Open office

In the 1950s, a team of German consultants at the Quickborner Group developed Bürolandschaft ("office landscape"), a design philosophy that eliminated private offices and arranged desks in organic, non-linear patterns meant to reflect the actual communication flows within an organization. The concept was explicitly anti-hierarchical. Corner offices and closed doors concentrated power. Open spaces, the designers argued, would distribute it.

American corporations imported the concept in the 1960s and 1970s, but they imported it selectively. The organic desk arrangements and generous spacing of Bürolandschaft were expensive. What survived the translation was the removal of walls and private offices, combined with standardized rows of desks, fluorescent lighting, and minimum square footage per worker. Robert Propst's Action Office system, designed in 1967 for Herman Miller, attempted to restore some personal space through modular partitions. Corporations bought the partitions and shortened them, creating the cubicle farm.

By the 2010s, open office plans occupied over seventy percent of American workplaces. Research consistently found that they produced the opposite of their stated goals. A 2018 study published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B found that face-to-face interactions dropped by roughly seventy percent when organizations transitioned to open offices, while email and messaging increased to compensate. Workers in open offices reported higher stress, lower satisfaction, and more frequent illness. The design that promised collaboration had produced isolation.