I built a coworking company, so I have said this sentence in more pitch rooms than I would like to count:

I mean put people in the same room, remove a few walls, give them a shared pantry, and every conversation will be heard. A founder will overhear a product problem. A designer will turn around and solve something with engineering. A junior employee will learn by sitting close to people better than them.

I still believe some of that happens. I also know I never checked how much of it was true.

Then the return-to-office wave started, and everyone was selling it with the exact word I used to sell. 

Amazon, Microsoft, JPMorgan, Instagram, TikTok, and half the corporate world want people back at their desks. 

Maybe some work really does suffer on Zoom.

But if collaboration is the reason, the question is not only whether people should return to office.

It is what kind of room they are returning to.

One of the early famous open-plan offices was Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, completed in 1906 for the Larkin Soap Company.

That is hard to ignore.

Open office was not born only as freedom. It was also born as visibility.

Everyone could see everyone. The company could call it culture. The worker could feel watched and inspired at the same time, which is a very convenient combination for an employer.

The idea sounds old, but it has aged well.

We still sell visibility as culture.

Decades later, Robert Propst tried to build something better at Herman Miller.

His Action Office system was meant to give people more control over how they worked.

Even today, Herman Miller’s Action Office line includes 120-degree workstations, which hints at what the original idea was trying to do.

Companies kept the panels and lost the control.

The result was cheaper to plan, easier to repeat, and simple to pack into a floor plate. By 1997, Propst was calling the cubicle-izing of people in modern corporations “monolithic insanity”.

That is what happened.

A design begins with a human idea. By the time it reaches procurement, it becomes a cheaper, simpler version of itself.

Coworking made it look better. Nicer chairs, better coffee, phone booths, glass rooms, plants, events, warmer lighting. Maybe a neon sign if the year was bad enough.

And we sold the same promise. 

People will talk more.

In 2018, Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban at Harvard tested that promise inside two Fortune 500 companies. They used sensors to measure face-to-face interaction before and after the move to more open offices.

If the pitch was right, people should have spoken more.

They spoke less.

Email and instant messaging went up.

I remember reading that and feeling slightly sick.

It bothered me because I had said the sentence so confidently.

I had told clients that removing walls would make people talk more.

Then someone measured it.

The idea that stuck with me came from psychologist Irwin Altman.

He wrote about privacy not as being alone, but as control. The ability to decide how much of yourself is available, to whom, and when.

That is what open offices often take away.

Headphones that may not be playing anything. Slack messages to someone sitting four feet away. Angled screens. Avoided eye contact. Tiny rooms booked for calls that could have happened at the desk.

I saw this in our spaces all the time.

People would put on headphones, avoid eye contact, or move to a phone booth even when they were not on a call. I used to take that as individual preferences. Some people liked quiet. Some people were more introverted. Some people just worked that way.

Now I think many of them were trying to create a little control in a room that gave them very little.

India is building more flexible office space than ever.

That growth is not automatically wrong. Flex spaces solve real problems. Teams change size, leases are painful, and hybrid work has made the old office model harder to plan.

What worries me is how easily the old line comes back.

Collaboration.

The word makes almost any floor plan sound generous.

There's a version of this same pitch going around right now, something called activity-based working. I'd like to say I'd check the research properly this time before saying yes to it.

I'm not sure I would.

I do not think everyone who sells open offices is lying.

I was not lying either.

I think we liked the story because it made a cheaper and denser room sound generous. The same layout could save space, fit more people, look modern, and still be presented as something we were doing for the team.

That is a useful story.

Maybe too useful.

I still believe offices matter. Some work gets better when people share space, and some culture does not travel well through calendars and calls.

But proximity is not collaboration.

Visibility is not trust.

And taking away walls does not automatically make people open.

I spent years helping companies design offices around a sentence I had not tested properly. That is harder to sit with than “open offices do not work,” because it means the mistake was not only factual.

It was something I helped build.

Hit reply and tell me: has your office ever been redesigned, and did anyone tell you what problem the new layout was actually meant to solve?

I read every email.

Until next week,
Ritesh

P.S. Propst’s original idea was not to trap people in boxes. It was to give office workers more control over how they worked. The sad part is that companies kept the furniture and ignored the control.