BUREAU’s Office | BUREAU

Program: Office
Lead architect: Carine Pimenta
Design Team: Marco Pallaoro, Matilde Mozzi, Veera Gontsugova

HOW TO WORK BETTER

1 DO ONE THING AT A TIME
2 KNOW THE PROBLEM
3 LEARN TO LISTEN
4 LEARN TO ASK QUESTIONS
5 DISTINGUISH SENSE FROM NONSENSE
6 ACCEPT CHANGE
7 ADMIT MISTAKES
8 SAY IT SIMPLE
9 BE CALM
10 SMILE

Peter Fischli David Weiss
How to Work Better, 1991

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In the past years, we have learned about mobility. Commuting and professional nomadism. We have been around, working everywhere, hurting our backs in bad chairs, home, cafés, construction sites, all sorts of transports. Micro-scale travelling in a reduced European perimeter, still quite intensively on the move. It does feel good to find, at last, a generous resting base-camp in the heart of our beautiful Lisbon. A space from the past that allows us to see further in the future, to project ourselves into something else, something we are not yet and that we might become. A good space is a space where one can project oneself, individually and collectively.

The past months, we have learned about immobility, this new word that is now part of our regular vocabulary: confinement. Stability and domestic adaptation, within our apartments. We have been nowhere but at home and in the screen, hurting our backs with endless zooms and trying to make all sorts of home exercises to keep up with it. Nano-scale travelling from one room to the other. It does feel good to find, again, our generous and beautiful resting place, the BUREAU. One that allows us to move our bodies comfortably, to be around again, to “travel” within a diversity of spaces. And to project ourselves in between those two very important “lieux” that host and support most of our everyday lives: work and living spaces. 

We have learned from one and the other and we will keep the lessons of both, helping us to re-think typologies of everyday spaces, those so important to mold and condition our experience. Rooms where we experience our lives, with our colleagues and families and above all, where we share moments that do not need “zoom” – the new outside. Those moments are the ones that make the BUREAU a space, a place, a settlement, a room, an atelier, an office, a living-room, a disco, a research lab, a dining-room, a vestibule, a place where we try to find out how to work better.

“Here’s to the BUREAU !”

Gordon Cole (David Lynch)

Episode 12 of Twin Peaks