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Despite its ubiquity in contemporary life, the office is a far-too-often overlooked typology of architectural space. Yet for the last 30 years, it has been a vital space of contestation and change in society, perhaps most evidently in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has called into question its continuing existence. As a place of community, play, and of course, work, the architectural evolution of the office might represent our most profound anxieties about one of the most inescapable parts of our lives. The Office of Good Intentions. Human(s) Work, cleverly edited and compiled by Florian Idenburg and LeeAnn Suen, with magisterial photography by Iwan Baan, explores the many architectural and social meanings of the office in an atlas that approaches encyclopaedic breadth. To the pioneering postmodernist work of Gaetano Pesce for TBWA\ CHIAT \ DAY’s 1995 office suite in New York and Facebook’s iconic early 2000s Menlo Park campus, the volume adds examples such as Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti complex / commune, and meditations on the evolution of the office chair and the skyscraper. What emerges from this myriad of examples is an overarching design language that finds itself torn between labour and leisure: good intentions writ large on the world of work. ◉