YOU'RE READING THE QUARTZ OBSESSION FROM OCTOBER 2, 2018
Don’t fence me in
If you’re reading this at work, there’s a good chance that you’re sitting at an open desk or communal table. (Hey, is that guy reading over your shoulder? 👋) And if so, you might still be adjusting from the not-so-distant past when you sat in a comparatively private cubicle. Those were the days!
Every generation or two, culture (and consultants) drive workspace design in a new direction. Cubicles, perhaps the most reviled of these trends, were originally conceived in the utopian ’60s as the apex of the modern office. Part of what was meant to be a flexible, customizable system that would let companies balance community and privacy, the modular pieces were soon put to use to herd employees into grayscale grids.
Today, many of us graze in free-range pastures—but these are hardly utopian paradises. Meant to foster conversation, there’s evidence open offices do the opposite, as employees tune each other out with headphones and water coolers are replaced by Slack channels. The good news is it’s probably only a matter of time before the tide shifts again, giving us something new to grumble about. In the meantime, pull up a swivel chair.
BY THE DIGITS
$5 billion: Sales of office systems by Herman Miller from 1964–2005
430,000: Size of Facebook’s open office in square feet
250: Square feet of office space per worker in the US in 2000
190: Square feet of office space per worker in the US in 2005
60%: Proportion of workers who worked in cubicles in 1997
70%: Proportion of office spaces with “no or low partitions” in 2017
93%: Percentage of workers in 1997 who wanted an alternative to cubicles
13,000: Population at Apple’s new $5 billion spaceship-like Cupertino headquarters. When it opened in 2017, there were rumors of employee revolt against the open floorplan.
FUN FACT!
The predecessor to the cubicle is the carrel. If you’ve ever ground out the hours at a library, you’re part of a tradition of study in a tiny cube that goes back to the Benedictine monks of Westminster Abbey.
BRIEF HISTORY
The early days of office space
Office culture truly began in the 1800s, with the financialization of the world and the rise of the clerk. According to Nikil Saval, author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, offices were“intimate, almost suffocatingly cozy spheres,” and clerks served as “assistant manager, retainer, confidant, management trainee, and prospective son-in-law.”
Desks provided a degree of privacy in such an emotionally porous space, featuring high backs, roll tops, and pigeonholes. As the ranks of clerical workers grew, their status inevitably declined, and in the early 20th century the efficiency-obsessed Taylorism movement applied the principles and organization of the factory to the office space. Rigidly arranged rows of flat-top desks mirrored assembly lines, allowing management to observe their workings from above as they would a machine. The visual result is captured by the pointedly named Consolidated Life, the fictional insurance company in Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment.
After World War II, a new office plan arose out of the ashes: Burolandschaft, or “office landscaping,” which might look something like the office you work in now. It was still open-plan, like the Taylorist grids, but it lumped employees into organic-seeming work zones to encourage democracy and discussion rather than silent, symmetrical cogs, “fundamentally a reaction against Nazism.”
ORIGIN STORY
An open and shut case
Discussion in an open office was, like democracy, loud and messy. Robert Propst, who worked at the design giant Herman Miller, envisioned the Action Office (zip! swoosh!) as a way companies and employees could have it all—private spaces for focus and communal ones for collaboration.
The cubicle, originally, wasn’t a cube at all: It was a modular system of desks, walls, and other furniture that gave workers some semi-private, customizable space, yet left them open to their co-workers. (It even had a roll-top drafting desk like those of yore, one of a series of genuine design classics that emerged from the system.)
But their modular nature meant that employers could do what they wanted with them. It wasn’t long before they started moving back to space- and money-efficient grids like the stolid Taylorist offices that the pointedly named “Action Office” system was supposed to destroy.
The Action Office quickly evolved into the Cube Farm as corporate consolidation and a recession led to waves of white-collar layoffs. Now, that utopian tool of autonomy and flexibility became a symbol of replaceability.
QUOTABLE
“Not all organizations are intelligent and progressive. Lots are run by crass people. They make little, bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rathole places.”
TIMELINE
1853: Herman Melville publishes “Bartleby the Scrivener,” an early account of office rage.
1936: Construction begins on Frank Lloyd Wright’s legendary open-plan Johnson Wax offices.
1964: Herman Miller introduces its first Action Office.
1967: Jacques Tati satirizes the cubicle in his film Playtime.
1970: Action Office co-designer George Nelson calls its effect “dehumanizing.”
1989: The comic strip Dilbert begins syndication.
1994: Cutting-edge ad agency chiat/day debuts a radically open office.
1998: chiat/day kills its wildly unpopular radically open office.
1999: Mike Judge’s Office Space hits theaters.
MILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION
Why is it so hard to design a decent office?
If there’s a lesson to the cubicle, it’s that the best-laid offices often go awry. Robert Propst’s action-oriented brainstorm became a dull-gray spreadsheet for people, which is why it was replaced by the open office, which sought to break down divisions among co-workers and create a fluid environment of frequent encounters and discussion.
And the result seems to be that people talk less.
Why? For the same reason cubicles started to replace open-office plans in the first place: privacy. A Harvard Business School professor ran a study in a company “engaged in a ‘war on walls’” to find out how employees were communicating with each other. Interactions between colleagues in the open space fell from almost six hours to less than two. But email messages went up by half and instant messages by two-thirds, as people sought to replace the semi-privacy of the old space. So the big beneficiary of the new architecture of offices might be Slack and Spotify.
THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK!
Why bars make people talk—and how it could help offices
It’s not just the booze: “Bar height” is a standard 40 to 42 inches, referring to the height of the stools and counter, that puts sitting and standing tipplers at eye level and increases the chance of meeting eyes across the room. While a lot of workplaces supply alcohol to get co-workers talking more casually, to which there’s been a bit of a backlash, open-office plans have begun to integrate the proportions of bar furniture, rather than the product served on it, to establish casual chat spaces.
TAKE ME DOWN THIS 🐰 HOLE!
In 1999, Wired told the chaotic tale of chiat/day’s 1994 “virtual” open office, which had no assigned desks, laptops and cell phones for all employees, college-like collective areas, and even “little ‘Tilt-A-Whirl’ domed cars, taken from old amusement park rides, where two people could sit down together and brainstorm.” In other words, the vanguard of offices then, which looked a lot like the vanguard of offices right now. Tastemakers gave it rave reviews. It was a total disaster.