A Building Isn’t a Building Without Its People: The Social Production of Workplace Purpose

For most of my career, I believed that work could exist anywhere. Technology, trust, and flexibility were the real enablers — space was secondary. But as I began studying spatial theory in the context of what I now call Invisible Architecture™, I found myself rethinking that belief.

The turning point came when I encountered Bill Hillier’s work on space syntax. Hillier argued that space is not passive background — it’s an active system that structures how people move, interact, and communicate (Hillier, 1996). In other words, buildings do not simply contain human activity; they shape it. This idea unsettled my remote-work convictions and reframed how I think about purpose-built environments.

Because if spatial form organizes human behavior, then a purpose-built building cannot fulfill its purpose without the people it was built for. A hospital without healers, a school without students, a restaurant without diners — each is structurally intact but existentially incomplete.

This realization connected me to a deeper theoretical lineage that explains why physical presence still matters, even in a digital age.

1. Lefebvre: Space Is Socially Produced

In The Production of Space (1974), Henri Lefebvre proposed that space is not an empty container awaiting occupation, instead it is produced by social relations. He describes a triad of conceived, perceived, and lived space:

• Conceived space is the planned or designed environment — the architect’s drawing, the corporate floor plan, the “strategy.”

• Perceived space is how that design is used and maintained — the operational layer of movement, access, and routine.

• Lived space is the emotional, cultural, and symbolic experience of the people who inhabit it.

Purpose exists only when these layers align. A space that is conceived but not lived is an abstraction, a diagram, not a workplace. When a building stands empty, its conceived purpose remains suspended, waiting to be activated by lived experience (Lefebvre, 1991).

2. Tuan: Space Becomes Place Through Experience

Yi-Fu Tuan put it even more directly: “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it and endow it with value” (Tuan, 1977). That act of “endowing with value” is what turns architecture into workplace.

The return-to-office debate often focuses on productivity or policy, but underneath it is a philosophical question: Can a workplace have meaning without presence? According to Tuan, no. Presence is what converts the abstract idea of a workplace into something recognizable, even sacred. A place of shared purpose.

3. Heidegger: Building Is Dwelling

Martin Heidegger’s essay Building Dwelling Thinking (1951) offers a poetic reinforcement: “We build because we dwell.” In his view, the act of building is not technical but existential. Structures exist to enable dwelling, to host human being-in-the-world. Without that human inhabitation, a building’s reason for being is unrealized. The built form might persist, but its being is incomplete.

4. Hillier: Space Configures Social Possibility

Returning to Hillier, his work bridges philosophy and practice. Through empirical analysis of movement patterns and spatial layout, Hillier demonstrated that built form conditions the probability of encounter, communication, and collaboration. In offices, this means that geometry (corridors, visibility, adjacency) shapes culture as much as any HR initiative (Hillier, 1996).

In that sense, “returning to the office” is not about nostalgia for desks and water coolers. It’s about restoring the social circuitry of the building -- the human networks that give its architecture purpose.

5. Invisible Architecture™: Reuniting Purpose and Presence

Invisible Architecture™ builds on these ideas to reveal the unseen systems: social, procedural, digital, and cultural, that animate physical space. When conceived purpose, operational reality, and lived experience fall out of alignment, the workplace loses coherence.

An organization can’t simply mandate return and expect meaning to follow. The task is to reweave the invisible architecture: to reconnect design intent with human experience.

For leaders in Real Estate and Facilities Management, this means auditing not just the physical space, but the social production of it; how policies, patterns, and presence interact to create (or erode) purpose.

Because ultimately, buildings don’t have purpose. People do. And it’s their presence, physical, emotional, and collective, that turns architecture into life.

References

• Heidegger, Martin. Building Dwelling Thinking. In Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. Harper & Row, 1971.

• Hillier, Bill. Space is the Machine: A Configurational Theory of Architecture. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

• Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Blackwell Publishing, 1991.

• Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota Press, 1977.