People thrive when exposed to the outdoors. But most offices can't offer employees beautiful vistas of streams and fields. Sky Factory's video screens give office drones a little taste of the outside world, and potentially makes them happier and more productive in the process.

It never ceases to amaze me how ostensibly innovative companies expect their employees to work in perfectly uninspiring digs. For all their “out-of-the-box” thinking, they still think it appropriate to stuff their creatives into office cubicles or, worse still, station them at long, sterile white desks, where all accessories are kept at right angles. Read More »

There are two things Switzerland does better than anyone else: minimalism and milk chocolate. The slick, glassy office building you see here is proof positive of the former in the town that gave the world the latter.

Most of us who work in open-plan offices think there’s plenty of communication between coworkers -- too much, in fact, with every chewed banana and crunched chip and shrill phone conversation broadcast indiscriminately throughout the space.

Artist Anne-Laure Maison believes there’s not enough. At the office of Le Groupe Matelsom, a French home furnishings company, she painted neon pink lines on the carpet to give visual form to what she perceived as a sore lack of communication between coworkers.

San Francisco design agency Studio O+A has sent us images of its new West Coast headquarters for AOL in Palo Alto and -- hold on to your foosball tables -- it doesn’t completely suck!

We say that not because Studio O+A sucks. The firm is actually a skilled interior designer to the Internet stars, having whipped up interiors for Yelp, Facebook, PayPal, and others that deftly straddle the line between real, live professional workplaces and the standard dot-com aesthetic of arrested adolescence.

Adapting old buildings for contemporary use is one of the thorniest design problems around. Balancing the needs, both aesthetic and functional, of modern life with the labyrinthine imperatives of historic preservation can be an elaborate, protracted dance -- one to which Elding Oscarson knows all the steps.

MVRDV, the Rotterdam-based architectural firm responsible for such gravity-defying projects as a barn balanced on a hill, has won a much quieter commission: the conversion of a defunct Dijon Mustard “laboratory”--your guess is as good as ours--into a call center for a French teletech company. The goal: Make workers with one of the most monotonous jobs in the universe actually want to come into the office.

Most tax offices are about as charming as, well, doing your taxes. Leave it to UNStudio's Ben van Berkel -- an architect who made an NYC loft look like sculpture and a shopping mall feel like a museum -- to design a government tax building that’s so cheerful, you’ll actually want to get audited.

The latest in our annals of wacky, zany, golly-gee office design comes courtesy of Jensen Architects in wacky, zany, golly-gee San Francisco. Their design for the ad agency Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners West resembles a cartoon version of an entire city neighborhood, stuffed into a scant 21,950 square feet.

As ArchDaily.com shows, it's got park benches, bright blue stadium stairs, and buildings within the building.

And, of course, the requisite frog green carpet climbing structure-turned-phone booth (up top).

The French arm of ad giant JWT tapped quirky fellow countryman Mathieu Lehanneur to design its offices recently. The result: a cool little bunker of a place that looks like a cross between a golf course and a set from Dr. No. And we thought WikiLeaks had the market cornered on this sort of thing.