Silicon Valley start-ups knocked down walls

“EVERY GENERATION REMAKES the office to suit its needs. The Industrial Revolution produced the factory, and the large manufacturing floors championed by the mechanical engineer Frederick Taylor were the original open-plan offices. When the first white-collar workspaces emerged in the twentieth century, they resembled an assembly line. In 1939, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Headquarters introduced brighter lighting and more humanity. Cubicles took off in the 1980s alongside the desktop computer, giving workers a bit more individual privacy and dominating the work landscape until Silicon Valley start-ups set about knocking down walls and recruiting laptop-enabled workers with beanbag chairs and foosball tables.”

Excerpt From: Reeves Wiedeman. “Billion Dollar Loser.”