In her profound book The Modern Interior historian Penny Sparke proposes a revisionist definition of the modern interior:
[The modern interior,] which was formed and developed between the middle years of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, went beyond style and encompassed many more inside spaces than those contained within the home…The visual languages through which it was expressed could range from Louis Quinze to Streamlined Moderne. The modern interior addressed in this study can be understood, therefore, in a very general sense, as the inside location of people's experiences of, and negotiations with, modern life.
With Sparke's expanded definition in mind, our understanding of the 20th-century origins of the interior design profession broadens. In particular, this essay will discuss the earliest designers of American corporate office interiors, a group of men who called themselves “scientific office managers.” They were disciples of the turn-of-the-century industrial theorist Frederick Winslow Taylor, and they practiced a nascent form of interior design. They drew and analyzed floor plans, designed lighting schemes, promoted indoor air-filtration and conditioning, and designed furniture and specialized equipment. Their work was a comprehensive attempt to form and mediate the collision between intimate human environments, a vital new architectural typology, and the emerging social and cultural realities of industrial modernity. Borrowing the language of French historian Michel Foucault, the scientific office managers were visionary theorists of the emerging disciplinary society.
The interior space of an early 20th-century American corporate office was the mechanical/architectural heart of an enormous paper-processing machine. Its employees would arrive to the office building riding streetcars and carriages on fixed iron rails; they were hoisted high into the sky inside mechanical conveyors hanging from braided steel cables in open vertical shafts. The office's rhythms were regulated with a clockwork precision: to enter, workers were obliged to present a paper card into a mechanical clock, stamping the exact moment of arrival.
At precisely 8:00 a.m. every morning, a light would flash high upon a wall, a bell would ring, and the workday would commence. For female clerks this typically meant seating oneself before a mechanical printing machine – a typewriter – ears connected by tubes to a rotating wax-cylinder audio recording machine. There might be as many as 200 or even 300 women in each room. As the workers typed, each depression of the printing machine's buttons would be logged on a mechanical counter and scored in keystrokes per minute. Every 20 minutes it was time for a set of printed documents to advance. The typed papers would be loaded onto conveyor belts, sent overhead in a wire basket, fired by pneumatic tube, or gathered up by a brigade of scurrying office boys.1
In the early 20th century it was still a novel idea that human work could (and should) be organized as mechanically and precisely as the gears of a machine. This so-called “scientific management” of labor was invented by Frederick Winslow Taylor.2 Taylor was an American engineer who developed his ideas by closely studying the actions of laborers and machinists in the Midvale Steel Works in Philadelphia over a period of years in the 1880s. By minutely documenting each task step by step, measuring with rulers and stopwatches, and then experimenting with alternative tool and processes, Taylor convincingly demonstrated that an outside “expert” could determine the single most efficient way a worker might accomplish a given task. In this way, Taylor invented a new paradigm of industrial organization. He “imagined a machine in which the mechanical and human parts were virtually indistinguishable” (Hughes 2004). Taylor rationalized and optimized each work task, and each worker, seeking to eliminate every superfluous movement, unnecessary step, and wasted material. He substituted the mechanical repetition of the automaton for the holistic labor of the craftsman: “In the past, the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.” (Taylor 1911). Scientific management, or “Taylorism” as it also came to be known, has been called the most important American contribution to Western thought since the Federalist Papers (Braverman 1975).
Taylor's ideology of scientific management legitimated the central role of managerial planning experts. In matters of business, industry, government, and agriculture – even in the domestic management of households – carefully trained specialists could maximize output by rationalizing tasks, materials, and tools.3 Maximized output meant efficiency, and efficiency was believed to be the engine of profit and progress. The “scientific” expert would become the warden of organizational knowledge and technical expertise. He would take complete control of the work process, regulating every activity. “All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or laying-out department” (Taylor 1903), thereby “specify[ing] not only what is to be done, but how it is to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it” (Taylor 1911). A lifetime of accumulated experience and instinct, once held by the shop foreman (or homemaker, scrivener, or farmer), was displaced by the scientific manager, wielding the iron-clad “rules, laws, and formulae” necessary in order to “plan ahead” (Taylor 1911). Taylor's technocracy was a revolutionary idea masquerading as self-evident truism, and it spread quickly throughout the industrialized world. By 1913, only two years after its English publication, The Principles of Scientific Management had been translated into Russian, French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese (Hughes 2004).
Although Taylor conceived of his work as a broadly applicable “set of principles,” his specific studies focused on the factory floor and industrial yard. It was left for his followers to extend the model into other realms. For the specific case of “scientific office management,” one journal was particularly influential: System (later System: The Magazine of Business), published by the Shaw-Walker Company in Muskegon, Michigan from 1900 to 1927. In addition, I have identified four published manuals from that time period: Lee Galloway, Office Management (1919); William Henry Leffingwell, Scientific Office Management (1917); Carl Copeland Parsons, Business Administration: The Principles of Business Organization and System (1909); and John William Schulze, The American Office: Its Organization, Management, and Records (1913). Each author was a self-proclaimed disciple of Frederick W. Taylor. These four men, as well as the editors at System, conceived of the corporate office – that administrative beehive of book-keepers, office boys, salesmen, typists, and file clerks – as essentially a giant paperwork factory. Just as the efficiency of an ironworks factory could be increased by the rationalization of its tools and procedures, so too could the office interior. Spatial environments could be optimized, workers better trained, office tools perfected, procedures rationalized, and waste eliminated. In an age of emerging continent-scale, and even global-scale, industrial processes, “a comparatively small force of highly specialized employees under the direction of a few experts” (Galloway 1919) could be organized so as to direct and manage the disparate activities of thousands.
The Railroads have made it possible for a manufacturer to places his goods at a low cost in any part of the country; and with favorable conditions, he can undersell a rival at the gate of the latter's plant. Then comes the test of organization and system. Each firm must count the cost, must eliminate all waste, must secure the benefits of large-scale production, must buy cheap, produce economically, route scientifically and market its product without waste. Other things equal, the victory comes to the best organization.
(Parsons 1909)
The most profitable corporation, and thereby the most successful one, would be “scientifically” organized as a paperwork factory, designed and overseen by a team of elite Taylorist scientific office managers.
While the need for administrative oversight is as ancient as the oldest cities, the notion that administrative work required a separate and distinct architectural space – an office building – is surprisingly recent (Gatter 1982: 14). The earliest modern examples date from the middle decades of the 19th century.4 By the 1870s large multi-story office buildings could be found in US urban centers, although these were typically organized as honeycombs of small-scale commercial suites, each just a handful of rooms. It was only in the late 1880s and the 1890s, following the establishment of the modern corporation, that anything resembling the contemporary open-plan office building appears. It was into this context that the scientific office managers emerged. Their work – drawings, diagrams, custom furniture designs, equipment designs, annotated photographs, graphs, charts, etc. – can be understood as rudimentary attempts to develop design principles for this emerging new form of interior space.5 They concerned themselves with a very familiar list of questions: they investigated space planning, furniture design, lighting, health and wellness in interior environments, interior equipment, casework, ergonomics, color, and acoustics. Aligning this list alongside our contemporary definitions and standards, it is clear that the scientific office managers quite comprehensively practiced an early form of interior design.6
The first place to begin to evaluate the scientific office managers as proto-interior designers is to note their reliance on the drawing and analysis of floor plans.
They worked extensively towards the rationalization of adjacencies and work “flow” through the office. One common technique was to overlay a diagram mapping the flow of clerical documents through the office on top of the existing (unsatisfactory) floor plan. This diagram would invariably demonstrate the chaotic, non-sequential relationship between spatial organization and work tasks, highlighting what the Taylorists named “waste motion.” “If letters weighed ten pounds apiece, probably a correct routing would quickly enough be found. But because they usually weigh but an ounce or so, failures to attain a direct routing are often observed. It takes nearly as much time, however, to carry one ounce one hundred feet as to carry ten pounds” (Leffingwell 1917b). The key to eliminating waste motion was the redesign of floor plans. Furniture, partitions, and equipment would be reorganized so as to maximize efficiency and streamline the flow of paperwork. The goal was explicit: “there should be no doubling back in the progress of work through the office” (Schulze 1913).
The notion that paperwork should “flow” through the office was often taken to its logical extreme. The literature includes examples of early 20th-century office interiors that were planned around a network of moving conveyor belts, analogous to the moving assembly lines developed by Henry Ford in his factories. The belts would pass alongside each clerk, who would collect and return papers onto the moving line. In other offices where either the architectural geometry or work sequences were not conducive to such an absolute linearity, paper might move from clerk to clerk inside bundles of pneumatic vacuum tubes or inside suspended metal gondola-baskets hanging from overhead circulating cables (American Pneumatic Service Company 1912). In all of these examples, the office was designed as a “set of channels through which work should circulate direct, clean, even, rapid” (Murphy 1914).
The concept of minimizing waste motion was not, however, limited to the movement of paper. Take for example this remarkable passable written by W. H. Leffingwell in 1917:
Drinking water is a necessity in every office.…Too often fountains are placed in out of the way corners and other inaccessible places. The average person should drink water at least five or six times a day. If each of one hundred clerks in an office were compelled to walk fifty feet to, and fifty feet from, the fountain, five times a day, each one would walk five hundred feet a day. Multiplied by one hundred clerks the distance traveled would be fifty thousand feet, or nearly ten miles. Multiplied by three hundred working days, the clerks would be walking three thousand miles for water in a year.
(1917c: 10–11)
In spite of the fact that a healthy, well-hydrated clerk was more likely to be an efficient worker, the seconds required to walk the 50 feet for a drink at the fountain was time not spent pressing buttons, recording dictation, or filing documents; to Leffingwell's calculus, those precious lost seconds were the consequence of faulty architectural planning.
As fundamental as the battle against waste motion was, the Taylorist office theorists also concerned themselves more broadly with the full scope of space-planning questions. They designed efficient egress pathways (“Desks should be placed in pairs, with an aisle on each side of the pair, so that a clerk can leave his desk without disturbing anyone” (Leffingwell 1917c); they advocated integration between plan and structural system; they drew bubble diagrams to study adjacency requirements (Van Deventer 1909); and they discussed degrees of “public-ness” and “private-ness” within the office suite (Stanger 1911). They were concerned with spatial “compactness” and the intensive, efficient utilization of leased floor space (Anonymous 1909). In short, for the Taylorist office theorists, the design of the office floor plan was paramount; “The selection and arrangement of the men and equipment in the space available is…second to no other [problem] in the office” (Schulze 1913).
Complementing the scientific office managers' design work in plan was their attention to furniture, casework, and interior equipment. The analogy with Taylor's pioneering industrial studies was direct: just as the proper configuration of a coal shovel proved vital for the efficient loading of steam engines, so too the intelligent design of a worker's desk was essential for efficient clerical function.
The desk is the most used piece of furniture in the office. The office employee is at it constantly. The highest type of working efficiency in a desk is obtained when the desk itself is so constructed and so arranged that it does not in the slightest degree interfere with the progress of a person's work, but, on the other hand, aids in every possible way.
(Schulze 1913)
As to the design of the desk, a “sanitary” one, lifted on slender legs, was strongly preferred over the older designs; traditional bureaus that descended all the way to the floor were believed to harbor “dust or dirt [that] can accumulate without being seen” (Schulze 1913). Even more problematic were the traditional patent-cabinet or roll-top desks. Those desks had been designed for the clerks of the pre-corporate era – enclosed, self-sufficient work-stations filled with numerous cubbies, enclosures, slots, and drawers to contain his hand-copied papers and ledger books.7 In the corporate Taylorist age, however, these enclosed desks began to look like vaults, dangerous traps into which important papers might fall, slipping out of the paperwork channel and becoming lost and abandoned. The sanitary desk – with its clean, flat surface on which all vital papers remained visible – afforded no sanctuaries into which renegade papers might slip.
If any drawers were permitted below the smooth desktop, they were few and exactingly regulated. Rigid inventories were written to specify exactly which items were permitted, and in what quantities and locations:
The equipment of the office manager's desk calls for a calendar, ink eradicator, ink eraser, pencil eraser, three penholders, out desk basket, in desk basket, ink-well, mucilage pot, pen tray, two glass cups, waste basket, ruler, scissors, and two paper-weights. His supply equipment includes: various blank forms, desk blotter, six hand blotters, clips of various sizes and kinds, fasteners, pasters, pins, rubber bands, washers, lead pencils, pens, engraved letter paper, second sheets, envelopes of prescribed sizes, scratch pads and memorandum pad. Twice a week, at times when there will be least interference, an office boy goes through the desks of the whole establishment and replenishes supplies. To guide him he has the list allotted for every class of desk, showing the minimum and maximum quantity of each article. He keeps between these two figures.
To discourage non-compliance, the Taylorists recommended that managers inspect the drawers randomly and frequently.8
To customize standard desks for specific work tasks, the scientific managers recommended, and often designed, numerous supplementary mechanisms and modifications. The literature records numerous examples: sliding leaves, drop panels, inset file tubs, retractable typewriter platforms, desk-mounted storage cubbies, custom drawer configurations, foot-pedal controls, ergonomic footrests, etc. Ergonomic studies, often performed using photography in front of gridded walls, confirmed the efficacy of the configuration. Often complementing the modified desks was customized interior casework, such as storage cabinets and bookshelves. Matched with the modified desks and casework were carefully considered task and executive chairs:
The same principles of selection and standardization should be applied to office chairs. An employee does his best work when he is submitted to the least discomfort. Upholstered chairs are not comfortable for any length of time, nor are straight wooden seats. For ordinary use the wooden saddle seat has been pronounced by office furniture men to be considerably more restful than any other kind of seat, with the exception of the more expensive cane seats. Cane seats are still less fatiguing, but are objectionable for general use because of their poor wearing qualities. For executives the cane seat covered with perforated leather is suggested. They allow plenty of ventilation, are attractive in appearance and do not shine the clothes. The backs of chairs should be formed of spindles rather than of solid wood or upholstery, to allow ample ventilation. For stenographers and typists special chairs have been designed composed of wooden saddle seats with adjustable spring backs. They can be adjusted to fit the height and convenience of the persons using them. All office chairs should be of the revolving kind to avoid the waste effort incurred in moving chairs back and forth when it is necessary to rise or change the position.
(Schulze 1913)
Working together the desk, cabinets, and task chair comprised a productive ensemble, designed as “equipment that will enable the worker to perform operations with the fewest motions” (Leffingwell 1917a).
Although the scientific office managers did most of their work through floor plans and interior equipment, the scope of their practices was broad and comprehensive; they managed to address nearly every contemporary interior design concern. For example they were early advocates for the introduction of filtered and conditioned ventilation into building interiors (Koon 1913). They also studied interior illumination requirements and recommended both natural light and artificial light solutions (Estep 1912). To combat fatigue caused by excessive sitting and repetitive motion, they promoted office-wide, periodic callisthenic breaks. They proposed design solutions against interior noise pollution. They even speculated about the health effects of interior color (Leffingwell 1917c). Considered in total, the Taylorist office theorists systematically employed a comprehensive set of interior design techniques to give form and coherence to the new forms of interior space in the corporate office.
The Taylorist office theorists endeavored the perfect system, a human-machine assembly flawless in every part and function. They specified the quantity of paperclips in a manager's drawer, the optimal angle between a typist's forearm and torso, the foot-candles required on an accountant's ledger, and the maximum permitted number of steps to the water fountain. They aimed to regulate space to the quarter of an inch and time to the fraction of a second. Masquerading as simple technicians of efficient capitalism, they were ideological visionaries, designers of the emerging technocratic order. Before their eyes danced the intoxicating, utopian dream of an orderly factory, creating orderly men leading to an orderly world (McLeod 1983).
As the French historian and theorist Michel Foucault reminds us, it has not only been the philosophers who dreamed of a perfect modern world:
there was also a military dream of society; its fundamental reference was not to the state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to the primal social contract, but to permanent coercions, not to fundamental rights, but to indefinitely progressive forms of training.
This is what Foucault named “the disciplinary society.” With its emphasis on productivity and efficiency, with its mechanisms of control and regulation, and through its techniques of visibility and positive conditioning, Foucault argued that the disciplinary society was the paradigmatic and deterministic form of political, economic, and cultural organization in the modern world. He described that world as constructed so as to better order, arrange, reproduce, and amplify:
architecture that is no longer built simply to be seen (as with the ostentation of palaces), or to observe the external space (cf. the geometry of fortresses), but to permit an internal, articulated and detailed control – to render visible those who are inside it; in more general terms, an architecture that would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them.
(Foucault 1978)
Foucault's writings help us to understand that, rather than just the amusing, mad scribblings of self-important micromanagers, scientific office management must be understood as the material enactment of a profound political philosophy. Hiding behind the “scientific” counting of footsteps and the weighing of papers by the ounce, behind human bodies measured and graphed for ergonomic fitness, behind gridded and redrawn floor plans, was a utopian vision of a minutely regulated, productive, technocratic clockwork society. Undoubtedly that vision was motivated by the image of a marching columns of soldiers, each young body disciplined into correct and proper form, calibrated for the projection of maximum power and effect. Clerical workers were soldiers, managers commanders, and corporate offices battlegrounds:
It is a good plan, when laying out a new office…to cut small squares of cardboard or paper of various colors, each color representing a department. The squares, approximately cut to scale, can be arranged on a large sheet of paper on which the floor plan is drawn, just as a general would position his troops on a map showing the field of battle.
(Schultze 1913)
In Foucault's disciplinary society power is not the arbitrary hand of authority exercised from above; rather, it is distributed as a network of constructive “micro-power.” It constitutes; it organizes, arranges, quantifies, corrects, and amplifies. Schoolchildren at their desks, patients in their beds, factory workers on the assembly-line, all are measured and aligned with the precision of soldiers marching in formation. Each typist sits at her desk, facing forward, working to a steady beat, efficient and rational.
The Taylorists aspired towards a perfected system, regimented in every detail and perfectly calibrated in all its motions. They permitted no space for informal improvisation, nor did they consider any idea of design as a balanced negotiation between conflicting interests and competing powers.9 As the office theorists argued repeatedly, there really was just “one best way” (Brandeis 1911), before which all other inferior and inefficient configurations must be judged inadequate.
That judgment would be performed by an elite group of professional and progressive experts (male of course), best suited by class, breeding, and education to determine what needed to be done.10 They would offer the definitive assessment of how space, equipment, and work should be organized, so as to best conform to the mechanical requirements of a totalizing system, calibrated in every motion and systematized in every detail. In this sense, the standardization so apparent in their designs – the identical desks in rows by the hundreds, the identical white blouses, the optimized task chairs, the runs of rectilinear filing cabinets, even the invention of carbon paper duplicates and unornamented white plaster walls – was more than just the material expression of a conformist sensibility. It was more than an aesthetic ideal, although it was certainly that.11 It was more than simply the expression of military hierarchy and order, although it was that too.12 Rather, the absolute standardization of the early 20th-century corporate office must be seen as the material and organizational expression of Taylor's “disciplinary” philosophy. The idea that a cadre of professional experts using rigorous scientific (or pseudo-scientific) analysis could solve social and economic problems through empirical means was a theory that reached deeply into the history of 20th-century design. It was of course the fundamental axiom of functionalism, and in that, a key tenet of 20th-century modernism. It is no surprise at all to learn that Le Corbusier himself was an enthusiastic Taylorist: “All is organized; all is clear and purified…Taylorism is not a question of anything more than exploiting intelligently scientific discoveries. Instinct, groping, and empiricism are replaced by scientific principles of analysis, organization, and classification” (Jeanneret and Ozenfant 1918). And it remains today a powerful and resonant contemporary ideal, now perhaps best known as “evidence-based design.”
Excavating the long-forgotten careers of the Taylorist office theorists can provide a new lens for thinking about the history of interior design in the 20th century. When we acknowledge their manuals as a nascent form of interior design practice, we discover an overlooked history that locates the design of interior space at the center of the some of most important questions of modern life, not least of which was the theorization of the most important new architectural typology of the 20th century. Men like Leffingwell, Schulze, Galloway, and Parsons (and the editors of System) explicitly set out to mediate the collisions between new forms of interior space, new types of industrial organization, new mechanical technologies, and rapidly shifting cultural patterns. They were inadvertent visionaries masquerading as pragmatic technicians, designers who recognized the potential for interior design to engage with some of the most complex questions of their day. In the crude instrumentalism of their work, they may remind us of that which the decorative flourishes of their interior decorator contemporaries have at times tended to obscure: interior design has always been the spatial negotiation of modern life.
Research for this project was supported by the James Madison University Program of Grants for Faculty Educational Leaves.