Let us begin with the problem of variety. The idea of men as millions of faceless nameless cogs pervades 20th century literature. The nature of modern housing reflects this image and sustains it. The vast majority of housing built today has the touch of mass-production. Adjacent apartments are identical. Adjacent houses are identical. The most devastating image of all was a photograph published in Life magazine several years ago as an advertisement for a timber company: The photograph showed a huge roomful of people; all of them had exactly the same face. The caption underneath explained: In honor of the chairman’s birthday, the shareholders of the corporation are wearing masks made from his face.
These are no more than images and indications. . . . But where do all the frightening images of sameness, human digits, and human cogs, come from? Why have Kafka and Camus and Sartre spoken to our hearts?
Many writers have answered this question in detail—[David Ries-man in The Lonely Crowd; Kurt Goldstein in The Organism; Max Wertheimer in The Story of Three Days; Abraham Maslow in Motivation and Personality; Rollo May in Man’s Search for Himself, etc.]. Their answers all converge on the following essential point: Although a person may have a different mixture of attributes from his neighbour, he is not truly different, until he has a strong center, until his uniqueness is integrated and forceful. At present, in metropolitan areas, this seems not to be the case. Different though they are in detail, people are forever leaning on one another, trying to be whatever will not displease the others, afraid of being themselves.
People do things a certain way “because that’s the way to get them done” instead of “because we believe them right.” Compromise, going along with the others, the spirit of committees and all that it implies—in metropolitan areas, these characteristics have been made to appear adult, mature, well-adjusted. But euphemisms do little to disguise the fact that people who do things because that’s the way to get along with others, instead of doing what they believe in, do it because it avoids coming to terms with their own self, and standing
| 183 WORKSPACE ENCLOSURE** |
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. . . this pattern plays a vital role in helping to create an atmosphere in which people can work effectively. You can use it piecemeal to generate the larger patterns for workspace like flexible OFFICE SPACE (146), HALF-PRIVATE OFFICE (152), and home workshop (I 57). Or, of course, it can be used to help complete these larger patterns, if you have already built them into your design. Even in an alcove off the family commons— alcoves (179), you can make the workspace more suitable for work, by placing and shaping the enclosure immediately around it according to this pattern.
People cannot work effectively if their workspace is too enclosed or too exposed. A good workspace strikes the balance.
In many offices, people are either completely enclosed and feel too isolated, or they are in a completely open area as in the office landscape and feel too exposed. It is hard for a person to work well at either of these two extremes—the problem is to find the right balance between the two.
To find the proper balance, we conducted a simple experiment. We first defined 13 variables, which we thought might influence a person’s sense of enclosure in his workspace.
These 13 variables are:
1. Presence or absence of a wall immediately behind you.
2. Presence or absence of a wall immediately beside you.
3. Amount of open space in front of you.
4. Area of the workspace.
5. Total amount of enclosure around the immediate workspace.
6. View to the outside.
7. Distance to nearest person.
8. Number of people you are aware of from your workplace.
9. Noise: level and type.
IO. Presence or absence of a person facing you directly.
1 1. Number of different positions you can sit in.
I 2. Number of people you can see from your workspace.
13. The number of people you can talk to without raising your voice.
We then formulated thirteen hypotheses which connect these variables with the comfort of the work space. The hypotheses are listed below. We interviewed 17 men and women who had all worked in several different offices. In the interview, we first asked each person to think of the very best workspace he (or she) had ever worked in and the very worst; and then asked him (or her) to make a sketch plan of both spaces. Then we asked questions to identify the value of each of these 13 variables in the “best” and “worst” workspaces. Thus, for instance, we might point to one of the sketches a person had drawn, and say “How far away was that wall” to establish the value of the third variable. The values of the variables for the 17 best and worst workspaces are given in the following table.
On the basis of this table, we then calculated the probable significance of our hypotheses, according to the chi-squared test. Nine of the hypotheses appear to be significant according to the chi-squared test, and four are not. We now list the nine “significant” hypotheses, and with each one, in parentheses, we venture an explanation for its success.
1. You feel more comfortable in a workspace if there is a wall behind you. (If your back is exposed you feel vulnerable—you can never tell if someone is looking at you, or if someone is coming toward you from behind.) The data support this hypothesis at the I per cent level of significance.
2. You feel more comfortable in a workspace if there is a wall to one side. (If your workspace is open in front and on both sides, you feel too exposed. This is probably due to the fact that though it is possible to be vaguely aware of everything that goes on 180 degrees around you, you cannot feel in real control of such a wide angle without moving your head all the time. If you have a wall on one side, you only have to manage an angle of 90 degrees, which is much easier, so you feel more secure.) The data support this hypothesis at the 5 per cent level of significance.
3. There should be no blank wall closer than 8 feet in front of you. (As you work you want to occasionally look up and rest your
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| Effic | Y | \ | V | N | Y | Y | l JO | 35 | U | *5 | S | Y | Y | X | 4 | 5 | N | Y | X | X | 2 | 2 | O | 5 | 0 | 3 |
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| Ron | V | N | Y | V | S' | Y | M | 2 2 | 57 | 44 | S' | X | Y | X | 8 | t | N | Y | N | X | 2 | 1 | 4 | \ | 3 | \ |
| Joan | Y | X | Y | X | N | \ | 1 20 | 20 | 30 | O | Y | X | S' | X | J | 9 | X | N | X | Y | 1 | 1 | 1 | 9 | 1 | 2 |
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| Phyllis | Y | Y | Y | Y | N | N | 70 | 1 jo | 5° | 0 | S' | S’ | Y | Y | 1 | 1 | Y | S' | X | X | 3 | 3 | 0 | 15 | 0 | 1 |
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| Mary | Y | X | Y | S' | N | X | 400 | 20 | 75 | *5 | Y | X | Y | N | 21 | 2 | Y | X | X | Y | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | O | 1 |
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