“The chief function of the city, is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.”
Habitats for Humans
A simple truth sitting at the heart of Atlassian’s new building, and all Right Angle’s work, is that people are a product of the places they inhabit.
The conclusion that we can draw from this truth is that it’s worthwhile fostering better environments because they in turn make for better people. Or to use Atlassian’s words; your effort unleashes their potential. If you don’t believe in this basic premise there isn’t much point reading on - but we suspect that you do.
Right Angle invests its effort into creating better habitats for humans around the world, from Silicon Valley where there is an abundance of capital and a lack of meaning, to Johannesburg where there is a lack of capital and an abundance of meaning. Sydney is somewhere in the middle of capital-meaning axis and Atlassian Central should prove that you can have both.
Right Angle global work snapshot
“In a future where people can work practically anywhere, the modern office will need to restate its reason for existing.”
Martin Raymond, Head of Insight, The Future Laboratory
2017
Future Hysteria
The only thing interesting about the quote on the last page is that it dates back to 2017, proving we’ve been suspicious about workplace for a long time and innovated very little.
Ever since 2020 most of our clients have been gripped by a kind of future workplace hysteria, driven by the idea that anything we thought or had before Covid-19 is no longer relevant.
We’d argue that while Atlassian Central will be an astonishing new piece of architecture, armed to the teeth with innovative technology, there are three old-fashioned objectives underlying the project:
Attract and retain talent
Nurture team
Innovate for its customers
Thinking through this opportunity requires ‘depth of field’. The ability to hold a distant past in our minds along with an understanding of the present and an aspiration for the future. We need to embody the strong thoughts, values and experiences that already exist in the company and use them to shine a light on the right type of future.
Philosophy
The word philosophy is not used often in the dark arts of property, but we see some kind of philosophic alignment as a necessary condition for working with clients. Increasingly we talk about values-led development (what things stand for) rather than value-led development (what they cost).
Through your brief for this project, our work on the YHA in your tower, Central Place Sydney and broadly across Tech Central we already have some bearings on what you believe. We know you don’t go for vulgar expressions of wealth. We know you don’t provide coffee to your staff in the building. We know your founders have a bad-ass buffer around them to keep their heads clear.
We’d like to get to know you better and use that to establish some philosophic common ground for Atlassian Central. If we don’t align on the full potential impact of this project and feel mutually motivated by it, we just aren’t a good fit.
Process
We’ve learned the hard way that technology developers and property developers are not the same animals.
If you are from the tech-world your mental model is fluid and flexible. You’re part of the ‘agile’ cult and comfortable with planning to start. If you are from the property world you don’t know what Waterfall means and you plan to finish.
It is premature to propose a process for working on this project, but inevitably we will explore the tension between ideologies of technology and property. It’s a productive tension with the right minds involved, exploring the balance between structure and freedom.
People
We are going to spare you vox pops from strangers and just say this: The limits of capital and intelligence mean that any agency you employ will have roughly the same talent at its disposal, but we will define ourselves by our effort.
Our core team includes entrepreneurs, architects, psychologists, landscape architects, political science experts and cross-cultural linguists. We are likely to integrate external super intelligences and experts if it works for Atlassian.
Everyone will be there because they believe in the connection between habitats and human potential.
Place
Atlassian Central is both a spaceship from the future and a tree with roots in local soil. How you connect to and participate in the broader ecology of Tech Central, Sydney and the world really matters.
We doubt there would be any agency in the world with as much local knowledge and experience. Our HQ is a five minute walk from site, as is the cinema and health club we own and operate.
We have led projects to fill the vacant retail space at Central Station, we have helped YHA understand how to be under Atlassian but not overshadowed, we have explained the psychological difference between tech managers and makers to the CPS team and we have worked with every single one of your team except for EOC and WTP. How we translate that knowledge in your project remains to be seen, but it’s an unfair head start and we are going to enjoy it.