Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  The charismatic and learned Drucker embedded himself in American corporations as a consultant and in American universities as a lecturer. His conspicuously civilized mien, combined with a luxuriant crop of black hair (in later years, his stark baldness would prove equally imposing), made him at once a forbidding and a seductive presence. He produced a stream of books, with unabashedly portentous titles about change—The New Society, The Age of Discontinuity—that commanded the attention of CEOs. His prose style was aphoristic almost to a fault, full of vatic pronouncements on the future of man, delivered with a tone of authority that no American management guru could muster. For businessmen who read no philosophy, Drucker was their philosopher. His manifest intelligence added luster to the otherwise monochrome language of management: discussing organizations and corporate structure, he moved with relative nonchalance among an impressive number of disciplines (the social sciences, history, economics) and, like his Austrian compatriots, spoke comfortably of epochs and continents, whereas most Americans languished in the faux-spiritual rhetoric of “self-actualization.” In the brutal corporate raider world of the 1980s and 1990s, the aging Drucker leveled criticisms against social inequality; he acquired a saintly reputation among executives who were obviously ignoring him. Today, after his hopes for a moral managerial class have drowned in globalization’s merciless tide, Drucker’s aperçus fill desk calendars and quotation books. Barack Obama has cited him as a favorite writer.

  Like McGregor, Drucker was a figure who inadvertently harmonized the impulses of the nascent counterculture with the outwardly stuffy world of business. Though hardly countercultural himself, Drucker’s concepts would prove useful to people in later years who wanted to make the office hospitable to the wilder world outside it. Over the course of the 1960s, Drucker came to expound one of the notions that would make him famous: the idea that a swelling group of workers was becoming central to the economy. They were middle-class employees who would never identify themselves with the “proletariat,” nor, in fact, with management. They were technical and professional workers who controlled what Drucker believed was becoming the most important resource of all: knowledge. Calling them “knowledge workers”—a term he coined in 1962 at the same time as, but independently of, another social theorist, Fritz Machlup—Drucker saw them as occupying a historic role in the making of a responsible society.

  In Drucker’s view, what was changing about work was the increasing need to apply knowledge to work. Knowledge as such, in the intellectual sense, was different. The mathematical formulas and theorems that existed in books were a form of knowledge useful to intellectual history, but mathematics as applied to, say, a space program was “knowledge work.” So, too, did advertising and marketing and various other new professions require the mental labor of workers, applying what they knew from various disciplines to the techniques of mass persuasion. It was one thing to be an expert in Freud or Newton in a university; another to use the insights of Freud to sell a toothbrush or to use Newton to build a ballistic missile capable of striking the Soviet Union.

  Knowledge work itself came from a historic shift, one that Drucker, like so many, traced to Frederick Taylor. But his version of the history was marked by a curious and useful elision. In Drucker’s account, Taylor came upon a working world characterized by rote, nearly mindless, activity. It wasn’t planned so much as willed: the workers simply worked harder rather than “smarter.” Until Taylor, that is: “Taylor, for the first time in history, looked at work itself as deserving the attention of an educated man.”19 Drucker’s subsequent description of the insensate labor of unskilled men in factories draws almost entirely from Taylor’s portrait of them—and accordingly condescends to their abilities to plan and organize work. In actual fact, it wasn’t so. Before Taylor, work was already organized by teams of factory workers, who in large part had control over how they worked. The knowledge they applied to work was largely “tacit” in nature, agreed upon among the workers themselves and developed through a silent or coded language, rather than “explicit” (to borrow a famous definition from the sociologist Michael Polanyi). What Taylor sought in particular—indeed, what constituted his signal obsession—was to extract this tacit knowledge from the workers and install it in another set of people, the “industrial engineers.” Drucker called them “the prototype of all modern ‘knowledge workers’ ”—a plausible assumption but one that excised the tremendous amount of knowledge that already existed in the work process.20 (Taylor lamented that after being taught “the one best way,” workers had a stubborn tendency to return to their own ways of working.)21 It was a useful fiction, and a common one, that helped to uphold a new class of technicians and professionals as the masters of an ever more progressive society, dependent on the application of knowledge to work. For the knowledge worker, Drucker held, was not simply a freelance professional but rather “the successor to the employee of yesterday, the manual worker, skilled or unskilled.”

  Social theorists all over appeared to agree that the labor market in the United States was changing dramatically, becoming less focused on manufacturing and more on goods and services—the age would get its first monumental treatment in sociologist Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society in 1973—but Drucker was the first to give the new age a hero, some years after his compatriot Schumpeter, seeing bureaucracy all around, had demanded one. Drucker’s explanation for the rise of the knowledge worker in the 1950s and 1960s remains striking. Rather than work itself changing, he believed the increasing life span of workers was changing the labor supply, and therefore changing the kinds of jobs available. An individual could imagine him- or herself working longer—in which case, it no longer made sense to drop out of high school, or avoid college, in order to enter the labor force. One didn’t need a high school education to land a desk in the steno pool; neither precalculus nor the history of the War of 1812 would serve you in your work. A kind of educational inflation, however, soon made a high school degree a requirement, as, in our time, a college degree has become, for working virtually any kind of office job. The jobs had not gotten more complex; the individuals working in them had. In other words, “knowledge worker” was the name for an overeducated office worker—someone whose capabilities far exceeded his or her position. “They expect to be ‘intellectuals,’ ” Drucker writes. “And they find that they are just ‘staff.’ ”22 Drucker’s explanation, in other words, was supply side rather than demand side: a larger educated population was prepared to do, and indeed desired, different kinds of work from before. It remained for the workplace, Drucker concluded, to adjust accordingly. This meant managing knowledge workers in order to elicit better performance: they would answer to the demands of knowledge, not to the demands of arbitrary authority, like a boss. Excellence, not output, would be the measure of productivity. This in turn suggested that the workplace had to become more performance based, less hierarchical, and more open to the ideas of its employees. It had to change shape, too: Drucker lauded the “campus” atmospheres of places like Bell Labs and Connecticut General as conducive to knowledge work.23

  Nonetheless, Drucker’s conception of “knowledge work” was almost inevitably vague, based on an argument more propagandistic than analytical. It seemed to answer to a felt need, a spirit of anxiety in the workforce itself, rather than a change in the kinds of work being done. Just as William H. Whyte and office workers like Alan Harrington had named the disease—bureaucracy—Peter Drucker named the still-to-be-hoped-for cure. The actual boundaries of knowledge work remained difficult for even more empirically motivated writers to define, its characteristics resistant to cataloging; still, the term spread among management theorists like an epidemic, suggesting that knowledge work was like pornography: you knew it when you saw it. Fritz Machlup, whose book The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States had appeared alongside Drucker’s early forays into social theory, attempted to measure the actual worth of knowledge. Machlup—like Drucker, an Aus
trian émigré who had studied under Hayek and von Mises—argued that “a succession of occupations … first clerical, then administrative and managerial, and now professional and technical personnel” were leading “a continuing movement from manual to mental, and from less to more highly trained labor.”24 Yet in his measurements, Machlup was nothing if not inclusive: knowledge workers for him were “all the people whose work consists of conferring, negotiating, planning, directing, reading, note-taking, writing, drawing, blueprinting, calculating, dictating, telephoning, card-punching, typing, multigraphing, recording, checking, and many others.”25 In other words: office work. Naturally, when he estimated its worth, he considered it the fastest-growing sector of the economy.

  Machlup was more generous than Drucker: for him, even the most mechanical white-collar tasks were part of knowledge work. Drucker and others would see it as a specific fraction of the workforce, the entrepreneurial elect within the bureaucratic machine of the office, the people who analyzed and judged rather than followed orders. Yet because all sorts of work within the office could qualify as “mental” (as Machlup correctly intuited), it became a futile labor to identify what precisely knowledge work was—and a far easier task to propagate it as a buzzword.

  In this respect, it’s probably better to think of knowledge work as the name of a desire, or a hope, rather than an actual feature of the workplace. The wispy outlines of the knowledge worker would be filled in, again and again, by designers and management gurus following in Drucker’s confident (if evanescent) footsteps. Each new thinker took the idea to mean something different, adding to its multifarious and slippery meanings. Despite this vagueness, and perhaps a little because of it, the idea of knowledge work would drive the central changes in office design up to the present day. Knowledge workers would be the heroes of a coming new society, an “information society,” in which they were the chief “symbolic analysts,” all the while rehabbing the urban core as a “creative class.” The tone of all values being revalued—somberly accounted for in Drucker—would become ever more strident and unhinged. Meanwhile, office designers worked patiently at realizing the material conditions for the utopia, when it arrived, so that it might feel at home. Perhaps creating the right space for knowledge work, the story went, would finally make it a real thing.

  Robert Propst, who never saw a new idea that he didn’t like, ate up the “knowledge worker” concept and began deploying it in his writings and memos to Herman Miller. With the imaginary knowledge worker filling his dream office design, space planning had more than mere ergonomics at stake. It provided a rationale, a spur, for his work.

  And then, as if providentially, a design emerged from Europe that would give his work on furniture an entirely new setting, as well as a vote of tremendous confidence.

  By and large, except in inspiring the glass office building envelope, Europe hadn’t provided design ideas for work spaces in generations. American offices had been the dominant form of design, with European offices at best furnishing smaller versions of the gargantuan American bull pens and skyscrapers. Indeed, the bull-pen office itself became known in Europe as the “American plan,” one that Europeans used sparingly, if at all. Without the enormous building plates characteristic of American offices, corridors and closed-door offices were the norm throughout western Europe. Two devastating continental wars had only sealed the lid on European cautiousness.

  But the postwar reconstruction led famously to unbelievable rates of growth, particularly in Germany, the most ravaged nation of all. The lightning-fast emergence of German manufacturing out of its cratered and ashen cities gradually broke the congealed tentativeness of managerial thinking and design. Architects had new license to think of bigger buildings. German émigrés who had spent the war in American exile returned to West Germany. Trailing them were clouds of American business thinking, from scientific management to human relations, that flooded Germany with an incredible rush. The terrible cost of the war had been a kind of “creative destruction.” With its desperate need to bury and move on from its recent murderous past, Germany was cleared for new thinking. Out of the ferment of ideas came a new approach to designing offices.26

  In 1958, the brothers Wolfgang and Eberhard Schnelle, languishing as assistants in their father’s furniture company, decided to light out on their own. They founded the Quickborner consulting group, a space-planning firm outside Hamburg. Space planning had hitherto been a negligible function of architectural practice—as long as the outside was shiny and glassy, and the inside was pleasantly furnished and Muzak filled, the architect felt he was done (Florence Knoll constituting a lonely exception). The Schnelle brothers, however, spied an opportunity lying dormant in the well-trod alleys between office desks. Though these regimented rows had once reflected the deepest impulses of Taylor’s acolytes, the gesture of apportioning a space between desks had over time become rote and uninspired, much as the corridor offices had been. The Schnelle brothers wanted to get beyond the conventional ways of dividing up an office, which claimed to rely vaguely on charts of organizational hierarchy but in actuality often derived from awards of status and prestige. Sure, on the level of individual psychology it made sense to give some managers closed-door offices and higher-ups corner offices with carpeting. But how did that at all help the work flow of the entire office? In their view, the office was an organic whole, made up of finely interlinking parts and an enormously complex network of paper flow. Yet most offices, whether consisting entirely of closed-door offices or open bull pens, hardly reflected this work flow. A new conception of the office was needed—one that was organic, natural, on a human scale.

  Through measurements of communication within offices, the type of space and level of privacy that each employee needed, and the amount of time that each employee needed to spend on the telephone versus interacting with other employees, the Schnelle brothers arrived at a solution. They called it Bürolandschaft, which translates literally as “office landscape.” As many at the time and since have noted, the translation is somewhat misleading, because “landscape” in the German phrase doesn’t carry any of the connotations of the natural world that it does in English. And yet there is, in fact, an affinity with certain planned “landscapes” of the natural world—namely, the classic Italian Baroque garden. In the sample plans the Schnelle brothers devised, the arrangement of desks seems utterly chaotic, totally unplanned—a mess, like a forest of refrigerator magnets. But, as with the seemingly “wild” overgrowth of a “natural” garden, the office landscape is more thoroughly planned than any symmetrical and orderly arrangement of desks. Imaginary lines wend their way around every cluster, delineating common pools of activity; between and through the undergrowth of clusters are invisible, sinuous paths of work flow. Rather than the coffee carts of the Crystal Palace trundling along at appointed hours, the Bürolandschaft insisted on the more flexible “break room,” where employees could retreat for conversation and coffee at their leisure. And, most startling of all, there are no closed doors in sight, no one boxed in, no executives enjoying commanding views in snug corners. At most, a few mobile partitions and plants shielded certain sections and workers from others.

  The uniformity of previous office design was so rigidly accepted by everyone that the free-form concept seemed at once promising and totally insane. Only the publishing company Bertelsmann was willing to commission the Quickborner Team to spend two years instantiating its ideas. A group of architects, engineers, and interior designers met with Quickborner’s systems consultants to work with Bertelsmann employees and devise an appropriate setup. The result was received as a kind of liberation. Signature European firms were soon falling over themselves to transform their stuffy, bottled-up environments into the breathing, lyrical, and above all flexible spaces of Bürolandschaft. Within a few years, office landscapes were blooming in Sweden (kontorslandskap!), and word began to make its way across the English Channel and the Atlantic.27 Articles in small architectural presses began report
ing on the German phenomenon, snagging readers with their smoothly scattershot arrays of little rectangular desks.

  Francis Duffy, a British architect and office historian, was a student when he first came across Bürolandschaft in an article by the renowned architectural historian (and fellow Englishman) Reyner Banham in 1964. Many years later he recalled the excitement it caused. “The building’s form was excitingly non-orthogonal,” he writes. “The interiors were rich in informal break areas, elegant planters and carpet! Workplaces were not arranged in regimented rows, like contemporary American offices, but in an organic and free flowing pattern, following, as Banham’s text explained, systematic studies of flows of information and patterns of interaction.”28 And above all, it was only an approach, not a one-model-fits-all design. “Once seen,” he wrote, “Bürolandschaft could never be forgotten.”29 The universal office solution had arrived. Duffy had been expected by his professors to follow slavishly the “glamorous” precedents set by the Lever House and its ilk, but he quickly became one of the most articulate advocates of office landscaping outside its home country. Robert Propst, who grew aware of the phenomenon around the same time,30 became a strong proponent in America. Quickborner established teams in both the U.K. and the United States, and in 1967 the first American office landscape was set up for DuPont. Soon New York’s Port Authority would ask Quickborner to propose landscapes for the hundreds of office floors rising at the tip of Manhattan in the two towers of the World Trade Center.

  A typical office landscape plan.

  Since each office had different needs and did different kinds of work, the way each office landscape looked should have been as wildly unpredictable as the “American plan” was stolidly always the same. And yet “flexibility” meant that even if the specific arrangements were different, all landscapes in fact had recognizably similar features. Reports from office landscapes by workers all roughly provided the same view. As one enters the office landscape, spartan dinner-table-like desks (reducing the number of vertical planes reduces noise) appear set entirely at random, with acoustic screens shielding noise and plants providing “organic” breaks in the floor’s wide, expansive stretch. Over time, however, a certain kind of order emerges. Secretaries are still pooled together, but at odd angles. Large tables enclosed by curved sound partitions make for the sole conference “rooms.” The chief executives are out on the floor but get apportioned conspicuously more space. Nearly every aspect of the design is mobile. In a way, the Quickborner Team had only carried out another revolution of the Taylorist wheel; freed from the model of the factory, it had added flexibility to Taylor’s sacred quest for efficiency.31