Thinking About Cubicles - A History

As with all things, the cubicle was first tried out on animals. 

Our great, though often misunderstood and paradoxical, Western Civilization culminates in one essential creation: the cubicle. In many ways, the cubicle is a symbol of the Occidental Tradition's failure to renew itself, to answer the questions it itself posed over millennia of its existence.

Yes, the tragic divine order that punishes Oedipus, the doubt Christ feels on the cross, the letter Hester Prynne bears shamed by society, Madame Bovary's suicide, Anna Karenina's suicide, the Grand Inquisitor's interrogation of Christ, K's endless trial, Munch's paranoid scream, Willy Loman's suicide, Marlow's lie, Kurtz's madness and our whole sense of disorder, alienation and emptiness can be reduced to three impermanent walls without a door, carbon-copied throughout the world.


Where did this anthem to a mechanized, surprisingly public, yet somehow alienated society come from? I want to trace the origins of this tasteless and formless homage here. But before I do, let's define what it is that several thousand years of Occidental rationalism has birthed.

According to the all-knowing, more-accurate-than-Britannica-since-it-is-written-by-regular-folk, and democratic Wikipedia, the cubicle comes from the Latin word "cubiculum," which was a rusty, steel implement used for anal probing in the Dark Ages, to purge the body of evil spirits.

Ok, that isn't exactly accurate. Cubiculum means "bed chamber." However, when I look at a cubicle, I do not think of a sprawling king-size bed upon which I can engage in restful slumber. That's because the meaning of the word "cubiculum", like that of most things in life, cheapened as the years passed. It soon came to mean any small room or space.

And then, in the 1960s it happened.

In a secret, underground Nazi chem lab... I mean, in Zeeland, Michigan, in the offices of Herman Miller Research, a man by the name of Robert Propst was staying up late at night, hatching a devilish plan. A plan so evil that before he knew it Herr Propst would be responsible for what is tantamount to a crime against humanity. But of course, since his contribution enriched the corporations that run the entire World, he was certainly not punished for it.

That plan was something called... the Action Office! Of course, as the story goes, the Action Office was not intended to be used for evil, much like the atomic bomb and the burning of witches, but to maximize office space, create efficiency, and comfort for the busy-bee worker of the modern era. (It is worth nothing that certain sources also attribute the creation of the Action Office to a designer by the name of John Schiflett, who was brainstorming away in Colorado, under the offices of the very same Herman Miller Research - perhaps his was a bastardization of the prototype Herr Probst unleashed).

But, as most great ideas, especially ones done in the name of capitalist progress, the Action Office gave birth to something much darker and more sordid than Herr Probst could have ever imagined. His worker-friendly, benevolent and blandly-named Action Office became what we know today as the... CUBICLE.

So how did the worker-friendly Action Office become the worker-enslaving cubicle? I bet you already figured it out. Yes, according to this brilliant (and brilliantly in-depthly brief) history of the cubicle, it was the fault of the U.S. Treasure Department. But then again, I mean, what isn't these days?

At one crucial moment, this brave and bold federal department relaxed its regulations regarding the time depreciation of office equipment. And cubicles are considered exactly that: furniture or office equipment. And since furniture depreciates in just seven years versus an office (i.e not a cubicle), which takes almost forty years, it only made sense for companies to put employees in cubicles instead of offices. They could recover their costs quicker.

So there is one very obvious and simple-to-understand reason why Probst's idea was bastardized. The second, also referenced in the same brilliant historical account of cubicles, had to do, very simply, with the maximization of space. Less space, less rent, fewer expenditures.

As time passed, as the crisis of the Western Civilization deepened, cubicles flourished like an apocalyptic plague. Probst watched his creation wrested from his hands and turned into the free world's equivalent of the gulags. Shortly before he fell to rest on his death bed, he was recalled to have named the cubicle "monolithic insanity." 

Sure, what started as an attempt to maximize individuality and work performance, turned into a symbol of corporate oppression, but human beings are resilient (and will put up with a lot out of fear of losing their job). And, as time has shown again and again, they will find a way to deal with, and even embrace and accept the worst.

Thus, if anything, though the history of the cubicle is the story of our failure as a culture, it is also a story of the triumph of human endurance. Yes, you may say the jackal is being a little dramatic. But when I look around me, into an endless sea of featureless, grey cubicles and I see the people slaving away in them, I think, goddamn it, you beautiful people...

No, that's not true. I just shake my head and look down with a feeling of mutual shame and disgust.

a personal touch