Economics was the one thing Propst had failed to take into account. But it was also what triggered the cubicle’s runaway success. Around the time the Action Office was born, a growing breed of white-collar workers, whose job titles fell between secretary and boss, was swelling the workforce. Also, real estate prices were rising, as was the cost of reconfiguring office buildings, making the physical office a drag on the corporate budget. Cubicles, or “systems furniture,” as they are euphemistically called, offered a cheaper alternative for redoing the floorplan.
Another critical factor in the cubicle’s rapid ascent was Uncle Sam. During the 1960s, to stimulate business spending, the Treasury created new rules for depreciating assets. The changes specified clearer ranges for depreciation and established a shorter life for furniture and equipment, vs. longer ranges assigned to buildings or leasehold improvements. (Today companies can depreciate office furniture in seven years, whereas permanent structures–that is, offices with walls–are assigned a 39.5-year rate.)
The upshot: A company could recover its costs quicker if it purchased cubes. When clients told Herman Miller of that unexpected benefit, it became a new selling point for the Action Office. After only two years on the market, sales soared. Competitors took notice.
That’s when Propst’s original vision began to fade. “They kept shrinking the Action Office until it became a cubicle,” says Schwartz, now 80. As Steelcase, Knoll, and Haworth brought their versions to market, they figured out that what businesses wanted wasn’t to give employees a holistic experience. The customers wanted a cheap way to pack workers in.
Now, bearing in mind that the cubicle leveraged away the “bull pen” of rows of mere desks, where one’s workspace was a desktop and an in box, cubes aren’t all that bad. I suspect most of the animus against them has to do with dislike of work, work conditions, and office culture in general, with “cube hell” being a convenient (and sometimes justifiable) target.
But, then, I’ve been oddly fortunate enough to have office space for much of my professional career, so I’m probably not the right person to talk. And, given that so much of my job is spent (ugh) on the phone, hopefully that will remain true.
When I worked at Xerox, I started in a bullpen — a big room with about nine desks. I was told that it was the room where the Galileo was assembled, and I guess that Xerox must have leased some space to JPL. The ceiling was a good 30 feet high. There were no windows. It was noisy when there were more than about two of us in there.
Later, they put Steelcase system furniture in the same room. Eight U-shaped units were installed, each of which had plenty of bookshelves, lots more desk space than the steel government-style desks we had been using, and partitions with sound-deadening material. This was a big upgrade even though it closed things off a little and some folks might have felt claustrophobic. Each unit was about 8 by 8, and included a space just big enough to turn your chair around in. The panels along the sides and bottom of the U shape cut the sound down considerably (though not as much as they would have if the ceiling were lower), and made it possible for more than one person at a time to have a conversation on the phone. At the most, I think we had 7 people in there at once.
Later, they installed a network printer in the same room. Now the lack of real walls became a problem, because some people would hold conversations at the printer, and even those who didn’t made something of a racket coming and going for their printouts. Still later, some folks moved out (including John Todd and Ken Feuerman), and no one was hired to replace them. The three of us who were left in the room could use multiple units if we wanted them. I sometimes used a second computer in the unit that faced mine, and I occasionally used the additional desk space to spread things out on, but I really didn’t need any more drawers or bookshelves, and given my job, there wasn’t much of an advantage to me to have another unit available. Nothing I did required me to have that additional space.
The only concrete problem I can point to with the units we had was that conversations with three or more people were not possible. Two people could talk if they could find two currently unused units and if they kept their voices down. Three or more people had to borrow an office or a conference room. I don’t know if the cubicle had any significant effect on my productivity or not, and I don’t know if the cubicles had any significant effect on my psychology. I do know that we regarded it as an upgrade from the bullpen, and when I went to grad school and ended up in another bullpen for a short time (the graduate student’s office was for a brief time a converted classroom), I wished for a cubicle.