Speed, spontaneous interaction, flexibility, and collaboration describe the brief for office design today, where the “open plan” reigns. Fueled by the success of start-up tech offices, and with them media and advertising companies, casual workspace that can jolt users into fast thinking and faster acting is prompting the more sedate businesses—such as financial and law offices—to try out new kinds of flexible settings.
Open office design, as Nikil Saval points out in his lively book Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (Doubleday, 2014), has been around for at least four decades. While you could argue that even before that, clerks, reporters, and architects performed their tasks in rooms without walls, the notion of its being a design solution arrived much later. With the growth of middle management in the post–World War II period, the pressures of real estate induced corporate America—and its architects and designers—to try something different. Influenced by Germany's Burolandschaft (office landscape), with its open, organically arranged, and non-hierarchical layout, or Herman Miller’s Action Office I and II workstations designed by Robert Probst in the 1960s, the modern office began to take shape. Action Office II, based on three panels that could be flexibly positioned at obtuse angles, became wildly influential—but not in the way conceived by Probst. Instead, a watered-down version—fabric-covered cubicles with partitions at 90-degree angles—arranged according to a grid, was adopted. It filled the bill economically. As Frank Duffy, a British architect and expert on office planning, who has studied and worked in the U.S., notes, open planning never really caught on in Germany and Scandinavia, where work councils had formed to ensure employees have control over their environment.
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