The cover says it all. In our May/June 2022 issue, we talk to professionals in Canada and around the world who are grappling with how to upend entrenched assumptions about the need for blood, sweat and tears in service of architecture. We also include voices from firms that have already begun to restructure their offices in ways that better support the needs of their employees. The “work-life balance” often sounds like lip service, but it shouldn’t. And the people designing our physical spaces need it just as much as we do.

We also look at three exceptional examples of offices that seek to deliver that hybrid level of comfort: a new, gleaming glass-and-steel edifice near Basel; a multi-floor office literally carved into an existing complex for a tech company in Shenzhen; and an adapted tobacco pipe factory in London that does double duty as bathroom showroom and co-working space.

And we take a look at developments in life sciences laboratories, where firms are engineering the types of work settings that cannot be replicated at home, and with an eye towards increasing comfort for those who work in them.

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:

The Valley

MVRDV’s commercial-residential experiment rises — and is ready to bloom — in Amsterdam

An Elemental Cottage

Superkül creates a vacation house that’s perfectly at home in the elements of Ontario’s Kawarthas

A Focus on Hospitality

Projects and products that nourish the body and soul: a shipping container facility in Delhi, Michael Graves’ collaboration with CVS, and RIOS’s institute for transformative medicine in California

Bathing Beauties

From storage to sinks, everything to make your bathroom shine