It is a little world
- Cubed
In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished.
Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives.
...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not.
The brick is one of those old technologies, like the wheel or paper, that seem to be basically unimprovable. ‘The shapes and sizes of bricks do not differ greatly wherever they are made,’ writes Edward Dobson in the fourteenth edition of his Rudimentary Treatise on the Manufacture of Bricks and Tiles. There’s a simple reason for the size: it has to fit in a human hand. As for the shape, building is much more straightforward if the width is half the length.
Despite the furor over their aggressive unmanliness, clerks, and with them the office, crept silently into the world of nineteenth-century America. Moral philosophers were mostly preoccupied with the clang of industrialization and its satanic mills, and most regarded as negligible the barely audible scratch of pens across ledgers and receipts that characterized the new world of clerical work. It was only a “dry, husky business,” as the narrator of Bartleby had it.
As office buildings grew taller, and flammability became a problem, steel file cabinets replaced wooden ones – the tall cabinets mimicking the shape of the skyscraper, such that the “file” seemed to be a metaphorical stand-in for the office itself. “Each office within the skyscraper,” C. Wright Mills would argue some years later, “is a segment of the enormous file, a part of the symbolic factory that produces the billion slips of paper that gear modern society into its daily shape.” Aldous Huxley, in his dystopian novel Brave New World, could imagine no more powerful symbol of a totally bureaucratized world than the idea of each person having his or her name on a file.
“In the past the man has been first. In the future the system must be first.” — Fred W. Taylor
Taylorism was a way of thinking that came at the expense of the workers’ own knowledge of their system. Taylor summed up his philosophy thus:
“It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standard and enforcing this cooperation rests with the management alone.”
The unscripted practices of the old offices would remain, but as a kind of subterfuge: in the future, a leisurely pace wouldn’t be the norm; time would not be given, but stolen.
By separating knowledge from the basic work process (“the separation of conception from execution,” as Harry Braverman once put it), in the factory as well as the office, the ideology of Taylorism all but ensured a workplace divided against itself, both in space and in practice, with a group of managers controlling how work was done and their workers merely performing that work.
Somewhat more dangerously, this division put into serious doubt the notion that office workers were, as a whole, on the way up. It became increasingly clear from the shape of the offices themselves, and from the distance between the top and the bottom rungs of the “ladder”, that some workers were never going to join the upper layers of management. For some, work was always, frankly, going to suck.
The formula that Sullivan coined to explain this individualist-conformist principle has become a commonplace of architectural history: “Form follows function.” The envelope of the building was to reflect no particular style, no empty ideal, but rather, with as pure a transparency as possible, the shape and feel of the interior. It was the office that determined the skyscraper – a fact that might have had a beneficial effect on the form of the office itself.
But the result was the opposite: few conceptions of the office have had a more deleterious effect on the human work environment. The title of an influential work by the architectural historian Carol Willis gives us a better, if less palatable, explanation: Form follows Finance. For by and large, making an office “functional” had less to do with making it serve the needs of a particular corporation and much more with serving any corporation. The point was not to make an office building per specification of a given company, but rather to build for an economy in which an organization could move in and out of a space without any difficulty. The space had to be eminently rentable.
This was not meant to be like Bell Labs; there were no expectations that the clerical workers would run into their managers in a “serendipitous encounter” and produce a new innovation. The ideas was rather to create a workplace in which status barriers seemed to dissolve, in which participation and friendliness all around made the work environment look less like the white-collar factory it was.
“The caveman was undoubtedly very pleased to find a good cave but he also undoubtedly positioned himself at the entrance looking out. Protect your back but know what is going on outside is a very good rule for survival. It is also a good survival rule for life in offices.” — Robert Propst, The Office: A Facility Based on Chicago
An organic, almost forest-like office layout.
There is an affinity with certain planned “landscapes” of the natural world – namely, the classic Italian Baroque garden. In the sample plans the Schnelle brothers devised, the arrangement of desks seems utterly chaotic, totally unplanned – a mess, like a forest of refrigerator magnets. But, as with the seemingly “wild” overgrowth of a “natural” garden, the office landscape is more thoroughly planned than any symmetrical and orderly arrangement of desks. Imaginary lines wend their way around every cluster, delineating common pools of activity; between and through the undergrowth of clusters are invisible, sinuous paths of work flow.
In the end, noise would always be a problem, when quiet was not placed at a premium. Interaction and communication were conceived of as norms in the landscaped office; introspection and concentration were sidelines. In the rush to open-plan the world, some crucial values for the performance of work were lost.
The cubicle had the effect of putting people close enough to each other to create serious social annoyances, but dividing them so that they didn’t actually feel that they were working together. It had all the hazards of privacy and sociability but the benefits of neither. It got so bad that nobody wanted them taken away; even those three walls offered some kind of psychological home, a place one could call one’s own. All these factors could deepen the frenzied solitude of an office worker.
Working in the typical dot-com office was an admixture of frenetic pace and a relaxed overall atmosphere, exemplifying that chilled-out anxiety which was the general mood of the 1990’s.
The office, Chiat argued, had become the site of a turf war, not a place to do work. Changing the office “means focusing on doing great work instead of focusing on agency politics,” he argued. “You come to work because the office is a resource.”