Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace

Journalist Saval (an editor at n+1) offers a detailed social and cultural history of the white-collar workplace. He narrates the evolution of the office in the first decades of the 20th century and tells how “administration and bureaucracy [took] over the world of business.” Along came the typewriter, vertical file cabinet, managers, and efficiency experts to organize this new class of workers. The most influential and ultimately terrifying of these is Frederick “Speedy” Taylor, the father of the time and motion study, who was responsible for “vast caverns of bull pens and steno pools” and “eventually [gave] workers the impression that their work was routine and dead-end.” Saval spends considerable time on the successes and failures of an office’s architecture and design: Frank Lloyd Wright’s radically organized Larkin Building in Buffalo in 1904 somehow leads us to Clive Wilkinson’s Disneyland-like paradise for TBWA/Chiat/Day in 1997. Saval’s readings of pop culture representations of the office and its workers add a lively and ironic perspective. We may have come to the point, Saval suggests, when the office may be disappearing. Self-identified as a “work of synthesis,” the book draws heavily on the credited work of others, so one wonders about the “Secret” of the title. Never mind. The result is an entertaining read. Agent: Edward Orloff, McCormick & Williams. (Apr.)