Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler's fascinating study provides a history of the open plan office, from its original conception in the late 1960s as a progressive, egalitarian innovation to present-day ambivalence about dehumanizing and alienating workspaces.

Originally inspired by a progressive vision of a working environment without walls or hierarchies, the open plan office has since come to be associated with some of the most dehumanizing and alienating aspects of the modern office. Author Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler traces the history and evolution of the American open plan from the brightly-colored office landscapes of the 1960s and 1970s to the monochromatic cubicles of the 1980s and 1990s, analyzing it both as a design concept promoted by architects, designers, and furniture manufacturers, and as a real work space inhabited by organizations and used by workers. The thematically structured chapters each focus on an attribute of the open plan to highlight the ideals embedded in the original design concept and the numerous technical, material, spatial, and social problems that emerged as it became a mainstream office design widely used in public and private organizations across the United States. Kaufmann-Buhler’s fascinating new book weaves together a variety of voices, perspectives, and examples to capture the tensions embedded in the open plan concept and to unravel the assumptions, expectations, and inequities at its core.

"The book includes a rich array of vintage photos tracing the development of the open-plan office in the U.S....." - The Wall Street Journal

"Kaufmann-Buhler shifts the viewpoint from the single, often idealized generic worker, to the embodied experience of a diverse array of individuals ... Design history will benefit from more histories that, like this one, acknowledge peoples’ complex lived and sometimes fraught experiences with iconic, celebrated designs." - Design and Culture

"Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler’s comprehensive survey of the postwar American office has arrived with exquisite timing just as the coronavirus crisis has ignited an intense global debate about the future of work, what the purpose of office should be, and how it might be improved through design to become more equitable, healthy, and sustainable." - Design Issues

"Effectively expands and energizes the existing literature on office design. Kaufmann-Buhler throws new light on features of the modern workplace that have resisted critical analysis due to their overwhelming ubiquity. Indeed, it is precisely the criticality of its approach, its commitment to interrogate the inequities endemic in white-collar work, that makes this text essential reading not only for scholars, but for anyone who has questioned the values and virtues of office work." - Journal of Design History