Evolution of Office Space – Are they really designed to control you?

The Apple TV+ show ‘Severance’ has just released its second season, and the reviews have been nothing short of rave. The sci-fi office space psychological drama returns for its much-awaited second season after three long years, and it’s all set to take the audience through its claustrophobic atmosphere inside the Lumon HQ once again. The show has been impactful in many regards, none more than the coinage of the term ‘The Severance Effect.’ So, what is the Severance Effect? How is it intricately linked to the design of offices and its evolution? Let’s find out.

The Severance Effect!!

The Severance Effect occurs when an office space is intentionally designed to create a strong separation between an employee’s personal life and professional life. In the show, a medical device is placed carefully inside every employee’s brain, which causes them to lose all memories of the outside world as soon as they enter the office premises. Likewise, they forget everything that happened inside the office once they step out of it. This is essentially the ‘Severance’ program, that lends its name to the show. While replicating the same isn’t possible in real life, offices have gone above and beyond with their interior and space design elements to create a similarly eerie atmosphere.

Minimal windows, a sterile atmosphere, smaller ventilation space, monotonous aesthetics, and repetitive furniture, are all elements of an office interior design that make a place feel detached from reality or the outside world. A lack of homeliness is involved, which further revive the idea of work and labour whenever inside the office. In some cases, a sense of gloominess also prevails over the office space. But how did the design of office spaces originate and how did it come to be like this today?

The Beginnings

 The feel and design of office spaces today are mainly due to the budgetary constraints put on the developers. When the modern-day office culture started sometime in the mid-1900s, these were developer-driven projects that were on a tight budget. This meant that architects and designers were always under pressure to come up with a prototype involving less space and more efficiency; where the ROI was more than the cost of building and operation.

This led to the design of these sealed box-like rooms inside a building, where windows and louvers were generally lacking. From the outside, the buildings also looked like a hermetically sealed structure. This allowed for more employees to work side-by-side while occupying less space. It was also very cost-effective. This gave birth to the concept of ‘Action Office’ as we know it today.

Two people in particular, among a host of others from history, take the onus behind this revolutionary design concept that is ‘Office Buildings.’ The first is Frederick Winslow Taylor, known as the Father of Scientific Management. Taylor brought about a more mechanical way of performing tasks and improving work. He emphasized that efficiency can be engineered, tasks can be measured, and workforces can be optimized. This objective outlook provided him with the perfect design plan for a workplace or office without paying enough heed to other aspects like safety, health, and other anxiety-inducing factors such as the toll it would take on a worker’s mental health. It was Frederick Taylor’s vision that gave birth to the modern-day ‘Office Plan’.

There are some differences in the office design from now to back in the mid-1900s. The workers went about their jobs on the ground floor and the managers’ floor was on top. This enabled them to keep an eye on their workers. While the design has seen many changes and has become far more sophisticated today, the common idea of maximizing efficiency behind an office design remains the same.

The Cubicle Age

After Frederick Taylor, another person who came along in the 1960s and contributed to this evolution was Robert Propst. Propst was an American inventor, who is generally credited with inventing the ‘Action Office’. The Action Office design later became the ‘Cubicle’, as we know it today. Propst’s ‘Action Office’ was born out of his good intentions to liberate the workers, and provide more space for them to operate. He realized that the previous design, based on Taylor’s concept, was becoming too stressful and jarring for workers.

However, Propst could not have visualized that major corporations would prop up in the 1970s and hijack his idea of a cubicle. Today, the cubicle is a norm in almost every office design. It gives the illusion of privacy, but it ends up becoming solitary box-like cells. Propst did not like it one bit. He envisioned his ‘Action Office’ as a way to promote productivity, privacy, and health, whereas the modern-day cubicle version that it became, served the opposite purpose. He even called them ‘Monolithic Insanity.’

With time, the office ceilings started getting lower, the fluorescent lights gave a sense of coldness in the room, the tiles started flattening out, and the long dull carpets were laid out on the floor. These design innovations were cheap and durable, and they provided developers with just the right requirements for workers to operate with utmost efficiency. But the severity of a potential health hazard remained. This brings us to the phenomenon of ‘Sick Building Syndrome’.

Health Hazard – Sick Building Syndrome

Sick Building Syndrome is a condition where people inside a building experience health issues where no specific cause can be identified. Workers experience everything from headaches to nausea to coughing to sore throat to itching and many more symptoms. Due to the absence of any underlying health conditions in those people, the cause for these symptoms is attributed to the building itself and its design.

Remedies for this would likely include changing the air filters, taking regular breaks outside the office, and opening windows, among others. This ailment was completely borne out of the design of office buildings and their cramped way of using spaces.

One of the big examples of Sick Building Syndrome was the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency, which came up in the late 1970s. As ironic as it sounds, the HQ of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington DC stood out as the prime example of how a building should not be designed. The building and agency, whose job is to ensure and regulate good indoor air quality, became a hub of stale air and harmful germs inside it. This is how.

When opened, the EPA HQs were supposedly the pinnacle of energy-efficient design. They had open floors and sealed windows to save energy and reduce wasted heat. The interior decor was a standard design with plush carpets, acoustic ceilings, and fluorescent lights. As a workplace, it was branded as the ultimate productive place to work at first. However, flaws in this design started to appear soon after.

Employees started getting sick with headaches and nausea being the most common norm. Since it was a classic case of Sick Building Syndrome, something people weren’t much aware of back then, they brushed it aside as office stress. But things worsened after that. On top of headaches and nausea, people started getting coughs, itchy eyes, burning sensations, etc.

After an inspection by engineers, they found out that it was the office decor and furniture that caused these problems. The glue fumes from the carpeting and off-gassing from furniture were all high levels of chemicals swirling around the interior of the office without any place to exit. The building was so tightly sealed that barely any fresh air entered or exited the place.

The Future Issues

Countless other examples have been littered throughout history, and yet the average prototype of an office design remains the same everywhere. So, what is the way forward for the design of office spaces? Should office spaces remain the way it is, creating this hard divide between work life and personal life? Or do you think there is a healthier way of tackling this issue with better interior and space design?

Given that work-life balance has been the biggest topic of discussion in the modern-day context, what role do you think office spaces play in that and how can their design be either beneficial or detrimental to the same?