The pandemic also reminded everyone that open offices are germ-filled petri dishes. It proved that most people who used to work in an office can work equally well from home.

The design may also heighten office sexism and health troubles.įor convincing corporate real estate managers that open plans are bad ideas, no survey has had as much impact as an impromptu worldwide experiment, conducted during the past three years, called the COVID pandemic.

Instead, researchers have found, they drive workers into more isolation. It's now well established that open-plan offices fail to accomplish one of their major stated goals-increasing collaboration. In a sense it has been: dozens of recent surveys have recapitulated these findings. Apart from some references to ashtrays, the survey might as well have been written in 2020. The respondents-358 employees at 18 companies-complained about noise, distraction and soullessness. like a completely open plan with little privacy,” the author wrote. The writing has been on the cubicle partition since the very first survey comparing this to other office designs was published in 1970. worked in one, according to a survey by global architecture and design firm Gensler. By 2020 two thirds of knowledge workers in the U.S. The open-plan office, in contrast, has spread far and wide. Freon began to be phased out in 1987 because it was destroying Earth's ozone layer. At DuPont, the new arrangement housed the company's Freon refrigerant division. Those designers held that companies increasingly relied on professionals-or knowledge workers, a term coined in 1959-who bristled at corporate hierarchies and needed more opportunities to collaborate. This was the first major corporate adaptation of an “open-plan” office in the U.S., following the latest thinking by German architectural designers. In one corner, they provided a lounge with armchairs and Eero Saarinen end tables. The firm put almost everyone into one big room with low partitions. In 1967 chemical company DuPont gutted a floor of an office building in Delaware and rebuilt it.

Open the office