| This dissertation examines the history of the open plan from its early development in the context of the post-war period through its implementation and widespread use in the late 20th century. Using a combination of design history and material culture approaches, I argue that although initially developed as a progressive office design concept in the late 1960s, by the 1990s the open plan had become a negative symbol of white-collar work in popular culture. Tracing this transformation, this study begins with an overview of the history of office design in the post-war period in the United States. In the second chapter, I situate the progressive vision of the open plan promoted by architects and designers in the late 1960s within the context of an intellectual movement called post-capitalism. I argue that the proponents of the open plan envisioned a future of office work characterized by an increased emphasis on social relations, a change in management culture, and an elimination of organizational hierarchy. In the third chapter, I adapted a model from Industrial Systems Engineering to analyze archival material regarding the implementation of the open plan in Wisconsin State Government (1970-1990). I argue that the open plan was just one change among a number of other changes in this period, and that those myriad organizational, economic, technological, and social changes in white collar work influenced the design, meaning and use of the open plan in Wisconsin State Government offices. In the fourth chapter, I analyze the representation of office cubicles in various popular media in order to analyze the negative imagery associated with the contemporary office cubicle and contemporary white-collar work in the United States since the 1990s. In the final chapter, I argue that the original goals of the open plan failed to manifest not because the design was fundamentally flawed, but rather because the culture and structure of work changed the context in which the open plan was implemented, and created pressure on systems furniture and the open plan to rapidly adapt to changing organizational and technological needs. |
