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Comment by tikhonj | Hacker News Reader

High-end office builds are also efficient rectangular prisms far more often than not, yet they don't feel like hospitals, schools or prisons.

I've spent extensive time in all of these except prisons, and I can tell you the difference is stark. What explains that? Is it all just down to expensive trim and interior decor? I'm sure that plays a part, but that was never my main impression. Instead, it comes down to the layout and light and feel: it's clear when a building, however regular and rectangular, is designed to support and empower the occupants and when it's designed to control and direct.

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High-end office buildings cost massively more to build. Also plenty of them put employees in a very aesthetically pleasing well-lit panopticon with open-plan seating. I much prefer my dingy fluorescent-lit office that has a door that closes. (And I turn of the fluorescent lights in favor of my own small lamp.)

Floor fitout is typically left to the tenant, not the landlord. Building skyscrapers with empty floors gives flexibility to future tenants, increasing the rental/purchase value.

Tall office buildings may often have open plan, but this should be attributed to the fitout builder’s client (e.g. SomeCrazySoftwateCompany as the incoming tenant), not the building builder’s client (e.g. SomeGroupInvestmentCompany the owner of the building)

If you takeout the actual tenant configurations of offices, the idea of "High-End office buildings" becomes pretty irrelevant in this conversation & context of the comment I replied to. Because at that point you're basically just talking about the lobby & the elevators, and the view out the windows.

But they would fit right into these pictures. Not super expensive design offices, but normal administrative building looks roughly the same.

Nope. Its windows. Prisons in most cases are buildings without windows or very small ones. Offices and schools pretty much always have windows.

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