Die Despotie des Büros: Innenräume und Einrichtungen 1880-1960

The office represents one of the major systems in collective organisation. It seems like a complex universe, a setting for the daily interaction between people, but also a place of self-determination and oppression that reflects social history and its evolution, progress and contradictions. On the other hand, the office can be viewed as a system of relationships between the human being and the space, between the human being and the furnishings. This system of relationships can be variously interpreted in the light of various pointers from social history and the political reading of its phenomena. In my chapter I re-examine the history of Modern office interiors in the light of Michel Foucault’s considerations about the 'dispositif' issue and with a series of demonstrative projects. If in some cases I appear to be stretching the theory somewhat, it should be said that during the twentieth century, the office interior really did seem to materialise Foucault’s idea of the dispositif – especially when understood as a ‘form of control’. This was possible not only thanks to the combination of its internal relations and the organisation of the work indicated by Office Management Science, but also through the arrangement of spaces and furniture. The office can be seen as a means, as much physical as psychological, of exercising microscopic control within the social body of white-collar workers, and indeed it exerted this power on a daily basis. The architectural space and elements that compose it, such as furniture and equipment, might be considered as an apparatus parallel to the bureaucratic organisations that enacted them. It was a matter therefore of ‘systems’ that accompany, and for the most part direct, the work of the white-collar workers. Observation of the succession of spatial, organisational and aesthetic characteristics of the working spaces reveals how the office design is an ambiguous problem, with no unequivocal response, but where ideas dominated by rationalisation and control have prevailed.