PRF2100

The Cognitive Canvas

An office concept where biophilic design and avant-garde art treat wellbeing, productivity, and creativity as the same question.

The Cognitive Canvas
Concept, rendering, technical solutions ArchiCAD, Twinmotion 2023

An office landscape is rarely neutral. It shapes how people think, how long they last, and whether anything new occurs to them over the course of a day. The Cognitive Canvas takes that seriously: the workplace as an instrument for cognition, not merely a container for working hours.

The concept rests on biophilic design and universal preference — two principles pointing the same way. We orient towards nature, towards light, towards spaces with a logic the body recognises before the mind can explain it. That is not decoration. It is what allows a space to carry a full working day without draining the person standing in it.

The canvas itself comes from Dadaism: the blank field as unexplored territory, and an anti-aesthetic that challenges what an office is expected to be. The rooms are composed so the unexpected has somewhere to happen — every architectural move is a possible starting point for an idea, not just a solution to a requirement.

The art gives the building a narrative structure. On the third floor you meet Ivan Kliun — Russian avant-gardist, geometric abstraction, colour used as construction. On the fourth, Picasso takes over, with Cubism's dissolution of form and perspective. The two floors ask different questions of the people working there: one about order and harmony, the other about how something can be seen from several sides at once. The office becomes a place you think in, not just a place you sit.

Browse the full booklet
Rendering of a lounge area by the waterfront windows, with round café tables, a bookshelf full of books, a Kandinsky-inspired painting, and copper pendant lights.Rendering of a lounge corner with a Kliun-inspired geometric painting on a rusted accent wall, a dark sofa, an orange leather pouf, and a sketch wall with sticky notes to the right.Rendering of the reception area with a desk branded "reMarkable," a cubist painting on the wall, a glossy rust-toned staircase, and a city view through large windows.Rendering of an open-plan office area with workstations by large windows overlooking the marina, a wall covered in colorful sticky notes, and blue figurative paintings on the right-hand wall.Rendering of a meeting room with a branch-pattern accent wall, a long dark-wood table with yellow and grey chairs, copper pendant lights, and a screen displaying the "reMarkable" logo.Rendering of a smaller breakout zone with a branch-pattern accent wall, standing desks with monitors, a glass cabinet with cacti, and a colorful abstract painting on the wall.

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