Trapped in a cubicle far
Robert Oppenheimer agonized over building the A-bomb. Alfred Nobel got queasy about creating dynamite. Robert Propst invented nothing so destructive. Yet before he died in 2000, he lamented his unwitting contribution to what he called “monolithic insanity.”
Propst is the father of the cubicle. More than 30 years after he unleashed it on the world, we are still trying to get out of the box. The cubicle has been called many things in its long and terrible reign. But what it has lacked in beauty and amenity, it has made up for in crabgrass-like persistence.
More in an article at Fortune. For me, it is not the nature of the cubicle, but the mindset it seems to inspire. There are systems and strategies to solve the regularity—and a systematic approach to furniture isn’t bad—but people often fall into the grid-driven grey-box uniformity that is so soul-crushing.
This entry was posted at 10:49 am on 9 March 2006 and is filed under Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
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