16 August 2022. Offices 2 | Raymond Briggs
The fight for office space // Hiding politics in plain sight
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1: The fight for office space
This is the second part of a two part review of Gideon Haigh’s book The Momentous, Eventful Day. In Part One I discussed issues of gender and control.
One of the most engaging sequences in Gideon Haigh’s book The Momentous, Eventful Day is about the introduction of the despised office cubicle – which was intended as a positive idea to open up the office, not as the cot cost cutting measure satirised in Dilbert cartoons and the film office space.
Haigh summarises the challenge of the office designer like this:
The office designer faces one of the designs supreme challenges: the reconciliation of management to wish to supervise with their need to delegate, with workers impulse to cooperate and their desire for privacy. No two people have quite the same way of working, meaning that at a certain point every office configuration will be on satisfactory to a proportion of its occupants (p.55).
Office design took a great leaps forward in the 1950s, through Raymond Loewy’s humane design for the New York Lever building, and for the low-rise headquarters of Connecticut General, the forerunner of the office campus.
In Europe, German designers Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle developed the idea of the burolandschaft. The brothers brought the principles of cybernetics into the office, designing fluid spaces that could follow patterns of interaction.
If Lever House and the Connecticut General building preserved the privilege space of its executives, the Schnelles wanted to "eliminate the hierarchical order and unite the entire staff from its head down to the last typist". It was a vision of the business as egalitarian, organic, even social democratic.
Their work was popularised in the US by Robert Propst, in an influential 1966 article. Haigh sees Propst as the office equivalent of the atomic scientist Robert Oppenheimer, and if that seems overblown, Propst was also
an idealistic thinker whose invention was put to purposes at odds with his hopes.
Working with George Nelson, Propst created the Action Office, a modular furniture system designed to allow privacy and interaction appropriate to every style of working. The designs received enthusiastic reviews, and sold badly.
Action Office II followed quickly, now with padded partitions.
In his writing about the office Propst talked about the counterculture, about social change, and about technological revolution. After all, this was the 1960s. And Action Office II was far more successful. Haigh adds a cautionary note:
(I)t wasn’t because they were listening to Steppenwolf or Simon & Garfunkel that corporate treasurers liked Action Office II: not only were the partitions tax efficient, but they also made for incontrovertible savings in horizontal space, accommodating more workers (p.68).
(Action Office II, as intended by the designers. Action Office, via Dezeen.)
In his 1968 book The Office, Propst showed the partitions as honeycombs connected together at 120°. In practice they were invariably used at 90°, replicating traditional office designs. As the designer Francis Duffy observed,
It took five seconds for Action Office to turn into a box.
While Haigh describes his book as ‘a requiem’, but he also makes it clear that it is not an obituary. It was a written during the pandemic, at his kitchen table, at a time when there were widely divergent views on the future of the office.
Since then I think, we have learnt that people hate commuting more than they hate the office, but they really hate commuting.
The twin ideas of the ‘home office’ and of ‘telecommuting’, run almost exactly in parallel over half a century. Communications technologies, personal computers, and business models such as outsourcing (invented and named by Ross Perot’s company EDS in the 1970s) had been eroding the traditional idea of the office for half a century.
The conventional office has been under attack for almost as long. Philip stone and Robert Lucchetti published their article ‘Your office is where you are’, as long ago as 1985, in which they proposed that the office was "an activity rather than a place”.
One of the less remarked effects of all of this has been the shrinking of office space, from 25 square-foot per employee to 10 square feet—which also requires an open plan office.
And the idea that space and privacy matters in the office runs right through the book. Towards the end Haigh surmises that one of the reasons why workers welcomed working from home when the pandemic arrived was that they got their privacy back:
(N)o need to worry about being overheard by the wrong ears, or staff on the desk inviting prying eyes; no need to feel hot or cold according to the temperature is regulated by others; no need to print and print for a day on display.
The final chapter has a crisp review of some of the recent research on work and the pandemic.
For me three things stood out from reading this short history.
The first is the role of office buildings and projects in corporate power:
(T)hose grandiose pleasure domes of Facebook, Apple, and Google, embodying the founders’ vision and the shareholders’ wealth, speak to sensations as old as time. As Louis XIV’s great Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert noted: "nothing marks the greatness of princes better than the buildings that compel the people to look on them with awe” (p.115-16).
The second was the sense of the office as a place that shaped our social relations, and in ways that do fulfil social needs:
In excitement at its dissolving, we are in danger of forgetting needs that the divide of work and home satisfied... In elegantly defending her former office life, Financial Times’ Lucy Kellaway describe this as the greatest loss she felt and working from home: suddenly she felt like the same person everywhere, and it was a boring’ (p.118-19).
The third is a reminder the office work isn’t going away, what ever happens to the office. This is Elizabeth Patton, who wrote a history of the home office:
(W)orking at home in your favourite T-shirt or pyjamas is still labour.
Haigh is an enviously elegant writer. For me, the cover price of the book was justified by his description of the Harvard Business Review as the place “where the conventional wisdom goes to audition”. Or his summary of Michael Jensen’ insidious article ‘Theory of the Firm: Managerial behaviour, agency costs and ownership structure’ which did far more than Milton Friedman to launch the long cycle of short-termism created by ‘shareholder value’ and executive enrichment. It was, Haigh notes, “dense with mathematics and unexamined assumptions”.
This is a rich book but also an easy read. It covers a lot of ground, and much of it unfamiliar, without ever seeming dense.
Notes from Readers
My thanks to Richard Leeming, who tweeted a note to me yesterday about the first part of this review, on gender:
2: Raymond Briggs: hiding politics in plain sight
I wanted to remember the outstanding illustrator Raymond Briggs, who died last week, and a post by Olivia Ahmad, at the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, gives me the opportunity. Briggs produced dozens of classic illustrated books, from Fungus the Bogeyman to The Snowmen to Where the Wind Blows, to Ethel & Ernest, about his parents, all full of quotidian detail. When my son was a lot younger we used to read Ug: Boy Genius of the Stone Age, which has a lot of good stone-related jokes in it.
If there’s a thread running through Briggs’ work, it’s about the politics of experience. He came from the most of ordinary of homes. His father Ernest was a milkman, his mother Ethel a maid. But in the days when grammar schools mopped up the smarter working class kids, Briggs was able to get from a grammar school to art college.
((C) Raymond Briggs. From Ethel & Ernest.)
His art college teachers were’t impressed that Briggs wanted to be an illustrator, but he needed to work and he also seems to have understood that genre brought its own freedom:
“Below painting comes illustration… below that comes cartoons… then, below the gutter, are the sewers – strip cartoons! Comics! Ugh! The very cesspits of non-culture…”.
I think that the quotes come from an interview that Olivia Ahmad did with Briggs a few years ago, although that’s not clear from the piece.
His own background comes through almost of his work, in a way that was missing from illustration at the time: Father Christmas, for example,
represented the bearded icon as a working-class man, a perspective hugely underrepresented in publishing.
(Briggs) “His job is very much that of the working man. It is a cross between a postman, a milkman, a coalman and a sweep. It is cold, lonely, hard and dirty. No wonder he grumbles a lot.”
Fungus the Bogeyman—which I think was the first Briggs’ book that I noticed, similarly deals with the underside of life:
The book celebrates all things dirty and grimy: “I wanted to show the petty nastiness of life – slime and spit and dandruff, all this awful stuff which is slightly funny because it detracts from human dignity and our pretensions… everyone’s got that in their life. Everyone has to deal with disgusting things.” Now we see books all the time that are full of the essential grub of life, but in 1977, this was a bold new idea.
His parents pop up in some of his more explicitly ‘political’ books, such as Where The Wind Blows:
(H)is characters Jim and Hilda were based on his parents and featured in two books, Gentleman Jim and When the Wind Blows. In both, Jim and Hilda trust the police and the state, but are badly let down by wealth inequality and nuclear war.
His graphic novel biography of his parents, Ethel & Ernest, drawn when he was in his 60s, is a quiet masterpiece.
(Briggs) “It’s just a book of facts, just their plain lives. Nothing extraordinary about them, nothing dramatic; no divorce or anything. But they were my parents and I wanted to remember them.”
Although it’s a very personal book and evocative of its time, it has a lot to say to many people. It talks about the gap that can open between parents and their children because of social mobility, family tension and the grief that comes with death and loss.
This reminded me of one of the truths about art: that the very local, and the most personal, can be the most universal. And without wanting to shovel it on with a trowel, it also reminded me what we lose when our cultural life squeezes out people from poorer backgrounds.
Briggs did everything in his books by hand—drawings and lettering—and I also liked the discussion here of craft:
When I met Raymond as a (well over-keen) illustration student and talked to him about the way he sculpted his drawings with pencil and crayon, he said he did that not to create the soft and densely-coloured effect of his illustrations, but because he preferred dry materials that don’t involve washing up after.
(Briggs) “I’m only concerned with getting the work done, getting it down on paper, getting it tidied up so you can get rid of it out of your head. What happens to it after that is another matter.”
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