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The Larkin Company started out in 1875 as a manufacturer of soap, which its traveling salesmen sold on the road, later branching into various perfumes and powders. But in 1881 it began to experiment with soliciting storekeepers by mail, which unexpectedly resulted in a boom in orders. Soon Larkin began, in what seemed like a natural leap, to provide general luxury items, like a fine handkerchief or a small art photograph, and to select orders as a sales incentive. It worked: gradually Larkin began to buy mass quantities of all kinds of products—bicycles, silverware, baby carriages, clothing, guns—directly from manufacturers and sell them through its newly expanded mail-order business.49 Much like Amazon.com a century later, Larkin was forced to expand enormously from its original raison d’être to focus on managing the sheer volume of mail orders coming through. Twelve new soap factory buildings were constructed in the 1890s, but it quickly became clear that the mail-order business was no longer secondary. By 1903, the company was receiving five thousand orders a day.50 Darwin D. Martin, one of the accounting secretaries, developed a highly efficient account-filing system for tracking orders, but the innovation couldn’t compensate for the lack of space. The company administration decided that it could no longer have its clerks working in hot, dirty, noisy environs surrounded by soap vats. The thirty-five-year-old Wright was young for an architect and mostly known for his houses, which were already famous. “His houses are called ‘freak’ houses,” wrote Darwin Martin in a letter to John Larkin, reassuring him that “the owners, whom we met, were not freaks.”51 In person, Wright impressed the Larkin managers with his evangelism for clean air and well-lit spaces. On the strength of his near-messianic fervor, he was hired.
The challenges in designing the Larkin Building were many. It needed to accommodate eighteen hundred office workers processing their six daily shipments of mail orders while nonetheless maintaining a comfortable, spacious environment. Part of the problem was the location: Buffalo was not a hospitable city for a clean, well-lit office. Surrounding the site for the company, near the already built factories, were railroad lines, forges, foundries, coal yards, and other heavy industry—a grimy, dusty environment for a soap company. Without atmospheric control, soot was bound to accumulate along the walls and on the desktops. The original factory buildings where the office workers were housed had nothing in the way of air-conditioning (it hadn’t been invented yet), and no example existed of an office building that had successfully managed the circulation of air and still maintained an adequate quantity of light. Wright’s design would meet all of these challenges and in the process raise the status of office design to an art. “In-so-far as it is simple and true it will live,” Wright would intone some months after its completion, “a blessing to its occupants, fulfilling in a measure on behalf of the men who planted it there their two great reciprocal duties, duty to the Past and duty to the Future—duties self imposed upon all right thinking men.”52
Wright had promised his commissioners that the offices would be as “light as out doors”—this despite the plans to seal the interior with solid slabs of brick massing. And yet the most immediately obvious achievement in the building was the gleaming ubiquity of natural light—something that workers in supposedly progressive offices today sometimes go an entire day without. The basement received natural illumination from windows in the foundation wall and from skylights. Otherwise densely packed stairways were leavened by both skylights and slits of windows along the climb. The entrance to the lobby was opened up by large sheets of clear glass, framed as doors; this was an unusual move at the time, but following Larkin it became a commonplace of all building lobbies. But Larkin’s most famous feature was its central light court. Filtered by a metal-and-glass roof, the skylight cascaded downward through a vast cavern of space carved by balconies, flooding and reflecting off the white walls. A light court was a common feature of skyscrapers in Chicago, but unlike those buildings, where retail stores filled the periphery spaces, Larkin used its court as office space—indeed, the central administrative space, where Darwin Martin and William Heath sat alongside an orderly row of administrative assistants.
Yet such plentiful daylight, and Buffalo’s general predilection for viciously humid summers, made ventilation and temperature control a big problem. Wright’s solution appears to have come to him in a burst of inspiration: “The solution that had hung fire came in a flash. I took the next train to Buffalo to try and get the Larkin Company to see that it was worth thirty thousand dollars more to build the stair-towers free of the central block, not only as independent stair-towers for communication and escape, but also as air-intakes for the ventilating system.”53 The pylon-like towers on the outside were therefore kept exterior to the building itself precisely to make the interior more habitable. In other words, it was the needs of office and the mechanical structure of the ventilation system that determined the shape of the building, a rare instance of form truly following function. Air came in through the ducts in the walls of the corner towers; entering the basement, the air was filtered and either heated or, after the installation of a new refrigeration system, cooled. This “conditioned” air was then distributed on each floor of the building. Though less advanced than the systems that would follow the mass adoption of cooling systems, Larkin’s innovative environment made it very nearly the first air-conditioned building in the country.
The arrangement of the desks and offices themselves appeared traditional at first. On either side of the chest-high walls flanking the central gallery lay modular file cabinets and row after row of custom-designed desks, grouped in packs of four, each equipped with a fancy metal cantilevered folding chair that swung in and out (which despite its fanciness was apparently rather uncomfortable to sit in for the whole day).54 The general pleasantness of the conditions smoothed the impressively organized flow of paperwork, which sped from the low-level receiving area up to the top of the building and then trickled down through several departments until it could safely be expedited to the factory floor. Correspondents would dictate responses to mail-order inquiries into gramophones; these recordings were pressed onto wax disks that were taken by messengers to a typing pool; the typed-up responses were checked; then they were sent to the warehouse. (Wright would revisit this slow downward curve some fifty years later in designing the interior spiral of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.) A number of rooms were devoted to relief and enjoyment. A YWCA was available in the building chiefly for therapy and counsel (there were not enough young male employees to justify a YMCA). A library provided four hundred circulating titles and the latest magazines, while a “rest room” was equipped with leather chairs and a player piano. Tiled roof gardens offered escape in spring and autumn.55
Though employee testimonials are few, the ones that survive affirm a special pride in the warm nature of the business. “A class place to work in Buffalo,” a former secretary reported. “They took care of you.”56 One visitor claimed that hundreds of thousands of visitors came to marvel at the building—including several Russian aristocrats and various engineers and designers from around the world—which was somewhat strange for what was, after all, merely an office.
But more was at stake in the thoroughness of the Larkin Building’s design than mere problem solving or taking good care of its workers, as the thousands of visitors would indicate. Wright and the Larkin people had created a total office environment, every detail of which was intended to exude the enlightened attitude of the company itself. Again, like the offices of Google, the Larkin Building was an advertisement for the company; its reputed attention to the work process helped sell the company’s products. It inscribed the walls with inspirational buzzwords, goads to the collective productive spirit:
GENEROSITY ALTRUISM SACRIFICE
INTEGRITY LOYALTY FIDELITY
IMAGINATION JUDGMENT INITIATIVE
CO-OPERATION ECONOMY INDUSTRY
INTELLIGENCE ENTHUSIASM CONTROL
The building was also an advertisement, for
the staff as much as for visiting foreign dignitaries, for the health and fortitude of American business. “It is enterprise, American enterprise, that drives the wheels,” wrote the observer George Twitmyer in the Business Man’s Magazine, “carefully organized systems and methods are the jewel bearings; good will, the lubricant.”57 Wright, too, would proclaim the ineluctable Americanness of the building. “The American flag is the only flag that would look well on or in this building; the only flag with its simple stars and bars that wouldn’t look incongruous and out of place with the simple rectangular masses of the exterior and the straightforward rectilinear treatment of the interior.” In tones reminiscent of Ralph Waldo Emerson, he proclaimed the building’s independence from malign European influences: “I think our building is wholly American in its directness and freshness of treatment. It wears no badge of servitude to foreign ‘styles’ yet it avails itself gratefully of the treasures and the wisdom bequeathed to it by its ancestors.”58
At the same time, though it was infinitely more advanced and considered than the dingy, gloomy offices that were beginning to climb undeservedly high above American cities, there was a danger in the Larkin Building’s totalizing nature that would appear again and again in the history of the office. For what passed for workers’ welfare could with a little imagination also be seen as social control. Look at the photograph of the light court: a row of identically attired and coiffured women together in a visual line, guarded at the desk corners by four male executives. Was this a communal, team-focused environment? Or was it one designed for easy supervision and surveillance, a way to enforce discipline and adherence to unity? Even the recreational activities stressed cooperation and commitment. The theme of a “masque” held for executives and secretaries in 1916 was described in a pamphlet with the mock language of seventeenth-century allegory, spiced with a few choice words from twentieth-century management theory: “That when Industry is mastered by Ignorance, and all the qualities that go with Ignorance, like Disorder, Sloth, Greed, Inefficiency, and Strife, Industry becomes useless and unable to serve mankind. When, however, Industry is freed from Ignorance by Imagination, and the spirits which accompany Imagination, like Service, Co-operation, Order, System, and Ambition, then Industry becomes the true servant of mankind and indispensable to its happiness.”59
The light court of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building (1904). Buffalo Historical Society
“System,” “Order,” “Inefficiency”: these were also the shibboleths and scare words of the scientific managers, potentially making a major bummer out of what was otherwise a company party designed for relaxation. “Relaxation,” however, was not a neutral fact; it was rather the other half of the managerial equation—evidence of the Larkin Company’s commitment to what was known at the time as “industrial betterment.” A loose movement of reformers and visionaries, alarmed by the rising tide of strikes and sabotage committed by restless, unmotivated workers, they didn’t feel that the solution lay in reducing the monotony of the work—say, by rotating workers from job to job or offering workers more control over the pace of their labor. On the contrary, for the reformers, monotony was in fact the good part about industrialized work. The intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers puts it elegantly: “Borrowing the concept of habit from late nineteenth-century psychologists, they insisted that routine emancipated the worker by wearing deep and comfortable tracks in the nervous system that set his mind free for thought. Hence, if industrial employees chafed at their tasks, effective cures concentrated not on the work but on the worker’s mental state.”60 The task was therefore to offer amenities on and off the job. The Larkin Building corresponded precisely to this ideal: the work process was as regimented as a Taylorist office, but the workers had, by way of compensation, noonday lectures to attend; classes to frequent; a company newspaper, Ourselves, which the workers could help put out or at least read. The numbing work remained the same. Though the Larkin Building had elevated the process and environment for working, it did little to change the nature of how work was organized or how hierarchies were rationalized—in short, how the office could offer better work, not just a better working environment. The Larkin Building would remain the best office building on offer for years to come. But its design could only refract, not solve, the growing problem of office work and its discontents in the early twentieth century.
3
THE WHITE-BLOUSE REVOLUTION
The offices of our grandfathers were without steel frames and files, without elevators and radiators, without telephones,—and without skirts.
—CHARLES LORING, ARCHITECT1
In his early novel The Job, Sinclair Lewis, America’s first writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, set himself the task of depicting a phenomenon that was simultaneously new and extraordinarily common: the ascendancy of a woman from the provinces who finds a big-city job in an office. Before the figure became a stereotype—the “w.c.g.,” or “white-collar girl”—Lewis had set her essential outlines. His heroine, Una Golden, grows up in Panama, Pennsylvania, its smug isolation somewhere out in the lonely green middle west of the state belying the exoticism of its name. “Not pretty, not noisy, not particularly articulate, but instinctively on the inside of things,” Una has an innate aptitude for manners and etiquette—“a natural executive,” who ensures that her father, Captain Lew Golden, never eats with his knife and that her mother doesn’t lose her mind reading too many drugstore dime novels.2
Ambitious but untrained, desiring freedom without any idea what it would look like, she reads widely and haphazardly in high school, preparing herself for a local, Panamanian existence: securing a local husband from among the few available males and contenting herself with the sparse amenities of private life, snatched from in between hours of daily domestic labor. That is, until her father dies—leaving her, at age twenty-four, and her hapless mother, at a much more advanced and unusable age, weighed down with what had been hidden debts. And so Una follows the path that untold millions like her will take: she enrolls in a local commercial college, which teaches her stenography, typing, filing, and minor bookkeeping, and takes her newfound skills to an office in New York, from which she draws a meager salary that might keep the bill collectors at bay.
“They are a new generation of their sex, cool, assured, even capable,” wrote the popular novelist Christopher Morley in a newspaper column in 1921, describing seeing a scrum of w.c.g.’s in the subway. “They are happy, because they are so perishable, because (despite their naive assumption of certainty) one knows them so delightfully only as an innocent ornament of this business world of which they are so ignorant.”3 Lewis would sound the note of the white-collar girl’s alienation in a tone of greater disaffection, even genuine hatred. It was a “vast, competent, largely useless cosmos of offices,” a “world whose crises you cannot comprehend unless you have learned that the difference between a 2-A pencil and a 2-B pencil is at least equal to the contrast between London and Tibet; unless you understand why a normally self-controlled young woman may have a week of tragic discomfort because she is using a billing-machine instead of her ordinary correspondence typewriter.”4 Lewis knew that his (somewhat overwrought) satire only masked something essential about office life: that it had taken an outsized place in the mental life of an entire generation of people all over the world. “Not through wolf-haunted forests nor purple canyons, but through tiled hallways and elevators move our heroes of today,” he wrote. “An unreasonable world, sacrificing bird-song and tranquil dusk and high golden noons to selling junk—yet it rules us.” The office was nevertheless not to be discounted, Lewis wrote, because “life lives there.” “The office is filled with thrills of love and distrust and ambition,” he continues. “Each alley between desks quivers with secret romance as ceaselessly as a battle-trench, or a lane in Normandy.” He neglected to add (though he no doubt recognized) that the rules governing the sexes were being rewritten there as nowhere else. Few social transformations in the twentieth century h
ave been as quietly revolutionary.
The American government began to hire female clerical workers in the 1860s, when a sizable chunk of the literate male labor force had exchanged crisp white collars for bloodstained blue Union uniforms. The U.S. treasurer Francis Elias Spinner led the way, overcoming opposition from the men in his office who foresaw the sanctity of their male preserve being compromised. Spinner kept the dangerous new hires away from any sensitive work, assigning them light, thoughtless tasks instead—like sorting and packaging bonds and currency—as a kind of experiment. To his pleasant surprise, the women did an excellent job. The plus: you didn’t have to pay them as much as the men. So he continued to hire women after the war had concluded, while federal legislators stepped in to ensure that they didn’t cost too much: a maximum salary for women of $900 a year was established in 1866, whereas maximum salaries for men ranged between $1,200 and $1,800.5 “Some of the females are doing more and better work for $900 per annum than many male clerks who were paid double that amount,” Spinner declared with satisfaction in 1869.6
Once it became apparent that women were perfectly capable office workers—and often accounted better than men—they began to enter the office world en masse, completely upending the male enclaves that had been dominant until the Civil War. The changes in proportion were enormous, accompanying the growth of the clerical workforce itself. In 1870, there were eighty thousand clerical workers in America; only 3 percent were women. Fifty years later, there were three million clerical workers, of whom women made up nearly 50 percent.7
The extraordinary growth in women’s employment was contingent on their being limited to particular positions, where they practically established a monopoly—if the kind of monopoly that indicated widespread subjection and nonchalant discrimination rather than unchecked power. Stenography was one of these fields. Office stenographers mostly took longhand dictation, especially important since handwritten notes—even if composed by a third party—were still considered more respectful than typed ones. As a result they were slightly higher in status and salary than typists but below private secretaries, who at least enjoyed personal proximity to executive power (nonetheless out of their grasp). Like so much of the office world, much of the stability of the workforce—its relative freedom from labor-management strife otherwise taking hold in other workplaces throughout the world—depended on this simple ambiguity of what status a stenographer held. Regardless of status, however, there was no question about the quality or interest of the work itself: Whether handwritten dictation or mechanical typing, the work didn’t involve much in the way of imagination or initiative, since women were seen as being better able to handle thankless work.