Propst is the father of the cubicle. More than 30 years after he unleashed it on the world, we are still trying to get out of the box. The cubicle has been called many things in its long and terrible reign. But what it has lacked in beauty and amenity, it has made up for in crabgrass-like persistence.
2006-03-10
Cubicles: The great mistake
Robert Oppenheimer agonized over building the A-bomb. Alfred Nobel got queasy about creating dynamite. Robert Propst invented nothing so destructive. Yet before he died in 2000, he lamented his unwitting contribution to what he called "monolithic insanity."
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2 comments:
Very interesting article. Some of the cube designs seem pretty cool, as they succeed in giving each worker some privacy. I have noticed that cube workers complain that they have trouble getting work done because the open plan encourages interruptions. Very interesting that a rural Michigan company invented and dominated this market.
Glad to see that the cubicle inventers had a different vision than how their customers used cubicles. The inventers saw large, private cubes comprosing an office that would get modified ruitinely. Instead their customers used cubes to cram more workers into smaller and less private spaces, and never modify the configurations.
I notice that the retarded US tax system helped the trend, since spending on cubes gets depreciated in 7 years whereas spending to create fixed-wall offices depreciates in 40 years.
And I'm sad that a Republican who thinks working at home is good has translated this preference of his into a freakin' law that encourages this for federal offices. "Republicanism" sadly has come to mean only low taxes (but not fully flat!) and laws against flag burning, abortion, gay marriage, and banning christian displays from courthouses.
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