by Nikil Saval
And “flexibility”—not by accident still one of the key words of the office environment—was the appeal to executives who otherwise had no interest in giving up their generous corner offices for a desk out in the open. For a flexible office was above all a cheap office. No need for expensive wooden private office partitions, let alone any other amenities that might speak of permanence. The office landscape could be rearranged at will, at virtually no expense at all; shrinking the company would make no dent in the planning budget, since you just had to move the desks around. And with the mass flirtation with a cheaper office came the first hint of danger. Very small status symbols began to reappear in office landscapes: upper-level managers were given more space and better partitioning than junior people; a supervisor might have the benefit of two potted plants shrouding his desk, whereas secretaries had none at all. And then there was the noise. The Quickborner people had foreseen the problem of noise in an open plan—it was after all a constant threat in “American plan” offices as well—and for that reason insisted on carpeting and sound screens. But this failed to counter the problem. In the DuPont offices, people speaking in low tones managed to sound muffled enough, but higher-pitched noises, such as ringing telephones or the unending whir of typewriter strokes, carried unimpeded throughout the office. In the end, noise would always be a problem, when quiet was not placed at a premium. Interaction and communication were conceived of as norms in the landscaped office; introspection and concentration were sidelined. In the rush to open-plan the world, some crucial values for the performance of work were lost.
In 1964, a year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and a year before the escalation of the American ground invasion of Vietnam, the American economy was growing at a nearly inhuman speed, and Herman Miller unveiled the practical results of Robert Propst’s research. Called Action Office, it was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. Rather than a furniture item or a collection of them, it was a proposition for an altogether new kind of space.
Most office designs were about keeping people in place; Action Office was about movement. For in keeping with the ergonomic thinking that Propst had been doing for years, the motion of the body assisted—corresponded to—the ceaselessly inventive motion of the white-collar mind. Advertisements for the system show workers in constant motion; indeed, the human figures in the images often appear blurred, as if the photographer were unable to capture their lightning speed. The subjects are rarely sitting; when they are, they seem just on the verge of rising again. The display surfaces show copies of the latest popular science journals; a prickly model of a molecule lies dormant on one of the desks: the knowledge worker is home in the office at last. And the space is porous enough for the “fortuitous encounter” that Propst believed normal offices militated against; two empty espresso cups on a mobile, neutral table—better for a meeting, Propst believed, than the battlefield of a personal desk—bear witness to an intense conversation with another human performer.
Action Office I (1964). Courtesy of Vitra Design Museum
There were many idiosyncratic touches. Because Propst had convinced himself that work out of sight was work out of mind, there were no large desk drawers. Instead, there was a movable display surface, from which items could be retrieved and replaced at ease. A standing rolltop desk—a retro touch, one of the first rolltop desks since the early days of the countinghouses—not only kept workers on their feet but also allowed them to leave work out overnight, securely closed. (Though it only allowed a pile three inches high; anything higher, Propst thought, led to inaction.) This was another one of Propst’s hobbyhorses: the fact that managers insisted knowledge workers clear their desks at night, when “few thinking projects are completed in a day, and some are mulled over for weeks.”32 The office as it had previously been constituted was against thinking, against creativity, against knowledge. But what was an office for, if not for cultivating the mind? “An office is a place for transacting abstractions,” Propst insisted. “Its function is to be a mind-oriented living space.”33
Action Office was the happy result of an unusual collaboration. Propst had been thrown together with one of his near opposites—George Nelson, who grew to prominence by converting the ideas of modernism into effortlessly cool pieces of furniture. Propst was laconic, prophetic, intransigent, exuding the tight-lipped silence of the American West’s wide expanses; Nelson was a scotch-swilling bon vivant and raconteur. Propst had never left the country; Nelson had spent his youth touring Europe, becoming fluent in Italian, French, and German, and he would later pick up a little Japanese and Portuguese.34 But both were committed, almost instinctively, to remaking the world around them. Just as Propst seemed to belong outside conventional design tradition, Nelson was perhaps the least self-conscious of any of the modernists; with a slew of products, from multicolored Pop Art swag-leg desks to futuristic shell-shaped chairs, he channeled the idea of modern and new without even seeming to think about it. Looking back on his long career, he stated his belief that “everything that is worth anything is always modern because it can’t be anything else, and therefore there are no flags to wave, no manifestoes, you just do the only thing you can honestly do now.”35 The items Nelson had designed for Action Office were beautiful, at once homey and utterly modern, nostalgic and forward thinking. His desk surfaces rested on cantilevered die-cast aluminum legs; for the standing desk, a chrome brace doubled as a footrest. A “communications center” with a telephone was acoustically insulated. Above all—and what is impossible to convey with black-and-white photographs—it was colorful: green, bright blue, navy blue, black, and yellow. Like bright magazine advertisements, or the Pop Art of Warhol and Lichtenstein that executives were putting in their offices, Action Office proclaimed its allegiance to the new spirit of the age: rich, advanced, potentially liberating.
In this sense, the Action Office that Propst had conceived and Nelson designed might have been the first truly modern idea to enter the office—that is, the first in which the aesthetics of design and progressive ideas about human needs were truly united. For years, the glass skin of buildings had suggested progress, but inside everything looked much the same as it had for years—only buffed with slightly fancier furniture and cleaner-looking lines and partitions. The worker, these designs implied, was interchangeable and malleable, a cog in a machine. The worker imagined by Action Office was also pictured as a machine of sorts—but less like a robot and more like the Italian futurist images of machine-like soccer players, seething with dynamism and physical intelligence. With Bürolandschaft, and now Action Office, it appeared as if the office world were on the verge of a breakthrough, at last able to achieve the work utopia that it had always promised. Voices like Drucker’s were clamoring that a new age was coming, one beyond planned socialism and industrial capitalism—a knowledge economy. Had this new age at last gotten the furniture it deserved?
When Action Office was unveiled before the press, the answer appeared to be resoundingly affirmative. “Seeing these designs,” wrote Industrial Design, “one wonders why office workers have put up with their incompatible, unproductive, uncomfortable environment for so long.” Meanwhile, the more popular Saturday Evening Post cried, “Office workers of America, beware! The Action Office is coming! We are in real danger of being enabled to work at 100 percent efficiency.”36
Despite the rapturous reviews, Action Office didn’t sell. Office managers complained that the entire system was too expensive, because the furniture was made of such quality material. And the space that Action Office created was too vaguely defined, its borders too porous. The “office landscape,” for which Action Office was perfectly suited, had yet to catch on in the United States; it was unlikely that managers would quickly leap from their orthogonal bull pens to the terrifying freedom Propst envisioned; despite the Aquarian currents already beginning to waft through the office, they were a conservative bunch. The product won a few awards within the industry but otherwise saw little actual adoption in th
e workplace.
Propst had run up against a classic problem of design, rooted in his approach from the outset. Office planners and architects tend to imagine that the setup of their own offices should be the way that everyone should work. They pretend that their own subjective methods are objective empirical results. For this reason the most advanced offices usually end up looking like the offices of architects and planners. In the same way, Frederick Taylor had claimed as “scientific” what had in fact been rooted in a personal obsession: the need to make workers stop soldiering and submit to supposed experts like himself. To his credit, Propst had at least attempted to verify his own thoughts by speaking to a handful of other experts. But he had only sought out sympathetic voices; his surveys, likewise, were planned, unconsciously or not, to confirm his own thoughts on the matter. It may be, of course, that office workers themselves would have appreciated the malleability of Action Office—it was certainly better than the imaginatively null kinds of workplaces they were accustomed to. But on this matter, as on most others, their voices are unrecorded, and regardless, there were never enough Action Office installations to test their reactions.
The failure of the first Action Office on the market might finally have been due to another factor: the cynicism of executives. They had the final say on how their offices looked, since they controlled the bottom line, and the last thing they were going to drop a ton of money on was a set of fancy chairs and desks for their junior and middle managers, let alone the steno pool. The news about the junior staff being “knowledge workers” hadn’t yet reached the top. And office space was growing at too fast a volume for anyone to be concerned about niceties. Something faster was needed, something more easily reproducible.
Nonetheless, Propst took the design community’s enthusiasm over Action Office as a vote of confidence. He went back to his team and pushed forward. He was determined to return with what he believed the office needed, his vision uncompromised.
Rather than merely acceding to the market demands, Propst doubled down on his own theoretical work. He became more confident in the essential rightness of his thinking, incorporating more and more of the spirit of the 1960s—individualism, autonomy—into his notes and writing. He became relatively well-known in the world of architecture, with his writings on design solicited by major journals. When the left-wing thinker and artist Ben Shahn presented his paper “In Defense of Chaos” at the International Design Conference in Aspen in 1967, arguing that space needed to be more anarchist, Propst responded with his own paper essentially agreeing, saying that individuals needed more freedom in managing their spaces. (The fact that Shahn’s essay was later published in Ramparts magazine, one of the antiwar New Left’s house organs, begins to suggest the depth of interrelations between the practitioners of design, art, and management theory in the 1960s.)
The concept that Propst came to reiterate again and again was that office design needed to be “forgiving.” That is, overly designed and stylized spaces were “unforgiving,” barriers against change, and change was coming into the office one way or another. Computers were automating more and more processes, allowing office workers to reduce routine tasks to focus more on “tasks of judgment.” What an office design had to do was anticipate these changes as best as it could, through modularity and flexibility. It had to be adaptable, movable. This meant that “design” itself had to be tossed out: anything that made his concept more expensive and less “forgiving” to user needs was against the concept. This meant that Nelson, whose relationship with Propst had never been close, had to go. Though he had been integral to the conception of the Action Office, Nelson was too partial to humanizing and stylish touches in his products. The predilection for beauty of the object was an obstacle in Propst’s eyes; it detracted from the beauty of the office worker’s motion in space.
By the end of 1967, Propst had made significant improvements. The space was smaller; the interlocking walls were mobile, lighter, and made of disposable materials; storage space was raised off the ground. Action Office II was Propst’s attempt to give form to the office worker’s desire. A “workstation” for the “human performer,” it consisted of three walls, obtusely angled and movable, which an office worker could arrange to create whatever work space he or she wanted. The usual desk was accompanied by shelves of varied heights and variable placement, which required constant vertical movement on the part of the worker—because “man,” as Propst observed, is a “vertically oriented machine.”37 Tackboards and pushpin walls allowed for individuation. Intentionally depersonalized, the new Action Office would be a template for any individual to create his or her own ideal work space.
Action Office II (1968). Courtesy of Herman Miller
Early brochures for Action Office II play this up—we see modular walls expanded to create broad, half-hexagonal spaces; tackboards are used to great effect, and the walls are adorned by hangings, maps, or chalkboards. Workers are in motion or constant conversation, some even standing to make dramatic pointing gestures to other workers sitting on high swivel chairs (which force them constantly to move between sitting and standing positions).
So it was that in 1968, Propst unveiled Action Office II and published a seventy-one-page pamphlet that trumpeted the theoretical bases of his new design. Called The Office: A Facility Based on Change, it was a kind of Port Huron Statement for the white-collar worker. Contained in a single pamphlet was a meditation on work and its changing status in 1960s America. Propst’s narrative of the office teems with high historical drama, centered on one key event in the history of labor: the gradual replacement of America’s manufacturing base with white-collar work. “We are a nation of office dwellers,” Propst asserted. The face of capitalism had changed; the office had become a “thinking place”; “the real office consumer [was] the mind.” Repetitive work, of the kind performed in factories and typing pools, was disappearing, to be replaced by “knowledge work”—and the new office was going to have to keep up. Propst noted that in the spring of 1968—that fabled spring of Prague and Paris—the New York Stock Exchange, which he called “the office-of-all-offices,” suffered a “hiccup” when the manual machine processing required to run share transactions was suddenly and dramatically outpaced by the volume of trading, forcing the exchange to limit its hours.
Despite the dated references, Propst’s thinking is uncannily prescient, foreseeing many of the same obsessions that people in the office are busying about today. Many of the problems he saw as contemporary remain contemporary; many of his solutions are those later proposed by others. He describes the constant state of technological and economic changes that motivate endless innovation in business. He laments the overload of information inundating office workers. He outlines the multitude of positions for conversations that office workers need. Like so many today, he stresses the danger, to one’s mental and physical vitality, of sitting too long at one’s desk. He argues that the ideal office should make room for “meaningful traffic” between knowledge workers and lights upon the constant battle between privacy and openness in the office.38 And behind it all one can see Propst reflecting on the chaos and ferment of the 1960s: “Our culture shows all the signs of digesting ideas and producing new values at a dismayingly rapid rate. New music forms are innovated, adopted and rejected in a few months. Social evolution is bursting by all the old progress norms.”39 Much of Propst’s understanding of ergonomics and the importance of interaction in the office will sound familiar to many today, and even intuitive. At the time, however, the panoramic vision he had of the office—taking in history and psychology, ergonomics and theories of business—was virtually unprecedented.
Advertisement for Action Office II. Courtesy of Herman Miller
Yet reading through Propst’s book is like peering into a mind concerned only with brains and legs, abstractions and motions. It is unencumbered by personalities and bad behavior. His vision is so complete, so penetrating, that it refines human needs out of existence. He sees only bodi
ly needs, and in his models people are only bundles of mental stimuli. Were they not also bundles of emotions and deeper needs, one day greedy and heartless and competitive, the next warm and collegial? Despite and perhaps a little because of his clear understanding of the poor thinking that had led to the terrible offices he was trying to undo, he had a very clear understanding of where history was going: in his direction. As doctrinaire as any orthodox Marxist, Propst implied that implacable social forces would make human beings recognize the inevitability of his designs. He was unable to imagine a world in which they might be perverted to unfathomable ends. His optimism would be his undoing.
Like its predecessor, Action Office II was received as a liberation. In a New York Post column titled “Revolution Hits the Office,” Sylvia Porter, a reporter rather than a design expert, wrote that in the light of Action Office II the old office was now officially doomed: “You know … the completely enclosed ‘boxes’ in which the bosses isolate themselves behind monster mahogany status symbols; the inhuman row upon rigid row of steel desks with their clumsy drawers at which you sit all day; the huge file cabinets in which we hide paper until it is obsolete, irrelevant and overwhelming.” With Action Office there were changes afoot at last. “As a person who has spent a working lifetime in the open spaces of a newspaper city room,” she wrote, “I find the concept entirely appealing. I particularly like the idea of sitdown or standup work stations.” And she was enchanted by Robert Propst’s language as well: “Incidentally, Propst won’t even use the word ‘desk.’ In the modern office, you, the ‘human performer,’ will work at ‘free standing units’ in your ‘work station,’ choosing either to ‘sit down’ or ‘stand up.’ Like it?” For her, “the success of the concept seems assured.”40