The open-plan office

The open-plan office has become an urban archetype, engrained in our consciousness – an ineluctable and inescapable element of modernity.

But there is nothing particularly modern about the idea. It originated towards the end of the 19th century, when construction technology using steel beams allowed architects to create big, column-free spaces. These became the clerical equivalent of the factory floor, with workers seated at rows of desks, overlooked by executives in enclosed, glazed offices.

Significant change came, perhaps surprisingly, in postwar Germany. Partly in reaction to the extreme order, surveillance and hierarchy of the Nazi regime, a new, more informal office design began to emerge. Quickborner, a consultancy working alongside a Hamburg office furniture manufacturer, devised the Bürolandschaft concept (the “office landscape”). This comprised seemingly random clusters of desks and workspaces arranged as islands in a sea of carpet and pot plants.

In fact, this being Germany, the patterns were a result of a rigorous study of how office workers grouped themselves into units to address tasks. Instead of hosting ranks of clerks, these offices encouraged chatter, movement and informality. In this kind of layout a certain democracy prevailed. As workers were promoted, for example, they might stay in or near the same spot, avoiding the envy and dislocation that might have resulted from a move to a separate office.

In the US the landscape was solidified into a version of the older format as offices were sub-divided into cubicles while executives got window offices (corners remaining the biggest prize). Such arrangements ingeniously maintained the worst of both worlds.

Germany, meanwhile, along with Scandinavia, began to abandon the original open-plan model as they found that employees desired more control over their personal environment than the few personal items they were allowed on their islands. Corporate continental Europe began to drift back to quieter, individual offices with windows that could be opened and direct daylight.

The other outcome of the open-plan system has been “hot desking” or “hotelling”, in which itinerant workers are expected to settle wherever there is space for a laptop. It solves the problems of inefficient occupancy but creates new issues of personal space and a sense of belonging. This is linked to the “creative” workspace model, in which workers float around a teeth-clenchingly cliched funscape of brightly coloured breakout spaces, big kitchens and table football areas.

Today a hybrid of tech spaces and laboratories with their generous staircases, landings, write-up spaces and canteens seems to be setting a new open-plan pattern where cross-disciplinary breakthroughs happen.

Change is inevitable and constant in the open-plan office, but that elusive cocktail of communication and privacy is the key.

Edwin Heathcote