The Ever-evolving American Office: from Efficiency to Coziness

The modern American office traces its open plan roots to idealistic modernist architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, who saw interior walls as social barriers and believed removing them would break down division.

Corporations embraced the concept for a more practical reason, packing more workers into less space rather than liberating them.

In the 1950s the German Quickborner team developed the Burolandschaft or office landscape, breaking long desk rows into partitioned groupings, and Herman Miller expanded the idea in 1964 with the Action Office and its larger surfaces and adjustable desk heights.

When companies began buying the system as modular parts in 1968, they kept the space saving features and discarded the humanizing ones, giving rise to the cramped cubicle farm.

Designer Robert Propst, who helped create the Action Office, later denounced what it became as monolithic insanity, and research has since linked open plan layouts to workplace conflict, elevated blood pressure, and higher turnover.

Some employers now abandon cubicles for clustered desks rebranded as pods, showing how each era's office reflects its shifting assumptions about what workers actually need.

Propst's pods have a sequel: the empty office. Moody's put U.S. office vacancy at 21% in the first quarter of 2026, a record and four points above the 2020 level, with Oakland, Austin and Chicago each shedding more than half a million square feet, per Bisnow. Bosses answer with attendance orders: the share of Fortune 100 firms requiring full-time office work has jumped from 5% to 54% since 2023, yet badge swipes still hover just over half of 2019 levels. Landlords are betting on quality instead. CBRE counts vacancy at 18.3% by its own measure, the sharpest quarterly drop since 2015, with prime space at 12.3%. Watch whether Moody's third quarter read, due this autumn, turns down too.