Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  This was not something that designers were necessarily prepared to do. Design is normally the enemy of culture (in the Silicon Valley sense): if something needs to be designed, that means putting some kind of limit on space and personal or even group expression. Architects and designers were more interested in thoroughly conceived spaces, of putting their marks on the world through a project. Designers like Nelson and Eames, and architects like Mies and Johnson, wanted to convey an entire worldview through their work. But this was too much for the Valley people to handle. They were too arrogant to countenance anyone else’s imagination impinging in the slightest way on their own. “When we began working with an outside interior designer,” Razorfish’s chairman, Craig Kanarick, said in an interview, “the issue was to get stuff done super fast and relatively inexpensively and with some specific functions in mind. That person had her own ideas about what she wanted to express as an artist. I think it’s what makes her great as a designer. But it also made it difficult to work with her.”23 And above all, they needed it faster; the speed of design was too slow. “A dot-com client always wants a facility that’s faster, cheaper, and better,” one design firm principal told Interiors magazine. “He’s the client from hell.” The designer added, wryly, “That’s not necessarily a bad thing.”24 In fact, the dot-com era, in its brief period of efflorescence, might have changed design irrevocably—and, many designers were saying, for the better.

  Designers stepped up to meet the dot-com model, often by establishing their own departments specifically geared for dot-com clients. These departments developed new ways of working—usually meaning that they worked insane hours—to meet the always-on schedules of the dot-commers. “Image is everything for dotcom companies,” a project manager from the design studio Swerve said at the time. “Most of them don’t acknowledge old systems of doing business.”25 As a result, designers had to come up with “hip” spaces and furniture, indicating the dot-commers’ rebellion against the status quo, while doing it quickly. Places like Swerve came up with designs from scratch: colorful, enamel-covered workstations with boomerang-shaped desks for Evolve, which they managed to produce in eight weeks. They made conference tables that could split in quarters; sidecar tables that could “dock” onto desks when one worker needed an instant powwow with another. For the company Blue Hypermedia, Specht Harpman Architects came up with desks, dividers, storage units, and lighting that could be shuffled into team spaces or separated into private work spaces at will. A series of custom-made, slip-fit metal clamps assisted the assembly and disassembly. All of it had to coexist in a space that was open, the view unfettered by partitions. In an era when Peter Gibbons tearing down his cubicle wall in Office Space had become the most resonant image of workplace rebellion, the open plan was the image of the coming revolution.

  There was another rationale to the open plan, which went as far back as the original open plan, the Bürolandschaft: the idea of the “spontaneous encounter.” Propst had floated the idea during his development of the Action Office, though it never took hold then. In the dot-com boom, however, the idea that two workers from different departments or on different rungs of the ladder might run into each other by chance and, through the sheer friction of their sudden meeting, combust into a flaming innovation became sanctified as the key to company culture. In traditional offices, according to the dot-com ethos, CEOs were insulated from people lower down through spatial constraints: they were literally cushioned in an executive floor, in an executive suite, and, because they had an executive bathroom, didn’t even run into people in the urinal or the stall. But in the dot-com office, the story went, a chairman might be lightly bonked on the head by a Nerf arrow flying freely through open-plan space, loosed from an engineer’s bow as he careened around on his kick scooter—and, as in the fable of Newton bonked by an apple, thereby discover the secret of the universe. It was yet another spin on the human relations school of management, whereby “culture” could solve any potential conflict in the workplace and produce benefits in productivity.

  The emphasis on spontaneity, fraternally connected to the overwhelming emphasis on fun, was eliminating an old—and, many Valley people thought, outdated—distinction between work and leisure. The New Economy offices were infamously some of the most intense workplaces in the United States, but not because people were working constantly. In fact, the work rhythms were largely unscheduled—and that was the danger. With the Internet providing inexhaustible modes of distraction, alongside its growing bounty of pornography, work tended to stretch out over hours. The dot-commers would work for twenty minutes, take a coffee break, go back and work for an hour, run to the gym, sprawl out in the company lounge and look at Webzines for an hour or so, head back to their computer for more work, order dinner, play video games, and so on, until some sixteen hours had passed, much of it spent sitting in front of a computer.

  It was for precisely this posture that Herman Miller produced the Aeron chair in 1994, the most powerful symbol of the dot-com bubble. Designed by Bill Stumpf—hitherto famous for designing the Ergon chair, the first ergonomic chair for the office—and Don Chadwick, the first version of the Aeron, the Sarah, was originally intended for the elderly in nursing homes who had otherwise been content with the traditional La-Z-Boy. But the Sarah was too futuristic and expensive for anyone to consider using in a nursing home. Getting rid of the foam cushions that they had used in the Sarah, they stripped down their new chair into a basic woven-plastic-and-fabric mesh. What had originally been designed to prevent bedsores would now protect the sore asses of engineers. It was practically the first ergonomic chair without cushioning—and it sold for $750. It was a phenomenon. Companies bought it by the boatload; an entire episode of the show Will & Grace was devoted to Will’s attempt to get an Aeron chair. But its success was a sign not of the endless mobility and freedom of the dot-com office but of its simultaneously lackadaisical and profoundly intense pace, which kept people essentially confined to one place for hours on end.26

  Workers were motivated not only by the money, though, but also by the famous company culture, the widespread practice of making dot-com workers feel as if they were artists, autonomous and free. As long as workers believed they were creating something new, and that they were doing a new kind of work, not for others, but for themselves, it was easier to work long hours. Though Silicon Valley in the dot-com years embodied this ethos in its purest form, it was something that well exceeded its geographic and corporate cultural boundaries. Arlie Russell Hochschild’s study The Time Bind (1997) had shown how the changing dynamics of corporate culture at a Fortune 500 company—“autonomous” work teams and the rest—encouraged workers to seek the satisfactions of family life increasingly at their companies. They posted longer hours at the office than they did at home. Though Whyte had warned against the tendency of office life to incorporate family life, he had not anticipated the unraveling of the nuclear family. Stepping up to take its place was the office.

  Business books had advocated a more familial office environment since the 1980s; Peters and Waterman had connected it to upholding the autonomy of lower-level workers and had encouraged collaborative teamwork. Typically, they had given it an unintentionally Orwellian spin, by calling it the “illusion of control.” “If people think they have even modest personal control over their destinies,” they wrote in In Search of Excellence, “they will persist at tasks. They will do better at them. They will become more committed to them … [T]hat we think we have a bit more discretion leads to much greater commitment.”

  The idea for the most audacious office experiment in the dot-com era arose, the story goes, at Telluride. Jay Chiat, then sixty-two, was mid-slope, careening skillfully through fresh powder, when he came to his realization. Technology had made the old office obsolete; it was time to use that technology to create the office of the future. By the time he reached the bottom, he had come to a decision. His office would have to go through a fundamental change in the way it did business. />
  Perhaps it was the speed he was going at—gravity pulling at his skis like fate—or the sheer hubris he had accumulated over a lifetime of accolades. Perhaps it was both. With his blinding white hair, implacable gaze, and fidgety manner, Chiat was an immediate presence in any room. And he had the characteristic impatience and restlessness of a man who constantly felt that he was surrounded by stupid people. Like the classic admen—Dowd, Ogilvy, Bell, Bernbach—he tried his hardest to be effortlessly quotable; his lines had the added benefit of sounding imperious and authoritarian. “Taking risks gives me energy.” “Don’t be afraid of failure unless you’re working for me.” “Money hasn’t changed me. I’ve always been an asshole.” The staff of his agency, Chiat/Day, liked to compile gems like these into an in-house book: Quotations from Chairman Jay. When entering a presentation, he immediately launched into critiques. “This doesn’t hang together,” he would say. “You don’t have one single idea.” “He would terrorize people,” a former vice-chairman was quoted as saying. “When things were going well, he would walk around the agency complaining, moaning and abusing everyone.” Chiat clearly had a touch of Steve Jobs (“the quickest study I’ve ever met,” Chiat said of Jobs, though, in a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, he also called Jobs “moody and erratic”).27 Both had the habit of counting on vast teams of people whom they were relentless in pushing as hard as they could. And Chiat reportedly forced ads down his clients’ throats, gagging them until they cried uncle. Some of those clients became ex-clients.

  No matter what you thought of him personally, he had been successful. Chiat/Day, Chiat/Night, his employees called it—because they worked at all hours to make what became the most iconic ads of the 1980s. His company had created the Energizer Bunny (it keeps going and going and going …); it had done the famous “1984” Super Bowl spot for the first Apple Macintosh, in which a female American athlete hurled a sledgehammer at a gigantic screen on which Big Brother was delivering his latest motivational lecture. His ads glittered with a veneer of erudition and intelligence, of being in the know. According to one associate, the “roiling stew” of his ads might consist of “a dash of Moby, a sprinkling of Sontag, and bits of Lenin and Lennon, served on a dish designed by Walter and Margaret Keane”—thus, the associate went on, had Chiat moved advertising “into the postmodern era.”28 In 1990, the industry trade magazine Advertising Age had crowned Chiat/Day “the agency of the decade.” Chiat had been fast in other respects too—adopting the cubicle in his L.A. offices earlier than most. Despite the growing bad feelings about the cubicle, it hadn’t hurt Chiat/Day’s business: on the contrary. Jay Chiat and his company had done everything right. Why change it all now?

  It turned out things weren’t right after all. The downturn of the early 1990s had been hard on Chiat/Day. It lost two big clients, Shearson Lehman and American Express. It closed its San Francisco office. It hired a big adman, Tom McElligott, and lost him nine months later. To recoup losses, it sold an Australian ad agency it had acquired in 1989. Its creative powers were apparently suffering too. Advertising Age had been scathing about some commercials for Benetton: “so very mundane, very Fox TV, very Sherman Oaks,” it said; the ads reeked of “adolescent sniveling.”29 By 1993, snowbound in Telluride, Chiat knew it was time for a shake-up. And Chiat was sure his office was the problem.

  Offices, Chiat thought, are ruined by politics. People become obsessed with each other rather than the work. They defend their privileges over the needs of other people; their status over genuine space requirements. Higher-ups hide in offices when they should be out on the floor; lower-downs get stuck in noisy open floors when they sometimes need a room to concentrate. The office, Chiat argued, had become the site of a turf war, not a place to do work. Changing the office “means focusing on doing great work instead of focusing on agency politics,” he argued. “You come to work because the office is a resource.”30

  Chiat had already revolutionized his offices once before. In 1986, he had hired the architect Frank Gehry, then floundering after an early critical succès de scandale with his Santa Monica home, to design his agency offices in Venice, California. Working with the inescapable, and inescapably arch, Pop artist Claes Oldenburg, Gehry produced one of Southern California’s iconic buildings, whose focal point was a giant pair of binoculars. (Each “eyeglass” housed a conference room.) The layout was unusual, with pizza parlor booths for informal meetings, trash-can lids directing the light from ceiling lights, and all around Jay Chiat’s sterling collection of contemporary art. Opening in 1991, it was “the Oz of offices,” New York later said, turning Frank Gehry’s career around and becoming one of the grandest of work spaces—appropriate to an agency that had ruled the decade before it. And yet Chiat still continued to carp and whine, complain and moan. It wasn’t enough. And the agency was no longer doing well.

  In November 1993, at an Advertising Age conference in New York, Jay Chiat announced his new plan: the walls, desks, and cubicles were going. So were the desktop computers and the phones. Anything that anyone might have once called “theirs” was gone. He called it a “team workroom,” but everyone else called it a “virtual office.” The work had been “deterritorialized.” Everyone would be given a cellular phone and a laptop computer when they came in. And they would work wherever they wanted. According to Adelaide Horton, the chief operating officer of Chiat/Day, people would naturally work in teams, and the teams would work in conference rooms—or, as Chiat/Day preferred to call them, “strategic business units” (which sounded suspiciously like the “strategic hamlets” of the Vietnam War). If anyone was carrying personal effects—like pictures of his dog or family, or plants—he would be kindly requested to place them in a locker of his choosing. It sounded to some like high school. For Chiat, he saw it as more like higher, rather than secondary, education, and it was all to avoid the childish atmosphere of primary school. “We’re trying to structure things more like a university, rather than an elementary school. Most businesses are run like elementary schools—you go to work and you only leave your office when you have to go to the bathroom. That sort of thing breeds insularity and fear, and it’s nonproductive. The important thing is to focus on what kind of work you do.”31

  Chiat’s office plans became the talk of not just the industry but the entire world of business. Coming from a bold agency, and a bolder chairman, it seemed like the most exciting move that an office could possibly make. It was the root, the zero degree of offices: this far, and no further, could the radical office go. “Thoroughly armed with the modern weaponry of the road warrior,” Time magazine wrote breathlessly, “the telecommuters of Chiat/Day … are among the forerunners of employment in the information age.”32 Soon everyone was talking about the possibilities of making their offices virtual. Ernst & Young established a “hoteling” service in its Chicago office, where traveling workers, who were out most of the time anyway, found a desk if and when they came in. Cisco Systems and Sprint also began experimenting with the “virtual office.” No attempt, though, was more thoroughgoing than Chiat’s, and he didn’t hesitate to trumpet its eventual success as the future of the office. He also convinced, or perhaps bullied, everyone at the firm into accepting the idea, despite their objections to the lack of private space. It would have been a mistake to see the changes as cost cutting, which some had accused Chiat of doing, because none of it came cheap: buying all the new computers and phones and furniture took much more money than Chiat/Day could really afford. But the vision of a new workplace was more powerful than any anxious glance at a balance sheet, let alone a finance officer’s querulous whining.

  The furniture came first. As promised, the office walls came down, along with the lighter cubicle walls. In their place were couches and tables in common areas, like in a rec room. Lockers were color coded red, green, black, and blue (Chiat’s designer, Gaetano Pesce, had a penchant for garish colors). Most famously, Chiat had Tilt-A-Whirl domed cars installed, which had been taken from a defun
ct amusement park ride, for two people to have private conferences. They became the only place where people could take private phone calls.

  Within a year, the experiment was going awry. As Wired reported during the fallout, the office politics that Chiat thought his experiment would expel came back in a new and even more aggressive form. Anything that could have gone wrong went wrong. People arrived and had no idea where to go, so they left. If they stayed, they found there was nowhere to sit; there were too many people. Not allowed to leave anything out on the collective tables—especially not paper (Chiat insisted that the office had to be “paperless”), they stuffed unfinished work in their lockers. The lockers turned out to be too small. People used their car trunks instead. (One employee used a toy wagon to cart her stuff around.) It turned out Chiat and his designers had miscalculated how many computers or phones they would need (and the agency couldn’t afford more). People who lived nearby would arrive early, stash their computers and phones in a locker, and catch a couple hours of sleep before starting work. Sometimes they’d sequester them overnight to be sure to have work in the morning. People began playing hooky. Managers couldn’t find their staff. No work was getting done. It was a disaster. In 1998, the experiment was declared over—a more traditional, or at least less chaotic, design would be commissioned. In an interview with Wired, Chiat conceded few mistakes. There should have been more computers, he agreed. But he was right about privacy, he argued, right that the virtual experiment was the future. It was, he said, “the only thing I ever did in business that I was satisfied with.” The moral of the Chiat/Day story was so simple that Chiat himself was unable to draw it. In almost comic accordance with his personality, Chiat had been prescient and willful, egalitarian and autocratic, all at once. His experience in advertising had led him to believe that people should be pushed to achieve nothing short of excellence and that no one was better qualified than himself to judge whether they got there. In the name of upending hierarchies, he hierarchically instituted an egalitarian system whose fundamental truth only he was positioned to recognize. In a classic case study in unintended consequences, the experiment failed, and the subjects of the experiment came to be blamed. You can’t have egalitarian offices, it was said, because people aren’t set up for them. Some are fit to rule, and others to be ruled: hierarchy alone is natural. “Deep down, we’re all still cave dwellers,” one survivor of the experiment said. And Chiat blamed the desire for a corner office as the culprit: “We all have been taught the corner office is a badge of success. It’s difficult to change that.” Despite the revolutionary air at the end of the millennium, it was impossible to ask whether the office workers themselves should be consulted, whether they had ideas about how a workplace should be run. Under this rubric, the last people who knew anything about anything were the knowledge workers.