Observations on offices

All sorts of things have suffered from the post-2001 world recession, including the market for office furniture. However, demand for one thing, according to a recent report by Key Note, keeps on growing: the partition panel.

These omnipresent screens, covered in padded fabric and varying in height between roughly four and six feet, were first made by the American firm Herman Miller in the 1960s, as part of its "Action Office" system. In America, they are the raw material for cubicles, those univer- sal signifiers of white-collar alienation immortalised in Scott Adams's Dilbert books. Cubicles were designed as an improvement on the "bullpen" office: the serried rows of desks occupied by the pre-1960s typing pool, surrounded by private rooms for executives. Compared with the bullpen, cubicles were meant to provide some acoustic privacy. Whoever had this idea cannot have realised that sound waves travel above six feet.

British companies tend to use panels as an element of Burolandschaft (office landscaping), a concept developed by the Quickborner Team, a German management consultancy, and popularised in English-speaking countries by the architect Francis Duffy. Burolandschaft aimed to create pleasant and relaxed offices through grouping desks in "islands", adding foliage and paintings, and using shoulder-high room dividers. The initial idea was that such offices would be tailor-made for specific clients, a bit like corporate feng shui.

Yet office furniture is increasingly standardised, as it is monopolised by multinational firms and made subject to international health and safety regulations. So Burolandschaft now just implies an open-plan office with standard-issue generica such as filing cabinets, water coolers, artificial plants and motivational pictures.

According to management theory, the open-plan office helps to sweep away outdated hierarchies and inefficient bureaucracy, fostering creative interaction and teamwork. The gimmicky names for the layouts of trendy advertising agencies and web design companies - romp spaces, hot desks, caves and commons - suggest that they can turn work into one long, creative holiday. The reality is that open-plan offices allow firms to keep an eye on their workers and save money at the same time. In conventional closed office systems, too much square footage was taken up by linking corridors and by the areas behind doors. An employee in a cellular office is literally a waste of space.

If you think your open-plan office is a hierarchy-free zone, take a look at the seating. Firms spend a lot on office chairs because they wear out quickly, and have to conform to health and safety directives. So the lowliest office workers have quite high-tech chairs, with foam-filled seats, swivels, castors and levers to adjust the height. This has created a burgeoning market in swankier "executive" chairs for managers, with higher backs, leather covers, wider seats, greater adjustability and more generous padding, including "memory foam", which responds to an individual's body shape. The booming areas in the office furniture industry are those that either save on space or allow bosses to buy kudos. So much for the spontaneity and egalitarianism of the "borderless office".

Joe Moran lectures at Liverpool John Moores University

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