Cubed

by Nikil Saval

  When I asked Francis Duffy whether he believed that Dutch offices like Interpolis and its ilk were the future of the office, he replied that they seemed to be “chinks of light in the situation” but that they weren’t radical enough. To go further, we had to change not just offices but cities themselves. Office design was advanced; it was the supply of offices that was regressive.

  For over a century, the dominant model of office development—in the United States and the U.K. particularly, but now also in emerging economies, like China and India—has been speculative. Offices get built not for specific purposes but to satisfy imagined future demand. This has resulted in the spectacular skylines that people admire, from Vancouver to New York and from Kuala Lumpur to Shanghai, at a terrible cost: human, environmental, and otherwise. Development schemes, whether grand or minimal, rarely survive financial crashes, and the 2008 crisis has left a lot of office carcasses lying around. Drive around office park corridors near Princeton, New Jersey, and in Northern Virginia, and you’ll see dozens, maybe hundreds of boxy office buildings with “For Lease” signs out front, advertising their many thousands of square feet of rentable space. Across China, you can find ghost cities of empty business districts, with towers crowding empty downtowns, rising over unused streets into skies viscous with smog. In Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, an unfinished office tower, Torre David, has infamously been taken over by squatters, who have developed their own informal skyscraper community.

  But even offices that are used are wasteful. Most of the time they’re empty (though the lights are often still on), and even during working days some estimates suggest that people are at their desks only about a third of the time. Businesses can use that sort of statistic to cut down desk sizes and crush people into less space, but the lesson is much larger than a real estate one. In Bengaluru, India, where my family is from, the sprawling campus of the software company Infosys is out in a special economic zone called Electronic City. It has a water and electric supply separate from, and better than, the city of Bengaluru itself. The campus is extraordinarily well landscaped, filled with careful floral arrangements haunted by rare butterflies. Bengaluru was once known as the “garden city,” and I still recall it as a sleepy, relatively small South Indian town in the 1980s. A decade later, the country’s economy had liberalized, and Bengaluru became the center of the country’s burgeoning information technology sector, and the fastest-growing city in India. But its infrastructure was never maintained at a level to sustain such growth; most of the city’s best companies moved out to special zones like Whitefield and Electronic City—to garden cities of their own.

  Infosys’s campus consists of many “modern”-looking glass buildings, originally designed to project a “global” image to visitors; among the most striking, or bizarre, on the Electronic City campus is a solid-glass reflective block with a transparent sphere scooped out of the center, known affectionately to Infosys employees as “the washing machine building.” A representative of the company insisted to me that such buildings are part of Infosys’s past and are gradually being greened.21 Green or not, outside a city with a level of poverty hovering around 30 percent, the benefits being apportioned among the offices seem to be particularly unequal, not to mention unsustainable. What’s more, the design inside is hardly progressive. Infosys’s buildings were packed tightly with cubicles; and another campus I visited, General Electric’s research facility out in Whitefield, was the same. When I asked a representative of GE why they had chosen to use cubicles, he replied, “How else do you design offices?”22

  In his book Work and the City (2008), Duffy suggests that the supply chain needs to be completely reordered so that use becomes the primary criterion for creating offices, not speculation. The suggestion isn’t purely a fanciful one. The phenomenon of “co-working,” something that has exploded in the last decade, is evidence of a new attitude toward building use. Co-working can take several forms, but the most basic is the provision (for a fee) of a shared office facility (desks, conference rooms, coffee) for freelancers who want to get out of their apartments and be sociable in an office setting. These office settings are almost universally classic millennial “creative” offices: open plan, vintage furniture, bicycle racks, whiteboards. One of the co-working spaces I visited, Indy Hall in Philadelphia, consisted of cheap IKEA furniture that was easy to put together and just as easy to dismantle and throw out. Most members had “flex” memberships, which meant that they came in rarely; most didn’t use it as their primary office. Alex Hillman, one of the co-founders of the space, told me that Indy Hall was competing not with other offices but with its members’ homes. The space was outfitted with well-indented couches and slightly rickety bookshelves, a full kitchen with freshly washed dishes drying next to the sink, and a fridge full of homemade beer. On the shelves I saw the usual business classics with some slightly more hacker-ish additions: a biography of Steve Jobs, Lawrence Lessig’s works on free culture, and The Essential Drucker.

  The hidden promise of co-working is of course serendipitous encounters with like-minded entrepreneurs. The amount of business-speak expounded on the virtues of co-working—and the conditions it creates for “creative collisions” and “radical collaboration”—has been voluminous. (Said Tim Freundlich, one of the founders of HUB, a co-working space for social entrepreneurs: “The tectonic shift in how people, especially millennials, want to physically go to work and the understandings emerging around the utility of rapid prototyping, collaboration and ‘creative collision,’ married to the surge in having sustainability and one’s values incorporated into our work all make this type of model successful.”23 Got that?)

  And yet co-working has more potential than a one-company office to make encounters a genuine proposition: It seems more likely that you would meet someone useful outside your delimited field of work than you would in it. If you’re working on, say, a toy design, but you know nothing about social media, it’s possible that you might strike up a conversation with someone who understands marketing and would be willing to help (also for a fee). Despite the impressive strangeness of actually paying to go to an office (when freelancing was supposedly going to keep you out of one), co-working has proved immensely popular. As of 2012, there were eighteen hundred co-working spaces in the United States—a figure that has doubled every year since 2005—and there were at least ninety thousand people who were dues-paying members of a facility, half of whom were in the United States.24 Some companies have predictably seen co-working as an opportunity to decrease costs. In 2011, the California electronics company Plantronics told about 175 members of its staff that they no longer had desks. They had the option of working from home; commuting to the office (where presumably they’d have to share space); or taking a desk at NextSpace, a co-working building, in San Jose. About a dozen took Plantronics up on the offer—though it wasn’t one that they could exactly refuse.

  But co-working also offers the model in which a company shares a space or small building with other companies, such as GRid70 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the furniture company Steelcase, the marketing company Amway, the grocery chain Meijer, and the shoe company Wolverine Worldwide all overlap, and all share ideas, meetings, and, occasionally, food. Zappos in Las Vegas and Google in London have opened up their office spaces to strangers—hoping for yet more “creative collisions” to take place.25 When I visited GRid70 in May 2013, I was impressed by the genuine openness and informality of the work spaces. Presentation spaces were shared across the companies, and I saw people from different organizations popping in to watch how other businesses did work.

  For the flexible workplace, a new crop of flexible furniture styles are coming up. In their book, Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration, the Stanford Design School professors Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft take examples from their work with students to come up with designs for office environments. Moving screens for impromptu partitions, foam blocks for informal seats, whiteboard sliders to seg
ment rooms and start meetings, large tables for projects, and flip-top tables for storing unfinished projects: it’s the old Robert Propst model of creating space, one that is flexible and “forgiving.” Though Doorley and Witthoft make allowances that people will occasionally need to find space and room to think, the emphasis falls firmly and irrevocably on collaboration. Even their offices, which I visited in the spring of 2012, were designed along an open plan.

  In a world of upheaval, the old furniture companies that dominated the office market—particularly Steelcase and Herman Miller—are struggling and shifting back to basics: to detailed behavioral studies of office workers and their needs. The prospect of a single supplier catering to an entire office building—as Steelcase did in the 1970s with the Sears Tower—no longer animates the industry. Paul Siebert, director of research and strategy at Steelcase, told me that he saw tremendous difficulties facing office designers in the years ahead. “I think in terms of work-space design, in some ways, there needs to be or there’s likely to be a new kind of emergent discipline that’s integrative. In other words, interior designers are struggling, hard, to be relevant and so are architects. And so are space planners and so are product designers.”26 Both Steelcase and Herman Miller have intensified their use of anthropological techniques—participant observer, video ethnography, object testing—to understand office workers’ behavior and to design around behavior rather than attempt to influence or change it. Herman Miller’s most recent furniture solution, Living Office, represents a stripped-down approach to the office along the lines of old Robert Propst. Short, waist-high partition walls were constructed out of big foam blocks that could be easily shifted around. Tall blue cushioned three-seat couches with wings could be massed together to form impromptu conference rooms. Everything was flexible. Reaching back for an old metaphor, the company called each potential arrangement a “Living Office landscape.” “In a Living Office,” it advised, “people should immediately grasp what they can do, where they can go, what things are for, and why they are the way they are.” The same company that had given birth to the most reviled feature of the American workplace was now looking back to its very human-scaled origins.

  Indy Hall, a co-working space in Philadelphia. CJ Dawson Photography

  When I visited the Herman Miller offices in Zeeland, Michigan, it was chiefly to plumb the Propst archives, to see the genesis and apotheosis of the Action Office. But in the company’s own new work space, it had shifted to a largely open-plan space: you entered confronted by an espresso bar and saw executives out alongside the junior staff. Though there were tons of private meeting rooms and colorful offices with George Nelson swag-leg desks, there was not an Action Office in sight. Eventually, I was taken to the local manufacturing plants. As I walked along the steel pedestrian bridge above the assembly-line floor, I was overwhelmed with the sweet smell of plywood. There, beneath me, workers in goggles were wrapping giant sheets of plywood in fabric: the still-booming business of the cubicle.

  GRid70, a co-working space for multiple companies, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Courtesy of Steelcase

  Herman Miller’s retort to its own Action Office—the Living Office (2012). Courtesy of Herman Miller

  For the moment, despite the adoption of co-working-style spaces by larger companies, the phenomenon appeals to only a small segment of the workforce. But that segment is expected to grow. Projections by software company Intuit suggest that by 2020 freelancers, temps, day laborers, and independent contractors will constitute 40 percent of the workforce; according to Greenwald’s calculations, it might even be 50 percent. Even this might underestimate the amount of casualized labor the country should expect. Not all of these, of course, will be office workers. But it seems likely that a substantial number of office workers will go freelance, or at least spend some significant portion of their lives freelancing.

  Here is where the question of “autonomy” returns. From the perspective of those employed in the permanent workforce, freelancers and temps might seem to enjoy more autonomy: they determine either the kind of work they do (freelancers) or the length of the contract they want to serve out (temps). But contingent labor is also the sort that doesn’t easily get to make demands beyond that. Freelance contracts are notoriously difficult to enforce; the looser the labor market, the tighter the control companies have over their workforces. According to Freelancers Union, which helps independent contractors get health benefits and other protections, over 77 percent of freelancers have had trouble collecting payment at some point in their lives. The number of freelancers and other forms of informal employment may itself be underestimated. In this respect, the United States is returning to the preindustrial era in a different way from what Erik Veldhoen implied. Back in the mid-nineteenth century, the labor market was vast and unregulated, and workers weren’t counted in any systematic way. With an increase in precarious employment, or the precariousness of permanent employment, work appears to be moving not forward but back: back to an earlier era of insecurity. It’s not a coincidence that the office itself may also be disappearing, at least in the form that it arose at the beginning of the twentieth century.

  Flexibility doesn’t have to be one more trick in the managerial guidebook for keeping workers docile and consenting. Flexibility, like technology, is a tool, an opportunity: it lies there, inert, until someone uses it. The willingness of workers to discard status privileges like desks and offices is not just a sign of giving in to executive demands for cost control; it also suggests that the career path that defined the white-collar worker for generations—from the cubicle to the corner office, or even from the steno pool to the walk down the aisle—is coming to a close, and that a new sort of work, as yet unformed, is taking its place. It remains for office workers to make this freedom meaningful: to make the “autonomy” promised by the fraying of the labor contract a real one, to make workplaces truly their own. “Whatever history they have had is a history without events; whatever common interests they have had do not lead to unity; whatever future they have will not be of their own making,” wrote C. Wright Mills in the middle of the last century. The coming years will test the truth of that prophecy.

  Acknowledgments

  This book is chiefly a work of synthesis; without the incredible and ongoing labor of scholars whose work I cite in my notes, it would not be possible. I am also grateful to the libraries of the following institutions, and to their librarians, staff, and security officers: the New-York Historical Society; Columbia University; Stanford University; University of Utah; and University of Pennsylvania.

  For editorial and research assistance: Donald Albrecht, Bette Alexander, Karina Bishop, Carla Blumenkranz, Benjamin Buckley, Kim Buckley, Judy Candell at the Department of English at Stanford, Amanda Claybaugh, Liz Clinkenbeard at GitHub, Georgia Collins at DEGW, Nicholas Dames, Marije den Hollander at Rijksgebouwendienst, Stephen Distinti, Francis Duffy, the staff of Joseph Fox Bookshop, Edward Morgan Day Frank, Brian Gallagher, Joe Gallagher, Richard Greenwald, Mark Greif, Katie Hasse at Steelcase, Lara Heimert, Coralie Hunter, Gloria Jacobs and Linda Baron at the Herman Miller Archives, Sadaf Khan at Infosys, Kate Kingen, Benjamin Kunkel, Mark Lamster, Alexandra Lange, Louis Lhoest at Veldhoen + Company, Allison Lorentzen, Chidambaram Maltesh at General Electric, Mark McGurl, Jeremy Medina, James Melia, Franco Moretti, Joan Ockman, Bruce Robbins, Marco Roth, Jim Rutman, Mark Schurman at Herman Miller, Jacob Shell, Katherine Solomonson, Nathaniel Sufrin, Dayna Tortorici, Juriaan van Meel, Astrid Van Raalte at Microsoft Schiphol, Erik Veldhoen, Jon Vimr, Kanye West, Alex Woloch, Hannah Wood.

  For their mentorship and support: the Garrisons, everyone at n+1, Keith Gessen, Chad Harbach, Edward Orloff, Gerald Howard.

  For everything: my parents, and my brother.

  This book and its author are dedicated to Shannon.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. In neglecting the wider world of work, I less justifiably focus on films and novels to the exclusion of television
, more powerful a cultural force now than in Mills’s time. Cubed is in that sense a partisan work, not seeking to tell the entire cultural history of the office, but seeking out those moments in culture where narratives of office life responded to or even helped shape its social world.

  2. C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 353.

  1: THE CLERKING CLASS

  1. Benjamin Browne Foster, Down East Diary, ed. Charles H. Foster (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1975), quoted in Michael Zakim, “Business Clerk as Social Revolutionary; or, A Labor History of the Nonproducing Classes,” Journal of the Early Republic 26, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 580.

  2. Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), in Billy Budd and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 1986), 8.

  3. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851; New York: Penguin, 2001), 4.

  4. Melville, “Bartleby,” 4.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Ibid., 8.

  7. Ibid., 11.

  8. Ibid., 12.

  9. Ibid.

  10. “Marginalized: Notes in Manuscripts and Colophons Made by Medieval Scribes and Copyists,” Lapham’s Quarterly 5, no. 2 (2012): 155.

  11. Evelyn Nakano Glenn and Roslyn L. Feldberg, “Degraded and Deskilled: The Proletarianization of Clerical Work,” in Women and Work, ed. Rachel Kahn-Hut, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and Richard Cloward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982): 204.

  12. Brian Luskey, On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 6. Luskey notes, however, that the census did not disaggregate private-sector workers from those in municipal government, nor those in law offices from clerks in countinghouses.