62 OFFICE DESIGN
auditorium, dining and reception areas; and William Tabler, who was to become a hotel specialist, all played their part. George Nelson designed a rooftop private club and restaurant. Charles Eames designed the Time-Life chair as a favour to his friend Henry Luce, the founder of Time and Life magazines. (It became the Cadillac Eldorado of desk chairs, and the top of the line at Herman Miller, significantly wider than the seat of the Aeron. Modelled after a wider stationary chair produced for the lobby it is still being manufactured today.) Josef Albers, Fritz Glarner and Francis Brennan designed murals for lobby walls. There was a photo gallery on the 28th floor where the photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt worked. Luss was responsible for 21 floors of offices. Tey were all about style and adaptability. Te cliché of ‘a wake-up call’ has earned
the witty riposte that one can wake up but still not get out of bed. But these interiors caused others to not merely wake up but leap out of bed, down a double espresso, and be raring to answer history’s summons – welcome news in an industry that often resists change. At the same time as the Time & Life revolutionary interior was being created, the academic Robert Propst was undertaking research as part of the design process at Herman Miller. Propst was an academic discovered by ‘Jan’ DePree, the founder and president of the company.
Action Ofice was an infinitely flexible sub- architectural system that would provide a sense of place and purpose for the individual without sacrificing executive and staff privacy
Published in 1968 and a decade in
the making, Te Office – a Facility Based on Change was the result. Te goal – to investigate how the world of work operated – concluded, sadly, that ‘today’s office is a wasteland. It saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort.’ It identified how the office had evolved – that this was no straight line evolution – and how new professions, new management styles, and the war of communications devices were influencing the office, and how all of this impacted the performance of people at work. It required a change, and Propst had the inordinate self-confidence to act. He understood that office users wanted answers, that the answers lay in the concept of an overall system, essentially one that could be perceived as the user’s own, responsive to individual needs, allowing employers to format their offices the way they wanted. Tat was the start of Action Office, in
1964, with George Nelson working on the design. It was the world’s first open-plan office system, ‘a bold departure from the fixed assumptions of what office furniture should be’. It won an award but was not a success – in fact, it was a commercial failure. Nelson moved on but the product was developed further by Propst and Jack Kelley, and the revised kit of parts introduced in 1967, capable of modification to suit the changing needs of employees, became an
Right An early example of the revised kit of parts for Action Ofice, designed by Robert Propst (pictured) and Jack Kelley
Below right Action Ofice was the world’s first open-plan ofice system
Below left George Nelson worked on the design of the original Action Ofice system
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