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  • Stop!

  • Let's break this down.

  • We all know open offices are bad.

  • There've been studies that show that private officesclearly outperformedopen ones.

  • Open offices are about saving money.

  • Pricey real estate means that every square foot's a dollar sign,

  • and that's fine.

  • But we don't like to talk about it that way.

  • We act like it's about interaction and collaboration,

  • even though studies have shown that ease of interaction is not an issue in any type of office.

  • To be clear,

  • I am throwing stones from a glass office.

  • This is where I work.

  • My desk is incredibly close to my poor neighbors,

  • I always have to wear headphones to concentrate,

  • and nobody ever...

  • ...talks.

  • But when you look at really cool companies,

  • across the board

  • they all have open offices

  • toencourage interaction and openness.”

  • Dog vacation website? Open office.

  • Charity website? Open office.

  • But this is not just penny pinching.

  • We talk about them like they're better,

  • and they used to be.

  • Open offices were once works of art.

  • They were just ruined...

  • by too many bad copies.

  • This is an open office. It's a post office

  • from 1872.

  • Open offices weren't invented by hip millennials.

  • This is not a barista.

  • This is not a Feng shui consultant.

  • Clerical work was done in big open spaces

  • as early as the 1750's.

  • But small rooms were most common.

  • By the 1900's,

  • more and more people were spending their days

  • in offices.

  • One genius wanted to make offices more open,

  • and he wanted open spaces to work better.

  • The Eminent American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright”.

  • Come in lad. Instead of a building being a series of boxes and closets,

  • it became more and more open, more and more a sense of space.”

  • Wright's known for his houses, often with open plans,

  • but he designed offices too.

  • In 1909, he experimented with open offices in a Buffalo building.

  • In 1939,

  • he created a masterpiece

  • in Wisconsin.

  • The SC Johnson company needed a new headquarters,

  • so they asked Wright to design it.

  • They make cleaning products like

  • RAID!!!!” (bugs screaming)

  • Yes Raid, new bug killer discovery from Johnson's Wax.”

  • The administrative building was the highlight.

  • It was a stunning open office.

  • Wright believed new materials, like steel, enabled bolder designs.

  • The box was a fascist symbol

  • and the architecture of freedom and democracy needed something beside the box.”

  • Just in case you missed that, he just said boxes are fascist.

  • Yeah.

  • Doesn't that sound a lot like modern open office hype?

  • But there were big differences between what Wright made and what we have today.

  • This thing was incredibly well designed.

  • First are these dendriform columns.

  • Dendriform means tree like.

  • They were so elegantly skinny, they worried building inspectors.

  • The ceiling let in natural light.

  • Visitors compared it to a cathedral.

  • Wright also specially designed each of these desks and chairs.

  • Just look at all the space between them.

  • And managers got private offices on a mezzanine.

  • Wright said that it paid off.

  • One of the first consequences was tea in the afternoon,

  • and they didn't like to go home.”

  • But Wright's open office was very different

  • from the open drudgery in, say, 1960s “The Apartment.”

  • People eliminated Wright's careful design work

  • and made

  • a copy of a copy of a copy.

  • Open, but without Wright's genius behind it.

  • That's why people thought a “cubicle

  • might be the solution.

  • The May 1968 issue of Progressive Architecture has a lot of gems.

  • Like this flooring that's…asbestos tile?

  • Hindsight 20/20 probably shoulda gone with linoleum.

  • Page 174 has a spread about a movement calledrolandschaft.

  • It meansoffice landscape,”

  • and started in Germany in the 1950's.

  • By the 60's, it had made its way to America.

  • Look at this diagram of DuPont Chemical's boxy,

  • very organized offices beforerolandschaft.

  • And now look at the fluid, organic layout they ended up with.

  • The idea was to make offices open, but keep them flexible.

  • Herman Miller did the same with their "Action Office."

  • And what exactly is Action Office?”

  • Well, I'm walking through it right now.”

  • Herman Miller's Robert Propst

  • designed it to break up space,

  • but

  • it allowed for easy interaction and rearrangement.

  • There were even special task groups for each part of the office.

  • The idea was constant flexibility

  • with specifically designed furniture.

  • But when people copiedrolandschaft and Action Office,

  • they forgot the flexibility and attention to detail.

  • They only saw the walls.

  • So over the decades we got a copy of a copy of a copy.

  • And went from thoughtful design to

  • cubicle farm.

  • We'll go ahead and get this all fixed up for you.”

  • "Great."

  • Today's supposedly hip open offices are, in part, a reaction to cubicle hatred.

  • But many lack the care and attention of the open offices of Frank Lloyd Wright,

  • or the partitioned privacy of Herman Miller androlandschaft.

  • We've kind of got the worst of both worlds.

  • The open offices we have are overrated bullpens,

  • but the idea

  • is worth executing well.

  • Because it matters too much to stop trying to fix it.

  • By that we mean the 40 hours a week,

  • the 87,000 hours,

  • the nearly 10 full years of your life you spend inside the four walls of one room.”

  • So I don't wanna leave you with the impression that Frank Lloyd Wright's open office was perfect.

  • His custom-designed three legged chairs turned out to be kind of unstable,

  • and they were eventually replaced.

Stop!

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