The History of Office Design
Offices have existed as long as institutions and organizations have needed places to conduct their accompanying clerical and administrative duties. However, with the emergence of a white-collar workforce in the first half of the 20th century, offices--and their design--became more important than ever.
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Background
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By the beginning of the 20th century, there was a growing class of professional, salaried workers in the United States who performed clerical, administrative and management duties for about 10 hours per day. The birth of such a workforce meant that people would be sitting next to each other several hours a day performing their tasks.
So a need arose to align the nature of a job with the equipment used to do the job and where the work took place to create the most efficient and comfortable working environment.
Frederick Taylor and Scientific Management
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American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) developed the theory of "scientific management," which sought to optimize the method for performing tasks in the workplace. Taylor successfully applied his theory by tripling the amount of coal shoveled in mines by reducing the size and weight of shovels.
This success eventually extended to the design of the entire workplace, as he devised a way to isolate the bosses in private offices, leaving the workers in an open environment--akin to a factory floor. Thus, Taylor is credited as perhaps the first person to design office space. He published his theories in the monographs "Shop Management (1905) and "The Principles of Scientific Management" (1911). -
Burolandschaft
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If Taylor's design discouraged socializing among workers, the German "office landscape"--Burolandschaft--attempted to encourage it. With side-to-side workstations for clerks or pinwheel ones for designers, Burolandschaft, inspired by 1950s socialist Europe, was a concept that believed in the importance of communication as it pertains to understanding work flow.
Herman Miller's "Action Office"
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Inspired by Burolandschaft, Robert Propst, who worked for office manufacturer Herman Miller, invented the "Action Office" in the 1960s. It was a workstation that aimed to increase productivity, provide space to work and grant more privacy to the worker. This was the precursor to the cubicle.
The "One-Size-Fits-All" Aesthetic
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By the 1980s, to accommodate the rapid growth of middle managers--those higher than the average worker yet under executive management--"building block" workstations were introduced, virtually indistinguishable from one another. The cubicle was thus born.
Office Design Today
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In the last decade or two, however, designers like Knoll and Vitra have designed office furniture to encourage communication and sociability in the workplace. Today, many office designs strive for work environments in which members of organizations can exchange ideas and other forms of information.
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