Book review: Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, by Nikil Saval
Early in Cubed, a detailed cultural history of how the office grew to become the definitive 20th-century workplace, Nikil Saval presents a mocking description of the stylish office worker, courtesy of Walt Whitman in 1856.
by Nikil Saval
Doubleday
4 stars
Tomas Hachard
Early in Cubed, a detailed cultural history of how the office grew to become the definitive 20th-century workplace, Nikil Saval presents a mocking description of the stylish office worker, courtesy of Walt Whitman in 1856. At that time, non-manual labour accounted for a minority of jobs in the United States, and those who did spend their days in an office were often the source of derision.
As trade expanded across the US, the amount of clerical work increased. And as the number of people working in offices grew, the question arose of how to optimise efficiency and, in some cases, comfort in this new work climate. To start, Saval explains, many offices took a cue from the factory and lined desks up in long rows.
Then, in the early 20th century, two innovations emerged that would be recycled and reinterpreted in various ways over the next century. The first arrived courtesy of Frederick Taylor, a consultant and theorist who made it his goal to remove all inefficiencies from the office and argued for an extreme division of labour to replace what was the more fluid work style of the old clerks, who worked in small offices of four or five people and were responsible for a wide variety of tasks. Taylor created the position of the manager.
The drive to get workers producing at highest capacity probably reached its apex with Robert Propst's Action Office in the 1960s. The Action Office was an open-concept space consisting of several different working spaces, including a desk that you sat at and a larger drafting table that you could stand over. Propst's second version of the Action Office added walls of different heights around the workspace.
Propst's ideas were received rapturously, heralded for finally allowing the office "to achieve the work utopia that it had always promised". The results, however, were hardly radical. The Action Office, which was meant to liberate workers and get them moving around the office, instead led to the proliferation of its stifling cousin-in-design: the cubicle.