HR 101: the history of the office cubicle

Welcome to HR 101. Class is now in session. Today’s discussion will focus on the history and evolution of the office cubicle.

The history. The cubicle was designed in 1964 by Robert Propst, an artist and president of Herman Miller, according to the furniture company’s website. He was trying to improve on an office environment that, in his opinion, “saps vitality, blocks talent, [and] frustrates accomplishment” by designing furniture that would foster collaboration and productivity—but this was not it.

Over time, cubicles developed a reputation as cold, sterile places where employees begrudgingly did their jobs, escaping only for the occasional coffee break. Movies like the 1999 cult classic Office Space perpetuated this stereotype, making the cubicle synonymous with soul-sucking corporate drudgery. Despite this grim association, the cubicle would remain the standard for office layouts for decades.

But by the mid-2010s, millennials took the workplace by storm, bringing with them new expectations for their jobs—and the look and feel of the spaces where they’d be performing them.

“Today, collaborative work and the world are dynamic, unpredictable and fast-moving,” Entrepreneur reported at the time. “The cost and burden of poorly designed, obsolete workplaces is too large to ignore—and millennials are flat-out refusing to work in them.”

Fast-forward. Millennials’ desire for unconventional work spaces has driven several office design trends over the last decade, according to Forbes. Many of today’s workplaces feature fewer cubicles and more open floor plans that are meant to promote collaboration, as well as inclusivity, as HR Brew has reported.

But cubicles aren’t going extinct. In fact, they’re having something of a renaissance, the New York Times recently reported. For some employees, after working from home during the pandemic with distractions from family and friends, the cubicle doesn’t look so bad after all—in moderation.

At Grassi, for example, a New York accounting and auditing firm with 500 employees, staffers can use cubicles and collaborative workspaces, allowing them to prioritize their needs in the moment.

If the future of work is hybrid, as some research has suggested, it seems only appropriate that the same applies to office designs.