The offices of NYLON magazine in New York. Design by Homepolish (homepolish.com). Head of Commercial Design, Shelly Lynch-Sparks, photos by Claire Esparros.
The way that office design has evolved says a lot about the way we think about company organization and work in general. In the first half of the 20th century, many white-collar workplaces in the United States were still organized into rows of corridor offices. But by the 1950s, offices had begun to shift to the kind of layout you might see in “Mad Men”: a ring of offices around the corner of the room, surrounding a secretarial pool or accountants in the middle. In this design, only a company’s higher-ups had privacy: The lower-downs lived out their working lives in plain view.