Selgas Cano’s inventive new workspace for creative start-ups in London’s Tech City quarter performs more like a piece of urban fabric than a conventional office. Second Home is at once both simple and complicated, familiar yet unexpected. Its website strapline declares it to be ‘the place where entrepreneurs and creative businesses come together, in pursuit of great work’. It’s a description that glides past typological labels: is it an office or a café? A members’ club or a guild for nomadic workers?

When explained by its co-founder Rohan Silva, former Downing Street senior advisor and the instigator of the government’s Tech City initiative, this hybrid hub (a ‘hubrid’?) appears as the inevitable conclusion of astute market analysis. While the number of small businesses in the UK is proliferating − from 700,000 in 1975 to 4,800,000 in 2013 − the lifespan of big firms is shrinking. In 1930 the average S&P 500 company lasted 90 years; in 2013, it was only 18. More specifically to the locale, the number of digital and technology companies in east London increased more than tenfold from 200 in 2010 to 2,500 in 2013.....Continue Reading

> via The Architectural Review