The History Of Office Space

Office space has changed considerably over the years as human society has changed its needs. The word office comes from the Latin officium and does not actually refer to a space as it does to the bureaucratic activity surrounding a certain job or post. Thus people speak of the office of president and so on. However, as writing became more common, people who held offices increasingly needed to stay in one place and complete their work.

In the many centuries prior to the industrial revolution, office space was basically indistinguishable form a library, since all writing was kept in the same place, even if the contents of the writing were significantly different. For this reason archaeological findings typically turn up a great mixture of documents in one space. Most offices seem to have stored their scrolls in pigeon holes in the walls of rooms which held copyists and other workers simultaneously.

Things continued in this way without interruption until the Industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries brought about a radical change in the arrangement of office space. As industries expanded they needed larger numbers of people to handle the paper work. These people were called clerks because such work had been previously done by clerics of the church in the Middle Ages. Photographic and other evidence of this time period shows that clerks worked at top-heavy desks with storage containers stacked atop them. This created a somewhat higher level of privacy for bureaucratic workers than had been known before.

As the modern age dawned, business owners decided to change the outlay of office space in order to allow managers to improve efficiency by observing their workers more closely. These decisions brought about large rooms full of flat-top desks which revealed all the movements of the clerks at work behind them. Eventually, managers realized that some privacy was needed and designed the cubicles which many now associate with contemporary office space.