So Tino has a complaint about natural light in offices, and while he's right about the need for it he's a little incomplete on the cause of the lack of it. So here I am to fill in a gap or two.

It all starts with the adoption of two technologies in the 30s - air conditioning and fluorescent light. They go rather hand in hand, as they both were necessary in order for buildings to reach the large sorts of floorplans made desirable by high real estate costs. The combination of cause and effect is such that if you want air conditioning, then you probably want to keep your windows closed to keep that expensive cool air in, and you also want to minimize window exposure because more window surface area means more heat to eliminate. Glass, as it turns out, allows radiation in but reflects heat back. So with sunlight, you get a big solar oven -- you're probably familiar with the phenomenon if you've ever opened up a car door on a summer afternoon.

So. You're going to minimize your window exposure (after the advent of air conditioning average window heights relative to floor to ceiling heights were halved), and then you've got to come up with a way to compensate for the missing light. Voila, the fluorescent tube appears to save the day and make large floorplans possible without equivalently high ceilings and tall windows. Add the elevator and you've got the modern skyscraper; without it you have the modern factory. (Emphasis on modern -- early skyscrapers still had to deal with cooling and light the old fashioned ways).

So, prior to these two technologies, buildings had high ceilings, windows that opened, and floorplans that maximized window exposure, in order to get light and air into every occupied space. Add the modern wonders, and you suddenly can fill in all that space that used to be open, maximizing an entire city block. The first skyscrapers also predated (and brought about) setback restrictions, mandating that buildings have a restricted combination of height and width in order to allow sunlight to reach the streets below.

All of these factors combined to produce buildings that were as large at ground level as possible, with ceilings lower than in traditional structures, with windows large enough to allow nice views, but shorter than before as a way to reduce related energy costs. And these buildings begat the idea of the window office, or -- luxury of luxuries -- the corner office, as indicator of and reward for status.

All of this had developed before 1940, really. We've now had 60 years of using architecture as reinforcement of hierarchy. It continues to this day, and rather needlessly.

In an extremely tall building, you don't want the windows to open at all. It's a bad idea for wind load reasons alone, not to mention energy costs or cleaning costs related to air pollution. And in an urban core, you're necessarily going to have large floorplans simply due to the cost of real estate. But Tino and I don't work in an urban core. We work in a suburb where the mid-rise office building reigns supreme. In a suburb it's possible, and not terribly expensive, to build a building where every office is a corner office. It's also possible in a mid-rise in a suburb to have windows that open, as wind pressures aren't enough to cause problems. It's more expensive, though, than a big plain rectangular parallelepiped. And companies don't buy offices where everybody gets a corner office, because then where's the status symbol? Where's the reinforcement of the management hierarchy? And why should they spend any extra money (even if it's not all that much) for extra window (or corner) offices they don't have employees of the rank to fill?

The increased hostility towards the workers who populate these buildings comes not from the architects, but from the management of the companies that buy or lease the space, and from the "office space designers" (cube layout technicians) they hire to maximize their floor space.

The old/new building Tino moved out of has, really, a single advantage over the one into which he moved: high ceilings. It's a big rectangular parallelepiped, about 200 feet long and 100 feet wide, and it was designed to be very functional in an open floor plan, which, conveniently, it now has. The advantage the office space (distinct from the building) has over the new/old building is that the cubes have been laid out in order to take advantage of the windows, status be damned. If the hierarchy had been enforced (as I'm sure some people tried to do), the aisles would be not along the inside walls surrounding the core, but along the windows, as most employees don't rate window cubes. Instead, somebody realized that with the same square footage you could make the space much more habitable merely by putting the outside row of cubes along the windows, and keeping the cube wall height down. The disadvantage to shorter cube walls is that the office will be noisier, but given the advantage of natural light, it's a fair tradeoff.

The old/new building into which Tino moved has less window exposure to begin with, and then the cube orientation problem he mentions. The aisles are along the windows, not because it's a good place for them, but because the people on those floors weren't expected to rate window exposure. But that's not the architect's fault. It's bad, but it's a malicious imposition of hierarchy and not there for any given architectural reason.

Why? Because for 60 years, having a window has been an indicator of status, a reinforcement of rank. In a densely populated urban core, that still holds true and always will. In a mid-rise, in a suburb, it doesn't have to be true at all, but management wants it that way. I have a friend who works at SAS in Cary, NC. Every employee at SAS has not just an office with a door, but a window office. SAS had a billion dollars in revenue last year. Cube farms aren't monetarily necessary, they're a result of a corporate culture that believes that windows are a sign of status and not a feature that might help an employee get his or her work done.

link (18 jan)

I'd been wanting a Xootr ever since I found out they existed (which was a while ago) but I wasn't about to pay as much money as they were charging. I did, however, sign up for the free t-shirt offer, which got me on their marketing mailing list.

As I suspected, things worked out pretty well. Seems I'm not the only person interested but unwilling to shell out that kind of dough. What's interesting to me is that they're selling "factory second" units for 40-something percent off. If you can give a 40% discount and still make a profit, might that not mean that your original prices were a bit, um, steep?

I ordered a refurbished front-brake Street model. Not like I'm not gonna scratch it up anyway, and 30 bucks is 30 bucks.

link ( 9:32 EST, Thursday, 18 January 2001.)