Open Plan: A Design History of the American Office

Description

Originally inspired by a progressive vision of a working environment without walls or hierarchies, the open plan office has since come to be associated with some of the most dehumanizing and alienating aspects of the modern office. Author Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler traces the history and evolution of the American open plan from the brightly-colored office landscapes of the 1960s and 1970s to the monochromatic cubicles of the 1980s and 1990s, analyzing it both as a design concept promoted by architects, designers, and furniture manufacturers, and as a real work space inhabited by organizations and used by workers. The thematically structured chapters each focus on an attribute of the open plan to highlight the ideals embedded in the original design concept and the numerous technical, material, spatial, and social problems that emerged as it became a mainstream office design widely used in public and private organizations across the United States. Kaufmann-Buhler's fascinating new book weaves together a variety of voices, perspectives, and examples to capture the tensions embedded in the open plan concept and to unravel the assumptions, expectations, and inequities at its core.

Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler is Assistant Professor of Design History at Purdue University, USA, where her research focuses on the interactions and intersections of people, space, and things in everyday life. She has published articles in The Journal of Design History and Design and Culture, and she co-edited the essay collection Design History Beyond the Canon (Bloomsbury, 2019).

The book includes a rich array of vintage photos tracing the development of the open-plan office in the U.S..... * The Wall Street Journal * Kaufmann-Buhler shifts the viewpoint from the single, often idealized generic worker, to the embodied experience of a diverse array of individuals ... Design history will benefit from more histories that, like this one, acknowledge peoples' complex lived and sometimes fraught experiences with iconic, celebrated designs. * Design and Culture * Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler's comprehensive survey of the postwar American office has arrived with exquisite timing just as the coronavirus crisis has ignited an intense global debate about the future of work, what the purpose of office should be, and how it might be improved through design to become more equitable, healthy, and sustainable. * Design Issues * Effectively expands and energizes the existing literature on office design. Kaufmann-Buhler throws new light on features of the modern workplace that have resisted critical analysis due to their overwhelming ubiquity. Indeed, it is precisely the criticality of its approach, its commitment to interrogate the inequities endemic in white-collar work, that makes this text essential reading not only for scholars, but for anyone who has questioned the values and virtues of office work. * Journal of Design History * Open Plan takes us into the complex world of the post-war American office, not just through the eyes of the architects and designers and managers who created it but also through those who worked in it. From the concept of 'Burolandschaft' to Herman Miller's Action Office to the 'alternative' office and beyond, this highly original text shows us how the open workplace operated within the broader social, cultural, technological and political context of the period. -- Penny Sparke, Kingston University, UK As coronavirus creates unprecedented disruptions to workplaces and working patterns, the time is ripe for this rich study of an earlier revolution in office design: the postwar rise of open-plan offices and systems furniture. At the heart of open plan design was a conviction that offices had to accommodate change flexibly. But what happened when architects' ideals of managed change clashed with users' unplanned occupations? This engaging book counters the story of well-known office and furniture designers with that of less visible producers, managers and workers, producing a nuanced account of open-plan in all its variations. -- Barbara Penner, University College London, UK Weaving together histories of interior design, architecture, and organizational management, Kaufmann-Buhler offers a provocative critique of the open plan office in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She delves into the history of office systems, furniture, and idealized plans, and then interrogates it all with an eye on the "messy reality" of how any one of us occupies a work space day in, day out. Written in engaging prose, with archival illustrations, this book demonstrates how the open plan office structures privilege in the workplace, compels certain behaviors, and ultimately shapes the working lives of all users. -- Kristina Wilson, Clark University, USA Kaufmann-Buhler offers a wide-ranging design history of open plan offices in the twentieth and twenty-first century. This well-written book does a deep dive of the archives and provides the reader with a nuanced assessment of work from myriad perspectives. How you think about, conceptualize, and understand office culture will change after reading this excellent book. -- David Brody, Parsons School of Design, USA Through this work Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler provides a meticulously researched design history of one of the most significant developments in corporate interior architecture of the twentieth century. Open Plan is a richly detailed and fascinatingly illustrated description of huge value to anyone with an interest in office culture in its widest sense. -- Paul Atkinson, Sheffield Hallam University, UK As the Covid-19 pandemic restructures how and where Americans work - potentially for the long-term - Open Plan takes on ever greater significance. An earlier shift to the open plan office after World War II may have revolutionized the spatial organization of work, but it failed to deliver on its promise to make jobs more egalitarian and less reinforcing of existing hierarchies of gender and race. At a time when the home is increasingly becoming the workplace, Kaufmann-Buhler's fascinating book has much to teach about the hopes and hazards of radical transformation in our physical environments. -- Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University, USA Open Plan goes beyond the stereotypical downsides of cubicle life to consider deeply who belongs in the American office: whose bodies fit, whose ideas are incorporated, and who is encouraged to move around and experiment with design at work? At the heart of Kaufmann-Buhler's analysis are close readings of open plan systems not as stylish photographs or curious furniture arrangements, but as artifacts of corporations seeking progress by design, but unwilling to genuinely commit to all members of their workforce - especially women, people of color, and people with disabilities. -- Bess Williamson, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA