[sandover]

Please do a google image search for "medieval scriptorium". Then try a google image search for "victorian office engraving" or "victorian counting house engraving". Or check out this list of "Antique Office Illustrations 1770-1879" (https://www.officemuseum.com/photo_gallery_1860s-1880s.htm). What you'll see is different instances of the open office plan, over a timespan of a THOUSAND YEARS. It's a space plan which seems to emerge around collective knowledge work.

These types of workplaces are not a newly-hatched resource squeeze by our ruthless capitalist overlords. They are a physical work pattern which has been reinvented and retooled many times, and isn't going away. In most of history, "office"==="big room".