Description

The history of office buildings is neither consistent nor continuous. The different forms of ad­ministrative buildings in our time – cell-like offices arranged in rows along corridors, open-plan offices in interconnected open areas, offices in a differentiated structure of rooms with lounges and cafe bars, as headquarters, as satellite offices or home workplaces with central meeting points – are not inventions of the twentieth century. Every one of these office types has already existed in a similar form in the course of the last few millennia. Thus the kitchens and bathrooms adjoining Mesopotamian offices, and the administrative rooms of the Greeks that were also used as dining rooms are comparable to the cafe bars and lounges of today. The Egyptian scribes who moved around with their writing paraphernalia and met in scriptoriums are no different from today’s “office nomads;” the innumerable widely dispersed branch offices of the merchant empires of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are comparable to the satellite offices of today. The precursors of open-plan offices are to be found in the scriptoriums where the scribes of ancient Egypt and the monks of the Middle Ages worked. These discontinuities are explained by the history of office work development in the context of prevailing political and social conditions, as well as by technological development. This essay is intended to illuminate these historical aspects, even though gaps in the documentation and lack of information lead to a fragmented portrayal that can be only an approximation of the reality. Nor does the scope of this publication allow for this interesting subject to be dealt with in the depth that might be desired.

Ancient Egypt

In ancient Egypt (3200-525 BC), a spatial separation of palace and administrative authority took place as a consequence of the existing state system. The centralised state not only had sovereignty over infrastructure, water supply, civil engineering and the military, but also controlled and directed the entire economy. In order to cope with these extensive responsibilities, a soph­isticated and effective administrative system became established; it was described by Max Weber as the “historical model of all later bureaucracies.”[1] The administrative apparatus was organised in a strictly hierarchical fashion both at its headquarters at the royal court, and in a multitude of subordinate administrative authorities in the city centres and the countryside. The actual office work was carried out by innumerable scribes who were assigned on one hand to the various departments of the temple administration – bookkeeping and accounting – and on the other to registry authorities, which like today’s administrative authorities, were exclusively responsible for drawing up, registering and storing documents. Like today’s “office nomads,” scribes – who enjoyed considerable repute – travelled from place to place with their writing apparatus, which consisted of two wooden boards with inkpot and quill, analysed and organised content, gave orders and advice and met in scriptoriums in the city centre.[2]

The scope of office work can be seen in the ruins of the Middle Egyptian city of Amarna, the residence of Amenophis IV (Echnaton); just the administrative buildings with the scribes’ offices for the royal correspondence, the foreign offices and the “House-of-Life” (a combination of school and scriptorium in which holy books were copied) took up several streets in the city centre.[3]

Ancient Greece and Rome

Unlike the Egyptians’ enormous administrative apparatus organised in strict hierarchies, in the Greek poleis (democratically organised city-states) smaller administrative units came into being in the fifth century BC. With the constitution of the first democracy, new institutions (councils, people’s assemblies, supervisory committees, jury courts) formed in Athens and in the cities of the Attic colonies. Their headquarters were housed in multifunctional columned halls or in newly developed types of buildings. The bouleuterion, the prytaneion, the strategion and the tholos, to name just a few of the new building types, were mostly located at the agora, the political and social centre of Greek cities. As the administrative headquarters of highly placed publicly appointed officials, the buildings consisted principally of a central hall. This was used both for dining and for meetings, as well as discussions and hearings, and had smaller rooms annexed onto it – the kitchen, the archives and the local administrative offices. The open columned halls of the stoæ, which were also used in part for administrative purposes, led either into a great hall or into groups of smaller rooms arranged in rows. Here commissions sat in conference and smaller administrative bodies worked, for example like the market administration in the South Stoa in Athens. Buildings for the use of the port authorities and the customs offices were erected near the port.

At around this time the Roman city-state was becoming a great power, with a flourishing private sector and a well-developed state administrative system. Until the first century BC, the republic’s civil service consisted of patricians to whom minor functionaries reported, as well as scribes, messengers and heralds. In contrast to today’s perception of the civil service as a by­word for immobility and undue dependence, the higher public offices were called operæ liberales, the work of free men, and to hold such an office was regarded as a symbol of absolute freedom, “in which the free, well-born man can live out his urge to action.”[4]

As in Greece, civil servants carried out their duties in public buildings at the forums. Typical floor plans evolved, based on the Greek models, for the town hall, the curiæ and for the multifunctional basilicas, as offices of highly placed civil servants. In contrast to this, there was no standardised type of building for carrying out daily public duties. In Cosa around 180 BC, the civil servants worked in villas with atriums; adjoining the residential buildings, they were grouped around the forum.[5] In Veleia, on the other hand, the municipal administrative authority was located in individual rooms that opened toward the forum so that the floor plan of the building complex, closed to the outside, was reminiscent of an oversized villa with an atrium. Innumerable forums developed in Rome in the course of the centuries; some of them developed into mono-functional city districts. Trajan’s Forum, surrounded by columned open halls and the transversely positioned Basilica Ulpia, an imposing, two-and-a-half-storey hall with an extending gallery and library rooms annexed to the west side, served exclusively for legal administration.[6]

In addition to the well-developed state and communal administration, the private sector of the city (over a million inhabitants) flourished and many banks and large financial enterprises formed; their offices were mainly housed in the Basilica Aemilia and the Basilica Julia on the Forum Romanum. Here the citizens of Rome could buy shares, find out about rates of exchange, have bills drawn or issued and transfer monies. The merchants and book publishers, who already in those times employed up to a hundred slave-scribes to copy books, settled along the important circulatory axes. Their offices and writing rooms had direct access to the streets[7] or were located behind the shops.[8]

Early modern administrative authorities

After the collapse of the Roman Empire, it was not until the twelfth century that city-states in various regions of Europe again engaged in foreign trade leading to the development of state and private administrative bodies.

It was primarily the state administrative authorities which, as the extended arm of the monarchs, contributed considerably to the retention of power, and in so doing made clear again and again the importance of a well-organised administration. In private enterprise and the banking sector, the critical influence of a professional administration on market position and the success of an enterprise first crystallised in the course of the following century.

The origins of today’s banks are to be found in Italy in the late Middle Ages, as we see from the etymology of the word bank (Bank, banque), which derives from the Italian banchi (the money changer’s table). For a long time, banking was the province of rich merchants, today’s so-called “merchant banker,” and was thereby closely intertwined with trade. Although large commercial enterprises did business internationally and had branches in several countries, bookkeeping and thus office work did not gain in importance and increase correspondingly in size until it became professionalised through the invention of double-entry bookkeeping at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The Medici, who were among the most successful of the merchant bankers and headed one of Italy’s most modern enterprises, integrated these innovations into their enterprise. Already by the end of the fifteenth century, this family-run concern employed staff that worked exclusively in offices in the city palaces.

In the sixteenth century, the drive to expand the great commercial enterprises and the accompanying professionalisation of administrative work reached a high point for a period and in Augsburg, in the multi-functional enterprise of the Fugger family, led to the development of a new type of company. The flourishing mining and textile industries, the increasing trade in bulk goods and the beginnings of intercontinental trade relations were the breeding ground for this development. The introduction and further evolution of the innovations in bookkeeping coming from Italy formed the basis for the new company structure that consisted of an “increasingly formalised and hierarchical organisation,” and was organised in four to five hierarchical levels from Regierer (“governor”) to scribe. Under the generic term of Handelsdiener (merchant servant) head bookkeepers, factors, cashiers and scribes worked as employees in the family enterprise.[9] This company structure, in point of fact typical for nineteenth-century companies, points to similar types of building and office organisations.

At about the same time that the Fuggers’ enterprise was developing into one of the most modern and powerful in Europe, Cosimo de Medici carried out an administrative reform in Florence, the consequence of which was the concentration of the Florentine administrative authorities in the city centre and the building of the Uffizi galleries. The U-shaped three-storey building complex designed by Giorgio Vasari in 1560 resembles the Greek stoa in the series of individual buildings accessed via one-storey colonnades. The building units, which accommodated a total of thirteen institutions, public authorities and guilds, consisted of a square reception hall with adjoining rooms for scribes and offices for the staff and archives on the mezzanine floor above. On the piano nobile, further offices were planned; however, by the time the building was formally opened, they were already being used by the Medici as a gallery for their picture collection.[10] The Uffizi galleries were the first large building complexes in modern times to be erected exclusively as offices, which explains the derivation of the English word “office.”

A hundred years later, in 1694, the flourishing overseas trade in England led to the founding of the first European state central bank, the Bank of England, which moved into its new headquarters in the City of London in 1734. Around two large courtyards, the architect George Sampson grouped the following rooms: the bank hall in which the money counters and cashiers carried out transactions at counters and desks, two rooms for the bank directors, various smaller administrative and storage rooms and a two-storey hall for the bookkeeping department. The architects Robert Taylor and John Soane, who were charged with the extension and alteration of the building in the succeeding eighty years, continued to adhere to this layout. The bank employees, separated into different departments in accordance with their duties, worked in the enormous bank halls at long rows of tables arranged one behind the other, a spatial organisation known from the scriptoria and which continued in existence up to the writing halls of the early twentieth century.[11]

The industrial age

Eighteenth century developments formed the basis for the architecture of today’s office build­ings. With the founding of private banks and insurance companies, professional groups came into being whose fields of activity were linked to office work. Slowly that separation of working space from living space began to take place (later accelerated by the building of the railways), which accompanied the growth of commercial enterprises at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A consequence of this was the building of leasehold office buildings.[12] These new types of buildings, for banks, insurance companies and rental offices, were similar in their external appearance as well as in the design of their ground plans. The two to three-storey buildings in the form repertoire of classicism developed essentially as three types of ground plan: office buildings with an arrangement of rooms along a central corridor, another similar layout grouped around an atrium, or offices arranged around a central room. Until well into the nineteenth century, office work remained the privilege of the bourgeoisie; the prestige and social standing of the private and state administrative authorities came to expression in the design of the spacious closed offices.

From the middle of the nineteenth century, the expansion of industrial, commercial and transportation enterprises (railways) generated a growing demand for financing, which led increasingly to the establishment of limited companies, in which the banks participated significantly. In these varied fabrics of dependency, a spiral of growth took place in all sectors of the economy, manifesting itself in increased administrative costs and an accompanying boom in office building. In consequence of this growth, complex tasks within enterprises were broken down into subtasks. At the same time a hierarchical structure developed with distinct areas of competence becoming identifiable. Each department had its own area of responsibility and its own large room where all employees of that department worked together, so that a differentiation in the size of rooms resulted. With regard to hierarchy, to have one’s own office became a status symbol and a reflection of one’s position within the organisation.

In addition to economic expansion, technological developments had a significant influence on office construction. In the 1880s, the manufacture of steel beams and hydraulic lifts enabled the construction of framed structures of almost unlimited height. The telephone, electric light and the serial production of typewriters – all inventions of the 1870s – facilitated office work and increased efficiency.

In the succeeding years, different ground plan solutions developed on the two sides of the Atlantic; these differences could be explained by building regulations, the situation with regard to property and socio-cultural differences. In Germany, the height limitations prescribed by law were a deciding factor in the horizontal expansion of office buildings. In the five-storey building complexes, the familiar eighteenth century ground plan continued to be used, multiplied as often as required in accordance with spatial needs. Instead of the cell-like offices usual until then, offices of different sizes depending on the size of the department were arranged in rows along the passageways. At the same time, the building codes determined the depth of buildings so as to ensure natural light and ventilation.

In Chicago in the 1880s, the great demand for office space triggered a wave of building speculation. As there were neither height restrictions nor regulations on the depth of the rooms, economics and the desire to achieve maximum profit determined the form and the ground plan of office buildings. In the early phases of tower block construction, the exploitation of daylight – electric light was not sufficiently bright for typing – set natural limits on the speculators’ greed. Nevertheless, the room depths of eight to ten metres were still greater than those in Europe. As in Europe, similar ground plans with two rows of offices on either side emerged which, because of the greater room depth, allowed other spatial divisions. The floors of office buildings were frequently subdivided into a multitude of office modules, consisting of two small offices behind a room for a shared secretary. This typical American ground plan module could be rented as a single unit or in groups of units.[13] Larger enterprises renting one or more floors exploited the possibilities offered by steel framed construction and did without subdivisions into smaller office units. That was the beginning of the frequently cited American open-plan office.

The twentieth century

While coping with construction, building technology and aesthetic design were determinant for architects of the skyscraper, Frank Lloyd Wright set a new standard in office building layout in 1906 with his design solution for the Larkin Building. The Larkin Company, a mail-order enterprise, employed a staff of 1800 whose task it was to take orders, answer enquiries and do miscellaneous office work. Sitting at rows of small desks or opposite each other at long tables, the employees worked in large, open gallery rooms that were lighted by a central six-storey atrium. A newly developed filing system and implementation of the latest office technology were components of the optimisation process that resulted from a systematic analysis both of work processes and of the corporate structure. To compensate for a hard, monotonous day at work, the company’s directors organised picnics, weekly concerts, continuing education and vocational courses, as well as giving employees a share in the profits. The supposed innovations of the close of the twentieth century – lounges, libraries, YWCA and bathrooms – were already at that time available for staff to relax in their breaks, in the annex at the side of the building.[14]

The concern with the optimisation of work processes that saw expression in the new building types – in spite of the Larkin Company’s assertion that their concern was for the welfare of the workers – had its theoretical foundations in Max Weber’s work Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft and Henri Fayol’s Administration industrielle et générale. These works analyse improvement in the performance of administrative work, very much in the style of Frederick Taylor. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, office work was dramatically transformed. The specialisation and standardisation of tasks, the systematisation of work processes and the optimisation of the workforce to increase efficiency formed the basis for the subsequent restructuring of companies.[15]

Hierarchical organisation became the key characteristic of the modern enterprise. In its early stages this approach was largely perfected in America; the corporate structure’s pyramidal form manifested itself in the plans of the open-plan office in which the bosses’ offices were separated from the rest by glass walls. A positive example of this type of office organisation is the legendary office building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Racine, Wisconsin in the thirties for the Johnson Wax Company. The company’s fifteen departments were not housed in separate rooms as was usual, but instead they were all put together in a huge office hall lit from above. Only the company directors had separate offices. The company’s theatre, squash court and sun terraces are testimony to the extensive array of leisure opportunities offered by the Johnson Wax Company.

In Europe, its gaze directed towards America, skyscraper euphoria also set in at the beginning of the twentieth century, with an increase in speculative office building in the towns and cities. The architecture favoured floor plans allowing flexible use. And yet instead of the open-plan office, cell-like offices became predominant in the twenties and – multiplied in endless rows along central corridors – were the symbol of bureaucracy with its monotonous office work ever subordinate to orders coming down from on high.

With the bureaucratisation of commerce, the transformation from private secretary working for the bourgeoisie to salaried employee was complete. In Germany in 1925, this new profession constituted a substantial proportion (17%) of the gainfully employed population (in 1895 it had been only 3%). In order to distinguish themselves from the working (blue collar) classes, new middle classes adopted the white collar as the symbol of their higher status.

Due to the global economic crisis and the Second World War, the construction of office buildings in the thirties and forties almost ground to a halt. In the post-war era, architects carried on the office building tradition of the twenties and the so-called functionalistic approach reached its zenith in the fifties. The office tower became a worldwide symbol of economic upturn. While in America and Asia the unlighted, oversized open-plan office became the standard as a space-saving planning solution, in Europe the compressed, very dense plan with triple rows of closed offices around a central corridor became the expression of a materialistic world view. It was not until the end of the fifties that the focus of attention returned to the needs of the human being. Mantled with the catchphrase “Human Resources,” this attention took the form of a variety of theoretical approaches, which ten years later, were reflected in office building design.

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Originally published in: Rainer Hascher, Simone Jeska, Birgit Klauck, Office Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2002.