You mean this place we go to five days a week has a history? Cubed reveals the unexplored yet surprising story of the places where most of the world's work—our work—gets done. From "Bartleby the Scrivener" to The Office, from the steno pool to the open-plan cubicle farm, Cubed is a fascinating, often funny, and sometimes disturbing anatomy of the white-collar world and how it came to be the way it is—and what it might become. For More Info: http://smarturl.it/CUBEDSlideShare

2. The Cube
Meant to give workers autonomy and freedom, the cubicle turned
into one of the greatest symbols of white collar drudgery and
servitude. !
But what factors lead to confining your
existence within three walls?

3. When capitalism shifted into its
second gear in the late 19th
century, the need for greater
administration became paramount
and offices grew to be enormous;
the number of jobs differentiated as
well.
The result was that the office
became indistinguishable from the
factory: dozens of people working
in assembly-line-like arrangements,
at a constant pace with mind-
numbing consistency.
Factor
One:
Creating the
“Office
Utopia”

4. Factor Two: Acknowledging and Compensating
for Less-Than-Desirable Work
In 1905, The Larkin Building was the office of a mail order company that, like
Amazon today, sold everything and opened the workspace for clerks and
administration.

5. Larkin tried to make people feel better about how bad the work was by giving
them amenities:
noonday lectures to attend…
classes to frequent…
a company newspaper…
Sound familiar?

6. Factor Three:
Pioneering Works of Architecture
Lever House

7. Pioneering Architecture
Skyscraper Amenities included:
• lots of light
• restaurants
• Libraries
• sitting rooms for employees
and employee families
• model apartments for the
staff.
The Problem?
• the endless reproducibility of
the model: skyscrapers could
be reproduced at nausea
Pullman Building

8. Factor Four: Suburbanization!
Connec'cut
General
By the postwar era, suburbanization had accelerated, leading to an
enormous flight of middle classes from the urban core; offices followed. Why?
• racial and labor tension in the cities
• the lack of space in the cities
• access to younger female workers

9. German for “office landscape”, Bürolandschaft is the origin
of the “open office plan”.
The idea was to:
• make things more informal
• level hierarchies
• create more serendipitous encounters
Instead, workers saw: noise, distraction, the emergence of
‘informal offices’ with makeshift screens and house plants.
In Europe, the open office plan was
rejected by workers, the only place
where it succeeded was the US….
Factor Five: The Bürolandschaft

10. Factor Six: Robert Propst’s Action Office

11. So where does your cubicle come from?
The Action Office.
Developed for the Herman Miller company, the Action Office was
created by Robert Propst who saw the potential in the open office
plan but also realized that workers needed a space they could call
their own.
Unfortunately, Propst ran up against the desire for
companies to cram as many workers into as little
space as possible.
His workspace became a box.

12. One of the common problems we see over the course of office history is the
dissonance between design and culture.

13. Looking
Past
The
Cube…
*Photo
from
the
new
(and
improved)
TBWA/Chiat/Day
If we really care about the autonomy of workers, we have to make that
autonomy more meaningful than being allowed to work wherever you want.
When we think about the future of the office,
we shouldn’t just think about design and
technology.
We should think about control, and
who has it.

14. Learn More in Cubed: The Secret History Of The Workplace by Nikil Saval
Photo Credit: Katrina Ohstorm
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