Hear Here! How your latest/greatest open-plan office is probably a failure

At about the same time during the early 1960s, two different efforts which were to affect the "Open Office Revolution" were happening.

Germany's Quickborner Team was employing Office Landscape: very open, very organically arranged, convential freestanding furniture, with plants and freestanding screens as occasional space dividers. In a little garage-based skunkworks in Ann Arbor, Bob Propst was fundamentally rethinking the diagrammatics of the workplace, eventually to become the very successful prototype for all panel based office systems, Action Office.

Quickborner's office landscape never developed a substantial following in the American office culture. and Propst's highly adaptable, tailorable kits of parts was quickly corruted by an unimaginative, cost- centered corporate "enforcement culture" into...the standardized office cubicle... the staple commodity upon which Dilbert-dom has been built. Yet both these revolutionary types of environments focused early attention upon three work disruptive characteristics: noise, and its distractive qualities: speech intelligibility, and its confidentiality and focus destruction: and "visual noise," with its ability to fracture concentration.

Acousticians Geiger & Hamme discovered in the late 1960s that architectural surroundings had much to contribute acoustically. While flanking walls contributions are substantial, specific predictability of how they'll perform is difficult for acoustical amateurs. Ceilings were found, however to be more consistently predictable, and of major impact. And sound transmission through ceilings, the bane of of closed offices, was not the key issue, though a strength of then (and still) prevalent mineral fiber acoustic ceilings. Noise reduction was the goal, best met then (and still) by thick batts of rigid fiberglass board. And whether sound absorptive (best) or not, the panels separating people had to block direct-line sound transmission twixt mouths an ears of neighbors. That's reliably accomplished only if they're at least five feet tall with everyone seated, five and a half feet when some folks are standing - the reality unless occupants crawl about.

Concurently, research seeking other ways to render speech in offices unintelligible was beta-testing masking sound systems. In 1970, an open-plan mockup we tested at Horace Mann Educators reduced speech intelligibility from about 30 feet down to only "immediate neighbors" (both with fiberglass ceiling board). Conversely, just last month in an expensive high-design office with mineral fiber ceilings, no sound masking, and too low panels, we were able to clearly understand a conversation at 65 feet.

How widespread is the "wrongness" of what relentlessly continues to happen? A good guess would be that well over 90 percent of non-governmental rental open-plan offices have 'building standard" mineral fiber ceilings and no masking sound. How bad are the effects? It has been the experience of BOSTI Associates in seeking to determine the nature and priority of the existing problems in the tenanted office spaces it has been engaged to improve, that without a single exception, occupants of open-plan offices agree that poor acoustics is the number one barrier to their productive use of their space. That's true in hundreds of focus groups at countless locations - not a small sample.

These needs and their effects were known and widely published 20 years ago. Yet almost no one has heeded the information. And a twelve step program for office acoustics abusers can only begin when someone finally admits that they have the horrendous problem that exists. Now, in hushed tones so as not to disturb your neighbors, repeat after me, "My name is (your name here) and I'm an open-plan abuser."

Michael Tatum was an independent consultant based in Dallas, an affiliate of BOSTI Associates, and a professor at the School of Architecture, University of Texas at Arlington.
This article was in The Last Word of Interiors Magazine December 1996.