Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  Action Office II received immediate praise from the office furniture industry as well. Herman Miller launched a nationwide marketing campaign to educate designers on the use of the system, simultaneously inaugurating an accompanying lecture series on the future of creative office work (for which Action Office would be the ideal work space). An Action Office II model kit was provided to interested facilities managers. An architecture firm, JFN, installed the first Action Office II system in its workplace. Initially, sales were slow, but after the competitor Haworth produced a rival modular office system, Propst’s concept was validated, and sales began to take off. Steelcase’s 9000 series and Knoll’s Zapf System soon followed.

  Action Office II in action. Courtesy of Herman Miller

  The federal government helped these along as well. In order to stimulate business spending, the Treasury in the 1960s made a slight but powerfully significant change in the tax code, making it easier for companies to write off depreciating assets. A shorter shelf life was established for furniture and equipment, while more permanent features of buildings had a longer range. In other words, it became cheaper to have an Action Office than an actual office.41 The Action Office eventually became Herman Miller’s most important product and an inescapable feature of office design.

  There were concerns early. The jilted Nelson somewhat predictably foresaw problems in Action Office II’s design—or the lack thereof. Yet his insights into its flaws, however motivated by hurt, were genuine. In a prescient letter to Herman Miller’s vice president for corporate design and communication, Nelson lamented Action Office II’s “dehumanizing effect as a working environment”:

  This characteristic is not an accident, but the inevitable expression of a concept which views people as links in a corporate system for handling paper, or as input-output organisms whose “efficiency” has been a matter of nervous concern for the past half century.

  People do indeed function in such roles, but this is not what people are, merely a description of what they do during certain hours …

  One does not have to be an especially perceptive critic to realize that A[ction] O[ffice] II is definitely not a system which produces an environment gratifying for people in general. But it is admirable for planners looking for ways of cramming in a maximum number of bodies, for “employees” (as against individuals), for “personnel,” corporate zombies, the walking dead, the silent majority. A large market.42

  Meanwhile, the copycat Action Offices were starting to have strange, unforeseen effects on other workplaces. Rather than making them more flexible, they in fact appeared to be making them more regimented. Douglas Ball, a designer for the rival furniture company Haworth, came up with one of the many knockoff designs for the Canadian company Sunar. Initially excited, he emerged from the completed space utterly depressed. “I went to see the first installation of the Sunar system, a huge government project. The panels were all seventy inches tall, so unless you were six-foot-three you couldn’t look over the top. It was awful—one of the worst installations I’d ever seen,” Ball said. “We thought it was extremely flexible in the plan view, but we had never considered the vertical elevation.”43 And it was too late to fix the problem. He had trapped people in giant fabric-wrapped walls, when he had meant, like Propst, to free them. The open-office plan that had descended like a thunderbolt from Germany in the 1960s was becoming crowded with screens and partitions. The use of Action Office, one designer wrote in the late 1970s, “will almost certainly modify planning in a way that leads away from the original Bürolandschaft concept.”44 This would turn out to be a great understatement.

  What is happening? was the sentiment of designers at the time. In the wake of two massive changes in the thinking about offices—Bürolandschaft and Action Office—the sense of ultimate progress, of “human performers” (as Propst called them) growing more and more powerful, seems to reverse. The space is taking them over. The designers feel history slipping away from them, perverting everything they hoped for into everything they had fought against—their creation suddenly alive and powerful and monstrous in ways they could not predict. For it turned out that companies had no interest in creating autonomous environments for their “human performers.” Instead, they wanted to stuff as many people in as small a space for as cheaply as possible as quickly as possible. By 1978, Propst was composing memos on repositioning his design, panicked over the obsession with “easily defined and accountable cost savings.” “Meanwhile, other matters of more profound influence on the real productivity of organizations have slipped into the background,” he worried. “Action Office, which was conceived as a tool for managers, now has lost much of its initial broad dialogue with management.”45 Action Office had been meant for flexibility; instead, a new rigidity set in—though it was wrapped disingenuously in humanistic fabric. Propst’s memos seemed to have no effect. Soon the designs for Action Office in the Herman Miller brochures began to seem more box-like. They were selling what the companies wanted.

  Action Office II (1978)—the denouement. Courtesy of Herman Miller

  Whether due to the dystopian visions of Playtime or more concrete reasons, European office workers saw the writing on the wall. Offices were going in a bad direction, and nobody but they seemed to notice it. In a powerful shift, inspired by the industrial revolts taking place in France and Italy and Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, white-collar workers began to form “councils,” demanding an end to Bürolandschaft and all the supposedly progressive ideas of the designers. They had had enough of being imposed upon. They would decide their workplaces for themselves. In one country after the other—Italy (1975), Germany (1976), Sweden (1977), and the Netherlands (1979)—laws were passed mandating that employee representatives be allowed to sit on the supervisory boards of companies.46 Through their new organs of dissent, employees voiced their collective hatred of Bürolandschaft. Surveys suggested that the offices had “unpleasant temperature variations, drafts, low humidity, unacceptable noise levels, poor natural lighting, lack of visual contact with the outside, and lack of natural ventilation.”47 But there was another factor as well: the open-office plan also ran up against a strong cultural propensity for privacy that had built up in northern European offices and was difficult to contravene.

  From that point on, the European office diverged sharply from American office design. The Action Office made no inroads into the tightly wound, narrow floor plates of European office buildings. But rather than getting less innovative as a result, European offices became more daring. Stricter regulations led to better and more humane forms of experimentation. The landmark Centraal Beheer office building in the Netherlands, designed by Herman Hertzberger and unveiled in 1972, was one such example. Hertzberger insisted that the building’s employees “have the feeling of being part of a working community without being lost in the crowd.”48 In other words, Hertzberger wanted to keep the offices relatively open but without compromising the ability of individuals to have their own space and to organize their spaces in whatever way they chose. His solution was to make the office into something like a raised village or community tree house: Open-office areas for around ten people were connected by walkways and common spaces. Workers were encouraged to bring in plants and other decorations so that their spaces could become their own.49 It was, in fact, like Action Office II—except these spaces were made of concrete and had the aura of permanence about them. The workers in them were both protected and invited to stay. A similar focus on worker comfort would characterize the major offices of the 1980s, such as the Scandinavian Airlines building (1988) in Stockholm. In what would prove a hugely influential move, the building was designed as a small “city,” with a central “street” running directly through the plan, branching off into “neighborhoods” of private offices. Workers could choose to interact in the street if they liked, or they could retreat to their offices to do concentrated work. In the years to come, as the cube-shaped monster invading American offices became ever more frightening,
designers would look to the European exception as inspiration—or as a means of escape.

  In 1998, a journalist was sent to interview Robert Propst—then seventy-seven years old—for Metropolis magazine. Propst noted that his design proved irrepressibly popular: forty million employees in America alone worked in—by his own count—forty-two different versions of the Action Office. But he failed to note that by that point they were all known by the same name: the cubicle.

  He defended the features that had made his design so popular: its austerity, its flexibility. But he conceded what he hadn’t been willing to understand then. “The dark side of this is that not all organizations are intelligent and progressive,” Propst says. “Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rat-hole places.… I never had any illusions that this is a perfect world,” he concluded.50 Two years later he was dead.

  “I saw it happen … there was a moment when the orthogonal came in. Someone figured out that you didn’t need the 120-degree [angle], and it went click. That was a bad day,” Francis Duffy told me in an interview. “It took only five seconds for Action Office to turn into a box. Such a nice guy, Robert Propst. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”51

  7

  SPACE INVADERS

  The aspiring executive woman is engaged in a perpetual battle with hangovers of past discrimination as well as the renegade troops of continuing discrimination. She must take extraordinary measures to insure that her player status signals are registering on the same wavelength as those of comparable or superior men, and that message is, “Yes, I’m ready to play.”

  —BETTY LEHAN HARRAGAN, Games Mother Never Taught You1

  In the 1970s—that beige, dishonest decade—drinking at lunchtime was still a necessity, but the de rigueur two-martini habit was slowly giving way to a few glasses of wine.2 Afterward there was always the postprandial haze, the opiate fatigue that even a stiff coffee chaser couldn’t forestall. “In the early afternoon it was always quiet, the whole place tossing slowly in tropical repose,” wrote Don DeLillo in Americana, “as if the building itself swung on a miraculous hammock … [T]here was something wonderful about that time, the hour or so before we remembered. It was the time to sit on your sofa instead of behind the desk, and to call your secretary into the office and talk in soft voices about nothing in particular—films, books, water sports, travel, nothing at all.”3

  When there weren’t fun lunches, there were business lunches (also boozy). There were the dinners for trainees. Superiors flew in, and they had to be entertained. One manager at a major corporation of the time thought he would spend about nine days of the first quarter of the year simply entertaining.4 The rest of the time, there was the work, an endless amount of responding to communications and an endless amount of meetings—the latter making for nearly one-third to one-half of their day. Meanwhile, for the contemporary office worker who complains about the overload of e-mail, the pileup of mail and telegrams in the older, pre-digital office was nearly as onerous. In one list of a manager’s duties from the time:

  Paper work and mail; sales calls and negotiating contracts; reviewing telegrams at the office and at home; receiving and making phone calls (including unsuccessful repeat calls); talking to subordinates; interviewing recruits; reviewing with secretaries; teaching trainees; contracts, monthly summaries, weekly summaries, forecasts, sales plans, and quarterly reviews; reviewing subordinates’ expense accounts, career reviews (preparation and feedback); performance appraisals; meetings with others in the function, including technological, professional and associated functions; entertainment such as golf and skiing, travel; training programs; handling specific crises …; active recruiting on campus; discussions with others about competitors’ activities; organizing meetings; reviewing business plans continuously; watching video tape cassettes sent from headquarters; travel, and time waiting for planes or appointments; solving problems of interface with people in other functions; and special task force meetings.5

  When it wasn’t about commuting, lunching, and drinking, office life had become chiefly about meetings, training, and paperwork. For people down a level, there was still the routinization: the typing pool, the adding machines, the new automation of the computers.

  Yet the human element persisted: where systems of bureaucratic control, or simply a nasty boss, threatened to empty out the mild pleasures of work, there always arose a tendency for office workers to find ways of coping. The need for personalizing the workplace accounted partly for the persistence of the secretary—a stubborn remainder of an old workplace paternalism. Having a secretary to type or take dictation wasn’t necessary so long as you had a steno pool; computer automation was already making certain functions obsolete or ensuring that they were better done when not attached to a boss. But for managers, having a secretary (or two) was a status symbol that had accrued to their forebears, and one that they were not inclined to give up. For secretaries, too, the work required personality traits—affability, charisma, aplomb—that more mechanized kinds of office work ruled out, or at least didn’t consider valuable. Each day could prove unpredictable, based on the whims of a boss, who might need you to entertain and care for visiting clients or—it wasn’t in the job description—want you to return his wife’s shoes or stay at his home and dog-sit while he went on vacation. In Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s study of a large 1970s corporation, she found that the two most important traits in performance ratings meted out to secretaries were “initiative and enthusiasm” and “personal service orientation” (which one manager glossed as the “ability to anticipate and take care of personal needs”). And in her study the secretaries liked it that way. The work was organized in such a way as to make it entirely personalized—the skills that they got praised for were entirely personality based, and most of them felt that they had no other particular abilities. Much of their prestige was derivative, coming from the high status of the people they worked for. Limited opportunities for advancement, too, had curtailed the worldviews of the staff. Some went out of their way to verify the old stereotypes of “the office wife.” As one executive secretary put it:

  I think if I’ve been at all successful with men, it’s because I’m a good listener and interested in their world. I enjoy it, I don’t become bored with it. They tell me about their personal life too. Family problems, financial, and the problems of raising children. Most of the ones I’m referring to are divorced. In looking through the years they were married, I can see this is what probably happened. I know if I were the wife, I would be interested in their work. I feel the wife of an executive would be a better wife had she been a secretary first. As a secretary, you learn to adjust to the boss’s moods. Many marriages would be happier if the wife would do that.6

  This was the unchanging, staid world the office cubicle entered: it was simply another piece of furniture, whose appearance hardly seemed to register in the consciousness of office workers. From the stoned placidity of Life in the Crystal Palace to the 1970s, it would seem as if nothing had fundamentally changed. Of course, there was a new permissiveness in the fashions. “For years I’ve been taking the same train to New York that an advertising executive takes,” one Connecticut commuter quoted in Newsweek said. “He gets on at Darien, and used to be strictly a gray-flannel, button-down, crew-cut type. But now he wears flowered jackets, broad ties and sideburns down to here. I guess that’s what’s happening on Madison Avenue.”7 But things were changing in the office in a more profound way, with a kind of silent stirring that was difficult to sense; the office was becoming at once more hopeful and more confused, happier for some who had never been in it, less happy for those who were used to the way things were. Social changes outside the curtain walls were beginning to make their presence felt within, in ways that management theory had not fully anticipated.

  After 1964, when the passage of the Civil Rights Act led to the establishment of the Eq
ual Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), pressure began to build on corporations to hire African Americans. But transformations in the color of the workplace became more significant in the following years of militancy; in studies at the time, managers reported that the urban rebellions by blacks in cities across the country compelled them more seriously. “The riots affected everyone’s attitude,” one lower-level white bank manager attested. “They prompted a realization of the problem. It was an unfortunate way to do it, but it helped. And it’s not an unusual way for this country—it’s always been violent.”8 In 1972, Congress passed H.R. 1746, which gave the EEOC the power to sue noncompliant firms directly. Affirmative action programs sprang up at many companies, and the hiring and promotion of blacks increased dramatically.