This is not the standard review of one or two books of industry interest, but rather a story told through the accounts and perspectives of many authors. It is the story of the office building – its beginnings, its Golden Age and its transformation into the “Theatre of Work.” The story unfolds in five acts, representing each time period in which the office building was shaped by three main Players:

  • The Gods: Inspired architects considered legends of the built environment who have attained cult status as “starchitects.”

  • The Giants: Corporations and individuals that are the wealth engines of the U.S. economy.

  • The Oracles: Professionals from many disciplines – interior design, urban planning, architecture, facility management, psychology, neuroscience, journalism – who have contributed to the concept of the “workplace industry.”

It is an epic tale about what was once an iconic symbol of The Gods’ vision and The Giants’ power, only to be abandoned by those disillusioned and uninspired by it; yet given new life and purpose through the ingenuity of The Oracles, compelling The Gods and Giants to reassess and reinterpret their creation.

Act 1: The Background (1920-30) – The Gods Arrive

Act 2: The Beginning (1945-80) – The Gods Build Boxes, While The Giants Grow and The Oracles Prep

Act 3: The Golden Age (1980-2010) – The Gods Abandon the Box, While The Giants Stumble and The Oracles Thrive

Act 4: The Transformation (2010-20) – New Players Step Into New Roles

Act 5: The Future (Re:20s) – Gods, Giants and Oracles are Unified and Galvanized Into Action

Act 1: The Background (1920-30)

In the 1920s, European architects were inventing a new architectural style influenced by growing modernism and the work of Swiss-French God Le Coubusier. Two of these architects, Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra, journeyed to Chicago, Illinois, USA, to work with American God Frank Lloyd Wright; subsequently moving to Los Angeles to establish themselves as West Coast Gods. Schindler designed a new type of house based on flexible spaces for working/living. Both he and Neutra designed houses with an emphasis on healthy environments. Of Schindler’s Los Angeles Hollyhock House, British architectural critic Reyner Banham said he designed it “as if there had never been houses before.”

In 1923, Herman Miller opened his furniture business, which would become one of the key suppliers for the interiors of newly built office buildings during this period. But he would soon be rivaled by Hans Knoll, whose new designs and materials from his experience working with the Bauhaus Gods ushered in a time of growth for the high-end workplace furniture industry.

In 1932, The Museum of Modern Art in New York City curated a groundbreaking exhibit of the new style of European architecture termed “International Style.” This introduced the U.S. to the revolutionary work of the modern movement, exemplified by the Bauhaus Gods. Five years later, Bauhaus God Walter Gropius arrived at Harvard University to teach with his colleague Marcel Breuer, catapulting an elite group of young architects into the modern movement.

Act 2: The Beginning: (1945-80)

As men returned home from the Second World War, some changed into a new uniform for jobs in management to fuel the wealth engine of growing corporations. The grey flannel suit, white shirt and tie differentiated these workers from the blue-collar laborers on the shop floor. They filled the bureaucratic jobs required to produce profits for the managerial capitalist economy. Some worked with real estate brokers and economic developers to build company offices, factories, and research and development labs. The Industrial Development Research Council (IDRC) emerged.

New offices were designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Kevin Roche and other Gods working for big architectural firms like Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (b. 1950), and the new type of interior design and architecture firm Gensler (b. 1965). They were enabled by the materials (glass, steel, concrete), technologies (mass production) and aesthetic (less is more) of the International Style. Designed by Mies, the Seagram Building in New York City (1958) is the epitome of the lasting influence of modernism in today’s office buildings. Its box-like slab with darkened windows concealed the interiors created by Philip Johnson, separating the work of architects for the structure, and the work of interior architects for the total office design. This building was prophetically thought to be “the symbol of the future in which men are controlled by machines."

Finnish-American God Eero Saaeinen became the master of the “Versailles of Industry,” a type of building to house research labs and offices for Giants like IBM and GM. The AT&T Bell Labs building in Holmdel, New Jersey, USA, for example – which is now a National Register Historic Landmark – became an “idea factory.” Mervin Kelly, who ran the lab from 1925-59, invented a work culture of creativity whose mantra was “move deliberately and build things.” And design and build things they did, including some of the most innovative and transforming technologies during its existence. The large, glass-clad building was filled with physicists, metallurgists and engineers who worked their scientific magic on critical communication inventions. Their workplace, also designed by Saaeinen, consisted of enclosed offices with doors that were always open, inviting collaboration and compelling interaction.

In the 1960s, as German design innovators focused on a new form of open-landscape planning for office interiors known as Burolandschaft, in the U.S., Herman Miller President Robert Propst created a new corporate workscape: the Action Office, a “facility based on change.” It was a modular kit of parts that combined walls, a desk surface and component parts, which assembled into the infamous cubicle that populated open-plan space design.

Meanwhile, The Oracles were in universities studying psychology, architecture and urban planning. They included Frank Duffy and Alexi Marmot from the U.K., and Frank Becker, Mike Joroff, Bill Mitchell, Marty O’Mara and Eric Teicholz in the U.S.

Act 3: The Golden Age (1980-2010)

In the late 1970s and early 80s, The Gods morphed into starchitects. While a number of celebrity architects could be classified under this portmanteau, Frank Gehry is at the top mainly for the Bilbao Museum in Spain. He created new excitement for undulating forms in architecture that used the latest technologies for truly out-of-the-box buildings. In 1991, Gehry designed a small-scale building for advertising agency Chiat/Day in Venice, California, USA. It is a totally reimagined office building, from the huge Claes Oldenburg Binoculars sculpture at the entrance to the fish-shaped conference room inside.

A playful ambiance had invaded the theatre of work. The grey flannel suit was replaced by hoodies and jeans. Ping-pong tables took the place of conference tables. A Goddess emerged. In 2006, Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid drew inspiration from the Bell Labs model and utilized new technologies to design the undulating mixed-use office/factory for BMW in Leipzig, Germany. A new Versailles for Industry was created in which offices and labs could view the main purpose of the business: the manufacture of products – in this case, new vehicles – on the factory floor. Just as the lines between work and play, blue- and white-collar, and office and factory were beginning to blur, The Oracles were emerging with new ideas on office design and practices.

In the 70s, American architect Robert Luchetti created the concept of activity-based working based on his organizational analysis of how work is performed in not one place, but different types of locations depending on the tasks. This practice has proved more enduring than the cubicle farm, which has become the symbol for all that is wrong with the office. Architect William Pena wrote the book linking architecture and interiors. The space-planning profession had now grown to maturity using the architecture programming methodology found in Pena’s “Problem Seeking,” first published in the 70s. In the early 80s, Frank Duffy authored the Orbit Study on the integration of new technologies in office design, sponsored by the U.K. Government, British Telecom, JLL and Steelcase.

Another Oracle who published his ideas for new office interiors was Frank Becker with “The Total Workplace: Facility Management and Eclectic Organizations” in 1990. In it, he describes the concept of the integrated workplace, which meant breaking down silos between HR, IT, FM and CRE, a concept that had yet to happen in the office world.

The speed of dissemination of The Oracles’ ideas was made possible by the founding of two professional associations: the International Facility Management Association (IFMA) in 1980 and CoreNet (formed for CREs with the dissolution of NACORE and IDRC) in 2002. Becker, Joroff, Duffy and Teicholz wrote about their workplace concepts during this period, spoke at association conferences and authored research publications. It is Chris Kanes’ first-hand account in “Where is My Office?” that tells his fascinating story of how The Oracles were able to realize their ideas when he was a CRE for Walt Disney and the BBC.

As The Oracles thrived, the managerial capitalist corporations started to fall apart. Hubris and greed led to the collapse of Giants Enron, Arthur Anderson and Peregrine Systems. Around the time of the financial crash of 2008, a new source of wealth and power was emerging on the U.S. West Coast with the rise of surveillance capitalism. Facebook founders and other techies brought a new wealth engine to marketing, as algorithms could help target products based on data collected from the systems’ users. The financial Giants floundered, while The Oracles helped CRE and FM teams create new types of offices situated in verdant Silicon Valley landscapes reminiscent of the college campuses that produced thousands of young engineers now working for Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Facebook and Google.

Act 4: The Transformation (2010-20)

Adam Neumann, a charismatic, 6’7” salesman, appeared on the office scene in 2010. This new brand of Giant was hawking a type of workplace for “coworking” – a perfect product for young entrepreneurs to rent space, as needed, through their early growth period. WeWork was Workspace-As-A-Service (WAAS), following the concept of Software-As-A-Service (SAAS) invented by the techies as a means of delivering apps for business applications in the cloud and pay as they needed them. The cult-like workplace Neumann and his cofounder designed began to crash; and after burning through mounds of investment funds, Neumann was ousted, and today his once soaring fiefdom is on the verge of WeBankrupt.

Eschewing a single building for office functions, reinvented tech campuses for Apple, Facebook and Google were designed by Gods Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, and newbies Thomas Heatherwick and Bjart Ingels in parklike locations. Foster designed a round, futuristic office building, Gehry an homage to the Burolandschaft design, and Heatherwick/Ingels focused on a sustainable, human-centric workplace.

In 2012, the United Nations defined 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to address the environmental crises, economic inequalities and social injustices for the years leading up to 2030. The SDGs were adopted by world leaders in 2015 at an historic U.N. Summit, presenting The Giants, Gods and Oracles with the opportunity to integrate responsible, sustainable, ethical and equitable policies and practices into workplace design and operations.

At the same time, the World Economic Forum announced we are in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and new technologies are emerging to transform the theatre of work and the stage upon which it is performed: the office building. The real estate industry responded with PropTech applications for intelligent buildings, smart homes, fin/tech, digital twins and virtual/automated work experiences, including the virtual community of the metaverse.

But the biggest transformative event of this period threatened to make the workplace irrelevant. The COVID-19 pandemic was a death knell for the office building as lights went out inside workplaces around the world.

Act 5: The Future (Re:20s)

At the start of the 2020s, we are mired in polycrisis: the effects of the pandemic persist, social injustice continues, along with war, inflation, political chaos, cyberattacks, worker strikes, increasing natural disasters and rising mental health issues. In order to prepare for life and work in the remaining years of this decade, we need to train our “tomorrowmind” to exceed resilience and adaptability to become “antifragile” – using disruption to grow stronger and more creative. It is an opportunity for The Giants, Gods and Oracles to combine their gifts and goals to become a new player on the world stage: The Apostles, advocating for human rights, championing the protection of our planet and crusading for a better future. The single-purpose office building will take on a reimagined form in this silo-busting era as mixed-use functions will become more prevalent for both existing and new buildings.

Recommended Reading:

1 Clive Wilkinson (2019) “The Theatre of Work,” Frame Publishers, Amsterdam.

2 Peter Turchin (2023) “End Times: Elites, Counter-elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration,” Penguin Press, New York.
3 Dorothy Neufeld (July 7, 2023), “Visualizing 1 Billion Square Feet of Empty Office Space,” visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-1-billion-square-feet-of-empty-office-space.
4 Nancy J. Sanquist (Jan/Feb 2023), “Re:Work in the Age of the Re:20s. The New Project of the IFMA Foundation’s Knowledge Management Committee,” IFMA’s FMJ, pp. 056-058.
5 Stephen Kinzer (Aug. 7, 2003), “A Jewel Courts a Better Setting,” The New York Times, nytimes.com/2003/08/07/garden/a-jewel-courts-a-better-setting.
6 Richard N. Langlois (2023), “The Corporation of the 20th Century. The History of American Business Enterprise,” Princeton Press, Princeton & Cambridge.
7 & 10 Nikil Saval (2014), “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace,” Doubleday, New York.
8 Alice T. Friedman (2010), “Eero Saarinen: Modern Architect in the American Century,” placesjournal.org/article/modern-architecture-for-the-american-century/.
9 Jon Gertner (2012), “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation,” Penguin Books, New York.
11 Robert Propst (1986), “The Office, A Facility Based on Change,” Birch Publishing, New York.
12 & 14 Chris Kane (2020, 2023), “Where is My Office? Reimagining the Workplace for the 21st Century,” Bloomsbury Business, London.
13 William Pena (2012: 5th edition), “Problem Seeking: An Architecture Programming Primer,” Wiley Publishing, New Jersey.
15 Shoshana Zuboff (2019), “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power,” Profile Books, New York.
16 Reeves Wiedman (2020), “Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork,” Hodder & Stoughton, London.
17 Nancy J. Sanquist, David Karpook, Fred Guelen (2018), “Transforming Corporate Real Estate for the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” Corporate Real Estate Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 165-79.
18 Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, Martin Seligman (2023), “Tomorrowmind. Thrive at Work with Resilience, Creativity and Connection, Now and in the Future,” John Murray Press, London.
19 Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2014), “Antifragile. Things That Gain from Disorder,” Random House, New York.
20 Gillian Tett (2015), “The Silo Effect,” Simoon & Schuster, New York.