Robert Propst

Born in 1921 in Colorado, Propst began his career as a graphic artist, teacher, and sculptor. In 1953, he founded the Propst Company in Denver, a firm devoted to speculative product development. He came to the attention of D.J. De Pree, then president of Herman Miller, at the 1958 Aspen Design Conference. De Pree was taken with Propst's restless, cross-disciplinary intelligence and hired him to lead the newly created Herman Miller Research Corporation in 1960, with an initial directive to investigate problems outside of the furniture industry.

Propst became absorbed by the problem of the office. He studied biology, behavioral psychology, and mathematics in his effort to understand how environments affected human performance. His conclusion was blunt: the prevailing office, with its rows of identical desks in an open bullpen, was, in his words, a wasteland that sapped vitality, blocked talent, and frustrated accomplishment. His 1968 book The Office: A Facility Based on Change laid out his vision for a workspace that adapted to the worker.

The first version of his solution, Action Office I, was designed in collaboration with George Nelson and introduced by Herman Miller in 1964. It was a commercial failure, too expensive for widespread adoption. Propst redesigned the system as Action Office II, which appeared in Herman Miller catalogs in 1968. The new system featured modular panels, work surfaces, and storage components that could be assembled and reconfigured to create individual workspaces. It was an immediate commercial success.

What followed was precisely what Propst had not intended. Companies discovered that the modular panels could be used to subdivide large floor areas into grids of small, identical enclosures. The result was the cubicle farm. In a 1997 interview, Propst said that the cubiclizing of people in modern corporations was monolithic insanity. He died in 2000, having watched his invention become a symbol of everything he had designed it to prevent.