Open office schemes were originally intended to promote fluidity and flexibility. However, they soon became the gridded, rigid landscape we know today. Nature at Work is a project that seeks to bring the open office landscape back to its roots and to reimagine the role of nature in the workplace. A latex skin of the bark of a tree branch was taken and used to cast a flowing bioplastic partition. When this partition is inserted into the center of the typical open office, the gridded layout of desks and offices is disrupted and new typologies of open/enclosed spaces are created. Without the need to consume it, nature becomes directly present within the workplace as the index embedded in the bioplastic connects us visually, haptically and emotionally back to the tree from which it came.
