The crowded, cacophonous, chaotic open-plan office has been blamed for so many things wrong with workplace design today. Studies have shown that sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with your colleagues can erode concentration, lower productivity, increase stress, and make us generally more anti-social.
But the concept for partition-less offices started out as a potentially democratizing idea. Putting everyone on the same open floor was symbolic of dismantling inter-office hierarchies of power. It was also believed to increase collaboration between colleagues. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who in the 1930s designed what might just be the most inspiring open-plan corporate headquarters of all time in Racine, Wisconsin, even suggested that it was as a political act. “The box was a fascist symbol,” says Wright. “The architecture of freedom and democracy is something beside the box.”
How did Wright’s out-of-the-box thinking become a prison for today’s knowledge workers? Is it a mirror of how we work today?
BY THE DIGITS
70%: Share of US office workers in an open-plan office today
72%: Drop in face-to-face interaction in open-plan offices, according to a 2018 Harvard Business School study
$50 per square foot: Estimated cost savings for offices that switch to open-plan layouts, according to data analyst Erik Rood
159%: Growth in remote working in the US from 2005–2017
41%: Spike in headphones sales from 2008-2012. The Consumer Electronics Association says that most new units are intended for office use.
2,800: Number of employees sitting in the open at Facebook’s sprawling headquarters in Menlo Park. CEO Mark Zuckerberg likes to tout it as the “largest open-floor plan in the world.”
$260: Retail price of Panasonic’s wearable blinders designed for workers in busy open-plan environments
ORIGIN STORY
Grid and bear it
Frederick Winslow Taylor, a mechanical engineer and efficiency nut from Philadelphia, can be assigned partial blame for the practice of arranging desks in rigid rows in open offices. His bestselling book from 1911, The Principles of Scientific Management, gave office managers a template for laying out workstations so that every employee was visible to supervisors, like in a factory.
Inevitably, several designers challenged the strict tenets of Taylorism. Practitioners like Frank Lloyd Wright, Germans Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle, and Herman Miller’s Robert Propstproposed alternative layouts that considered the needs of individual workers and a diversity of working styles and tasks. But even with the new desk designs and partitions in play, those thoughtful configurations snapped back to the Taylorist grid. Without a designer’s eye, it’s just easier to give each employee the exact same set-up.