Behind Office Doors

A transdisciplinary history of the 20th-century office, exploring how its spatial forms, technological systems and managerial ideologies were constructed, challenged and lived with.

Throughout the twentieth century, office buildings became central to the organisation of societies – yet what went on inside them has remained remarkably understudied. Behind Office Doors explores this history by focusing on users and everyday practices. It examines how office spaces were conceived by architects, designers and managers, and how they were inhabited, experienced and contested by workers. From filing cabinets and air conditioning to EU offices and colonial bureaucracies, the chapters trace how design, technology and organisational thinking shaped office life. Alongside case studies on Europe, North America, Asia and colonial Africa, the contributions reflect on how the office has been approached in historiography. Drawing on cross-disciplinary research, this book argues for the development of historical office studies, showing how the design and management of offices have shaped cultures of work.

Acknowledgements

Introduction. Retracing Use and Users in the History and Historiography of the 20th-Century Office Building
Jens van de Maele

Part 1. Categories and representations of office users

Chapter 1. What’s the Use? The Users and Usability of the Filing Cabinet
Craig Robertson

Chapter 2. The Office in Popular Culture, or the “Plight of the Clerk”
Nicola Bishop

Part 2. The impact of normativity and standardisation on the office as an “environment”

Chapter 3. Too Cold? Gendered Conflicts over Mechanical Cooling in Early Post-war Japanese Office Spaces
Tatsuya Mitsuda

Chapter 4. Thresholds of Comfort : Managing Light, Sound and Focus in the Post-War Office Environment
Joeri Bruyninckx

Chapter 5. Surviving the Office : Workplace Design, Activism and the Health of Women Workers in 20th-Century Britain
Amy Thomas

Chapter 6. Measuring, Evaluating and Configuring : The German Debate about Safe and Healthy Screen Work
Bernd Holtwick

Part 3. Office uses conceptualised by and for the managerial elite

Chapter 7. A “Facility Based on Change” (for the Worse) : Leveraging Labour Process Theory to Understand the Evolution of Herman Miller’s Action Office
Petra Seitz

Chapter 8. The European Commission’s Office Spaces in the 1950s and 1960s : Constructing a Materialised Imaginary
Marco Ninno

Part 4. Visual essays

Chapter 9. “Mimic Men” in the Office Spaces of a “Nervous State” : The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Late Colonial Congo
Johan Lagae and Jens van de Maele

Chapter 10. Between Hierarchy, Efficiency and Pragmatism : Picturing Portuguese Government Offices in Historic Buildings during the Estado Novo Dictatorship
Ana Mehnert Pascoal

Chapter 11. Office Life in Chandigarh
Ruth Baumeister (text), Shaun Fynn (photography)

Epilogue
Martin Kohlrausch and Andreas Fickers

Contributors
Index

Jens van de Maele

Jens van de Maele is a postdoctoral member of the research group Modernity and Society 1800–2000 at KU Leuven.

Ruth Baumeister

Nicola Bishop

Joeri Bruyninckx

Andreas Fickers

Shaun Fynn

Bernd Holtwick

Martin Kohlrausch

Martin Kohlrausch is professor of European Political History and head of the research unit Modernity and Society at the KU Leuven.

Johan Lagae

Johan Lagae is Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning at Ghent University.

Ana Mehnert Pascoal

Tatsuya Mitsuda

Marco Ninno

Craig Robertson

Petra Seitz

Amy Thomas