The History of the Open-Plan Office: From Clerks' Halls to Hybrid Desks

By Victor Hoang · Updated Oct 24, 2026

In 1906, the Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, moved its mail-order staff into a new headquarters. It was designed around a skylit well. Executive desks stood in the open space, with balconies rising around it.

Large shared rooms for clerks are old. But the open-plan office as a design idea took shape in the late 1950s. Two brothers near Hamburg, Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle, built a consulting practice around the Bürolandschaft, or "office landscape." The throughline is a cycle. Each generation opens the office to speed up communication, cost pressure squeezes the design, and a backlash follows, until the next idea arrives. The wider story of the workplace itself, from scribal rooms to the hybrid week, is in the history of the office.

The Larkin well rose five stories. A century later the argument was the same: does putting people in sight of each other make work better? The answer, as this history shows, depends on what the room is for.

Timeline at a Glance

The Clerks' Hall (12th century-1930s)

From the exchequer table to Wright's skylit atrium

In twelfth-century England, the king's accounts were settled at one table. The Dialogue Concerning the Exchequer describes it: a black cloth marked with stripes covered the top, and counters were placed in the spaces according to their values. Officials sat on benches around it, a calculator worked in the middle of one side so he was visible to all, and the sheriffs and their clerks sat on the fourth bench to render account. It was a shared room built for record-keeping, but nobody called it open plan. It is a precursor, in the same family as the scribes' halls covered in the history of knowledge work.

The idea of designing a big room as a work system arrived with the mail-order business. The Larkin Company, established in 1875 as a national mail-order business selling soap products, hired Frank Lloyd Wright after its secretary, Darwin D. Martin, pushed for it. The headquarters at 680 Seneca Street was ready for occupancy in August 1906. A steel frame wrapped in masonry enclosed a large, open, five-story well lit by skylights. Executive staff had desks in that space, and balconies rose around it. The company's managers wanted a familial office culture, and the new headquarters was meant to ensure efficiency, productivity and cooperation among employees. The building was demolished in 1950.

Larkin's open court was a precursor too: one remarkable room for one company, not yet a rule for all offices. Meanwhile management writers were turning layout into a method. William Henry Leffingwell's Scientific Office Management, copyrighted in 1917 by the A. W. Shaw Company, tells readers to draw the office to scale on a floor plan and place cut-out cardboard desks on it before moving any furniture. It warns that private offices must not absorb all the windows. One photo caption contrasts an office where clerks face each other with an arrangement of low, flat desks all facing one direction, which the book's experts say would save money. Another shows partitioned booths laid out in aisles so the office manager at the end can supervise stenographers almost as well as in an open office. This is the bullpen logic: rows, one direction, one supervisor's line of sight.

Frank Lloyd Wright returned to the form later with Johnson Wax. The Great Workroom of the S. C. Johnson Administration Building in Racine, Wisconsin, holds more than one-half acre of open workspace under tree-like columns, and the building was designated a National Historic Landmark on January 7, 1976.

What it means for teams today: a shared room has always been a design choice, and the layout depends on what it is meant to do. Ask what yours is for before you copy anyone else's.

The Office Landscape (late 1950s-1970s)

Two brothers swap rows of desks for communication flows

A postwar German office, as the Hans Böckler Foundation's magazine Mitbestimmung put it in 2013, was a joyless place: desks laid out symmetrically like a schoolroom, with work organized by rank. A young consultancy near Hamburg, the Quickborner Team, founded by Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle, set out to change that. Its staff included mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers. The article dates the concept to the end of the 1950s, and it became known as the Bürolandschaft.

One of its first clients was Bertelsmann, which had its Gütersloh book-and-record distribution house redesigned. Customer data from the company's book club converged there, and the plan was to steer production, storage and shipping from the room. Reinhard Mohn worked in the landscape himself, as a demonstration. The office was divided by work and communication paths, not by rank: plants and screens structured what looked like chaos, and carpets were meant to reduce noise. Even so, the article says, the room was as loud as a ride in a VW Beetle. Workplace Insight's Mark Eltringham describes the same design as conventional furniture laid out organically, with screens and plants, reflecting the needs of individuals and teams, and with managers no longer in private offices.

The timing mattered. The Mitbestimmung article ties the landscape to a period when organizational theory was pushing back on Taylorist thinking, helped by cybernetics and a wider push to "humanize" work and encourage teamwork. It also records the fate of the idea. The landscape was exported as far as the United States, but success brought imitators who watered the concept down, then computers moved many exchanges to the screen. In Eltringham's account, once the idea was joined to corporate priorities it turned into American bullpens and clusters of workstations, and the original vision was overwhelmed by management's preference for command and control.

In 1972 the Schnelle brothers left the team to start a company for moderation techniques, which is a reminder that the founders themselves moved on from furniture to facilitation.

What it means for teams today: the original idea was organized around who needs to talk to whom. If your open floor is arranged by department headcount, you have the copy and not the original.

The Cubicle Years (1960s-1990s)

A humane system gets squeezed into rows

The American counterpart came from Herman Miller's research arm, run by Robert Propst. Dezeen's Andrew Shanahan reports that Propst, an academic given a free hand, spent about three years on the Action Office, with George Nelson giving the ideas form. Nelson accepted an industry award for it in 1965. The first Action Office was expensive and a commercial flop. Propst himself felt it was more of an executive set than the mass-market kit he wanted.

Action Office II fixed that. Dezeen reports that it reached Herman Miller's catalogs in 1967, and PIN-UP magazine dates the launch to 1968. PIN-UP describes Propst's goal as a flexible system that would encourage spontaneous conversation and idea sharing. It adds that, although he designed with humanistic intentions, the system let companies pack many employees into a small footprint, each with a semi-private enclosure. The panels in early installations met at 120 degrees. Dezeen reports that Propst favored two walls at that angle, inspired by honeycomb, and considered the four-sided cubicle the worst use of the system. Later they became 90 degrees.

Propst's own view, per Dezeen, was that the marketplace invented the cubicle, reacting to open desks in static rows and corner offices for managers. Competitors copied the design through the 1970s. Nelson's reaction was sharper. In a 1970 letter to Herman Miller's chairman, Dezeen reports, he called Action Office II unsuited to creating environments that gratify people. Dezeen also reports that Action Office has since earned more than $5 billion in sales.

So the first mass version of the open office was a compromise. It kept some privacy, which Leffingwell's rows did not, and lost the communication logic of the landscape. If you want the longer arc of the software that filled those cubicles, see the history of office software.

What it means for teams today: a tool built for one purpose gets used for the cheapest purpose. Check what your own office furniture and floor plan are optimized for in practice, not on the brochure.

The Open-Plan Boom (1990s-2015)

Tech companies tear down the last walls

The next push to open the room came with new ways of working. Veldhoen + Company's own timeline records that in 1995 Erik Veldhoen published The Demise of the Office, and that in 1996 the Interpolis project in Tilburg introduced wireless communication to support unassigned workspaces and a cultural shift toward trusting employees to work anytime, anywhere. The company says a 2001 German project at B. Braun followed after its CEO asked for the best state-of-the-art office example, and the answer was Interpolis. This became known as activity-based working: different spaces for different tasks, with no personal desk.

Not every open office followed that logic. At the end of this period the clearest statement of the opposite approach came from Silicon Valley. On March 31, 2015, Facebook staff moved into MPK 20, a 40,000-square-metre building designed by Frank Gehry in Menlo Park, with about 2,800 employees in one large room. Mark Zuckerberg described it as "the largest open floor plan in the world," and said it was easy for people to move around and collaborate with anyone there.

A few things about this era are worth separating. The Interpolis idea came with trust and technology; the one-room approach came with a bet on proximity. And in both cases the promise was the same one that Propst and the Schnelle brothers had made: more conversation. That promise was about to be tested.

What it means for teams today: an open floor without choice is one bet; an open floor with quiet rooms, shared desks and trust is another. Know which one you have bought.

The Backlash (2013-2019)

Surveys and badges find less talk, not more

Two studies in this window changed the argument. In 2013, Jungsoo Kim and Richard de Dear at the University of Sydney analyzed a University of California, Berkeley database of occupant surveys covering more than 42,000 office workers in the USA, Finland, Canada and Australia. People in open-plan offices were less satisfied with their workplace environment than those in private offices. The benefit of being close to co-workers was offset by more noise and less privacy. The study measured satisfaction, not productivity.

The second was behavioral. Ethan Bernstein of Harvard Business School and Stephen Turban of Harvard University ran two field studies of corporate headquarters moving from cubicles to open space, using wearable sociometric badges and company email servers. At the first company, a Fortune 500 multinational, 52 participants spent 72 percent less time interacting face to face, from about 5.8 hours per person per day to about 1.7 hours over 15-day windows. They sent 56 percent more emails to each other. At the second, also a Fortune 500 firm, 100 employees spent between 67 and 71 percent less time face to face, and emailed between 22 and 50 percent more. The authors conclude that, rather than prompting more face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger social withdrawal and a shift to email and instant messaging. Both studies cover participants at two headquarters, so they show what happened there, not what happens in every open office.

The research did not end open plan. Cost and density still favored it. But it moved the burden of proof from "why not open?" to "what is this open room for?"

What it means for teams today: measure how people actually communicate after a layout change. Badges are not needed; compare meeting counts, messages and survey answers before and after, and ask people what changed.

The Hybrid Return (2020-present)

The office becomes a place to visit

After 2020 the question changed. Nick Bloom of Stanford said in a Hoover Institution conversation that, as of mid-2023, full days worked from home were somewhere around a quarter of all paid working days among Americans aged 20 to 64, about four times the 2019 rate. That figure screens out low-earning, part-time jobs and comes from a survey he runs with colleagues.

The evidence on hybrid schedules is mixed by setting but encouraging. In a six-month randomized trial of 1,612 employees at Trip.com between August 2021 and January 2022, staff who worked at home Wednesdays and Fridays had one-third lower quit rates and the same performance grades as five-day office staff. That firm is Chinese, and the roles were graduate-level technical and finance jobs, so the result may not transfer to every company.

What does this mean for the open-plan office? If people come in two or three days a week, a desk for every person on every day is a waste, and the room must be good for the things people come in to do: meet, ask, learn from each other. That brings back the questions Quickborner asked in the late 1950s. For the broader pattern of remote and hybrid teams, read remote work productivity and async communication best practices.

What it means for teams today: design the office for the days people share, and move the focused work to wherever it goes best.

Key People

Key Facts

Key Facts: The Open-Plan Office

• The Larkin building was ready for occupancy in August 1906 around a five-story, skylit open well.
• The Quickborner Team's Bürolandschaft dates to the end of the 1950s.
• Action Office II reached Herman Miller's catalogs in 1967 and launched in 1968.
• After two moves to open offices, face-to-face interaction fell by about 70 percent in the measured groups.
• Facebook's MPK 20 put about 2,800 employees in one room in 2015.

The Pattern Behind the History

This is our synthesis, not a research finding. Across the timeline the same loop repeats:

1. The open room promises communication. Larkin, the landscape, Action Office and MPK 20 each promised it.
2. Cost and control reshape it. Rows, supervision lines and density win over flow.
3. People lose privacy and focus. Noise and interruption are the recurring complaints.
4. A study or a critic names the loss. Nelson, Kim and de Dear, and Bernstein and Turban each did.
5. A new variant arrives. Cubicles, activity-based work and hybrid desks each answered the last problem.

What It Teaches Teams Today

• Ask what the room is for. Collaboration, supervision and cost need different layouts.
• Offer a choice of spaces. Open areas for talk and quiet places for focus, as in the activity-based idea.
• Watch behavior, not intent. Compare communication before and after any layout change.
• Plan around attendance. If people come in a few days a week, design for those shared days.
• Revisit it often. Every generation of office design has traded one problem for another.

For more on how work measurement changed alongside the office, see the history of time and motion studies, the history of productivity measurement, and the productivity timeline. The full arc starts in the history of productivity. If you want the definition first, read what productivity is.

The open-plan office is a hundred-year experiment in how close is close enough. The teams that do best treat the layout as a hypothesis and check it against how people actually work.