For real estate with sustainable and shared benefits

The office economy has passed through four eras. The market era in the eighteenth century involved coffee houses and exchanges, as well as nascent banks and insurance firms whose owners and clerks often lived ‘over the shop’. The clerical factory era saw the rapid growth, mechanisation and feminisation of offices and the emergence of the grandiose and ostentatious buildings of the joint stock companies in the mid- and late-nineteenth century. The work of the clerk was mundane and laborious; days were long, and primitive offices were heated by coal fires, ventilation was poor and lighting was either natural or by candle.