The history of the evolution of the office

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word "office"? Probably, images: office rooms, soft chairs, clicking of keys, office gossips, a smell of stale coffee and people so busy that, typing on their computers, they do not even think to smile. So, all this remains in the past ... With the development of new technologies in general, the concept of "office space" has undergone dramatic changes. Now a startup or freelancer goes to “his office”, where everything is arranged for his convenience.

The results of the 2013 Deskmag survey are astounding:
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• 50% of all employees use the workplace around the clock
• 71% report an increase in their own creativity after the move
• 62% said their working conditions had improved
• Nearly 90% of employees reported increased self-confidence
• 70% of employees feel healthier than while working in a traditional office
• One-third to one-half of all employees are flexible and mobile.
• 64% of employees stopped tearing deadlines

So what's in front of us? Let's see!

Mankind has tried to make office work more productively since the inception of offices and continues today. Few people know how exciting and confusing this path was. IMHO, the history of the organization of mental labor can be divided into two stages. The first - from the 18th century to 1900, the second - from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. And from the beginning of the 20th century to our days only five types of office organization were created.

Just before 1900, office workers around the world had fewer than 300,000 people, and they were scattered across enterprises, markets, exchanges, factories, and manufactories. In fact, until the twentieth century, the office was just a desk and a chair.



In general, the first office building in history is East India House in London. The management of the colonies grew so much that only paperwork required thousands of office clerks. All of them needed to be gathered in one place and provide them with ideal working conditions. This is how the rapid evolution of offices began, the goal of which was to create the most free and comfortable working spaces.

Studying the history of offices, I unexpectedly discovered that the center and the basis of any office is an office chair. That, sitting on which you read these lines. The fact is that until the middle of the twentieth century, an ordinary chair was ... a luxury!



The interior of the House of India. The board sits on the chairs.



All the same House of India. People easier to press on the benches.

So, the final birth of world mass culture occurred in the 60s. And you know why at this particular time? Plastic. In the 60s, cheap armchairs were cramped. Everyone could buy a miracle for 9 bucks and fall apart for fun. Prior to this, 5% of people had chairs, and 20% did not even have chairs at home. We sat on stools, and even on the boxes. All life.



It is precisely because of the “stuntness” that the history of the office chair is very interesting. Even Protagoras argued that man is the measure of all things. Consequently, the whole architecture comes from human proportions, which means that the simplest (but fully-fledged!) Architectural element is a chair. Not by chance, every famous architect was noted in the history of creating his own chair, and each architectural era can be expressed through this element of furniture.

Actually, the first to decide to make the chair "affordable and functional" English cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale in 1760. He was the first in the history of making inexpensive chairs of simple design. "Folk chairs" caused such a sensation that they made the author's name a common noun. The animated series "Chip and Dale" was named precisely in honor of these chairs.



But you understand that the massive chairs caused a response wave of folk art. On the basis of the Chippendale chair, none other than Voltaire makes a powerful leap forward - the first to guess is to put the chair on wheels so as not to get up every time for the necessary piece of paper. On the right, Voltaire attached a board that rotated and was intended for writing. On the left there was a box in which paper, a feather and an inkwell were kept. This design was equally convenient for both leisure and work.



Subsequently, it became known as the “Voltaire chair” - it has survived and is now located in the Carnavale Museum (Hôtel Carnavalet) in Paris.

By the end of the 18th century, the wheelchair was quite common and subsequently only improved. During this period, it became a direct attribute of the office. Such seats are often included with the bureau or desk. Chairs on wheels were made of wood, were wicker and bent. Rarely met chairs from cast iron.



Here is an example of the office of Charles Darwin. As you can see, there is all the furniture on wheels. For its time, it was like anti-gravity - the future is here and now!



The third inventor on the way to the modern chair is considered the third US President Thomas Jefferson. This event dates back to 1779, when Jefferson guessed to make the chair spin.

But the real office chair was born only at the London World Exhibition in 1851.



This chair was the apotheosis of ergonomics and had all the functions of maintaining comfort at once - could be tilted, rotated and adjusted in height. Now it was possible to spend at the office table at least a whole day and not get tired.

Surprisingly, the chair caused a great protest from the church - because the chair violated the main commandment of the Victorian morality - it allowed to work with pleasure, while the church and the queen were in favor of humility. It was believed that working on an uncomfortable stool without a back is the only way to demonstrate one's delicacy and willpower, and therefore, one's high morality.

But progress was unstoppable. At the same exhibition in 1851, the main chair in history, consisting only of bent beech elements, serving 30-50 years old, saw the light! A miracle of engineering showed the Germans.



Viennese chair . The simplest, cheapest, durable and comfortable chair in history - the ingenious technology of bending under the steam of a beech tree has made it possible. Otto von Bismarck considered him to be the most important invention of the German people, who ordered not only parliament, but all state institutions to be equipped with such chairs.

It is light, elegant, concise! It has only 6 elements. This simplicity was revolutionary. Vienna chair was the first sign in the mass production of cheap goods.



Details are fastened together with cogs. Disassembled in a box with a capacity of 1 cu. m. holds 36 (!) chairs. It was also a new word in the transportation of goods.



In order to show the strength of chair number 14, it was thrown from the Eiffel Tower. The chair remained unharmed!

So Europe and America chose different ways of office construction, and the two chairs became symbols of two cultures. Europe showed humility in Viennese chairs, Americans rode skyscrapers on their office chairs.



Tesla in his laboratory sits on the American classics.

By this time there were two remarkable events in architecture - the Chicago fire and steel beam. Being in the same place at the same time, they gave birth to a new kind of architecture.



In 1871, Chicago burns to the ground. The year before, America’s steel mills were switching to a standard steel beam, the price of which was beginning to decline rapidly.

1867	1870	1875	1880	1885	1890	1895
$ 166	$ 107	$ 69	$ 68	$ 29	$ 32	$ 24

This is how the Chicago School of Architecture was born, which determined the appearance of buildings for the next half century. Now the buildings could be built entirely from a steel frame - of any height, with huge windows and spacious rooms. Steel nevertheless remained rather expensive and was used on a limited basis, only as floor slabs. It was only by 1890 that its price had fallen so far as to replace both horizontal and vertical supports with beams — the buildings received an all-metal frame. These were the first skyscrapers.



What did the office premises of the 1880-1930s look like? These were always spacious rooms, with a free arrangement, because sunlight was the main means of illumination at that time, so both the size and the layout were designed on this basis. The profitability of the office is directly dependent on large windows and high ceilings, allowing sunlight to penetrate as deeply as possible. The distance from the windows to the walls could not exceed 9 meters, which is the limit of penetration of sunlight. The ceilings were from 3 to 4 meters high, and the windows, of course, were as large as possible - at least 2x3 meters. If the office needed to be divided - only transparent glass partitions were used for this. All this allowed both ventilation and noise dissipation.

Prior to this, the offices were never located above the second floor, and the office buildings themselves could not be above 4-5 floors, since hunters climb the steep stairs was not particularly. There were even less people who wanted to use the elevator: the fact is that their construction was deadly dangerous - the platform and the cable. If the cable was torn (which is inevitable), the platform fell freely into the mine. Only in 1854, Elijah Otis patented an emergency brake for elevators.



Then the inventor struck the public with a demonstration of his safety device at the exhibition in Crystal Palace in New York - Otis stood on the open platform of the elevator, while his assistant chopped off the rope holding it with an ax; at the same time the platform remained in place and did not fall into the mine thanks to catchers. In 1861, Otis begins production of electric elevators. In 1900 - creates the first escalator.



Equitable Building 1870 was the first office building with an elevator, de facto we face the first skyscraper. Immediately, a new type of office was invented - the company occupied the first two floors, and leased the rest.

Now everything is upside down. The higher the floor was, the more expensive the room was - after all, there is plenty of light above and there is no noise from the street, and the panoramic windows give a beautiful view of the city.



An interesting feature of the Flatiron-Building of 1904 is that it was one of the first high-rise buildings, the structures of which were mounted on a frame of steel beams. As you can see, the plot of land was quite tiny, and the architect simply did not have the opportunity to use stone or concrete, since the thickness of the walls simply would not leave space on the ground floors. The building was so tall that it turned into a wind generator, and men from all over New York came to gape at the bullying skirts of pretty young ladies. From here grow legs at the famous photo with a developing dress of Merlin Monroe.



Began the race for the floors. In New York, a 30-story building was built in 1899, 47th in 1908, and 60 in 1913. Land prices were not long in coming. In the center of Chicago in 1880, one acre cost $ 130,000, but already in 1890 it cost $ 900,000.



With the beginning of the twentieth century, rapid industrialization began: business colleges opened in every major city in America training professional clerks. The white-collar population began to grow at a rate of 286% per decade, while for other occupations the growth was on average 65%. Their share increased from 5% in 1900 to 11% in 1920.


Guess what types of offices are listed under the numbers without Google

All this time, the office remained a continuation of the factory. Employees simply sat in long rows of tables and did paper work, like soulless cogs of the system. The authorities did not even talk to them, locked up in their separate offices. Such an office was invented by the famous labor innovator Frederick Taylor . He began his career by proposing to make shovels in coal mines three times easier than he increased his output. In the same way he organized the office space - all the staff sat at long rows of tables, communicating freely, and their management occupied separate offices at the edges of the floor.



However, the avalanche-like growth of information processed by the offices, its diversity, and an increasing number of different operations required a departure from the “factory” format. It was required to create a specialized workplace for each clerk, with a certain percentage of customization, and therefore privacy. At the same time, it was necessary to strengthen integration and facilitate communication between employees. In a word, they all should get their unique workplace, while remaining a cohesive team.




The answer was the German Bürolandschaft . He envisioned an open space where office tables are arranged in groups, in “natural order”, with trees in tubs and convenient aisles. In a word, imitating the natural environment to the maximum. The main idea of ​​the Germans was to put managers and subordinates at one table and completely get rid of the hierarchy in the organization of space.



It is easy to guess how the idea simplified the Americans. In 1963, engineer and architect Robert Propst introduced the Action Office system, which became known as the Cubicles. At first, they looked very free and liberating.



The idea was simple to the genius - to take an American office with long rows of tables and format it according to the German scheme. Tables were placed together, and each was fenced off in small partitions. So the clerks received privacy and at the same time remained in the openspace, and the company also saved on space.



Initially, Cubicles were conceived as an instrument of freedom. Let's give the floor to the famous Gordon Moore:

“By the way, Intel is famous not only for its processors, but also because it was here that the“ cubicles ”were invented, which in many modern companies replaced the traditional offices. How did you invent them?
- Yes, I remember that moment very well. We first acquired a large building at Santa Clara 4, the base of which was a huge square. When we imagined how we would build separate office rooms in it, we realized that all this would be very much like a prison. The only way out was not to build walls, but to divide all the huge space into “cubicles”. And then we thought: some employees would sit in offices, others - in cubicles, and decided to plant in cubicles and all the rest. I still occupy the largest cubic in the company, because I have a huge round table that cannot fit in a small one.

Initially it was assumed that the cubicles could be modified, changed shape and location, but very quickly this resulted in a “sea of ​​cubicles” or, if directly, a “farm of cubicles”.



Cubicles became the standard of American office life, however, having begun with the symbol of freedom and self-organization, by the end of the century cubicles became an integral symbol of oppression and lack of freedom. The leaders refused to sit in them, moving to separate spacious cabinets.



The beginning of the 21st century marks the emergence of the Internet, computers and a host of technologies that have reduced the number of office workers. Papers disappeared, communication was conducted through computers, so tables could already be set as you like. Yes, and the offices themselves in fact began to lose meaning. If earlier it was necessary to keep hundreds of clerks near the factory, now there are ten clerks, they work on the Internet, and the factory has become a virtual concept.

According to the US Bureau of Labor, by 2020, 65 million Americans will become freelancers who will no longer return to offices, representing 45% of the total workforce.

Offices began to move away from cubicles towards openspace with decoration and "eco-friendly design." However, this turned out to be only an attempt to return to the German ideas of the 1950s - people did not want to work in offices anymore, people just needed a convenient place to work. A place for creative work, not a box of 2x2 meters.

So it was, until coworking appeared. In 2005, the young programmer Brad Newberg was faced with the problem of choice. “Now my choice is either office work with its certainty and communication with employees, or freelancing with its freedom and independence. But why can't I get both? ”He began to think, and he combined both versions. Having rented a large room in an office building, he proposed using it for work to the same freelancers as himself. The new scheme of the organization of jobs, he called coworking (joint work).


Coworking CoCo Minneapolis

Coworking offers an ideal organization - open space, organized for convenient separation of teams into working areas, each of which is fenced off by decorative elements, which eliminates noise, but does not allow to fall into procrastination and completely retire. At the same time, in co-working space all space can be reorganized at any time - tables and partitions on wheels, like Darwin’s.


DI Telegraph workspace

In addition, each clerk has his place, and the team has its own table. But they are not locked in cubicles and can freely communicate with their neighbors - such moderate socialization gives a feeling of elbow and a working atmosphere. Moreover, there is no usual office pressure from the authorities - everyone here is sitting at the same table, the general atmosphere is democratic to the limit. That allows everyone to be his own manager - and this is beneficially reflected in the statistics (see above about reducing the breakdown of deadlines).

In addition to space, its content is also easily reorganized - almost every day co-working events are held for residents, and they themselves can decide which lectures and seminars they would like to see.


Coworking The Fueled Collective

Coworkers usually follow the precepts of the Chicago school and are housed in steel-framed buildings, which means high ceilings, spacious halls and huge windows for natural lighting. If such a building is also in the center of the city, then in terms of price / quality ratio such a site cannot have competitors from the classic offices.


The Chicago school can be proud.

But the main thing that coworking gives is a critical mass of ideas and professionals. As England needed to create the House of India for the management of the colonies, so that there was where to gather all the professional managers, also in the 21st century, the coworking became the offices for managing the Internet.

We set all this at the forefront when we created our coworking in the Central Telegraph . We have very high ceilings and panoramic windows instead of walls, free planning and common areas for recreation, negotiation and recreation. In addition, each employee has his own personal place, and the company has its own separate table.

A separate table for the team kills three birds with one stone. According to the theory of the organization of labor, the office distinguishes three functions of the employee:



It is easy to see that, sitting at the same table, the team easily performs these functions without getting up from the chairs.

And by the way, about the chairs: in our coworking is one of the most serious elements, and we took the chair of famous designers Charles and Ray Eames of the sample of 1949. This is the very first plastic chair in history that I wrote about at the very beginning of the article - so each DI Telegraph co-working resident has the opportunity to sit on history, and he is also considered the most comfortable chair of the 20th century, which has become us the main selection criterion.

But what will happen next? How will the evolution of offices continue?

In 1962, Marshal McLuhan proclaimed that the future is in the global village. They say everyone will work from home and stop leaving him. However, in practice it turned out that we are all just too lazy and succumb to domestic temptations not to work. That is why freelancers move from home to coworking - their productivity simply doubles.

On the other hand, the thesis about the “last working generation” was put forward. If by 2020 the number of freelancers reaches half of the workforce, it simply means that half of the people do not work in the classic sense of the word, but have fun - devote themselves to creativity or fantastic start-ups.



Do you know why the SpongeBob animated series is so ironic? It's just the first cartoon of the 21st century in which the process of work itself is ridiculous. The fact that Sponge Bob goes to work is the central comic moment of the entire series.



For a new generation, work is fun and funny. Anything but not monotonous, meaningless work - it is taken over by computers, and soon by robots. People will just need a place to work. As a place for sports or a place for creativity. But it will be tomorrow, and our coworking is working today.

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