CURRENT RESEARCH

Designing the Postwar Office

The rise of the knowledge economy was one of the most important developments of the twentieth century. My newest research explores a turning point in the history of office work, the Bürolandschaft or “landscape office” movement of the 1960s. Of the many forms open offices have taken—from early secretarial pools to cubicle farms and beyond—it was easily the most avant-garde. It was also extremely influential, implemented by major corporations in workplaces around the world. Landscape offices were connected with:

• the evolution of computers

• new conceptions of creativity

• the rise of teamwork as a paradigm for white-collar labor

I write and speak about office history in relation to debates about the future of knowledge work. I have lectured on the history of landscape offices at Yale University, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, UCLA, and the Illinois Institute of Technology. This research was the subject of my 2018 fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. My most recent writing on office design:

WeWork Approached Physical Space as if It Were Virtual
• On the downfall of WeWork and the long history of comparing offices to computers

Too Much Information: Noise and Communication in an Open Office
• In praise of background babble

The Art of Work: Bürolandschaft and the Aesthetics of Computation
• Midcentury office design and the history of computer art