To be fair, cubicles were also dehumanizing, the whole rat maze thing. After several decades of cubicle life I think workplace engineers were desperate to try a

To be fair, cubicles were also dehumanizing, the whole rat maze thing. After several decades of cubicle life I think workplace engineers were desperate to try anything. So we tried open spaces, and they were possibly more terrible (I like them but I'm weird). But proper offices are expensive, so. Joel Spolsky took offices pretty seriously, I recall this bit: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/