The year is 1985, you’re packing your briefcase to head to the office, where you’ll sit behind a desk to do some paperwork. Fast forward to 2020, and you’re having a conference call with the entire team from the coffee shop across the street. Relatively, not much has changed; work is still being completed by the end of the day, it’s just with a different scenery.

Employees nowadays are looking for something more than just a job behind a desk. They want to work in a dynamic, inspiring space that adds value to their knowledge and promotes their mental and physical well-being. But this wasn’t the case a century ago. Take a look at how offices evolved throughout the years, and what we can look forward to in the future.

Long before we had the internet or computers, the British Royal Navy wanted to oversee all the logistics going on with their international trade routes in one central place. To be able to do so, they opened the Old Admirability Building in London - which is often considered the first-ever office building - in 1726. Soon after that, they began branching out all over the English city.

Open Plans

While some consider open plans to be a 21st century design trend, they have been a dominant officetrend all the way through the mid-20th century. Architects used “Taylorism” to study the mechanics of movements and a means of optimizing productivity, implementing open layouts with organized rows of desks for optimum efficiency and ease of administration.

Office Landscape

In the 1950’s, German interior designers began implementing “Burolandschaft” (which translates to “office landscape”), a concept which takes a more organic approach to office layouts by having larger floor plans for group work, curved screens, and greenery instead of partitions. In comparison to Taylorism, ‘Office Landscape’ is less systematic or rigid, allowing employees to “flow around” the space. After it became remarkably popular in Northern Europe, the style began spreading all around the world.