Cubicles and "monolithic insanity"

Dilbert was a wonderful antidote to my cubicle angst, back in the day when I used to inhabit one for forty hours every week. As a cubicle dweller, I had very few things. One day a colleague asked me whether it is because of my religious beliefs that I did not have any photo of my family in my cubicle. I tell you, there is a formula for being a cubicle worker--a photo or two of the family/pets, a small bowl of candies, kleenex, maybe a pretentious book, .... I was almost ready to respond that I have no religious belief, and that I do not believe in any god. Now, but I held myself back because that would have made me even more of non-conformist in that colleague's eye!

There is at least one good thing being a tenured faculty member in a university--we get our own office spaces, with a door and windows 8-) Not that I do anything in my office for which I need any enclosed, private space. Neither do I really need an office to display my book collection (I do not have one, anyway!).

So, where did this idea of cubicle originate? Over to the Scientific American:

[Open-plan] offices and cubicles were invented by architects and designers who were trying to make the world a better place—who thought that to break down the social walls that divide people, you had to break down the real walls, too.
In the early 20th century modernist architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright saw walls and rooms as downright fascist. The spaciousness and flexibility of an open plan, they thought, would liberate homeowners and office dwellers from the confines of boxes. But companies took up their idea less out of a democratic ideology than a desire to pack in as many workers as they could.

Ah, yes, democracy in the work place. Let us see. In my last job/career before returning to academia, we proles were in cubes, with offices with doors for senior staff. Well, with reorganization, one office became vacant, and two of us proles expressed interest to our director. Guess what he did? He did not want to make one happy and the other unhappy--so, neither got the office. I left for academia a couple of months after that--no, not because I did not get that office! And the other person left for another job. Yes, office life was crazy, as much as life in the ivory tower is crazy.

Anyway, the cubes were all modular, which meant that we could get larger cubes too! But, the dull boring modular cubes were apparently not what Herman Miller had in mind:

In 1968 Herman Miller began to sell its system as modular components, with the unfortunate consequence of letting companies cherry-pick the space-saving aspects of these designs and leave out the humanizing touches. As corporations began to shift all their employees, not only clerks, into open-plan offices, Herman Miller designer Robert Propst disavowed what he had spawned, calling it “monolithic insanity.”

Lovely phrase: monolithic insanity. The same phrase will describe Dick Cheney also really well. muahahaha