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French Firms Pons and Huot Share Lyrical New Offices

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What do you think of this strangely futuristic looking office from the French designer Christian Pottgiesser?

It is a conversion of an older building, with the replacement of a rotting roof with a huge wall to wall skylight, and a serious forest of indoor trees giving off healthy fresh oxygen – and lots of it…

….but why are the people in little greenhouses? Are the trees some kind of a danger? Or…

…is it the people. Is everyone infected with some kind of strange futuristic germ?

Mysterious. The entire center of the converted hall is one shared desktop space, with curved excisions carved out of it to create the workstations.

The offices are shared as combined headquarters for two companies, Pons and Huot. Speaking into the plastic bubbles would deaden sound, giving aural privacy, while keeping the space open to daylight.

So the open plan design allows for the maximum use of the shared space and light, while the bubbles would work to create privacy – because it would keep conversations private.

Another level of skylights at the desktop level takes the light down to another floor below. Meeting rooms are shared between the two companies.

But from above, the subterranean meeting room skylights appear as flat mirrored glass disks organically scattered across some of the desktop surfaces, like ponds among the indoor trees.

A very lyrical green design, once you understand the reason for all the plastic bubbles among the trees.

Via Contemporist