Replacing WFH with the open plan office can be a recipe for misery. But Anna Moloney says she’s found a solution: her wonderful, silent work coffin

For a woman to write – or, more exactly, to write well – she must possess a room of her own. On this, Virginia Woolf was unequivocal. “Give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days.” Woolf was looking to prove how the disparity in great male and female writers was not due to genius, but circumstance. 

She illustrated this in A Room of One’s Own in a simple image: a woman walking along the Oxford riverbanks on the brink of a eureka moment – only for it to disappear. She has been told to get off the grass: women are not allowed. Interruptions, she demonstrated, were the enemy to good thinking.

The blame for any shortcomings in my writing, then, dear reader, I put upon one man: Frank Lloyd Wright, inventor of the open plan office.

The devastating rise of the open plan office

The open plan office took the corporate world by storm in the 1950s and 1960s, but Lloyd Wright conceived the first of its kind much earlier when designing the New York headquarters for the prosperous Larkin Soap Company in 1906. He wanted the office to imitate a factory floor with one big main hall for all the workers, based on a belief that open space improved creativity and communication. Virginia Woolf wept.

More than a hundred years on from that experiment, I think we can all agree it went terribly wrong. Indeed, many studies have shown open plan offices are bad for productivity (few work well with noise), bad for collaboration (some have shown colleagues actually speak less) and bad for our health (ahem, Covid-19). The era of WFH offered a brief reprieve from many of these problems, but the tide has turned back. The natural desire for privacy after being flung back to the office has also resulted in employees creating what researchers have termed the “fourth wall” – visual signals to others (headphones being the typical choice) that they do not want to be interrupted. It’s a wall most find exhausting to keep up. 

The Booth is small, mildly coffin-like, and always a little too hot. It has a full glass side which is uncomfortably exhibiting, particularly for the poor-postured

It seems reasonable to suggest it is also chiefly the cost benefits (cramming as many workers as possible into prime rental estate) of the open plan office, rather than any promises of a ‘creative working environment’, that make them so tantalising to employers. To its credit, the UK government was onto this from as early as 1856, when they issued official guidance on office space layouts: “For the intellectual work, separate rooms are necessary so that a person who works with his head may not be interrupted.”