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Open, nonterritorial office plans are not necessarily a universal antidote to the cubicle design, however. One well-known example of the failure of such a design comes from Chiat-Day, an advertising company with offices in both Los Angeles and New York. In an attempt to increase collaboration, Chiat-Day removed dedicated workspaces and encouraged their workers to move around freely and to use different spaces according to their
tasks. Though workers did report increased communication, one of the goals of the new arrangement, they also complained of a lack of privacy, difficulty concentrating, and loss of time caused by the need to engage in searches to find particular people. Ultimately, Chiat-Day reverted to a more traditional design.
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It could be that with better support from the mobile technology that has been developed over the past decade, nonterritorial office designs will be more effective, but it isn’t clear yet whether the new technology has decreased our innate preference for face-to-face interactions.

In larger companies where such a free-flowing system of space use might not be possible, semi-open plans, in which the workforce is divided into smaller units, each of which occupies an open workspace, can produce satisfied workers with a strong sense of their place within an organization, provided that the spaces are well thought out. For one thing, spaces should be arranged to facilitate impromptu connections between members of unrelated work units. A common experience described by many employees of large companies is that the most innovative and exciting ideas can come about because of accidental meetings between people from work units whose functions may not be closely related. Using space syntax analyses, one can optimize a workspace to regulate the levels of such interactions. The use of space syntax to produce good social or thirdspaces, or even heavily trafficked corridors shared by multiple work units, can regulate the proportion of time workers spend in common areas where such valuable encounters might take place. Most social interaction does not take place in designed meeting areas such as coffee rooms or bullpens unless they are on well-integrated routes. As Judith Heerwagen and her colleagues put it in a review of the relationship between physical space and office
work, “The pathway seems more important than the destination.”
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Even simple proximity can have a major influence on our patterns of interaction within an office environment. One study of a large organization with two laboratories 60 kilometers from one another looked at the number of interactions between colleagues as a function of their locations. It was no surprise that almost all interactions were among people on the same floor. But what was surprising was that interactions between colleagues on different floors were no higher in frequency than interactions between colleagues in the two widely separated buildings.
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One rule of thumb from early studies in the field suggests that those whose offices are separated by a distance of greater than 30 meters will almost never encounter one another spontaneously. Even this small zone of interactivity will shrink further still if the office environment contains many complex and unintelligible routes.
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One compelling example of how the organization of workspace can increase productivity and contentment comes from a study of the effects of an office redesign for ThoughtForm, a creative company involved in design, communication, and marketing that had relocated from one building to another in Pittsburgh. Figures 10 and 11 show the layout of the old and new offices, revealing some marked differences between them. In particular, the old office layout had a preponderance of isolated cubicles, which employees had sometimes noted as feeling “claustrophobic,” and a notable absence of casual thirdspace in which those unplanned social interactions, particularly important to an organization whose product involved creative content, could occur. Indeed, the only spaces that were explicitly designed for group meetings appeared to be the formal conference and meeting rooms, both set well apart from the main working areas.

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Figure 10
: Original office layout

Figure 11
: Redesigned office layout

In contrast, the new design featured a long central hallway or “main street” that increased not only the spatial legibility of the entire office but also the likelihood of unplanned hallway encounters. As well, the “main square,” located in the center of the plan and directly opposite the reception area, was designed as an explicit thirdspace that could be used for anything from coffee breaks to PowerPoint presentations.
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Employees of ThoughtForm found that the new office design afforded enhanced opportunities both for privacy and for social interactions without any of the claustrophobic feelings of the former environment. (This is especially significant considering that the new office was 2,000 square feet smaller than the old one.)

Although it can be notoriously difficult to measure productivity in knowledge industries, especially those with a large creative component, there were clear signs that the new office design was enhancing the functionality of the company. Records of billable hours indicated that certain aspects of projects took less time once the company moved into their new quarters, suggesting that the new design, by enhancing social interactions and worker satisfaction, was increasing the company’s productivity.

Judith Heerwagen has urged some restraint in the general trend to dropping the cubicle design completely in workplaces with open or semi-open designs. The challenge, she says, is to strike the right balance between the needs for collaboration and for quiet, private working spaces. Though many studies have found that benefits accrue from increased interactions, it is likely that the quality of individual work will suffer from the increased noise and distractions in the open environment. Heerwagen suggests the possibility of producing what she has called the “cognitive cocoon,” which can surround workers with the tools they need to work without cutting them off from their surroundings.

How the balance between privacy and interaction is managed must also take into account the specific products that are being generated by an organization. Careful consideration must be made of the roles and the timing of individual work versus group interactions in a work process if a physical space is to be properly tailored to a company’s needs.

For reasons that aren’t well understood, companies that retrofit space originally designed for other purposes often arrive at the most interesting and efficient workspace plans. One reason for this may be that the classic office tower, with standardized footplates on each floor, constrains thinking about how best to organize space and workflow. Retrofitting a space is more likely to require deep thinking about how to co-opt the size and shape of rooms devised for other purposes, and the outcome of such problem solving may be more likely to be a creative and satisfactory workspace design. One of the most beautiful examples of such a retrofit that I have seen is the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture, which moved into an old textile factory. Because the factory was built before indoor lighting was common, and because textile work demands attention to light and color, the building was designed with huge windows and skylights. The School of Architecture took advantage of these features, restored using modern materials, and adapted the wide corridors once used for moving large loads of fabrics to create a vibrant, exciting, and dynamic work and learning space with many effective thirdspaces.

Regardless of its size, location, or objectives, any work organization requires some kind of physical workspace, and the way that this space is arranged will affect the manner in which employees work, interact, and feel. Much of this influence of space on behavior follows from exactly the same principles that we saw applied to understanding how we behave inside our dwellings, and these principles in turn derive from the psychological nature of our connection with physical space. At heart, we are slightly odd creatures who collapse spaces into simple topologies, often telling ourselves stories or fitting ourselves into larger narratives in order to understand where
we are. None of this might make much sense to an ant, a butterfly, or a honeybee, but it is a system that arises from the unique constitution of our brain, and it has consequences that range from where we go for comfort and refuge to how we earn our paychecks.

Whether they are single-family dwellings in the suburbs or gigantic architectural monuments in the core of a large city, buildings do not exist in isolation. They are collections of structures that produce the larger built environment of the street, the neighborhood, or the city. In some ways, the principles that determine our behavior in these larger domains are simply scaled-up versions of those we have seen operate inside buildings at the interface between constructed space and the fabric of our mind. In other ways, the larger canvas of the street and city produces an entirely new set of spatial concerns for us.

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n the fall of 2005, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore, two teenagers of North African descent, cowered in an electrical substation in Clichy-sous-Bois, a suburb of Paris, hiding from the police. The boys had done nothing worse than to engage in an impromptu soccer game with a few friends when they spotted a patrol car parked across the road from the playing field. Fearing that they would be detained, searched, asked to provide identity papers, and held, possibly for hours, at the police station, the boys fled. Benna and Traore, along with a friend, tried to squeeze themselves behind a big power transformer to avoid being spotted, but both boys, making fatal contact with unshielded wires, were electrocuted.

As the news spread of the deaths and the rumors of police persecution found wings, increasingly large numbers of young and dispossessed residents of the Parisian
banlieues
, oppressive suburbs filled with monotonous concrete-block buildings and largely occupied by the economically challenged ethnic minorities of France— mostly North African Muslims and Roma—took to the streets in protest. Over the succeeding three weeks, there were almost 3,000 arrests as rioters destroyed buildings and burned more than 8,000 vehicles, causing well over
200 million in damages.