Opinion: the conversion of old industrial buildings into "creative office space" has proven so successful in LA, even galleries like Hauser Wirth & Schimmel are getting in on the act, says Mimi Zeiger.

"If all possible old building stock in Los Angeles was converted to creative office space, that still wouldn't meet the demand for creative offices," a commercial real estate broker once explained to me.
At the time, his company was trying to crack the workplace code: how to cater to the technology sector's voracious taste for converted industrial warehouses and lofts" Established tech companies and startups alike had aligned the rough-and-ready aesthetics of the artist studio with the well-worn terms of Silicon Valley ? disruption, innovation, and flexibility. Although the biggest tech outfits are crafting the sleekest headquarters by the sleekest architects, "creative office space" is the dominant aesthetic of our time. Janus-like, it looks backwards and forwards at once, appropriating old tropes of creativity, labour, and industry with little patience for nostalgia.
Janus-like, "creative office space" looks backwards and forwards at once
The conflation of art, tech, and adaptive reuse was on my mind as I toured the mammoth art gallery Hauser Wirth & Schimmel this past March. Located in Downtown LA's Arts District, the 9,300-square-metre compound is at the epicentre of a neighbourhood that is indicative of the rapid cul...