Was The Guy Who Invented the Cubicle Right All Along?

In years past, the office cubicle was a stand-in for the gallows of the human spirit. It was the image of a life wasted away at work. The phrase “rot away in a cubicle” was bandied around with high frequency. Now, of course, as enlightened, modern men and women, we no longer stow ourselves away in tiny squares to do our work. We instead have the glory and horizons afforded us by the vaunted “open office plan.”

And boy, does it suck. 

It turns out the only thing sadder than staring at a stucco-esque wall segment is staring at a co-worker’s blank face and realizing you make the same expression eight hours a day. It also turns out that the open office is also open to sounds, and you’ll quickly learn the exact glottal tics of everyone within earshot. God help you if you’ve got a pen-clicker or a heavy gum chewer in your vicinity.

The whole thing feels vaguely insulting, like free donuts handed out by a company that won’t pay for the dental you’ll need after polishing them off. Especially when you consider that, like many innovations propped up in front of a worker with a wide smile, it’s not actually new at all. The “open office” was exactly what existed in the 1960s and earlier, then called the much less PR-friendly “bullpen.” People had no privacy and their productivity suffered, so someone decided to figure out an affordable way to give people offices of a sort, and the cubicle was created. 

And on and on, the snake feasts on its own tail.

You’d think there has to be some sort of happy middle-ground, an office structure that doesn’t feel isolated, but also doesn’t require you to know what all your co-workers look like eating salad. As it turns out, that was exactly what the inventor of the cubicle envisioned. Although he’s forever branded as the man that cooked up the identical squares, that wasn’t actually what he designed. His name was Robert Propst, and he worked at the storied design firm of Herman Miller.

If you’re familiar with Miller, you’d have a hunch that claustrophobic cubes seems like a far cry from their standard, and it was and is. The panels that would be used to construct cubicles were designed by Propst to be a much more modular solution. Something that could be used to divide up offices and give social privacy, without feeling maze-like. 

Unfortunately, when those panels landed in the hands of productivity-seeking executives, they went to the path of least resistance and easiest assembly, and manufactured the monstrosities that were accurately labeled “farms” — an implementation that Propst himself hated, and loudly railed against. Here’s his dismissal of the cramped labyrinth his work became, in his words: “Not all organizations are intelligent and progressive. Lots are run by crass people. They make little, bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rathole places.”

Unfortunately, I don’t see Propst’s vision ever manifesting as intended. I think in all likelihood, we’re in for a timeline of alternating labor boxes and human tide pools forever. Probably the best thing that’s ever happened for worker morale in the last two decades is the rise of working from home, and 7 million people had to die of a respiratory virus to get that.