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 Ghery’s 2015 MPK20 Facebook Headquarters, white-collar workers have continuously been arranged in straight rows within undivided large spaces. However, the open plan has been linked to a series of negative health impacts, from headaches and rashes to immune system disorders, back problems, and colds (Nielsen and Knardahl, 2019; Murphy, 2006). Potential health impacts of the open office have been further brought to light by the COVID-19 pandemic, in which crowded and shared workspaces without access to fresh air were identified as vectors of contagion and disease spread. Open plan offices also appear to have close ties to negative psychological and emotional health, de-humanizing their occupants (Taskin, Parmentier and Stinglhamber, 2019). Despite a growing body of work highlighting problems with the open plan office, the design continues to be used around the world.

The open office, however, is far from the only possible spatial arrangement of white-collar work. Exemplified by Steidle + Kiessler’s Gruner + Jarh building (1983) and Struhk and Partner’s design for Edding (1990), entirely, or primarily cellular, private office spaces have historically proliferated in Northern Europe. This unique typology has arisen due to the instigation of trade union activity, worker presence on corporate boards, and national legislation governing minimum standards in workplace architecture (Duffy, 1997; 2008; van Meel, 2000).

This paper positions the Northern European cellular office, as well as the political methods underlying the typology, as architectural means to protect bodies at work. Drawing upon both empirical quantitative data the paper suggests such cellular designs are likely to both increase worker productivity and positively influence worker health, both physical and psychological. Further, using labor process theory (Braverman, 1974), the paper argues robust and meaningful trade union and worker participation in the design of white-collar work spaces may serve to expedite the creation of such designs, ensure their continued usage, and through this protect worker’s health. While the open plan office may be the preferred design of capital, positioned to extract labor at all costs, the cellular design appears to be the correlated preference of labor, meeting employee needs and desires.