Cubed is Nikil Saval’s detailed cultural history of how the office grew to become the definitive 20th century workplace, Saval presents a description of the stylish office worker, courtesy of Walt Whitman circa 1856.* At that time, nonmanual labor accounted for a minority of jobs in the country, and those who did spend their days in an office were often the source of derision. Whitman, for one, described office workers as “a slender and round-shouldered generation, of minute leg, chalky face, and hollow chest … trig and prim in great glow of shiny boots, clean shirts—sometimes, just now, of extraordinary patterns, as if overrun with bugs!—tight pantaloons, straps, which seem coming little into fashion again, startling cravats, and hair all soaked and ‘slickery’ with sickening oils.”
To start, Saval explains, many offices took a cue from the factory and lined desks up in long rows. Then, in the early 20th century, two innovations emerged that would get recycled and reinterpreted in various ways over the next century. The first arrived courtesy of Frederick Taylor, a consultant and theorist who made it his goal to remove all inefficiencies from the office and argued for an extreme division of labor to replace what was the more fluid work style of the old clerks, who worked in small offices of four or five people and were responsible for a wide variety of tasks. Taylor created the position of the manager. As Saval writes:
By separating knowledge from the basic work process … the ideology of Taylorism all but ensured a workplace divided against itself, both in space and in practice, with a group of managers controlling how work was done and their workers merely performing that work.
Even as some offices today, particularly those in the tech industry, have attempted to move toward nonhierarchical models that recognize the benefit of idle, creative time, most still employ a version of this hierarchical, efficiency-driven system.
An office with 130 workers has one long desk for everyone. Only the boss’s section is messy.
