burçin Yıldırım, the co-founders of PAB Architects, who are also the Young Architect Under 40 Award Winners of 2015, have designed a coworking space in an industrial neighborhood of Istanbul that started to change into a lively hub for creative industries.

Habita is an office space designed with the notion of innovation, creativity and productivity that can be maintained by collaboration, interaction, and learning from each other. The entrepreneurs who founded Habita aim to sustain a creative community which can learn from one another both professionally and socially in the coworking and living environment with a motto of “accelerating in a shared habitat”.

The space designed in such a perspective has an open and transparent character enabling interactions and a flexible layout that allows its users to work in different “moods”; in different privacy settings, in different seating arrangements (on a chair, on a sofa, standing, lying), in different locations by giving people options to choose where and how they want to work. These options enable a dual working environment for users – a private space if needed or a diversified space with the potential of collaborations if requested.

The office space, with a setting in an industrial neighborhood with metal and auto workshops all around, carries the industrial character of the surrounding to indoors by natural and uncut materials like osb, iron profiles, ropes, polycarbonate plates and a number of greenery within wooden fruit boxes.

650-squaremetered-Habita, consists of 12 private offices with a range of 10-18 m2, open offices with eight tables for six each, and flexible working units for members who wish to come irregularly. The main architectural motive was to have a design where there are no strict boundaries between working, resting and social spaces that dictates how to work, rest and socialize in terms of space use. Therefore open workspaces are defined with just a level difference where the steps are turned into intermediary zones for working, socializing or resting.

The event space that will host presentations, interviews, panels, performances and workshops is placed at the heart of the office space as a natural part of daily activity; accessible, visible and welcoming. Modular elements to accompany the fixed bleachers are designed to allow different seating and event arrangements to be modified easily by users.

Habita, where human and spatial relations are designed to create an office culture to enhance sharing, supports a working environment where office turns into a social platform for interaction, encounters and co-producing.