Open Plan: A Design History of the American Office

In this history of the American open plan office, Jennifer KaufmannBuhler, an Assistant Professor in the Rueff School of Design, Art, and Performance at Purdue University, takes the reader on a journey through the evolution of the open plan work space and work culture itself. To do this, she considers workers’ peripheral issues, such as benefit packages, family photographs on cubicle walls, and spare systems furniture parts; matters that might be considered mundane but here are used to illuminate workers’ everyday lives and, thus, organizational culture as a whole. By reflecting on the experiences of workers of different genders, races, and abilities, Kaufmann-Buhler shifts the viewpoint from the single, often idealized generic worker, to the embodied experience of a diverse array of individuals. In its early days, open plan office design was considered a panacea for the social, organizational, architectural, and technological problems of the office space. As Kaufmann-Buhler writes, advocates frequently described it as a “transformative solution to the problems of contemporary organizations, a solution that would upend organizational hierarchy, support communication, and facilitate rapid change” (165), giving workers agency over their space and control over their work process. This book’s purpose is not to reinforce or challenge this point, but instead to untangle key drivers of the evolution of the workplace and identify the pivotal systemic issues surrounding this design model. At the fore is the system’s idealization of users as a homogenous “knowledge worker whose body, identity, and opportunity were conceptualized as universal and excluding workers’ whose bodies, identities, or job classifications were outside of that ideal” (14). Open Plan takes a thematic approach to explore the ways in which the economic considerations, futuristic visions, and conceptual and technological changes driving open plan offices intersect with the lived experiences of workers who actually use them. Managing change is a central theme in the first two chapters of the book, which puts idealistic design intentions and actual results into sharp contrast. Kaufmann-Buhler argues that, despite the language of egalitarianism used by American architects, designers, and organizations who discussed the open plan office as a step towards equality within the workforce, the practical manifestation of space Petra Probstner is an Associate Professor in Interior Architecture at Columbia College Chicago. pprobstner@colum.edu © 2021 Petra Probstner DOI: 10.1080/ 17547075.2021.1996826