A micro history of the office

By Ian Silvera, Account Director

Used to work in an office?  Well here’s something to mull over at the virtual water cooler: how did the office, as we know it, come about? Unfortunately it’s not as simple as one of the multiple-choice quizzes your family, friends or workmates have asked/forced you to participate in over the past months.

The office has a fuzzy history, with claims that the Roman Empire, and its sprawling bureaucracy, first established a formalised place of work away from the home (which, in and of itself, is quite a modern concept).

The Medieval Ages, with mass agricultural work, would see solitude-seeking monks scroll quietly away at dedicated study stations. These are really better described as bureaus or studies, rather than offices.

For one of the first full-blooded offices, we have to look to the 18th Century and the East India Company, the multinational trading giant which headquartered itself at the neoclassical East India House in the City of London. The building saw 35 employees oversee the corporation’s controversial, bureaucratic and administrative affairs.

The latter half of that century would usher in the Industrial Revolution and, with it, mass urbanisation. The phenomenon would see cities swell in size as workers abandoned the countryside and their farming communities for steamy red-brick factories. 

The jobs created new opportunities and wealth, with a middle-class emerging in the Victorian era. The telephone (thanks to Alexander Graham Bell), the dictating machine (thanks to Thomas Edison) and other forms of mass communication also allowed separate work areas to be established away from the factory floor. 

These closed office spaces would be successfully challenged in the post-World War II climate that saw companies embrace the Bürolandschaft or “office landscape” philosophy, which encouraged egalitarian open areas between managers and their employees. 

American inventor Robert Propst, an initial advocate of the Bürolandschaft system, would design the Action Office furniture series in the 1960s in a bid to encourage and safeguard employee individuality and freedom with semi-enclosed workplaces. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York was the first organisation to adopt the furniture.

But the Action Office mutated over the years as managers cut costs and attempted to cram more bodies into rooms. The cubicles – or the sea of grey walls – were born and lasted throughout the ‘90s.

The bursting of the dot-com bubble and the recessions at the start of the 21st Century would help rid the world of the cubicles, with open spaces coming back into fashion and more research showing that physical interaction increases idea generation.

Since then, offices have become recruitment tools. There are slides, there are beanie bags and there are tennis table set-ups in order to attract new talent. Budding entrepreneurs and freelancers, meanwhile, could take advantage of cool co-working spaces. 

With lockdowns easing in Italy, Jordan and Thailand, and the UK now expecting an exit strategy in the very near future, there is no doubt that the office will be re-imagined once again and technology will be at the heart of what we do next.