In 1999 Chris Baldry asserted that ‘For too long the built working environment has been excluded from the analysis of work organizations.’ (Baldry 1999) This phenomenon appears particularly salient in terms of the space of white-collar work. While architectural historians have spun a design narrative based on positive evolution, such work has remained largely segregated from investigations of the white-collar labor process.  Heeding Baldry’s call for integrated study of the built environment of work and the labor process (Baldry 1992; 1999; 1998; 2012), this paper unpacks the relationships between office architecture and managerial control of white-collar labor.

The paper makes a threefold argument. First, it suggests that the history of commercial office architecture can best be understood as one of continuity. While perhaps differing in aesthetics, office spaces from the past hundred plus years overwhelmingly share a common floorplate, the open plan. From Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1904 Larkin Administration Building to Frank Gehry’s 2015 MPK 20 Facebook Headquarters, white-collar workers have been arranged in straight rows within undivided large spaces. Attempts to change or reform the open plan, such as Herman Miller’s Action Office system (1968), have time and again resulted in failure, devolving back toward the open plan (Kaufmann-Buhler 2020; Saval 2014).

Drawing on the Marxian Labor Process scholarship of Braverman (1974), Burawoy (1985), Edwards (1979), and Knights and Willmott (1990), among others, the paper argues that continuities in architecture stem primarily from continuities and imperatives within the capitalist labor process. The space of white-collar work has remained continuous because the underlying nature of white-collar work has continued. Finally, actioning Chris Baldry’s repeated appeals, the paper emphasizes the importance of critical investigation of the built environment of work by sociologists, labor scholars, and architectural historians for comprehensive understanding of work and labor. The architectural record, it is argued, simultaneously reinforces, and provides nuance and texture to sociological understanding of these environments, highlighting both continuities and discontinuities in the labor process and the experience of work.