When an employee at Google’s Mexico City office takes a post-lunch plunge into the on-site ball pit, is she working or playing? And when an employee in one of Foxconn’s factory sites in China leaps from his eighth-floor dormitory, only to be cradled in recently installed “suicide” netting, is he fulfilling or transgressing the design of the workspace? What is the “work” that is supposed to happen in the workspace and how have transformations of the tools, economies, demographics, and technologies within the workspace shaped the notion of work?

"thresholds 44: Workspace," the current issue of the annual peer-reviewed journal from MIT Architecture, mines how the meanings of and locations for work have been historically and culturally defined, how work transposes earlier notions of labor and craft production, and how the work of artists, writers, architects, designers, and urban planners—alongside managers, psychologists, political leaders, and employees themselves—have been integral in construing the physical and mental conditions of work, rest, and play.

Thresholds 44 is edited by Nisa Ari and Christianna Bonin, PhD candidates in the MIT History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art program (HTC).

Visit Amazon.com to order your copy. To learn more about this or previous issues, visit the Thresholds website.