Privacy-challenged office workers may find it hard to believe, butopen-plan offices and cubicles were invented by architects anddesigners who were trying to make the world a better place—who thoughtthat to break down the social walls that divide people, you had tobreak down the real walls, too.

In the early 20th century Modernist architectssuch as Frank Lloyd Wright saw walls and rooms as downright fascist.The spaciousness and flexibility of an open plan, they thought, wouldliberate homeowners and office dwellers from the confines of boxes. Butcompanies took up their idea less out of a democratic ideology than adesire to pack in as many workers as they could. The typical open-planoffice of the first half of the 20th century contained long rows ofdesks occupied by clerks in a white-collar assembly line.

Cubicles were interior designers’ attempt to putsome soul back in. In the 1950s Quickborner, a German design group,broke up the rows of desks into more organic groupings with partitionsfor privacy—what it called the Bürolandschaft, or “officelandscape.” In 1964 American furniture company Herman Miller introducedthe Action Office system, which offered such improvements as largersurfaces and multiple desk heights. In 1968 Herman Miller began to sellits system as modular components, with the unfortunate consequence ofletting companies cherry-pick the space-saving aspects of these designsand leave out the humanizing touches.

As corporations began to shift all theiremployees, not only clerks, into open-plan offices, Herman Millerdesigner Robert Propst disavowed what he had spawned, calling it“monolithic insanity.” Today, many companies are even reverting to theprecubicle rows of desks, now called “pods” to make them sound vaguelyfuturistic.

Although open plans do have advantages in fostering ambient awareness and teamwork, a meta-analysis published last year in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Health Managementby Vinesh Oommen of the Queensland University of Technology inAustralia found that they cause conflict, high blood pressure andincreased staff turnover. Let us hope that architects’ next idealisticimpulse will be rather more successful.