12:23 pm - April 10, 2026The layout of many corporate offices constructed between 2010 and 2020 reveals everything about the ideology that gave rise to them: long tables arranged in rows, monitors pointing in the same direction, the absence of walls and doors, and perhaps some branded inspirational typography stenciled close to the ceiling. Desks that are hot. options for a standing desk. A ping-pong table that is never used. The entire thing conveys a certain message: that hierarchy has been eliminated, that teamwork is impromptu, and that you are all, in some significant way, involved in this together. Additionally, a growing body of research and a sizable portion of those who have worked in these spaces would attest to how extremely miserable it is to actually work there.
The argument against the open-plan office is not brand-new. It is now almost embarrassingly well-documented. Using wearable sensors and electronic communication data to measure actual interaction patterns rather than self-reported surveys, Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban’s 2018 study, which was published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, tracked employees at two Fortune 500 company headquarters before and after their transitions to open-plan layouts.
| Topic | Details |
|---|---|
| Concept | Open-plan office design — workspace layouts removing physical barriers (walls, cubicles) to increase perceived collaboration |
| Origins | The “Action Office” concept emerged in the 1960s; adopted widely through the 1990s–2010s by Silicon Valley companies as a symbol of flat hierarchy and innovation |
| Key Study | Bernstein & Turban, 2018 — Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B — empirical field study of two Fortune 500 headquarters transitioning to open offices |
| Shocking Result | Face-to-face interaction dropped ~70% after adoption of open offices; electronic communication (email, IM) increased proportionally |
| Worker Response | Employees socially withdrew and defaulted to screens rather than speaking aloud in shared spaces |
| Crown Workspace Global Survey (2025) | 1,250 professionals across 6 countries; 91% would return to the office more often if quieter, more focused spaces were provided |
| Notable Design Failure | Frank Gehry-designed Chiat/Day agency HQ, Los Angeles (late 1980s) — “flexible work” utopia; workers hated it immediately and demanded assigned desks back |
| Current Redesign Trend | 76% of facilities managers expect to redesign office spaces; shift toward activity-based working, quiet zones, and hybrid models |
| What’s Replacing It | Neighborhood-style workspaces; phone booths/focus pods; bookable collaboration areas; and — in some cases — the return of private offices |
The outcomes were startling and, depending on your point of view, either completely predictable or counterintuitive. Both businesses saw a roughly 70% decrease in in-person interactions following the switch to open offices. Email and instant messaging, two forms of electronic communication, grew proportionately. There was no increase in conversation after the walls were taken down. They were forced to put on headphones and stare at their screens while writing to coworkers they could actually touch.
Understanding the mechanism that Bernstein and Turban discovered is important because it clarifies a great deal about how these areas truly feel to the occupants. It turns out that humans are not wired to constantly observe one another. The natural reaction is to withdraw from a large shared area where everyone can see and hear one another. This is done by using technology, headphones, and the well-researched act of not being interruptable to create psychological privacy. As soon as the physical walls disappear, social walls take their place. These dynamics are not coincidental, such as the awkwardness of speaking out loud in a quiet room, the realization that your phone call is everyone’s phone call, and the decision of whether to ask a coworker a question or simply send a Slack message. They are integrated into the design and are structural.
As a sort of foundational catastrophe for the open-office era, the Chiat/Day case is worth revisiting. Frank Gehry was hired by advertising agency owner Jay Chiat in the late 1980s to create a Venice, California, headquarters that would represent flexible work in the future. There are no designated desks. shared area. The strict formality of private offices is being replaced by dynamic, impromptu collaboration. The structure was praised for its architectural design. However, the workers rebelled almost right away. Employees quickly started hoarding laptops, setting up camp in conference rooms, and claiming territory through increasingly complex personal rituals. In other words, they were making every effort to recreate the unique spaces that the design had purposefully eliminated. The agency withdrew to more traditional arrangements after a few years of the experiment. The lesson was not applied widely. Simply put, the ideology that gave rise to Chiat/Day expanded and became the norm.
Open-plan offices had become a philosophical statement by the 2010s, in addition to being widely used. They were embraced by Silicon Valley as proof of democratic cultures and flat hierarchies. Media companies and financial firms followed because the design conveyed a message about the company’s values, not because the research validated the design. Tearing down walls served as a visual shorthand for “we’re not like the old corporations with their corner offices and closed-door meetings.” For a long time, it didn’t really matter if anyone was able to think more clearly or work more efficiently.
That is now changing. 91% of respondents to a 2025 global survey conducted on behalf of Crown Workspace, which included 1,250 professionals from six different countries, stated they would visit the office more frequently if it had more quiet workspaces. Not tables for ping-pong. not exposed brick breakout areas. rooms that are quiet. areas where they could think without having to maintain a social contract with the forty people seated nearby. According to the study, 45% of employees still say they are more productive at work than at home. This is significant because it implies that the issue isn’t the office per se, but rather the particular layout that was forced upon employees for many years. There is a desire to be physically present at work. Simply put, the execution was flawed.
The direction is fairly consistent, but what comes next is still being worked out. Among the 76% of facilities managers who anticipate redesigning their spaces, the idea of activity-based working—where employees move between different types of spaces depending on what they’re doing instead of sitting at a designated desk all day—is gaining traction. This includes phone booths, small collaboration pods with doors, focus rooms that can be reserved, and neighborhood-style layouts where teams have loosely defined zones instead of open seas of desks for the entire company. Some businesses are just putting up walls again and calling it something else. These are the quieter ones, the ones without a brand to uphold around innovation aesthetics.
At this point in the narrative, there’s a temptation to declare the open-plan office dead and replace it with something just as neat and binary. However, that is most likely not the case. The “propinquity effect,” the known propensity for people to develop closer working relationships with those they see frequently, is real, according to the research, which does not imply that proximity is worthless. It was never a problem for people to work close to one another. It was a design decision that was optimized for optics rather than cognition, requiring everyone to think deeply in the same undifferentiated space and eliminating all physical boundaries. The next office will likely be less of a manifesto and more of an acknowledgement that people require different things at different times, such as some company, some solitude, some noise, and some silence. It’s a less intriguing philosophical assertion. In fact, it might work.
