L'enfer des cubicules
How an art professor’s utopian ‘Action Office’ became a Dilbert-ian nightmare
In 1958, an art professor named Robert Propst set out to design the perfect office. As head of research for the Herman Miller furniture company, Propst began to study the meaning of the modern-day workplace. He conducted extensive studies of office workers: identifying their every inefficiency, useless motion and wasted second—in the wild hope that he might, through architecture, correct them. Propst is seen as an early inventor of “ergonomics.” His observations on the importance of periodic physical activity spurred his invention of the stand-up desk. His belief that “fortuitous encounter[s]” between employees fuelled creativity led him to design porous workspaces with plenty of meeting spots. When his magnum opus was released onto the American market in 1964, its clean lines, movable walls and swivel chairs were “received as a liberation.” Propst called his creation the “Action Office,” but today it is known as “the cubicle.”
By 2011, according to Nikil Saval’s new book, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, at least 60 per cent of working Americans performed their labour in some form of cubicle. But only seven per cent claimed to prefer it to other kinds of work environments. In popular culture, “cube farms” are depicted as stagnant, anonymous incubators of petty grievance (think Dilbert and The Office)—not the liberating engines of creativity and social mobility that Propst hoped they would be. “Man is born free,” Saval writes, playing on Rousseau, “but he is everywhere in cubicles.”