History of office

The structure and shape of the office is impacted by both management thought as well as construction materials and may or may not have walls or barriers. The word stems from the Latin officium, and its equivalents in various, mainly romance, languages. An officium was not necessarily a place, but rather an often mobile 'bureau' in the sense of a human staff or even the abstract notion of a formal position, such as a magistrature. The relatively elaborate Roman bureaucracy would not be equaled for centuries in the West after the fall of Rome, even partially reverting to illiteracy, while the East preserved a more sophisticated administrative culture, both under Byzantium and under Islam.
Offices in classical antiquity were often part of a palace complex or a large temple. There was usually a room where scrolls were kept and scribes did their work. Ancient texts mentioning the work of scribes allude to the existence of such "offices". These rooms are sometimes called "libraries" by some archaeologists and the general press because one often associates scrolls with literature. In fact they were true offices since the scrolls were meant for record keeping and other management functions such as treaties and edicts, and not for writing or keeping poetry or other works of fiction.

Middle Ages

The High Middle Ages (1000–1300) saw the rise of the medieval chancery, which was usually the place where most government letters were written and where laws were copied in the administration of a kingdom. The rooms of the chancery often had walls full of pigeonholes, constructed to hold rolled up pieces of parchment for safekeeping or ready reference, a precursor to the book shelf. The introduction of printing during the Renaissance did not change these early government offices much.

An early European office.

Medieval illustrations, such as paintings or tapestries, often show people in their private offices handling record-keeping books or writing on scrolls of parchment. All kinds of writings seemed to be mixed in these early forms of offices. Before the invention of the printing press and its distribution there was often a very thin line between a private office and a private library since books were read or written in the same space at the same desk or table, and general accounting and personal or private letters were also done there.
It was during the 13th century that the English form of the word first appeared when referring to a position involving duties (ex. the office of the ...). Geoffrey Chaucer appears to have first used the word in 1395 to mean a place where business is transacted in The Canterbury Tales.
As mercantilism became the dominant economic theory of the Renaissance, merchants tended to conduct their business in the same buildings, which might include retail sales, warehousing and clerical work. During the 15th century, population density in many cities reached the point where stand-alone buildings were used by merchants to conduct their business, and there was a developing a distinction between church, government/military and commerce uses for buildings.^[1]

Emergence of the modern office

With the growth of large, complex organizations such as the Royal Navy and the East India Company in the 18th century, the first purpose-built office spaces were constructed. The Old Admiralty (Ripley Building) was built in 1726 as a three storey U-shaped brick building and was the first purpose built office building in Great Britain. As well as offices, the building housed a board room and apartments for the Lords of the Admiralty. In the 1770s, many scattered offices for the Royal Navy were gathered into Somerset House, the first block purpose-built for office work.^[2]

The sprawling complex of the extended East India House c.1800. The company employed an army of bureaucrats to administer its territories in India.

The East India House was built in 1729 on Leadenhall Street as the headquarters from which the East India Company administered its' Indian colonial possessions. The Company developed a very complex bureaucracy for the task, which required thousands of office employees to process the necessary paperwork. The Company recognized the benefits of centralized administration, and required that all workers sign in and out at the central office, daily.^[3]
As the Industrial Revolution intensified in the 18th and 19th centuries, the industries of banking, rail, insurance, retail, petroleum, and telegraphy dramatically grew in size and complexity. To transact business, an increasing large number of clerks were needed to handle order-processing, accounting, and file documents, with increasingly specialized office space required to house these activities. Most of the desks of the era were top heavy with paper storage bins extending above the desk-work area, giving the appearance of a cubicle and offering the workers some degree of privacy.
The relative high price of land in the central core of cities lead to the first multi-story buildings, which were limited to about 10 stories until the use of iron and steel allowed for higher structures. The first purpose-built office block was the Brunswick Building, built in Liverpool in 1841.^[4] The invention of the safety elevator in 1852 by Elisha Otis saw the rapid escalation upward of buildings.^[1] By the end of the 19th century, larger office buildings frequently contained large glass atriums to allow light into the complex and improve air circulation.

20th century

An office in 1903, equipped with speaking tubes.

By 1906, Sears, Roebuck and Co had opened their mail order and headquarters operation in a 3,000,000-square-foot (280,000 m²) building in Chicago, at the time the largest building in the world. The time and motion study, pioneered in manufacturing by F. W. Taylor and later applied to the office environment by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, led to the idea that managers needed to play an active role in directing the work of subordinates. As a result, in 1915, the Equitable Life Insurance Company in New York City introduced the “Modern Efficiency Desk” with a flat top and drawers below, designed to allow managers an easy view of the workers. This led to a demand for a large square footages per floor in buildings, and a return to the open spaces that were seen in pre–industrial revolution buildings.^[1]

1937 image of the Division of Classification and Cataloging, National Archives, United States.

However, by the midpoint of the 20th century, it became apparent that an efficient office required discretion in the control of privacy, which is needed to combat tedium linked to poor productivity, and to encourage creativity. In 1964, the Herman Miller (office equipment) company engaged Robert Propst, a prolific industrial designer, who came up with the concept of the Action Office which later evolved into the cubicle office furniture system.^[1]