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Extreme Offices

Office cocoonsSource

Life’s a beach, then you go home

If the company you work for can’t quite afford air conditioning or if the system has gone bust on a freezing winter’s day, you would really want your office to look like this. You could just imagine soaking up the sun on a golden Caribbean beach while away marching along your data entry funeral procession wrapped in seven layers of clothes. That conveniently placed metal rod could be used to perfect your pole dancing skills in front of your colleagues too, at the same time as providing an excellent intense bout of much-needed warmth producing exercise. On the other hand, in the sweltering summer days of mid-July, you will find yourself longing for igloos and snowball fights, as you try to fight off the saturating sweat and cursing the existence of palm trees and beach huts.

Gondolas in office Source

Are you taking the piste?

Luckily this Swiss ski lodge exists just down the corridor. Created out of disused cable cars, dead deer and perfectly legal white power, the office designers at Google really have tried to cover the entire seasonal spectrum. It certainly looks very modern and gives the day-to-day office drudgery an interesting spin, but if you’re sitting in a cable car all day, let’s face it, you’re going to get a bad back and a sore arse. Fashion over function, I say. No number of polar bear carcasses for cushions are going to hide that numb feeling in your derriere when you stand up.

Office slide Source

Just slipping off to the loo

There’s nothing like a gush of cold air either, to help you keep cool in the summer when the office is getting a little stuffy. In Red Bull’s office in London they have this here slide, which you could regard as a rather spacious manual fan that only really works in short, exceptionally enjoyable bursts. Need to pop downstairs to the canteen or the loo and don’t want to work up a sweat on the way? Best not take the stairs and rather jump down the slide and get those droplets of perspiration blown right off your brow.

Outside officeSource

You might want to leaf the office if it gets too hot

This idyllic architecture office of the firm Selgas Cano may not be extreme in the fundamental sense of the word, but who really thinks to build their workplace in the middle of a forest? Someone with a pretty extreme sense of style, believe you me. Although I do feel that a bunch of architects would probably be better off looking at a load of skyscrapers than some autumn leaves, if the planners were hoping for some inspirational moments staring out at the quaint setting. If some landscapers were drafted in to the office, or a few surgeons maybe, it would be a totally different story. You would need some serious air conditioning to stay cool in the summer though. Imagine trying to do all your bungalow drawings in mid-July when the sun is beating down through that glass frontage, turning your workplace into a makeshift greenhouse. It would not be a pretty sight, that’s one thing for sure.

Ice bottles strapped to fanSource

I’m a fan of this ingenuity

If your office doesn’t have Fort Knox to throw at office design to keep you psychologically cool in the event of air conditioning disasters, then you need not fear as all you really need is a fan, a freezer and a few bottles of water and you can stay actually cool with great ease. Just fix the frozen bottles to the back of the fan like the above and all the air the fan extracts out of the back will be cooled down and spread throughout the room. While this may not be the most extreme of office designs, you can’t for a second deny its resourcefulness.

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