Open space offices: from the Larkin Building (1906) to the cubicle, the tech revival, the post-pandemic era, and what the evidence says

An open space office —open space, open plan— is a workspace design in which several people share a single area with no significant walls or partitions between them. It sounds modern and is often presented as a recent innovation. The reality is much older and much more controversial than the usual conversation suggests. It's worth placing it historically and looking at the empirical evidence before making office design decisions, because the debate over whether open offices work or not has been open for more than a century and the answer is more nuanced than either extreme claims.

The first famous open space: Frank Lloyd Wright, Larkin Administration Building, 1906

When people think of open offices, the first thing that comes to mind is usually Google or Facebook. But the first celebrated open office in modern history was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright between 1903 and 1906 for the Larkin Soap Company in Buffalo, New York. The building was radical for its time: a central five-story open atrium, with open-plan desks on each floor, skylight lighting, forced mechanical ventilation (a novel technology then), and custom furniture designed by Wright himself, including desks and chairs.

The Larkin Building was explicitly a philosophical statement about work: a space where visible hierarchy was reduced, employees could see and hear each other, and natural light reached everyone. Wright designed it with the conviction that spatial transparency improved worker morale and collective productivity. The building was demolished in 1950 —sadly, without any real architectural reason to justify it— but its influence on the modern conception of the open office is direct.

The Bürolandschaft ("office landscape") movement in Germany during the 1950s-60s, popularized by the Quickborner Team consultancy, formalized the concept: offices with desks distributed without walls but with plants, low screens, and furniture arranged organically. It was a reaction against the traditional individual offices of the 19th century, considered rigid and undemocratic.

The Action Office and the betrayal of the cubicle: Propst, Herman Miller, 1964-1968

The most interesting (and saddest) story in office design stars Robert Propst, an American designer who worked for Herman Miller. In 1964, drawing on research with psychologists, anthropologists, and real workers, Propst launched the first Action Office —a modular furniture system designed to give workers privacy, dignity, ergonomics, and the ability to adapt.

The original Action Office was meant to combat the problems Propst observed in 1960s open offices: noise, lack of privacy, forced posture from sitting all day, lack of mobility. His prototypes included:

• Semi-enclosed spaces with ~1.5m walls that allowed privacy without total isolation.
• Height-adjustable work surfaces (the precursor of today's standing desk).
• Integrated storage within the worker's reach.
• Ability to be configured to taste.

In 1968, Herman Miller launched the Action Office II, a more refined and marketable version. It was a sophisticated, expensive modular system, designed to improve the worker's life.

What happened next is a case study in how good design intentions get corrupted. American corporations, during the 70s and 80s, stripped the system down to the bare minimum: cheap walls, space squeezed to the maximum, no ergonomic elements, no real possibility of personalization. The cubicle was born, and it would dominate the American office landscape for three decades.

Before he died in 2000, Propst publicly denounced what companies had done with his design. In interviews with Metropolis magazine in 1997 he declared: "The cubicle-izing of people in modern corporations is monolithic insanity... barren, rat-hole places where people work." The quote is cited constantly because it captures a real tragedy: a humanist design turned by real-estate and cost pressures into its exact opposite.

The cubicle dominated until the 2000s, when another architectural wave —this time driven from Silicon Valley— set out to bury it.

The tech revival: Google, Facebook, the 2000s-2010s

Starting in the early 2000s, the big tech companies in California popularized the return to the radical open plan. Google with its "campuses," Facebook with the Frank Gehry office that opened in 2015 (then the largest open-plan room in the world, with 2,800 employees on a single floor), Apple Park opening in 2017 with its glass ring.

The justifications were similar to Wright's a century earlier: more collaboration, smoother communication, breaking down visible hierarchies, flexible configuration. The aesthetic also changed: wood, plants, communal kitchens, play spaces, careful industrial design. The visible difference from the cubicle was enormous.

Tech companies became evangelists of the modern open plan. Office design consultancies (Gensler, IA Interior Architects, M Moser) adopted it as the standard for almost any sector. By 2017-2018, 70% of U.S. offices in medium and large companies operated in some version of the open plan, according to data from the International Facility Management Association.

And then the empirical evidence began to appear.

The Bernstein-Turban study: Harvard, 2018

In 2018, Ethan S. Bernstein and Stephen Turban, researchers at Harvard Business School, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B a study titled "The impact of the 'open' workspace on human collaboration." It was the first study to measure empirically —not through surveys, but with proximity and communication sensors— what happened when companies moved from traditional offices to the open plan.

The results were counterintuitive:

Face-to-face communication fell by 70% at the two companies studied after the transition to open plan. Far from talking more with the people they now saw constantly, people talked less.

Electronic communication (email, messaging) increased significantly —at one of the companies, email rose by 56% and instant messaging by 67%. People preferred to communicate digitally with the person next to them rather than verbally.

Interactions, when they did happen, were shorter and less substantive than in traditional offices with private spaces.

The interpretation Bernstein and Turban proposed had a psychological basis: when people are visually exposed to all their colleagues, they feel less privacy for casual or substantive conversations. Humans compensate for that exposure by withdrawing —using headphones, communicating in writing, scheduling formal meetings for conversations that in an office with private rooms would have been spontaneous.

The study was replicated and debated. Other research (Kim & de Dear 2013, Pejtersen et al. 2011) had shown similar patterns: open plans increase stress, reduce satisfaction, and increase sick-leave absenteeism. The academic consensus by 2019-2020 was clear: the open plan, at least as it was mostly applied, did not deliver the collaboration benefits it promised and produced costs in concentration and well-being that its advocates ignored.

The post-pandemic era: a fundamental change still being processed

And then, in 2020, something happened that completely changed the conversation: the COVID-19 pandemic. Millions of offices emptied overnight. Remote work became widespread out of necessity.

When, between 2021 and 2024, companies tried to return to the office, they discovered several things at once:

Remote work worked better than expected for many tasks. Companies that had banned it discovered their teams performed as well or better from home.

Employees resisted returning full-time. Data from Stanford (Nicholas Bloom and collaborators, WFH Research) shows that in 2024-2025 roughly 30% of working days in the U.S. were worked from home, a figure that has stabilized after the declines of the first post-pandemic years.

The hybrid model became the standard: 2-3 days in the office, 2-3 days at home, with variations. Companies that insisted on full attendance (some large ones in 2023-2024 with "5 days in the office" policies) lost talent or accepted changes.

The purpose of the office changed. The office stopped being "the place of work" and became "the place of intentional collaboration." If employees go to the office only 2-3 days, those days should be justified by something that isn't done better remotely.

This has produced an honest redesign of the open space concept at many companies:

• Fewer fixed personal desks (with hot-desking policies).
• More meeting rooms of different sizes.
• More quiet concentration zones (booths, designated areas).
• More explicitly collaborative zones (projectors, whiteboards, informal spaces).
• Better acoustics overall.
• Recognition that introverts and deep work need different physical space than extroverts and collaborative work.

The best-designed offices in 2026 are no longer pure open plans —they are careful hybrids where different types of work find appropriate spaces.

The honest evidence on when open space works and when it doesn't

Synthesizing the available research:

Open space works reasonably well for:

• Small, cohesive teams (5-12 people) whose collaboration is genuinely continuous.
• Work where coordination speed matters more than depth of concentration (active sales, customer support, incident management).
• Cultures with explicit norms about when it's okay to interrupt and when it isn't, and respect for those norms.
• Young organizations in a phase of heavy experimentation, where rapid reconfiguration matters.

Open space works badly or produces net harm when:

• Teams are large (50+ people in a single room). The level of noise and exposure crosses a threshold where the brain shifts into defensive mode.
• Work requires sustained deep concentration (programming, writing, financial analysis, detailed design).
• Types of work are mixed in the same area (a sales team making calls next to a programming team trying to concentrate).
• There are no alternative zones (booths, rooms, quiet areas) to retreat to when needed.
• The culture confuses "being visible" with "working," producing social pressure to look busy instead of thinking.

Designing an office honestly in 2026

Some practices that research and post-pandemic experience suggest:

Explicitly declare what type of work the office is for. If the office is mainly for collaboration and employees come in only a few days, the design should serve collaboration (more rooms, more informal spaces). If it's for daily individual work, the design needs more privacy.

Combine open and closed. The false dilemma "open plan vs. private offices" is better resolved with combinations: open collaboration zones, semi-private concentration zones, meeting rooms of various sizes, booths for calls.

Treat acoustics as a priority. Much of the failure of the traditional open plan came from bad acoustics. Absorbent materials, layouts that break sound lines, and acoustic zoning are more important than visual aesthetics.

Allow reasonable personalization. Everyone works differently. Allowing adjustments (light, chair, storage, position) instead of rigid uniformity produces better results.

Recognize that different people and jobs need different spaces. Forcing everyone into the same model —whether radical open plan or private offices— ignores the real heterogeneity of people and tasks.

Measure, don't assume. If your company is going to invest significantly in an office, measuring empirically (honest surveys, discreet sensors, productivity data by task) what works and what doesn't, before and after, is probably the most useful investment you can make in space design.

Common mistakes in office decisions

Designing for aesthetics, not for work. An office with plants, wood, and modern zones looks good in photos but doesn't necessarily serve the work done there.

Imitating what Google does. What works at a software company with an enormous budget and a specific culture doesn't automatically transfer to a different company.

Assuming more collaboration is always better. For many jobs, fewer interruptions yields more than more casual collaboration.

Ignoring differences between roles. A programmer doesn't perform the same next to a salesperson shouting on the phone.

Forcing a full return to the office with no clear reason. Companies that tried it in 2023-2024 have paid costs in lost talent. An honest return justifies what people are coming back for.

Underestimating acoustics. It's probably the least visible and most impactful factor in modern offices.

Offices and creative operations

For a creative team that operates in an office (whether fully in person or hybrid), physical space significantly affects the speed and quality of work. The dynamics of review, brainstorming, internal presentation, and focused production require different types of space that a single open plan rarely covers well. Without reflection on what type of work is done and where, the space ends up forcing behaviors.

That's why this decision, even though it seems like a facilities matter, connects with creative operations: approval flows require coordinated review spaces, content production may require both quiet spaces for concentration and collaborative spaces for review, and team cohesion —internal stakeholders— is built in the office when the hybrid model allows it.

At Polimake the operating assumption is that the team is distributed. The platform —Studio, Studio, Media— is the "virtual office" where coordinated creative work lives, without depending on physical coincidence. That doesn't eliminate the need for physical spaces when people gather, but it complements them so that the rest of the time the work holds up remotely.

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If you lead facilities, HR, or any team that makes office decisions and you got here looking for an answer about open spaces, the most useful thing you can take from this article is probably the historical and empirical nuance: open space is neither a modern innovation nor the optimal solution. It's a type of design with a century of history, mixed evidence, and an application that depends on the type of work and the size of the team. Office decisions made by imitating a trend rarely work; decisions made by honestly analyzing what your team does and what it needs can produce spaces that genuinely help.

To round it out, stakeholders covers the organizational dimension of coordinating people (which physical space affects), workflow covers how work moves (which space can facilitate or hinder), and algorithms to meet your goals covers the broader discipline of when to systematize the work environment and when not to.

Quick references

• Stakeholders — the organizational dimension that physical space affects.
• Workflow — how work moves.
• Algorithms to meet goals — systematizing the work environment.
• Content production — how space affects creative execution.
• WBS — the coordination that space facilitates or hinders.