What if empty office buildings are not a crisis, but an opportunity?

I recorded this conversation with urbanist and Field States founder Matthew Claudel at Worktech last October, shortly before The Resilience Lab went on pause.

At the time, much of the workplace conversation was still stuck on one question:

How do we get people back to the office?

While the podcast was quiet, that question began giving way to a harder one.

What happens to the buildings, and the downtowns built around them, when the old patterns of work don’t fully return?

That’s why I wanted to pull this conversation from the archives.

Matthew was already looking beyond return-to-office and asking what comes next.

Drawing on his MIT research, architecture, urbanism, and thinkers like Rem Koolhaas and Marshall McLuhan, he challenges us to see vacant buildings not simply as stranded assets, but as raw material for the next version of our cities.

What should our cities become now?

We explore converting underused offices into advanced manufacturing, education, childcare, and other new uses. We talk about why proximity still matters for collaboration, why traditional zoning may be holding back experimentation, and how cities can pilot their way toward a different future.

This is a conversation about more than real estate.

It’s about adaptive reuse in the broadest sense—not just adapting buildings, but adapting our assumptions about what those buildings are for.

Resilience isn’t restoring the city we had.

It’s discovering new value in what we already built, and having the imagination to create what comes next.

If you care about the future of work, cities, architecture, or how disruption can become raw material for reinvention, this conversation is for you.

Subscribe to The Resilience Lab, and share this episode with someone who should be part of the conversation about what our cities become next.

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Yes, it's been a while. I'll explain at the end.

First, the conversation.

Last October I sat down on a patio at Meta's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, mid-conference, no studio, with David Dewane. David is an architect out of Chicago, best known as the mind behind the Eudaimonia Machine, the theoretical building designed entirely around deep work that Cal Newport made famous.

He has since gone and built one. It's called The Ferris, it sits at Monroe and State in the Loop, and it's a members club and workspace for founders building with AI, a eudaimonia machine with a business model attached.

Which makes this conversation land differently nearly a year later.

David's opening claim: the workforce isn't burned out. It's languishing, the clinical middle ground where you're not sick and you're not thriving, just surviving the day. He said that last October. Gallup's 2026 report landed this spring with global engagement at 20%, the second straight annual decline, and managers falling from 27% to 22%.

His second claim is the one I can't shake. The scarcest resource in a modern workplace isn't talent or capital. It's attention. Set that next to a year in which most of us are supervising a fleet of AI agents, and the bottleneck in knowledge work has quietly moved from doing the task to having enough uninterrupted mind to direct it.

In this episode:

• Why we should stop focusing on designing the artifact of space and instead design for learning, warm relationships, awe, purpose, and play, and treat those five as the actual construction materials
• The difference between a building that functions and a building that performs, and why Harry Potter's potions dungeon is a serious design argument
• The ex-Airbnb data scientist who declared attention the scarcest resource at his new startup, plus the absurdly low-tech room rule they invented to protect it
• The single biggest drag on one firm's employee experience: slow computers. Nobody had ever measured it. Wait for where those computers came from.
• The firm that signed a lease on a gorgeous new space before anyone asked whether the building allowed dogs. The dogs were the culture. No survey caught it.
• "The future of work never happened," a former Netflix workplace lead on why we went back and learned almost nothing

Now the explanation. The Resilience Lab has been offline since February, not because I ran out of people worth talking to, but because the format stopped fitting the conversations and I wanted a better home for them. That work isn't finished. But I have a shelf of recordings too good to leave in a folder, and I'd rather put them out than keep polishing the container.

So here's my ask. Tell me what would make this show worth your time, and where you'd actually want to watch or listen. It will shape what comes next.

Find David on LinkedIn, he checks it about five times a day, his words, and find The Ferris at ferrischicago.com. If you're near Monroe and State, go see it and tell me what you think. I'm doing exactly that when I'm in Chicago for CoreNet in October.

Recorded October 9, 2025 at WORKTECH25 San Francisco, hosted at Meta's MPK21 campus in Menlo Park. Yes, that's a patio. Two people wander in near the end; we left it in.

Stay curious, build resilience, and lead with hope.

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In this episode of The Resilience Lab, recorded live at the Workspaces Conference in Napa, Rex Miller sits down with Sara Escobar and Corrine Murray, co-authors of the new book Work Then Place: a bold reframing of how organizations should think about work, leadership, and the workplace.

With decades of experience spanning Hulu, Netflix, Riot Games, CBRE, WeWork, and American Express, Sara and Corrine bring rare, hard-earned insight into why so many workplace strategies fail…and what actually works.

This conversation goes beyond office design and hybrid policy debates to tackle the real issues holding organizations back:

• Why defining work must come before designing place
• How fear and outdated management models undermine performance
• Why behavior change, not buildings, is the hardest and most essential challenge
• What leaders and managers need to do differently to create resilient, high-performing teams
• How to operationalize purpose, measure real work, and adapt in constant change

If you’re a leader, manager, workplace strategist, HR professional, or anyone navigating the future of work, this episode offers practical insight, grounded frameworks, and a clear call to rethink how work actually gets done.

This isn’t about perks, ping-pong tables, or mandates.


It’s about making work suck less…on purpose.

Subscribe to The Resilience Lab for conversations on resilience, leadership, workplace strategy, and the human side of performance, and share this episode with someone who’s wrestling with how work is changing.

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