The Office
An executive briefing suite in Benghazi, designed and delivered by DIUM in its entirety — from the plan and the ceiling to the desks, the screens, the carpet, and the relief map of Libya that holds the principal wall. Every element was drawn to fabrication level, manufactured and procured under the studio’s direction, and installed in Benghazi by the studio’s own team.
The space is organised around one position. The delegate table is a horseshoe open towards the principal’s desk, with a screen built into every seat, and a wall of screens carries the live data the meetings are held to review. The technology is absorbed into the joinery and the lighting is held steady through long sessions; the materials are few, dark, and heavy enough to carry the weight of what is decided here. The result reads less as a meeting room than as a small institution.
DIUM / The OfficeLESS A MEETING ROOM THAN A SMALL INSTITUTION.
Order
The plan has one centre. Every seat is set in relation to the principal’s position, and the geometry of the table is repeated in the light above it, so that the hierarchy of the space is legible before a word is spoken. Nothing in the arrangement needs to be explained to a visitor.
Systems
A briefing suite is judged in its silences. The screens in the table and the wall of screens that faces it were designed together with the joinery that houses them and the mechanisms that operate and conceal them, so that the technology is present at every seat and visible at none. The light is even and unchanging; the surfaces are matte, absorbing rather than reflecting.
Making
The space was built from the studio’s drawings rather than from catalogues. The desks and the table, the patterned wall cladding, the timber ceiling and the structure that carries it, the carpet, the lighting, and the relief map of Libya — modelled by the studio and cut on a five-axis CNC — were detailed for fabrication, made under the studio’s direction, and installed by its own team. The drawings and the photographs are the same project. AS DRAWN
Working together