Tempo - Part 2: "Wir fahren" - The Romance of Bürolandschaft
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
Kraftwerk move across the terrain of the 20th century. They began as an experimental cosmic rock band in 1970 – in the same milieu as Can, Faust, and Neu! – even featuring members of the latter. These musicians brought avant-grade training with likes of Stockhausen to primal funk grooves or psych-rock freak-outs. An alternate universe in which Bootsy Collins had been hired by La Monte Young rather than James Brown. Kraftwerk began as hippies.
Gradually Kraftwerk shed the corporeal in pursuit of the electronic. Cymbals were replaced by gated white noise. Synthesizers and sequencers sought to purge the organic from their sound. The smooth sine waves of analogue digitized into harsher shapes. Their visual style becomes regimented – the Men Machines in shirts and ties.
This will to technology, this disavowal of the past was perhaps necessary for young Germans born after the Second World War. History offered only tragedy and horror. The only direction could be forward. Which is also why their sound appealed to Afro-American ears like Afrika Bambaataa in New York or The Belleville Three in Detroit. For these men too, an acceptable identity could only exist in the future.
Kraftwerk’s disavowel of the past included their own. Their first three albums are not officially available. Their first legitimate child is Autobahn whose title track unfurls at a leisurely 22:48 mins. The motorway offers freedom to travel. A connection between the city and nature. Perhaps between the past and future as well. In this world, freedom also a little melancholy. Kraftwerk were touring on the Autonbahn – Ralf Hutter saying: “I had this old grey Volkswagen, so maybe we were dreaming of having a Mercedes one day.” The melodies of Kraftwerk often sound simple – childish even. But the emotions they convey are complex – just as a child’s emotions are not simple. Less “bittersweet” and more a whole palate of conflicting tastes and a whole palette of clashing colours (from oils to neon).
While Kraftwerk were fashioning their Trans-Europe actor-network, others were exploring a different configuration of people, machines and harmonies in the modern world. Until the 1950s, traditional white collar office design provided either “European” corridor offices (with monastic booths partitioned off to each side) or “American” open-plan offices that laid out staff in ordered, factory-like grids. The latter decreased space per person and increased supervision – a panopticon of paper and wood – and this lack of privacy was associated with staff lower in the hierarchy.
Bürolandschaft – “office landscaping” - was developed in Germany as a more organic alternative to these industrial models of workplace design. Desks were arranged in non-linear formations with screens and pot plants to artfully direct sound and vision. Such designs were made possible at scale by technical advances in construction, ventilation, and lighting. And they promised greater comfort and privacy for workers and reduced costs for employers. The development of these concepts came from interior designers and furniture makers. The term originates with the Schnelle brothers of Hamburg – sons of a furniture-maker who set up an office “space planning” consulting firm and whose first client was the publisher Bertelsmann. The approach was popularised in the US by Robert Propst of office furniture makers Herman Miller. Propst created a series of furniture and partitioning systems called Action Office that were supposed to give individual workers greater autonomy.
As Stewart Brand says: “architects and interior designers revile and battle each other”. So the main advocate of Bürolandschaft in the UK was, surprisingly, an architect. In the UK of the 1950s and 60s, office design was not a sexy place for an architect to be. The prestige projects were the new towns being built and the old towns being rebuilt in the aftermath of the war. However Frank Duffy was interested in offices. He went to America to do a Masters and then a PhD on offices (after being rejected by a PwC-precursor firm for not dressing smartly enough) before returning to the UK. Although Duffy was at Berkeley in 1968, he was not a hippy. Duffy is a technocrat and a humanist with a fascination for the relationship between people, work, and buildings. As a technocrat, he sought to analyse these relationships through research. As a humanist, he brought many different disciplines along for the ride – sociology was as important for Duffy as mechanics and engineering. The engineering challenges and organisational opportunities of Bürolandschaft appealed greatly to Duffy.
Some advocates for Bürolandschaft were claiming that it would remove hierarchy and formality from the workplace. They argued that the most important thing in offices was communication and therefore the optimal physical form for an office should be as big and as column-free as possible to allow for as much communication as possible. These claims sound oddly familiar to anyone involved in the “Enterprise 2.0” community. Technologies such as, first, blogs and wikis, and then, enterprise social networks, would remove hierarchy from organisations and that the most open online spaces possible would facilitate a revolution in communications. One could almost say that Enterprise 2.0 was Bürolandschaft gone digital.
In 1975, Duffy wrote an article reflecting on the Bürolandschaft movement which was both appreciative and sceptical. The focus on the effective use of space and the improvements in office furniture design were real. The drive to remove status from human institutions was futile (but there are better and worse ways of handling it). At its worst, office landscaping and the Action Office simply became efforts to cut costs at the expense of employees’ wellbeing. It ended by slipping back to the open-plan offices of old and the reviled cubicle farms of today.
Duffy continued to develop his practice and his ideas and we will next examine a concept of his – shearing layers.
Further reading: