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? Hi!) And if you’ve been in the workplace awhile, you might be adjusting from the not-so-distant past when you sat in a comparatively private cubicle.
Every generation or two, our offices completely change, driven by culture and consultants. Cubicles, perhaps the most reviled of these trends, were supposed to be the apex of office design. More precisely, the Action Office (zip! swoosh!) was supposed to. A product of the utopian 1960s, this was a flexible, customizable system of office furnishings that balanced community and privacy. It sounds downright revolutionary, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for companies to realize they could take the customized pieces and use them to herd employees into grayscale grids. The Action Office quickly evolved into the Cube Farm.
Don’t fence me in
But the open-plan offices that have cropped up in response are hardly utopian paradises. (Still in a cubicle now? The open-office plan is probably coming for you, too.) Meant to foster conversation, there’s evidence they do the opposite, as employees tune each other out with headphones and use Slack channels to take the place of connecting at the water cooler.
In 1999, Wired told the chaotic tale of an advertising agency that bet big on a radically open office plan, with no assigned desks, 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.” Ahead of its time, it seems, the vanguard of offices then looked a lot like the vanguard of offices right now. Tastemakers gave it rave reviews. It was a total disaster though, and the firm, TBWA\Chiat\Day, abandoned the concept at its offices in New York and Los Angeles, less than five years after trumpeting the design as the workplace of the future.
That said, it’s hard for any office plan to develop a worse reputation than that of the cube farm. Cubicles became popular at a grim time in the white-collar world, during a wave of mergers, corporate raids, and a recession, and all of the attendant layoffs. In short order, a design plan that was meant to provide a tool of autonomy and flexibility became a reflection of replaceability. Depressing? Indeed.
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, these offices were “intimate, almost suffocatingly cozy spheres,” where a clerk might serve 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, named for the influential industrial-management thinker Fred Taylor, 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 employees from aboveas 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, and was described by one of its promoters as “fundamentally a reaction against Nazism.” Indeed, discussion in an open office was, like democracy, loud and messy.
In the 1960s, Robert Propst, who worked at the furniture design giant Herman Miller, envisioned the Action Office plan as a way companies and employees could have it all. The cubicle, originally, wasn’t a cube: 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-efficient, cost-efficient grids like the stolid Taylorist offices that the pointedly named “Action Office” system was supposed to destroy.