Abstract
In organization studies, office architecture is mostly seen as an instrument for control and productivity. By taking into account the temporality of architecture within labour relations, an imagined dimension of the organization’s built space comes to the fore. For a better understanding of this dimension, this chapter turns to architectural theory, especially Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Using an approach grounded in discourse analysis and ethnography, the chapter presents four dimensions in which office architecture relates to the future: (1) office architecture is discursively charged with promises; (2) it produces conflicting anticipations of the future; (3) architectural aspirations have to be performed locally; and (4) office architecture stages labour’s inexhaustible potentiality. These dimensions imply that office architecture cannot be sufficiently understood only in terms of its functionality or instrumentality. Instead of simply assuring an objective technological rationalization, office architecture produces a shared imaginary of an ever more successful organization of labour.
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Notes
- 1.
Quotes from German texts are the author’s own translations.
- 2.
I make use of the terminology proposed by Niklas Luhmann in ‘The future cannot begin’ (1976). Drawing on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of time , Luhmann distinguishes between a future present, a date in the future we will once call now, and the future as a horizon of the present, which is marked by a constitutive openness and as such, can never be reached. While Luhmann opposes technology and utopia as two distinct modes of dealing with the future, my analysis would rather suggest the entanglement of both.
- 3.
The first non-territorial open space office in Germany is said to have been born from this problem. The number of employees had outnumbered the number of workstations by the start of construction. The new office form allowed for the accommodation of more employees than desks (Staniek 2005, p. 59), thereby loosening the strict coupling of staff and surface.
- 4.
Paradoxically , this is determining the architectural creative leeway quite a bit. For instance, the building’s depth is bound to be between 14 and 15 metres in order to provide sufficient lighting for different office concepts (cf. Staniek and Staniek 2013, p. 39).
- 5.
This case is analysed in detail in Adler (2017).
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Acknowledgements
I want to thank David Waldecker, Jens Maeße, Thomas Alkemeyer, Thomas Scheffer, Johannes Angermuller, the editors and the anonymous reviewer for critical remarks and helpful suggestions. Furthermore, I am grateful to Annika Raapke for proofreading the article.
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Adler, D. (2018). Solid Futures: Office Architecture and the Labour Imaginary. In: Krämer, H., Wenzel, M. (eds) How Organizations Manage the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74506-0_15
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