There was a curious addition to a 2016 report on the Top 10 Technologies Driving the Digital Workplace from tech researchers Gartner. It wasn’t a technology at all but rather a slightly obscure office design concept that originated in Hamburg in the late 1950s, but which tells us a lot about how we work in the 21st Century office, according to Gartner. Its history lies with the German consulting firm Quickborner. Led by the brothers Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle, the firm applied the egalitarian principles of the post war world and rejection of the scientific management theories that had created the familiar factory-like rows of desks that had come to dominate open plan offices to create something more in tune with the new age.
The resultant idea of Bürolandschaft (German for office landscape) applied organic forms to create something they considered more humane and natural. Although the model used conventional office furniture, it was laid out organically and divided up by plants and screens to reflect the needs of individuals and teams and to reflect flows of communication. Management was no longer isolated to private offices. Spaces were defined by the functions of the people who worked in them and their relations to colleagues.
Some very familiar themes
These are very familiar themes in what we often call the new world of work, especially with its focus on agile and activity based working. But in the post war world the focus was on overcoming the rigid hierarchies that had dominated the workplace since the turn of the 20th century.
In 1958, the same year that Quickborner popularised Bürolandschaft, the giant US office furniture manufacturer Herman Miller recruited a designer called Robert Propst to design a new range of products specifically for open plan offices.
Although he came to be known as the father of all those cubicle farms that dominated US office life in the late 20th Century, and still do to a lesser extent, he was driven by some of the same principles as the Schelle brothers. He shared the Schelle’s yearning for egalitarianism and human focussed design and once bemoaned that ‘the cubiclizing of people in modern corporations is monolithic insanity’.
His 1968 treatise called A Facility Based on Change set out the core principles of Action Office and his focus on people and their interactions is clear. Even so, the allure of command and control management structures and their desire for linearity meant his vision and that of the developers of Bürolandschaft was overwhelmed by the mainstream