Dhe office never had a good reputation. There are countless stories that begin with the fact that one no longer wants to meet the same pale colleagues in the same neon light with the same joke cups at the same copier every day. Fiction in which dedicated bureaucrats are the heroes running the state, public order, or even a large corporation, is rather an exception; only in the yuppie films of the 1980s does office life look perversely attractive before it usually turns out to be pure horror, as in “American Psycho”.
Dolly Parton’s hit “9 t0 5” is not a hymn to office life, but one about employee exploitation. The modern office districts, along with the shopping malls, have traditionally been the favorite hate object of all urban theorists. Capitalism, so the analysis goes, threw out the ordinary people and the small shops from the city centers and replaced them with its profit-making machines, into which the employees were stuffed every morning like corn into a broiler geese. The fact that the majority of employees commute to the office district by car also makes them an ecological problem.
Only with the pandemic did the view of the office change. While some were happy about the home office, those who lived in small apartments with small children began to miss the tranquility of their offices, and the inner cities looked so dead without the office workers that the returning suit wearers were almost a bit nostalgic looked at. Wouldn’t it be good if the spook of office modernity were over, or would a society lose its most important areas of innovation if you only saw colleagues the size of a postage stamp as an oversized chin with a slight underside view on zoom instead of in the hallway and no longer at a business lunch on the best ideas?
Pirelli Tower, 1960. Aus dem Band „Back to the Office: 50 Revolutionary Office Buildings and How They Sustained“ von Stephan Petermann und Ruth Baumeister.
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Image: Pirelli Milan Foundation
The cultural scientists Ruth Baumeister and Stephan Petermann recently published a fundamental work on the more recent history of the office (“Back to the Office. 50 Revolutionary Office Buildings and How They Sustained”. Nai010 Publishers). They present the most important office buildings of the years after 1945, including public administration buildings such as Alvar Aalto’s house for Finnish social security, company headquarters such as BMW’s “four-cylinder” in Munich or Norman Foster’s “HSBC Building” in Hong Kong, whose expressive supporting structure evokes the forces of the global seems to represent capitalism. Baumeister and Petermann show how office buildings have changed over time. You see open-plan offices that are slowly becoming overgrown with indoor plants, cupboards and ever higher partitions; while the employees’ hair is growing around 1970, interior walls are growing in the open-plan office, as if secretly trying to turn into a bunch of single rooms.