[brudgers]

The issue isn't open floor plans or private offices. It's quality of design, and indirectly hipsterism.

Good open floor plan designs are driven by acoustics and sitelines - management of audible and visual distractions. Yeah, staining the concrete slab and exposing the brick wall and using the metal pan and joists of the floor above as the ceiling and hauling in oak library tables as desks, just echos "lookie here, we're rebellious and unconventional." Then again everything echos. That's the pysics of sound meeting hard surfaces and since the echo reaches everyone, everyone will be tempted to look.

Architecture is sometimes said to be the world's second oldest profession - or the oldest when architects talk cynically amongst themselves about the nature of actual practice and dealing with the clients who pay them for their special talent...but anyway, good open floor plan design is a solved problem, all except for the fact that it hasn't photographed well since Gordon Bunshaft and SOM designed Lever House and CIGNA in the 50's and 60's.

Which is to say is that the problem with good open office design is that it doesn't look like photographs of office spaces in recent issues of magazines (aka "archiporn"). Instead it looks a lot like class "A" office space in a suburban office park - carpet, gypsum wall board, acoustic ceiling tile, and fabric covered modular office walls (aka "cubicles"). All these reduce sound transmission and reflection and impact noise - and if cubicle height is thoughtfully selected provide reasonable balance between visual communication and visual isolation and hopefully shared natural light. And if the holy grail of being able to select HVAC systems exists, then good white noise acoustic masking can be provided and that is even better than chasing sound attenuation.

Sharing the natural light means putting the private offices on the core and the serf farm by the windows. This of course means overcoming the sina qua non of hipsterism - status consciousness. But then again at the point where a leadership team has bought functional design over archiporn, this is just the last hurdle.

The problem of course is that corporate grade solutions require corporate grade budgets. Good systems furniture is more expensive than cheap doors, drywall and paint - as is good open plan office space versus lower quality space. On the flip side, acoustic ceiling tile and carpet are less than painted ductwork and stained concrete.

Anyway, the important change to architectural design over the past century is not an evolution of visual style. It's the increasingly sophisticated material options and the need to integrate an ever growing number of building service systems. The problem as always remains convincing lay people that living in a house isn't a good basis of experience for designing a workplace for others. The optimization problems are radically different.

Truly useful innovations in architectural design occur far less frequently than useful innovations in algorithms.

[vonmoltke]

The non-profit my wife works for recently renovated their headquarters, and the plan had all those elements. Until management got involved. Then the offices moved to the outer walls with the cubes in the middle. And the cubes got shorter. And nothing much was done about the HVAC.

Office politics often seems to be the root of all evil in just about every organization over 15 people.

[resu_nimda]

Do you have any primers on good open office design? Ideally something more accessible than a full textbook, to start with.

It sounds like you're saying that the optimal design is the incredibly dreary Office Space setup. You seem pretty critical of "hipsterism," a lot of which could be more charitably called "caring about aesthetics." Is there no middle ground?

[brudgers]

According to Alan J. Perlis, the best book on office design for the layman is Alice in Wonderland.

[resu_nimda]

Good to know, thanks.

[brudgers]

http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html

Architectural design is like programming except that the first run of the compiler is the last and even a cheap building office building costs a multiple of a fuck you exit money. So there's no ok let's walk away. Users are going to live with the first executable for thirty years or more.

That said, there's a reason that Alexander's book launched the idea of software architecture twenty years ago. It's that fertile in design values for the working humanist. Libertarians and corpratists perhaps not so much.

[resu_nimda]

Yeah I found the reference. I like your offbeat and rather non-sequitur style (what did that compiler analogy have to do with anything?), but I would have appreciated at least one earnest recommendation for reading up on office layout theories from the architectural perspective.

Guessing you're referring to something by Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form or A Pattern Language? Those predate your timeline by a few decades but I couldn't find anything else that fit. Whatever it is, I don't think it has quite the seminality in software architecture that you imply...

[brudgers]

A Pattern Language is where Cunningham got the idea of design patterns, and Alexander has had far more impact on the world via software than construction - even though the approach in Notes on the Synthesis of Form [which Alexander largely disowned] is probably more like the way software really gets developed...stringing together components rather than implementing patterns - it's engineering over architecture.

On the whole, architects tend to be a fairly illiterate group and the practice of architecture is largely a craft creating one off designs, so there aren't really any standard references on office layout or design - and certainly not any theories as theories of office space. There's just a guild that where the academy was still debating the utility of CAD in the year 2000 - I know, I was there. It's still not sold on Building information modeling - aka "using a database."

In so far as architecture is a science, actual buildings are its experiments [an idea stolen from E. H. Gombrich] Unlike a program, there's one shot at the artifact - the building gets built and the budget spent and there's no way to do test driven development or serious integration testing, let alone refactoring or versioning. The plans are like code and the construction process is their one and only pass through the compiler.

Anyway, you might find something in an architectural school library on office layout, but in practice a few pages from something like Time Saver Standards for Building Types is about as much reading as a practicing architect is going to do. The big drivers of schema are soft - the psychology of clients and the architect's empathy for those who have to inhabit the space...that's the whole of whether offices in the core and serfs by the windows gets built or not [and that's not the way to bet].

With a specific open office space, bringing in the modular systems vendor is how the actual layout of cubicles is done. The reason is that architecture is commoditized to the point that chasing through endless swaps of Suzy and Joe and Clay among the cubicles [and whose name goes where is an O(n^3) PITA] and only the person actually selling systems furniture can afford the handholding (unless you're Frank Gehrey and explicitly getting paid to do it and able to assign a $15 an hour intern with an March from Harvard's GSA).

If I were inclined to argumentation I'd point out that architecture was a couple of thousand years old when Vitrivuvious dedicated his 10 books to Augustus Caesar and thus you can pretty much be assured that any proposition that links software and architecture is grounded in all that history and floating free upon the mere sixty years that the concept of software has existed.

Habraken's Structure of the Ordinary is the way territoriality and control express themselves spatially and I find it informative for the sort of problems upon whose solution good office design depends. It's not rules for layout but the effects that various configurations create.

http://www.habraken.com/html/structure_of_the_ordinary.htm

Anyway, if there ever was a field of obsolescence ripe for disruption, it would be architecture here and now - and of course it's already happening. The infrastructure needed to provide many services ain't no building any more. The guild thinks technological progress is faster horses to speed up the production of drawings - or to anchor the analogy better pens. The idea of providing better solutions is inconsistent with the model of architecture as craft because a better solution might not require a building and with a business model that couples fees to a percentage of construction cost, there's no money in it.

Gosh, that was fun.