Three related articles: “Open offices are as bad as they seem—they reduce face-to-face time by 70%” by Beth Mole, “Acoustic Furniture Won’t Save You from Open Offices” by Kate Wagner, and “The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea” by David Hansson. The shared theme can be teased out by careful study: open-plan offices are not good places to work. I don’t need to rehash the articles; they are quite clear and enjoyable to read.
What I find interesting is that there is an unstated bias regarding professions in the open-office discussion. Not all office workers, not all professions have been treated equally in this debate. A lot of the discussion, as in Hansson’s piece, revolves around tech workers. This is partly because tech start-ups have had a culture of huge barn-like buildings and loft spaces, and partly because a lot of online discussion is more heavily dominated by tech writers than employment stats would suggest is representative.
Architects’ and engineers’ offices have been dominated since the nineteenth century by what used to be called “the drafting room”: a large open space full of designers. They We used to be hunched over drafting tables and are now squatting in front of computer screens. Each work table typically has next to it place to store drawings, whether it’s another flat surface, or a cubbyhole full of rolled drawings sets, or a small filing cabinet. Sometimes the drafting room is simply uninterrupted space, sometimes there are half-height for glass partitions, but it’s effectively an open office. There is no equivalent in, for example, law offices. There is no “brief-writing room” where young lawyers sit at desks side by side writing motions.
There is no reason inherent in the work being performed to explain why engineers and architects sit in open rooms while lawyers sit in private (if small) offices. In all cases, the work itself is performed by individual people working alone, and occasionally talking to peers and supervisors in collaboration. The difference is cultural and makes little sense. If lawyers’ work is important and benefits from a small private office, then so is the work of architects, engineers, and hundreds of other professions. People are resilient and can work in awkward and difficult circumstances, but there’s no reason that they should have to.
