In 1964, the iconic furniture design company Herman Miller unveiled an office plan unlike anything anyone had ever seen. Called Action Office, it was the brainchild of Robert Propst, who was among the first designers to argue that office work was mental work and that mental effort was tied to environmental enhancement of one's physical capabilities. Rather than a furniture item or a collection of them, Action Office was a proposition for an altogether new kind of space.

Most office designs at the time were about keeping people in place; Action Office was about movement. Advertisements for the system show workers in constant motion; indeed, the human figures in the images often appear blurred, as if the photographer were unable to capture their lightning speed.

Adapted from Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace

Action Office was the happy result of an unusual collaboration. Propst had been thrown together with one of his near opposites—George Nelson, who grew to prominence by converting the ideas of modernism into effortlessly cool pieces of furniture. Propst was laconic, prophetic, intransigent, exuding the tight-lipped silence of the American West’s wide expanses; Nelson was a scotch-swilling bon vivant and raconteur.

The items Nelson had designed for Action Office were beautiful, at once homey and utterly modern, nostalgic and forward thinking. His desk surfaces rested on cantilevered die-cast aluminum legs; for the standing desk, a chrome brace doubled as a footrest. A “communications center” with a telephone was acoustically insulated.

There were many idiosyncratic touches. Because Propst had convinced himself that work out of sight was work out of mind, there were no large desk drawers. Instead, there was a movable display surface, from which items could be retrieved and replaced at ease. A standing rolltop desk not only kept workers on their feet but also allowed them to leave work out overnight, securely closed.

Above all, it was colorful: green, bright blue, navy blue, black, and yellow. Like bright magazine advertisements, or the Pop Art of Warhol and Lichtenstein, Action Office proclaimed its allegiance to the new spirit of the age: rich, advanced, potentially liberating.

In this sense, the Action Office that Propst had conceived and Nelson designed might have been the first truly modern idea to enter the office—that is, the first in which the aesthetics of design and progressive ideas about human needs were truly united.

A Design Too Modern for Conservative Office Managers

When Action Office was unveiled before the press, the answer was resoundingly affirmative. “Seeing these designs,” wrote Industrial Design, “one wonders why office workers have put up with their incompatible, unproductive, uncomfortable environment for so long.” Meanwhile, the more popular Saturday Evening Post cried, “Office workers of America, beware! The Action Office is coming! We are in real danger of being enabled to work at 100 percent efficiency.”

>Office space was growing at too fast a volume for anyone to be concerned about niceties. Something faster was needed, something more easily reproducible.

Despite the rapturous reviews, Action Office didn’t sell. Office managers complained that the entire system was too expensive, because the furniture was made of such quality material. And the space that Action Office created was too vaguely defined, its borders too porous.

The product won a few awards within the industry but otherwise saw little actual adoption in the workplace.

Propst had run up against a classic problem of design. Office planners and architects tend to imagine that the setup of their own offices should be the way that everyone should work. They pretend that their own subjective methods are objective empirical results.

The failure of the first Action Office on the market might finally have been due to another factor: the cynicism of executives. They had the final say on how their offices looked, since they controlled the bottom line, and the last thing they were going to drop a ton of money on was a set of fancy chairs and desks for their junior and middle managers, let alone the steno pool. And office space was growing at too fast a volume for anyone to be concerned about niceties. Something faster was needed, something more easily reproducible.

Nonetheless, Propst took the design community’s enthusiasm over Action Office as a vote of confidence. He went back to his team and pushed forward. He was determined to return with what he believed the office needed, his vision uncompromised.

Sacrificing Style for Function

Rather than merely acceding to the market demands, Propst doubled down on his own theoretical work.

The concept that Propst came to reiterate again and again was that office design needed to be “forgiving.” That is, overly designed and stylized spaces were “unforgiving,” barriers against change, and change was coming into the office one way or another.

Computers were automating more and more processes, allowing office workers to reduce routine tasks to focus more on “tasks of judgment.” What an office design had to do was anticipate these changes as best as it could, through modularity and flexibility. It had to be adaptable, movable. This meant that “design” itself had to be tossed out: anything that made his concept more expensive and less “forgiving” to user needs was against the concept.

>Office design had to be adaptable, movable. This meant that 'design' itself had to be tossed out.

This meant that Nelson, whose relationship with Propst had never been close, had to go. Nelson was too partial to humanizing and stylish touches in his products. The predilection for beauty of the object was an obstacle in Propst’s eyes; it detracted from the beauty of the office worker’s motion in space.

By the end of 1967, Propst had made significant improvements. The space was smaller; the interlocking walls were mobile, lighter, and made of disposable materials; storage space was raised off the ground.

Action Office II was Propst’s attempt to give form to the office worker’s desire. A “workstation” for the “human performer,” it consisted of three walls, obtusely angled and movable, which an office worker could arrange to create whatever workspace he or she wanted.

The usual desk was accompanied by shelves of varied heights and variable placement, which required constant vertical movement on the part of the worker. Tackboards and pushpin walls allowed for individuation. Intentionally depersonalized, the new Action Office would be a template for any individual to create his or her own ideal work space.

The Accidental Cubicle Farm

Like its predecessor, Action Office II was received as a liberation. In a New York Post column titled “Revolution Hits the Office,” reporter Sylvia Porter wrote that in the light of Action Office II the old office was now officially doomed. With Action Office there were changes afoot at last.

Action Office II received immediate praise from the office furniture industry as well. Initially, sales were slow, but after the competitor Haworth produced a rival modular office system, Propst’s concept was validated, and sales began to take off. Steelcase’s 9000 series and Knoll’s Zapf System soon followed.

But the copycat Action Offices were starting to have strange, unforeseen effects on other workplaces. Rather than making them more flexible, they in fact appeared to be making them more regimented.

>'Not all organizations are intelligent and progressive. Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes.'

Douglas Ball, a designer for the rival furniture company Haworth, came up with one of the many knockoff designs for the Canadian company Sunar. Initially excited, he emerged from the completed space utterly depressed. “I went to see the first installation of the Sunar system, a huge government project. The panels were all seventy inches tall, so unless you were six-foot-three you couldn’t look over the top. It was awful—one of the worst installations I’d ever seen,” Ball said. “We thought it was extremely flexible in the plan view, but we had never considered the vertical elevation.”

And it was too late to fix the problem. He had trapped people in giant fabric-wrapped walls, when he had meant, like Propst, to free them.

It turned out that companies had no interest in creating autonomous environments for their “human performers.” Instead, they wanted to stuff as many people in as small a space for as cheaply as possible as quickly as possible.

By 1978, Propst was composing memos on repositioning his design, panicked over the obsession with “easily defined and accountable cost savings.” “Meanwhile, other matters of more profound influence on the real productivity of organizations have slipped into the background,” he worried.

Action Office had been meant for flexibility; instead, a new rigidity set in—though it was wrapped disingenuously in humanistic fabric. Propst’s memos seemed to have no effect. Soon the designs for Action Office in the Herman Miller brochures began to seem more box-like. They were selling what the companies wanted.

Hellholes Borne of "Crass People"

In 1998, a journalist interviewed Robert Propst—then 77 years old—for Metropolis magazine. He defended the features that made his design so popular: its austerity, its flexibility. But he conceded what he hadn't been willing to understand then. "The dark side of this is that not all organizations are intelligent and progressive," Propst says. "Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes."

Propst noted that his design proved irrepressibly popular: 40 million employees in America alone worked in 42 different versions of the Action Office. But he failed to note that by that point they were all known by the same name: the cubicle.

Adapted and excerpted from the book Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. Copyright © 2014 by Nikil Saval. Published by arrangement with Doubleday, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC.