By Kerri Anne Renzulli
For more than half a century, the cubicle has dominated American offices. Today it's synonymous with corporate monotony and conformity, but it actually started life as the antithesis of what it came to represent.
When Robert Propst, director of research for office-furnishings maker Herman Miller, unveiled his new vision of the workplace in the 1960s, he radically altered the way offices looked and functioned.
Propst saw the offices of his day -- often rows of identical desks surrounded by private areas for managers and executives -- as stagnant and stifling, says Purdue University design-history professor Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler. "He envisioned an office that could be more dynamic and social, that had a greater flexibility to meet the different needs people had throughout their workday."
The original concept
His initial reimagining of the workspace, introduced as the Action Office in 1964 and made in collaboration with celebrated industrial designer George Nelson, won a design award for its beautifully sleek furniture made of luxe wood and cast aluminum. Screens and shelving units provided a taste of the privacy for workers that Propst sought. But the design didn't offer much flexibility in creating individualized workspaces, and it was a commercial flop, thanks in part to its high price tag and difficult assembly.
Determined to see his vision through, Propst dropped Nelson and designed Action Office II, launched in 1968. His design was playful, full of color and pattern, and without right angles. The furniture and partitions were made from plastics and laminates, so they cost far less. And they could be easily arranged in a much broader range of configurations.
In Propst's mind, the Action Office, when installed correctly, would help workers deal with the ever-increasing amount of information being processed, fix the regrettable tendency of offices to "provide a formula kind of sameness for everyone," and relieve employees of the suffering caused by sitting for hours in one position. He wanted workers to be able to spread their work out, tack documents and photos to walls, rearrange the position of their shelves or bookcases, and raise their desk to standing height when desired. He believed employees would feel better and be more productive in a space that could be adapted to their needs.
But the companies that purchased his furniture -- or one of the many imitations offered by his competitors -- were more often drawn to his design because of economics rather than organizational psychology. As real-estate prices and building costs rose, Propst's creation offered businesses an inexpensive way to reconfigure their floor plans. By using components to create small, boxy workstations, companies found they could pack more employees into tighter spaces. The cubicle as we know it was born.
"Propst created Action Office as a tool of liberation, as something that was supposed to be good for people, but it turned into what he once famously called rathole places," says Amy Auscherman, archives director at MillerKnoll, now the parent company of Herman Miller. "He had these very utopian, lofty intentions, but he didn't account for the constraints of business and real estate. He couldn't dictate how his system was used, and its main feature is that it can be adapted and changed to suit an organization."
The comeback cubicle
His annoyance with the implementation of his design led Propst to deride his own creation in the years before his death in 2000, telling the New York Times: "The cubiclizing of people in modern corporations is monolithic insanity." He did still, however, like his original idea, designing his own home to mimic many of the features of his Action Office, and using the concept as the basis for the Co/Struc system -- a suite of flexible, modular, movable furniture designed for hospitals and laboratories.
Despite its many critics, the cubicle has proved remarkably persistent. It even seems to be enjoying a bit of a renaissance at the moment as employees grow frustrated with the lack of privacy and personalization that comes with hot desking and open floor plans. And while reality failed to match Propst's ambitions, his Action Office design sparked a continuing search for a better office.
"Many of Propst's ideas and the problems he was trying to solve still feel surprisingly fresh," says Kaufmann-Buhler. "You still hear business leaders talking about needing offices that support communication and flexibility just as he did."
Kerri Anne Renzulli is a writer in Orlando, Fla., and London. She can be reached at reports@wsj.com.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 21, 2025 09:00 ET (14:00 GMT)
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