Form Follows Fad: The Troubled Love Affair of Architectural Style and Management Ideal

Excerpts from an essay written for the exhibition catalog accompanying On the Job: Design and the American Office
An exhibition produced by the National Building Museum
Catalog published by Princeton Architectural Press, 2000 www.papress.com

Architecture and business, over the decades of the 20th century, have had much in common with the partners in a tempestuous love affair. American business has only intermittently succumbed to architecture’s fascinations. After a dizzying courtship, business leaders often conclude that architecture, like a beautiful mistress, too often consumes the bottom line rather than adding to it.

“Knock and it shall be opened to you”
Proclaiming that “human happiness was a business asset,” the “industrial betterment” movement seemed to offer an alternative to both unionization and eternal labor strife early in the 20th century. The hands of workers would fly, the argument went, if they were well-fed and housed and if they felt that their success was intertwined with that of the company. Shaping the morality of the untutored worker or the immigrant new to American ways put a nurturing face on raw capitalism. John H. Patterson’s National Cash Register Co. became a model of “practical religion.”

The Larkin Company, of Buffalo, New York, was the emblematic Industrial Betterment enterprise. It took an almost familial approach to staff, who were treated to picnics and weekly concerts and offered educational incentives and profit-sharing. In hiring Frank Lloyd Wright to design a new administration building, the company found an architect who possessed a messianic, Emersonian evangelism all his own. He proved the perfect man to put the Larkin ideal of moral uplift into place, and who created one of the most conceptually and technically rich commercial buildings of the 20th century.

Larkin executives recognized that the clerical staff, overwhelmingly women, needed a clean, well-lighted place to work, a feat not easily accomplished amidst Buffalo’s smoke-wrapped railroad sidings. Wright created not only a beautifully light-filled interior, he is justly celebrated in history for the inventive way he filtered the fetid air. But he also made a highly efficient machine of work, using emerging technology to handle the thousands of items of correspondence that poured in daily. From a lower-level receiving area, mail was moved to the upper levels, then processed downward. Wright installed cabinets in alcoves below high windows for the company’s unique system of card filing. Company correspondents dictated responses to inquiries into gramophones, which were taken by messengers to a typing pool, then checked and mailed.

The building also provided numerous self-improvement opportunities for the Larkin “family”: a library, lounge, YWCA, and classroom. The solid piers of the central light court gave way, as they soared upward, to elaborate decorations, hanging plants, and the sun’s rays picking out gold-leafed inspirational inscriptions. The celestial reference was none too subtle. In the public areas, wrote historian Jack Quinan, “Sculptures and inscriptions directed the employees away from the common notion of work as mindless drudgery and toward the belief that work well done is inherently edifying.” The most prominent inscription reads, “Ask and it shall be given you. Seek and ye shall find. Knock and it shall be opened unto you.” This evangelical quality is as much Wright as it is Larkin. Wright’s personal Eden ended a few years later, when he was cast into the social and professional wilderness after abandoning his wife and children. Throughout the remaining five and a half decades of his life, however, he studded talks and writing with such Emersonian vagaries as poetry, truth, beauty and ideals.

The workplace architecture of moral uplift would see its grandest monument in the soaring neo-Gothic terra cotta shaft of the 1913 Woolworth Tower, in New York. Such idealism would not survive the horror of World War I nor the giddy consumer culture of the 1920s.

“A normal American madness”
Frederick W. Taylor, “the father of scientific management,” was the most famous proponent of industrial improvement through rationalizaion of technique. He must rank as among the oddest figures in business history, no small feat in an era bursting with eccentrics. Born 1856 into genteel Quaker Philadelphia affluence, he early demonstrated that he was no ordinary child. At age 12, he devised a contraption of wood pieces and straps arranged to awaken him should roll onto his back. (He blamed the sleeping position for the nightmares and insomnia to which he was perpetually subject.) He exasperated his playmates by insisting on measuring off a game court in exact feet and inches. He would make lists of girls expected to attend a school dance, categorizing them as either attractive or unattractive, so that he could efficiently make use of time others would regard as carefree.

Though his keen intelligence, along with his father’s insistence, predestined him to Harvard and a career in law, Taylor left Phillips Exeter Academy just prior to completing his studies, an apparent victim of debilitating headaches and failing eyesight.

After a few months recuperation, he renounced the path his father had set for him, and instead joined the Enterprise Hydraulic Works in Philadelphia as an apprentice patternmaker and machinist. His eyesight returned of its own accord, but he remained a laborer, moving on to the Midvale Steel Company, in Philadelphia, where he worked his way up the ladder (though he was probably the only factory-worker member of Philadelphia’s exclusive Cricket Club). He took courses in engineering and became Midvale’s chief engineer. Taylor began to apply his analytical mind and mania for measurement to hone the efficiency of production by recording and analyzing tasks, measuring how long they took, and determining the methods that would save time and motion.

As Taylor took his process-engineering proposals to other companies, he was surprised to find resistance rather than welcome. Workers saw in his methods the potential for more work by fewer hands for less money. Taylor’s imperious manner failed to endear him to management either, which saw a threat to comforting old ways. He was even opposed by his employers, the bosses that would ostensibly benefit. They never invested enough money nor gave his methods enough time to work, he bitterly complained. His ideas began to catch fire, however, as disciples with greater diplomatic skill took over the hands-on tasks, leaving Taylor to consulting and writing. A 1910 paper became world famous as The Principles of Scientific Management.

Louis Brandeis, who later became an influential Supreme Court Justice inadvertently made Taylor famous by using Taylorite principles to argue The Eastern Rate Case, of 1910-11. While the case nominally concerned the arcane question of rail freight rates, it became a lightening rod for a nation made anxious by inflation. Brandeis, who represented interests who would have to pay more if rates were increased, made a stirring case that the railroads didn’t need more money because they were not using modern efficiency techniques.

Suddenly, efficiency, became the new panacea for the price problem. This “normal American madness,” as it was famously dubbed, “hit like a flash flood,” according to progressive-era historian Samuel Haber, “at first covering almost the entire landscape, but soon collecting in various places to be absorbed slowly and to enrich the immediate surroundings. . . . Efficiency appeared as a refurbishment of the commonplace exhortations to virtue and duty, as a means for the transference of personal morality to society, and as a means for the control of society without specific reference to morality.”

Taylor and his “Taylorites” were relentlessly attacked over ensuing years, especially by labor activists who decried him for his belief in the necessity of men “to become one of a train of gear wheels.” But Taylor’s focus on analytical methods rankled America for another reason: it appeared to subsume American individual intuition and enterprise to the mechanistic methods of science.

Haber remarked on how “Taylor’s frenzy for order was the counterpart of the disorder within him.” Sudhir Kakar, who wrote a psycho-biography of Taylor, found a man who was perpetually “propitiating vindictive and wrathful gods” within himself. Whatever those gods may have been, Taylor found himself unable ever to escape them. He compulsively measured, analyzed and sought improvements in just about everything he encountered. He even invented a golf putter to improve his game. Frederick Taylor died in 1915, his death presaged by the fact that he did not arise at exactly his usual hour and wind his Swiss watch.

Engineering the workplace–and the nation
Just as Taylor found engineering expertise underappreciated, Herbert Croly, a journalist and critic who edited the Architectural Record in the early years of the century, found the talents of architects perpetually subsumed to the bottom line. Haber sums up Croly’s frequent writings for the magazine: “There was little instinctive love of art in America, Croly declared. The great mass of building in this country was directed by men who were simply trying to build for as little money as possible something which would sell or rent. Even those who seemed concerned with beauty had the most barbarous taste. Art, which in most countries grew almost unconsciously, in American had to be pursued consciously, if at all.”

Recognizing how difficult it was to raise the status of architecture, Croly came to believe, with Brandeis and Walter Lippman, that professionals deserved a special status, one where their disinterested wisdom and acuity could be applied to the problems of the country. The expertise of the well-trained professional elite would keep at bay both the worst instincts of business and the inchoate desires of the masses. Croly’s famous and influential book, The Promise of American Life, was published in 1909. In it, he proposed that the nation be run by “exceptional men” rather than “the popular average.” Such an elite could re-engineer the economy and the polity to improve the status of the wretched poor and mend the social chasms that yawned between uneducated foreigners and the middle class that felt threatened by them.

In short, the “efficiency experts” that were rationalizing business would be turned to the task of rationalizing government. The primacy of science and professionalism in public affairs would get a nationwide advocate in the New Republic magazine, which debuted in 1914, with Croly as editor. Progressive reformer Thorstein Veblen took up the call after World War I, making common cause with followers of Taylor, and suggesting a separate elevated role for engineers to control and foster “productive efficiency” in the nation as a whole. It was not be. The movement quickly dissolved, with Veblen blaming engineers’ “hired-man’s loyalty to the established order.”

Mechanization takes command
It would take the Second World War, which ushered in so many unanticipated changes in American life, to again alter the relationship between architects and business. Mechanical ventilation, air conditioning, and improved fluorescent lighting were innovations that mobilization for war turned into necessities. The mechanically serviced workplace came into its own as windows, skylights, and light monitors–traditional forms of lighting and ventilation–were sealed up to meet wartime blackout requirements.

The war also had a dramatic decentralizing effect. Industrial districts and downtowns made tantalizing targets, so the military encouraged the location of strategic research and manufacturing facilities away from built-up urban areas and existing factory districts. There were plenty of good locations, created along the extensive highway network put in place as a Depression make-work effort. After the war, few of these companies would return to central cities.

Even more important, organizations found that people would work efficiently in serried ranks of desks with few traditional amenities or architectural embellishments–at least under the pressures of wartime. A legendary example is the humble, wood-framed Building 20, hurriedly erected in 1943 as a temporary building for the development of radar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It incubated not only wartime advances, but the science of linguistics, research in nuclear science, cosmic rays, dynamic analysis and control, acoustics and food technology as well as numerous computer breakthroughs. In the postwar era, business would begin to question whether architecture deserved a role in the workplace any more sophisticated than as a drafting service.

“Organizations seek the adaptable, interchangeable person”
In the 1950s, Skidmore Owings & Merrill alone built such canonical office towers as Lever House, New York (1952), Inland Steel, in Chicago (1958) and Union Carbide (now Chase Manhattan, 1960). Businesses moved to the suburbs, and architects were hired to build a more modern, progressive image of the corporation, offering views to lavishly designed leafy landscapes rather than the sooty exteriors of other buildings. Gordon Bunshaft, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, set a long, low, prismatic glass square on farmland in Bloomfield, Connecticut for the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company (1957), punching out four courtyards landscaped as Japanese gardens. Nearby, he perched a 336-foot by 378-foot tray of horizontal space on branching riblike fingers springing from concrete trunks for the Emhart Manufacturing Company, in 1963.

For all the design bravura and technological sophistication, buildings through the first two decades after the war expressed an almost unchanged management view of the workplace. Elaborate hierarchies emulated the military bureaucracies that had successfully prosecuted the War. “Organizations seek the adaptable, interchangeable person,” William H. Whyte wrote in his seminal 1956 study, The Organization Man. The gridded, rationalized, evenly serviced and totally flexible nature of the architectural workspace perfectly reflected the war-era management zeitgeist.

What was missing from the postwar era was any role for architects beyond the elegant packaging of such anonymous undifferentiated space. It seems ironic that the periods of greatest prosperity–and consequently, of greatest construction–have in the 20th century coincided with a minimized role for architects.

The trend began in the 1920s. Though the era is famous for such iconic structures as the Chrysler Building and Chicago’s Tribune Tower, architects devoted far more of their attention to proficiently turning out buildings that delivered the most rentable area per square foot built. They lamented the increasing complexity of the task and the greater numbers of experts whose concerns had to be accommodated. “The owner and his practical advisers must test and pass upon the plan and its functioning,” wrote R. H. Shreve, a partner with Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, the designers of the Empire State Building. “Finance dictates the fenestration; rent rolls rule the ‘parti.’ The engineers, the builder, and the Building Department impose material limitations affecting color and texture, while the zoning law and the budget cast their shadows over form and mass–ancient domains of my Lord Architect–now jointly occupied by him and his allies in the name of Cooperation.” While architects in 2000 might not frame the issue in such colorful prose, they readily recognize the sentiment.

The soaring shafts, Mayan ziggurats, zigzag decorations and neo-Gothic finials that characterized the 1920s skyscrapers enclosed plans that had been honed to minimize unrentable hallways. Windows were arranged not according to expressive whim, but to allow emerging office-plan layout specialists to regularize the size of offices. These skyscraping machines for moneymaking became the defining structure of the 20th-Century American city.

In the high-growth era that followed the Second World War, the attention lavished on the palatial quarters erected for the postwar corporate elite disguised a much broader trend to dispense with all but the most minimal attention of the architect. The wartime experience had shattered the consensus that business needed architecture to put on a certain kind of appropriately civic face. As suburbs leapfrogged into the leafy hinterlands, commercial architecture became ever more standardized, with more and more of the parts selected from catalogs and sub-assembled in factories for quick erection on site. Croly’s concern that “the great mass of building in this country was directed by men who were simply trying to build for as little money as possible” only became more evident as the last half of the 20th century unfolded.

The building breathes
In the 1980s an enormous divergence between American and European office-design practice began. The social-democratic politics that prevailed in Scandinavia, Germany, and Holland empowered workers’ councils, who put the quality of the office environment on the bargaining table. Not only did workers’ councils decry the distractions and lack of privacy innate to 1970s-style open offices, they hated the large, deep floors, where people had to sit as far as 100 feet from the nearest window. The councils made private or semi-private offices the norm for a high percentage of white-collar workers. Access to an operable window opening onto a view is now mandated in much of Northern Europe.

The need to give nearly every office a window inspired a great deal of architectural innovation in Europe. Deep, squarish plans got stretched into long narrow slabs or starfish shapes. Such long wings, however, tended to isolate workers. In 1988, the SAS Headquarters, in Stockholm, designed by Niels Torp, arranged narrow, fingerlike office wings along a skylighted internal street. Lined with plant-draped lounges and coffee bars, the street became the focus of company life, a place where meetings could occur informally and where process-improving ideas might incubate over a cup of coffee.

The push for a window and fresh air came out of an ecological sensibility and a suspicion of mechanically treated air that is deep seated in the culture of many northern European countries. Dutch, Danish, and German workers are also much more likely to bike to work than Americans, so it was only natural that Europe would take the lead in pushing energy conserving and environmentally sustainable building technologies through a combination of sponsored research, tax benefits, and prototype projects.

An early culmination of this trend was Foster & Partners ambitious “eco skyscraper” in Frankfurt for Commerzbank completed in 1997. The architect drew a triangular plan with bulging sides, then drilled a generous atrium out of the center of the full 30-story height of the tower. To bring light and air into the atrium, Foster punched a series of “sky gardens” out of the sides of the building.

It was not only an extraordinarily inventive way of giving all the offices an outside window, it transformed the entire experience of working in a tall building. Most tower-building occupants have a sense only of themselves as individuals because they look out over a skyline of strangers and competitors. There’s little connection with colleagues who work on other floors. At Commerzbank, occupants of atrium-facing offices not only see the sky through the garden openings, they see colleagues at work on floors above and below. Individuals are palpably reminded that they are part of a larger organization. The gardens, shared by several floors, make readily accessed meeting places.

Rise of the real estate product
Something quite different happened in America, beginning in the late 1970s. Businesses came to see office buildings as a profit-making asset in their own right, and began managing them for ultimate sale or sublease rather than for long-term value. Instead of building buildings that reflected community commitment, corporate values, or the needs of business process, companies began to shave away every eccentricity, dictated by a real-estate-development mentality that focused entirely on delivering a completely generic product, produced at lowest first cost. The floor plan shape and size of the American office building became rigidly proscribed nationwide. It became increasingly difficult for architects to propose specific solutions to a client’s unique needs or site. As such buildings were dumbed down to real estate-development product, innovation withered.

In quantity of commercial construction, the early 1980s had no equal thanks to lax lending requirements and generous tax benefits. While renewed status-consciousness brought back the private office, it was, like the 1920s and 1950s, an era in which architects were offered few opportunities to create innovative expressions of business goals. “Prestige” projects were denoted by the elaborateness of materials applied to the lobby and the complexity of the building crown. Under their neo Deco, neo Flemish, even neo Gothic skins, they hardly differed.

From garages to caves, clubs, and hives
The collapse of commercial building construction that occurred in the late 1980s coincided with an era of massive restructuring and downsizing in American business. Companies discovered “total quality” and learned the lessons American W. Edwards Deming had so succesfully taught the Japanese. They went “In Search of Excellence” (the title of Tom Peters wildly successful management bible); they became “customer driven,” according to the tenets of Richard C. Whitely or “reengineered” their corporations as advised by Michael Hammer & James Champy.

As accounting firms branched out to offer a broad range of management-consulting services, they were among the first to recognize the businesses that they were restructuring might benefit from new kinds of physical spaces. Management consultants created a new kind of shared space for “road warriors”–home bases for consultants who spent most of their time on the premises of clients. A “concierge” would set up the space, with files, computer hookup, and telephone–all arranged on a daily basis like a hotel room, hence the ugly term “hoteling.”

More important than the entirely unconventional appearance of the offices Jay Chiat built in New York and California for his Chiat/Day advertising agency, was that he eliminated conventional workstations and offices. He invited staff to become nomads, choosing a place to work (equipped with portable phone and laptop computer) based on what they needed to do. Depending on who you believe, Chiat sold the company a few years after these offices were completed because a) he had given it such a unique identity and vision that it was worth top dollar, or b) the entirely untethered environment created chaos which could only be fixed through the sale to TBWA. TBWA/Chiat/Day, has built yet another striking–if far more territorial–facility in California to the designs of Frank Gehry alumnus Clive Wilkinson and moved into new offices in New York designed by Gensler. Jay Chiat’s approach, however, has proved influential. Teamwork spaces dedicated to particular clients or products have now become common in advertising.

Projects like Chiat/Day simply recognize that the nature of work is becoming more mobile and fluid. Alfred P. West, the president of SEI Investments, in Oaks, Pennsylvania, found himself reconfiguring teams so often that he and his architect, Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle, simply put everyone’s desk on wheels, plugging them into a reconfigurable power, data, and telecommunications network dangling from the ceiling.

By the late 1990s, Jonathan Ryburg was able to document a broad movement in restructuring American businesses toward a “high context” work culture of frequent meetings, greater socialization and lowered hierarchies, emblematic of the urban cultures of Italy, Spain and Japan. (His Facilities Performance Group, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, analyses changing work patterns.) Northern Europe retained its “low context” approach (emulating the sociology of England and Germany) of private offices and closed doors.

The new century ushers in an era of perpetual corporate mutation. Management specialists these days use metaphors derived from nature, describing office ecologies or organic systems. “The knowledge-based organization is a map of very intricate networks,” says DEGW’s Frank Duffy. “Design studios and theaters are the kinds of metaphors companies will have to use to develop innovative capabilities,” says John Kao, who has taught business creativity at Harvard and Stanford Universities. “You need an environment where you can experiment.” Kao has created such an environment in San Francisco, which he calls the Idea Factory. Combining elements of a design studio and a television or multimedia production house, it is a place where businesses can test out means to integrate innovation into processes, whether by assembling expertise in new ways or rapidly prototyping ideas. Workplace analysts see only greater fluidity in the use of space. Less of what companies do involves linear processes and fixed jobs with fixed duties. Instead, each new product, each service-improvement innovation, becomes a project that is handled by an interdisciplinary team.

Architects, who traditionally deployed their skills to denote hierarchy or prestige have learned to adapt. Now they use spatial drama and architectural materials to signal the youthful, no-holds-barred nature of the workplace; as an advertisement of corporate values, even as decoration meant to recognize the unhierarchical nature of the space. In this topsy-turvy work world, the fitness center or coffee bar gets the most lavish architectural attention.

In a skills-short economy, even windows that open have made a comeback–they are a way of making staff feel valued. And some of the environmental innovations pioneered in Europe are making a tentative foray into America. The role of architecture as an aid to business is more appreciated than ever, garnering extensive coverage in the business press, and inspiring a prominent awards program. (Only Wall Street analysts, like hectoring in-laws, seem unhappy with the union, questioning the utility of any but lowest-common denominator design in growth-company facilities.)

Indeed, office-design culture is today so volatile that yet a new direction manifested itself early in 2000. A new Gold Rush is happening on the construction-clogged streets of San Francisco’s once decrepit South of Market neighborhood, driven by the billion-dollar dreams of “new economy” internet entrepreneurs and the open wallets of venture capitalists. Rechristened Multimedia Gulch, developers and architects cannot convert the former garages, factories, and lofts quickly enough to accommodate companies which months earlier may not have existed.

Internet-startup clients are changing the rules in several respects. They are heavy on graphic designers, interface designers, and animators, people whose education may be art school, whose lifestyle is urban, who draw inspiration from arts and culture, and who socialize in downtown nightclubs rather than suburban golf clubs. They tend to prefer urban loft environments to the carpeted, mirror-glass confines of office parks. Web-oriented businesses have tied up nearly all the available loft space in Chicago’s loop and in New York’s “Silicon Alley.” Loft structures in the echoing emptiness of downtown Detroit now flicker with lights late at night–a mini-revival driven by the dot-com boom.

Because of the design-driven nature of such businesses, architecture is playing a much more important role, shaping distinctive cultures and images for many of these companies. Some architects are even devising new dot-com prototypes. It’s a heady moment. Architecture, at last, may play the role it has always sought: putting a face on the creation and sharing of knowledge; creating an experiental environment that can alter and be altered by shape-shifting business.

Or the moment could evanesce, just–as many predict–the “new economy” will.