Open office

In 1958, the Quickborner management consulting team near Hamburg, Germany, developed a concept they called Bürolandschaft, or "office landscape." The brothers Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle designed workspaces without private offices or fixed walls, arranging desks in organic clusters meant to mirror the flow of communication within an organization.1

The idea was radical. Traditional European offices placed executives in private rooms arranged along corridors. The Schnelle brothers argued this layout froze hierarchy into architecture and obstructed the informal exchanges where real work happened.

Bürolandschaft spread across Europe in the 1960s and arrived in the United States by the late 1960s. American architects adapted the concept, but the communal spirit gave way to cost reduction. In 1967, Robert Propst at the Herman Miller furniture company designed the Action Office system, a modular set of movable partitions intended to give workers both privacy and flexibility.2

Corporations bought the partitions and removed the flexibility. The result was the cubicle farm, a grid of identical workstations that delivered neither the openness of Bürolandschaft nor the privacy of a closed office. Propst later called the outcome "monolithic insanity."3

By 2017, roughly 70 percent of American offices had adopted some form of open plan.4 Research on the effects has been consistently negative. A 2018 study published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B found that open offices reduced face-to-face interaction by approximately 70 percent, as workers retreated into headphones and instant messaging to compensate for the lack of acoustic privacy.5

The concept that began as a German experiment in democratic collaboration became one of the most widely adopted and widely criticized features of corporate architecture. The pandemic-era shift to remote work has reopened the question of whether anyone needs to be in the same room at all.