What Will Our Offices Look Like?

What in the hell was Bob Propst thinking? It's a reasonable question to ask as you survey the cramped confines of your standard-issue corporate cubicle and bathe in the dull glow of overhead fluorescent lights, all the while trying to ignore the sound of your colleagues' clipping their fingernails or blathering away on a speakerphone.

Propst is the guy who, three decades ago, dreamed up these modular boxes for furniture giant Herman Miller. As he envisioned it, the system of wafer-thin, movable walls would be a revolutionary tool that would break down rigid hierarchies, spur creativity and free work spaces from the shackles of uniformity. Unfortunately, he didn't count on the square-foot police. Those FORTUNE 500 facility managers arrested his innovation and reformed it into an impersonal, white-collar assembly line, one that can make a genuine gearhead long for the good, old days of windowless offices and rotary phones.

With that record of innovation, workers are a bit skeptical about the office of the future. What will the geniuses in real estate come up with in the next quarter-century? If current trends are any indication, hide. Consider "hoteling," the latest workplace experiment, which treats employees as though they were visiting nomads who are assigned a phone and portable desk by a concierge. Or perhaps the "head cubicle," as imagined by Dilbert creator Scott Adams, a square helmet that will let CEOs "stack us up like firewood in a warehouse on the outskirts of town, where rents are low."

Millions of telecommuters, of course, don't intend to wait for such an outcome. They have already set up quarters wherever they set down their laptops. "Today's office is an aging concept, 150 years old, that people have been hanging on to," argues Stevan Alburty, who runs WorkVirtual, an office-consulting shop. It's only a matter of time, telecommuting true believers claim, before city skyscrapers and suburban office parks are abandoned altogether, left as archaeological curiosities for future generations.

Well, don't start your dig just yet. PCs may be great for solitary pursuits, composing Powerpoint presentations or writing. But as long as co-workers need to brainstorm, bat around ideas and just plain gossip, they will always return to the water cooler, choosing a little face-to-face time over e-mail and the Web. Says Christine Albertini, vice president of advanced concepts at office-furniture maker Steelcase: "The basic nature of work is social."

Clueless corporations, which have typically approached the office as a storage site for people and paper, are only just starting to think outside the cubicle, imagining work spaces that foster interaction, not isolation. By 2025, though, the standard-issue, gloomy maze of hallways and bullpens of today may well be replaced--once they have been fully depreciated, that is--by a wide range of office setups that, just like the new economy, stress customization over mass appeal. In this newfangled, dynamic working environment, employees should be able to personalize their work spaces and constantly reconfigure their surroundings to suit the changing needs of business.

"Think of the buildings as stage sets, where you can play out any technological or organizational scheme," muses Volker Hartkopf, professor of architecture at Carnegie Mellon University.