On The Job - Design And The American Office. - The European Office - Brief Article - book review

Architectural Review, The, March, 2001 by Francis Duffy

Edited by Donald Albrecht and Chrysanthe B. Broikos. New York: Princeton Architectural Press with Washington: National Building Museum. 2000. Catalogue of an exhibition held at the National Building Museum, Washington DC, Nov 2000-Jun 2001. [pound]18.95

THE EUROPEAN OFFICE

By Juriaan van Meel. Rotterdam: 010

Publishers. 2000. [pound]16.50

These fascinating and coincidentally very well timed books make the greatness of American office design in the earlier part of the twentieth century fully apparent. In two very different ways they also serve to document the tremendous fall from grace that American office architecture has suffered since that wonderful curve of architectural achievement peaked in the late '60s.

The first book is the beautifully produced catalogue of the current exhibition about American office design in Washington, DC. It allows an absolute comparison to be made between earlier peaks and the present trough. Starting with Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building and continuing with the breathtaking mid century masterpieces -- Lever House, Connecticut General, Seagram, Inland Steel, Union Carbide, John Deere, Ford Foundation -- the catalogue concludes with a distressingly revealing photographic essay of new office buildings in one of the American boomtowns. It doesn't matter which boomtown. It doesn't matter which building. They are all in Dilbertville, technologically challenged, environmentally irresponsible, deeply anachronistic in corporate culture. And this when American entrepreneurialism in so many other fields have never been more impressive.

What has gone wrong? The second book -- again beautifully produced -- is an analysis by an able PhD student from the School of Architecture at Delft explaining some of the factors that have led to the considerable contemporary diversity of office building design in the UK, The Netherlands, Scandinavia, France, Germany and Italy. Van Meel's deft tabulations allow a relative comparison between the state of office architecture in the US and in Europe. This up-to-date pan-European survey is particularly useful because it stimulates hypotheses about what may be the causes of the catastrophic American decline in concern for the quality of the working environment.

Direct control by the client of the design process and direct involvement of ordinary office workers in the design of their workplaces are more common in Northern Europe than in the US. Demand led pressures on developers and architects seem to be far more persistent and more pervasive in much of Northern Europe. Institutional funding is organized in ways that often allow clients to fund their own, purpose built office buildings. Moreover the European regulatory environment is more stringent in practice because the feelings and aspirations of office workers can be channelled and articulated through Workers Councils.

In contrast, the American office since the '60s has become increasingly formulaic and resistant to user pressure. This is certainly true of the vast majority of buildings and interiors that American office workers are expected to tolerate, even in some of the relatively chic examples shown in the catalogue. Vast, mean, cubicle filled, aspect ignoring, gas guzzling, life diminishing towers and sheds have become the twin American office norms. The only possible defence of such buildings -- and in a knowledge based society with an increasingly discriminating and empowered office population it is surely no defence at all -- is that they are quick and cheap to build.

What has happened is that one kind of economic reality, and one alone, has prevailed -- profits for developers and brokers, the big players in the office supply chain. For American architects this has had a terrible consequence. They are no longer paid to think. They can't afford to invent. There is no time to listen to the users. What a supply side dominated system forces them to do is to deliver the same formulaic buildings and interiors, over and over again, only ever more quickly and cheaply. The sad environmental result, illustrated without apparent irony in the catalogue, is the destruction of the North American city, the North American landscape -- and perhaps eventually the North American economy.

There is another kind of economic reality: the use of architects' imagination to design workplaces from the inside out in ways that attract and stimulate people. To do this has always required creativity, invention and risk taking. It also requires substantial and open ended communication with the people who use the buildings. In a simpler age Frank Lloyd Wright took big risks on behalf of his client when he designed the Larkin Building. Were he alive today, he would certainly be looking to Europe for models of what can be done in reinventing the office. He would he equally keen to persuade American building owners that it may not be such a big sin to spend more than $100 per sq ft on buildings that now house the vast bulk of the US economy's intellectual and social capital.