At the end of the 1970s, the ancient dynasty of the American corporate office was under siege.The walls and doors once dividing one employee from another had come to be seen as obstructions in the route of revolutionary conversion. Long-haired radicals did not lead this onslaught, nor was it the bluecollared bourgeoisie who felt captive by the old order. This was a revolution of white-collar professionals. Their intellectuals, architects, advertisers, and especially business writers argued that individual offices were becoming a thing of the past, and none too soon. Oversized offices, offices with windows, corner offices—these structures of arrogance and petty resentment had for so long seemed permanent and inevitable. Now the walls defining private offices had to be removed. A new open office was rising from this ruins, a space plan of openings: open lines of communication, “open door policies”, or no doors at all! A new age was dawning: the Age of the Office Cube.

Architecture promulgation of the 1970s characterized the new cubicled office as “cybernetic,” without walls to impede the “free flow of communication.” If the representations of cubicle systems advertisements were any indication of their promise, office cubicle furniture helped ideas flow quite freely indeed. Without computers, email, and the internet, employees in these ads are portrayed in periods of frenzied, low-tech communication: pointing to each other across the room, passing papers over and around the tan and brown new office partitions, all while talking on the telephone and posting yellow notes in clusters of office cubicles.

West Coast technology companies endowed cubicle desks their initial allure. In the late 1970s, national business reporters described the insurgent work arrangements of Silicon Valley with breathless fanaticism. The computer chip company Intel often modeled the example of what modular office cubicles made possible. The company had no time cards, dress codes, assigned parking spots, cafeterias designated for the elite, and above all, no hard wall offices, just a sea of modular office partitions. The long, low cubicle dividers of Intel were fields of shared labor, like the communal farms that dotted the hills and dells around Intel’s Silicon Valley campus.

CEO Andrew Grove, incurious and cool in a wide collared open-necked shirt and silver bling, was a straightforward man of the people. He moved among the employees of Intel “empowering” them to succeed, and sat in a cluster of refurbished office cubicles at one side of the vast work space ready to assist. Most astounding of all (and unlike the communal start-up farms), this social experiment built with office cubicle walls was economically viable. In a point when the great industrial powers were being lapped by Japanese competition, Intel was making money hand over fist raking in orders over the phone by the casual occupants of call center cublicles. The affordable office furniture model was ppowerfully attractive as cheap cublicles flooding the market soon proved.

1980, precisely at the period of the cubicle’s ascent, consultants uncovered a public hunger for enlightenment. Instantly management intelligence manuals, previously confined to business school bookstores, joined diet books and self-help scriptures as best-sellers. They instructed Americans in the subtleties of Japanese management practices, Kaizen, Q C, and trade market globalization, but management writers revealed behind these particular trends what they believed to be the beginning of a new era in which bureaucracy and hierarchy would be obsolete and equality, creativity, and change would rule the day.

Authors flooded the market with Management Manuals referencing to this relocation as the “management revolution,” penning publications titled Liberation Management and the like. The cubicle, with its flexible structure and inherent equalitarian nature, provided the physical backdrop for this vision. Needless to say, the faithful believers in cubicles-office furniture fantasy have failed to provide flexiblilty. The so called movable walls of modular office panels lost what once made cubicles modular and became fixed monolithic mazes of workstations. 

In 2006 Fortune ran an article entitled “Cubicles: The Great Mistake,” including an apology from one of the first cubicle designers.
In Dilbert, The Office, Office Space, and many other popular satires of contemporary office work, the cubicle is a symbol of all that is petty, uninspiring, and even dehumanizing in corporate life. To say; "The promises of a utopian workplace have become cluttered with cublicles" would be a gross  understatement. 

The father of modular office cubicles never meant to wreak such bleakness on the American office. We know this from the delightfully delusional name Robert Propst gave his invention: the Action Office. Back in 1968 most modern office workers toiled in open bull pens. Propst's cubicle systems offered at least as much privacy as they had from the partitions in a toilet stall, albeit without the door. Corporate America, which is run by professionals whose offices have doors, has snapped up more than $5 billion worth of the cubicles for sale from maker Herman Miller.  Today 70% of U.S. office workers sit behind cubicle walls, which have long transcended mere modern office furniture to become a pop-cultural icon thanks to Dilbert.

As the millennium turned, it became clear there were issues with the cubicle. Its high, thick walls were too isolating.  Its shelf lighting and layout were designed for paper pushing, not laptop typing. And unbelievably employers felt it filled up too much floor space.  According to the American Society of Interior Designers; A typical workstation in the 1970s measured 144 square feet (12X12 cube). By 1995 it had shrunk to 100 square feet (10X10 cube) Today's cubicles average 64 square feet (8X8 cubicle), 48 square feet (6X8 cublicle) and 36 square feet (6X6 cubicle). Today space planners say they can slice an additional 21% without lowering productivity or increasing the crime rate.

Buz words fo the day such as “Game changing products”, “disruptive technologies”, “Change-agents” and people who can “re-invent themselves” are now employee-of-the-month material.
A new generation of work-space design promises to tear down those padded cubicle partitions.  Office architects are envisioning improved office cubicles, that feel private yet collegial, personal yet interchangeable, smaller yet somehow more spacious. Employing advanced materials, tomorrow's technology and the fruits of sociological research, designers are fitting the future workplace to workers who are increasingly mobile and global. Meanwhile, business exucitves are demanding rent-saving, productivity-boosting solutions to convince us that cubicles are cool.

Enter Cubicle 2.0. At Herman Miller, it's called My Studio and is aesthetically reminiscent of the iPod. Framed by brushed steel and clear plastic, the pods are separated by low partitions that slide open for passing paper clips and post it notes. An occupant of a 6x8 cube could invite two colleagues to perch on horseshoe-shaped cubicle desks. Overhead Storage and under the desk filing systems seems sufficient: lateral files tuck underfoot, data-cables hide behind an electrical panel...there's even a panel top coat hanger and closed door storage closet. And here's the kicker: the cubicle has a translucent screen similar to a shoji-like sliding door. Privacy remains an essential key to a worker's so called sense of territory.

Even as workplaces move toward more open seating, privacy remains a top demand among employees. Contemporary cubicle design reflected the outline Les Nesman diagramed with a duck-taped boundry of his personal office space in the TV series WRKRP in Cinncinati. A Knoll study found that 45% say they do their best work in "their own personal space." The top privacy-related gripe: overheard conversation, particularly from cell-phone shouters. So architects are being exhorted to help muffle cubicle babble. Some advocate loft ceilings, others white noise; a desktop gadget called Babble can broadcast garbled recordings of the user's voice to mask real conversation. A lot more people just wearing iPods at their desks according to Dennis Gaffney, co-director of workplace design for architects RTKL.

But designers agree that the best way to cap cube chatter is to move it to a conference room. Office furniture designs need to create spaces for people to go to talk with each other from the moment they pass the reception furniture in the lobby. Steelcase is testing a concept called the Cell Cell, a phone booth fitted with reception boosters. Chatty colleagues might gravitate to the Dyadic Slice, designed for two, or hold brainstorming sessions in the Digital Yurt, whose sensor-triggered lighting oscillates with increased activity. All that is taking place just as many employers are encouraging a more nomadic work style. At Sun Microsystems in Santa Clara, Calif., workers can pop into interchangeable cubicles, an increasingly popular option called hoteling. With 62% of office workers desiring flex time and 42% longing to telecommute, is the cubicle as we know it dead? Alan Hedge, a Cornell professor who studies workplace design thinks it should have ever been born. Technology already allows most of us to work from anywhere, but companies want to retain control.

 Just when workers started to enjoy smaller, cooler company cubicles a new wave of office design is blowing in accross the Atlantic Ocean. The descruction that earlier fell on walls and doors the private office is coming to the cubicle dividers. The origin of this conceptual movement can be traced to a company called Oticon, a midsize Danish maker of hearing aids back in 1991.  It sounds like the corporate paradise of the cubicle office of the future. Workers organize themselves, coalescing around natural leaders and gravitating to the most exciting projects. There are no middle managers, no hierarchies, no fixed assignments.
 
That's when Oticon's chief executive, Lars Kolind, turned traditional notions of the workplace upside down. Lars Kolind, a corporate renegade trained as a mathematician, swept away old structures. Workers were suddenly free to concentrate on any project and join any work team.Kolind's radical idea was to transform the company's once stodgy culture into a free marketplace of ideas. He moved headquarters to a new location where none of the 150 employees had a permanent cublicle desk or private office furniture, only mobile filing cabinets on wheels called pedestals that they pushed from project to project. Not one conference table or mesh-back chair could be found in any of the meeting rooms. He called it the spaghetti organization, because the place had no fixed structure yet somehow held together. Ideas bubbled up and turned into hits such as a new hearing aid that required less adjustment. Sales and profits soared.
The company became a model for management creativity with the complete absence of office cublicles used. Even CNN showed up to tape a segment. Yet as the company grew and went public, many of the old structures crept back.

Kolind eventually left, and these days there's not much talk about his spaghetti revolution. Still, its spirit survives. None of the 500 head-office employees at Oticon has even a cubicle. The latest headquarters features few interior walls. Workers sit around the perimeter of the building at simple desks no longer exhulting the office star executive chair. They attend meetings on soft seating, love seats and reception sofas in the center of each office floor design.The relaxed atmosphere helps retain top engineers, keeping Oticon at the forefront of innovation. Its unobtrusive Delta hearing aid has been a success. Sales of parent company William Demant Holding Group, of which Oticon is the largest business, have grown 36% since 2002, while operating profit has risen 57%.But some things have clearly changed. Everyone has a boss to whom they report and they no longer have total freedom to choose projects. That seems to suit people fine. A degree of freedom sparks creativity, but workers also crave leadership. The trick is striking the right balance. Says Mads Kamp, Oticon's director of human resources: "People want to be led.