Action Office, Or, Another Kind of 'Architecture Without Architects'

69 Action Office, or, Another Kind of ‘Architecture Without Architects’ Phillip Denny Action Office, a popular line of office furniture and Lillian Gilbreth’s time-and-motion studies in launched in 1964, remains in production today. In scientific management. As a point of comparison, the opinion of its inventor, Robert Propst, it was the Gilbreths’ work sought to standardise labour a system devised for organising information in processes toward the predictable, streamlined multiple formats. Indeed, more than a collection of performance of repetitive actions.3 The vast majority office furniture, the system comprises a network of of the Gilbreths’ interventions disciplined the perfor- ‘information products’: books, publications, audio- mance of a labourer’s work with the intention of visual materials, conferences and architectural reducing movement and physical exertion by means models, which, in concert, produce an optimal of scientifically-derived workplace choreography. environment for knowledge work in the information age.1 This integration of diverse formats character- Propst devised an altogether different approach. ises ‘systems furniture’, of which ‘AO’ (as it is called AO sought to streamline the working environment in according to the managerial shorthand) is the best- order to optimise a user’s ability to perform a slew known example. Moreover, the heterogeneity of of non-standardisable tasks efficiently. What distin- the line’s parts reflects the elasticity of the ‘system’ guishes this difference in approach is not only a concept at this historical moment; in this instance, question of method or context, but especially differ- a collection of things that form a complex whole. ences in the changing nature of work. Rather than The range of multimedia elements which compose optimising the laying of bricks or the assembly of the AO galaxy adheres to what computer scientist widgets on an assembly line, as was the case with Herbert A. Simon called a complex system, ‘a large respect to the Gilbreths’ subjects, Propst’s office number of parts that interact in a non-simple way’.2 workers confronted, on a daily basis, a constantly As an object of historical reflection, Propst’s system changing roster of informational tasks, and more- exceeded furniture design, management theory, over, the tools of their labour had changed. The and for that matter architecture too, in its capacity to factory and the modern office, principal sites of form connections between its many material, infor- production in the twentieth century, ultimately share mational, and human elements. This standardised fewer similarities than differences.4 system of partitions, desks, chairs, shelves, racks, and organisers aligned to produce a complex, effi- What did office labour look like in 1964? The cient human interface for knowledge work. modern office worker employed an array of novel information technologies in order to perform a host As a means of setting out, it would seem apparent of bureaucratic workflows: recording, transcribing, that AO should be thought of alongside other histor- calculating, typing, copying, calling, receiving, filing, ical interventions in the workplace, such as Frank storing, shredding, and so on. Of course, these 25 The Human, Conditioned | Autumn / Winter 2019 | 69–84 70 actions represent entirely different varieties of AO essentially greased the wheel of an advanced manual work than those that were studied by the division of labour endemic to late capitalism. The Gilbreths, such as bricklaying. Moreover, this form rationalisation of workspace according to the spatial of analysis discretised the performance of work consequences of workflows and ‘paper trails’ was a to such an extent that the optimisation of multi- process undertaken in the interest of satisfying the process, complex tasks would have been beyond managerial desire for increased worker productivity; the means of the Gilbreths’ abilities.5 office planning consultants such as Quickborner, Francis Duffy, and Herman Miller’s own ‘Facilities How then ought one to improve productivity Management Institute’ all claimed to improve worker in an environment that plays host to complex, performance.7 elastic workflows? Historical examples of an alter- native approach are numerous. One tradition of We must not fail to understand the particular social particular relevance is the perennial introduction historical situation of the individuals who functioned of improvements to the organisation and equip- in these spaces. It is not coincidental that Christine ment of the domestic kitchen. Innovators such as Frederick, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and Robert the American Christine Frederick (1883–1970) Propst designed environments intended to be used, and Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky principally, by women. In each case, the design of (1897–2000), conceptualised the kitchen as a site women into a given spatial environment and form of industry and ‘industriousness’.6 Accordingly, the of labour is conditioned by and enforces a vast kitchen was predisposed, in their thinking, to adjust- complex of patriarchal structures.8 Herman Miller’s ment along the lines of scientific management and advertisements for AO of the mid-1970s, such as efficiency theory that were applied in factories. the short film Beautiful Girls, make this point pain- Despite a considerable chronological interval sepa- fully clear.9 From the perspective of the marketing rating them, their work shared a common result: the team tasked with advertising AO, women appeared organisational rationalisation of space in order to in AO environments solely as clerical workers – the improve the efficiency of work. film spots are addressed to unambiguously male supervisors: We should consider how AO fits (and does not fit) into the historical lineage of these other in just six years, you businessmen in America are projects. Insofar as Propst envisioned a spatial going to equip your secretaries with eight billion paradigm cultivated from the specific demands dollars’ worth of typewriters, dictation equipment, of a certain kind of work, the resemblance seems copiers, typewriter ribbons – and furniture… Someone rather apparent. Propst designed an environ- is going to have to meet her environmental needs on ment that immersed knowledge workers in a the job, and that someone is Herman Miller.10 space augmented with technologies necessary to engage diverse forms of informational labour. At What does this piece of corporate propaganda tell the same time, the comparison might elide patent us about the designed situation of women in the differences. For instance, both Frederick and modern office? The film’s narrator later continues to Schütte-Lihotzky’s projects were motivated by the emphasise the pivotal value – an eight billion dollar particular context in which they were situated, that industry, after all – of secretarial work: ‘Doesn’t it is, the domestic home, and the historically moralistic make sense to keep her efficient and happy? She imperatives that enlisted women as managers of operates a machine… She indeed is the heart household economies. By contrast, Herman Miller’s of the machine age… but she is not a machine: 71 Fig. 1: An Action Office 2 installation used in Herman Miller advertising, circa 1975. Photo from Ralph Caplan, The Design of Herman Miller (Zeeland, Michigan: Herman Miller, Inc., 1976). Reproduced by permission of the Herman Miller Corporate Archive. 72 She’s an action secretary, and she needs Action trace the history of this system’s development and Office.’11 The narrator’s verbal elision of women deployment in the context of transformations occur- labourers and their environment (action secretary/ ring within and among larger systems of labour and Action Office) belies the project’s grand ambition to technology, and attend to how these mutations were create a frictionless, integrated system in which ‘a reinscribed in this complex set of designed objects.15 large number of parts… interacts in a non-simple way’. Here, furniture, architecture, machines, and Prehistory of Action Office their operators are designed to work in concert to Propst had worked on the AO system for almost four properly direct the flow of memos, presentations, years by the time it launched in 1964. Before joining documents, contracts – information of all sorts. In Herman Miller in Michigan, Propst had studied this light, AO manifestly appears as yet another form chemical engineering at the University of Denver, of information technology, as one system dissolving later switching into a program in fine arts. He entered into a larger one that includes ‘people, processes, the navy during World War II, during which time he and place’: the organisation, its work, and its spatial served in the South Pacific arena. After the war, he context, that is, its architecture.12 served as the head of the art department in a Texas college. Soon after, Propst formed an eponymous AO is thus a difficult object for design history industrial design firm, Propst Co., in 1953, in Denver, insofar as it displaces the functional definitions of Colorado. As an independent contractor in search either architecture or furniture. As introduced here, of work, Propst often offered his design innovations AO reconfigures the subject at the same time that it to potential clients ‘on spec’.16 On one occasion, configures space, all the while remaining both not- Propst marketed a novel connection system for architecture and not-furniture. This double negation

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