Buildings 2.0 Library
Conversations on the future of the built environment
81 episodes of the Buildings 2.0 podcast, each bound as a short book: the ideas, the numbers and the lines worth keeping.
Season 2, Episode 2 /Apr 12, 2025
Why the office isn't dead, it just needs to earn its place again
Corina Ocanto, Stream Realty Partners
Apr 12, 2025 /Design & Practice
Why the office isn't dead, it just needs to earn its place again
Corina Ocanto is vice president of workplace strategy at Stream Realty Partners, a national commercial real estate firm, after years at Gensler advising corporations on how their offices work. Trained as an architect, she now spends her days on the question every company has faced since 2020: what an office is for, and how to make one that people choose to come to.
Corina Ocanto, VP Workplace Strategy, Stream Realty Partners
In this conversation
Corina's core claim that space matters regardless of how remote a company is, because meeting other humans in person still matters.
Why culture is how people do their work and communicate, not pizza parties, and how an office can channel it.
Her observation that employees can spend fifteen years at one company without meeting anyone outside their department, and the design moves that change that.
Her caution about occupancy sensors and data: measuring a space is only useful if someone acts on what it shows.
Spaces are always going to matter. It doesn't matter how hybrid or how remote people are, quality of space matters.
Corina Ocanto
Chapters
Spaces are always going to matter
Corina's route from architecture to workplace strategy, and why space still matters.
By the numbers
Average office attendance relative to pre-pandemic levels, flat for two years
Corina says space still matters even when half the company is remote. This is the level of attendance the office now has to earn its place at.
Source: Kastle Systems Back to Work Barometer, via Yardi Matrix (2024) ↗Ask the questions first
The questions a workplace strategist asks before a single desk is placed.
Don't make them act like Amazon
Why a company should design for who it is, not for the tech giants.
Representing the people in the room
How to translate the needs of the people in the building into a space they will use.
What we can't live without
The tools and habits her team cannot work without.
Culture is how you do your work, how people communicate with each other and collaborate.
Corina Ocanto
Takeaways
Companies are not calling people back because productivity fell; many were more profitable remote. The office has to earn its place by doing what only a room can: putting people from different floors at the same coffee point.
Hybrid programs routinely miss their targets, and the math is unforgiving: one more office day per week is roughly a 25 percent change in how much space you need.
Workplace strategy is asking questions first. Designers are trained to propose; the value is in finding out what problem the space is meant to solve and who uses it.
Without people you've got software. A business is people.
Corina Ocanto