What makes a healthy workspace? At Novolife’s Bangkok HQ, blurring the line between office and outdoors goes a long way
When creating the new concrete HQ for the natural pharmaceutical company, Thai design firm Studio Krubka chose to look beyond the office walls and embrace the country’s tropical climate.
“It’s somewhere between indoors and outdoors,” says Danai Surasa. “People can remain connected to daylight, fresh air, the landscape and weather throughout the working day.” The co-founder of Bangkok-based Studio Krubka is explaining his firm’s design for the new HQ of natural pharmaceutical company Novolife on the outskirts of the Thai capital. The striking concrete building has lofty curved roofs and large, rectangular apertures – some of them windows, others portals to a verdant internal courtyard.
This blurring of boundaries between inside and out is a reflection of the company’s entrepreneurial aspirations. “Novolife develops products using Thai herbs and natural ingredients with the aim of supporting people’s wellbeing,” says Soyploy Phanich, Surasa’s fellow co-founder. “So we started with a simple question: if wellbeing is central to what the company produces, how can it also become part of the everyday working environment?”
The answer came in a layout that prompts people to encounter the lush courtyard as they move through the building. This is supported by a restrained colour palette that directs the eye to the leafy gardens – an effect that is enhanced by shifting light, weather and temperatures, all of which become accomplices to the architecture. “This workplace can feel different from one moment to the next, even though the building itself remains the same,” says Phanich. This environmentally minded approach is enhanced by the materiality and construction processes. The concrete was made using locally sourced aggregates without extensive chemical additives, while a reusable steel formwork shapes the structure.
Though the building has a strikingly minimalist concrete form, it also pays tribute to Thailand’s vernacular wooden architecture. Life in a Southeast Asian climate means dealing with heavy rainfall, so the office has a traditional bowed butterfly roof that channels rainwater to a central collecting spine. “Thai architecture has long developed ways of responding to the region’s heavy rain and tropical climate,” says Surasa. “We wanted to reinterpret that in a modern way.”
The building makes a compelling case for the beauty of a workplace shaped around nature and connected to the environment, while retaining something in common with the business inhabiting it. “A workplace should reflect the same ideas as the people developing the products,” says Surasa.
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