The word meant bedroom. The inventor called what it became "monolithic insanity."
In the mid-fifteenth century, a cubicle in English meant a bedroom. The Latin root, cubiculum, came from the verb cubare, to lie down.1 The word fell out of use after the sixteenth century and was revived by 1858 to mean a dormitory sleeping compartment in an English boarding school.2 The word has no etymological connection to "cube," which comes from the Greek kybos, meaning die.3
Robert Propst was not a furniture designer. He was a sculptor, teacher, and serial inventor whose previous creations included a vertical timber harvester and an electronic tagging system for livestock.4 Herman Miller hired him in 1958 with an open-ended mandate to find problems outside the furniture industry and conceive solutions for them.5
Propst studied how people actually worked in the open bullpen offices of postwar American corporations, long rows of identical desks under fluorescent lights with no privacy and no control over noise or interruption. His first attempt at a solution, Action Office I, launched in 1964 with design director George Nelson and failed commercially.6
The revised version, Action Office II, launched in 1968 with movable walls, adjustable work surfaces, and open 120-degree angles at workstation entries designed to encourage what Propst called "fortuitous encounters."7 Herman Miller had annual sales of $15 million when it launched. By 1970, that figure had reached $25 million.8
Competitors entered the market and stripped the system to its cheapest elements. Corporations discovered that movable panels could be packed tighter and tighter. The generous 120-degree angles closed to 90. The sit-stand desks were replaced with fixed surfaces. By the late 1970s, the dominant application had become the enclosed, uniform, gray-walled box that the industry called a cubicle farm.
George Nelson, the original co-designer, saw the problem by 1970. He wrote to Herman Miller’s vice president for design describing Action Office II’s "dehumanizing effect as a working environment" and calling it "admirable for planners looking for ways of cramming in a maximum number of bodies."9
Propst spent the rest of his career trying to improve what the market had done to his creation, developing acoustic systems, healthcare furniture, and more than 120 patents in all.4 In 1997, at 76, he told The New York Times that he had hoped to give knowledge workers "a more flexible, fluid environment than the rat-maze boxes of offices." His verdict on what corporations had built instead was five words long: "The cubiclizing of people in modern corporations is monolithic insanity."10 He died three years later.