A major weekly magazine recently did a story about a hot young Internet company. Mostly the same old same old: 80-hour weeks, self-defining jobs, gigabytes of tension every day. Nothing you can't read about in Douglas Coupland.

With the article were color photos of the offices of this company. Now, bear in mind, the company's not huge. They have only tens of millions of dollars to play with, not hundreds of millions. But they are a creative operation. Their core business is making content to draw people to their site and to their brand-name.

Here, with faces blocked to protect the guilty, you see some of the pictures. Looks pretty familiar, huh?

Now I'd call your attention to two things. One, the color scheme to which these people subject their retinas 80 hours per week. What word would you use for it? Being polite, we could call it "beige". We also might call it "Sahara Sandstorm Tan",  or how about "Puke Brown"? "Siena Shit"?

The boss's office is a little better. At least there appear to be a bit of art on the walls. However, when it came time for his shot for the article, the photographer placed him out among the cubicles. So we get Mr. Soon-to-be-a-multi-millionaire in his color-sink of choice.

If I told you the name of the company you'd recognize it immediately. There's a pretty good chance you go to their site often. I do. (Hint: they are an extremely popular, hip on-line magazine whose name contains five letters. The five letters are NOT s-l-a-t-e.)

I'm not here to run down the magazine. I read it every day and like what they do. But seeing their workplace gave me pause and aroused an old concern of mine about the under-noticed, under-studied effects of workplace design.

I felt a sudden concern and some despair for the writers and editors and salespeople who exist in that bland tan corner of Hades so many hours each week. And of course, they're far from alone. As you read this, you may well be in your own little Po-mo Lite Tan corner of hell yourself.

Before we get into theory and wild speculation, let me give you another example of really bad workplace design, on a much, much bigger scale.

2. Après E.R.

Here we are in Houston. No, it's not downtown Houston. That's a couple of miles off to the left.

This is the Texas Medical Center, the largest collection of healthcare facilities in one location in the world. On a 300-acre site you have 100 buildings including 7 hospitals, two medical schools, a dental school, a nursing school, etc., 52,000 employees, dealing with 4.5 million patients annually, 37,000 parking places, and 12 miles of roads (as of this writing).

Because of a traumatic injury to a family member, I spent many months in various of these buildings. In the process, I drove often over most of those 12 miles of roads, and I believe I parked at one time or another in most of those 37,000 spaces (several of the curtain-walled six- to ten-story buildings in the photo are parking garages).

I had lots of time to observe the design and functioning of this vast undertaking. Obviously, modern Western medicine, with its fervently allopathic stance ("allopathic" means "against disease"--a good Western doctor is one who fights disease), relieves much suffering.

But. In my months in the Texas Medical Center, it also became obvious that the long, slow process of healing--physical, mental, emotional--is rarely furthered by the design of the surroundings, the eternally beeping, artificially lit rooms, the cloistered, cluttered buildings, the tiny open spaces out-of-doors with, if you're lucky, an occasional bench under an occasional tree.

And I finally had to conclude that in this society healing itself seems often hindered by the very places that are supposed to promote it.

My thinking went like this:

We look at medicine in the past and shudder. Leeches? Blood-letting? How awful, how primitive, and (we see now) how directly destructive to the patient's well-being.

Or, consider surgeons' gowns. Before Lister discovered and demonstrated the dangers of sepsis (infection), surgeons often wore the same operating gown, day after day. The accumulation of blood and filth was a mark of pride, an indication of how busy the doctor was. How awful, how primitive, and (we see now) how directly destructive.

My long exposure to the 300-acre miracle of modern medicine that you see in the photo led me finally to this question:

Is it possible that the architecture of the present-day hospital is just as awful, just as primitive, and (though we can't see it yet) directly destructive to the patients' well-being?

What happened to Rule One of the Hippocratic Oath: Above all, do no harm?

In design, how like prisons modern hospitals are. The patient is consigned to a cell, his/her life is no longer private. One sleeps and eats when the institution decrees. And the cell is barren, with maybe one window, which looks out on other buildings.

What resources is the patient to draw on other than those allopathic medicines which the doctor feeds into the body? Meditation or prayer in such an environment would surely try the abilities of even a Buddha. Even simple relaxation techniques can be difficult in these surroundings, since you know that at any moment someone, a nurse, an intern, a doctor--maybe someone unknown to you--may come in and intrude not only on your mind but your body itself.

3. The Architecture of Mind-prisons.

But have we not also just described the environment of the modern workplace? We're back in the cubicles again with their lack of privacy, the unexpected intrusions, and--above all--the cell-like design of the spaces where we ply our various trades, with their marvelously uniform tans, light blues, pale greens, vomit yellows, and soulless beiges.

Oh, sure,  the particularly affluent or hip company may have art on the walls. The cubicles may be colorful or even asymmetrical. But the same monotonous, numbing mind-regimentation rules and is embodied in the physical appearance of the place itself where one works.

One has to ask: just how far from barbarian psychic reality are we in the Late Capitalist workplace?

We pride ourselves so on our lovely, efficient buildings. Cool in summer, warm in winter. All to the good.

But to enter such a place--skyscraper, hospital, prison--is to divorce oneself completely from the one resource which is our greatest, perhaps our only, well of healing, health, hope, and creativity. Enter any of those walls, and your are cut off, isolated from nature.

Let me repeat that:

To work today in the corporate world is to isolate yourself
physically, visually, mentally, emotionally, psychically,
from nature.

I leave you with an analogy, to indicate where we are as a work culture, and as a health culture, as a design culture:

Present workplace design is to good workplace design
as 50s car design is present car design.

In the 1950s, car designers gave us flash and dash, hearty externals (fins galore) meant to grab our attention so we wouldn't notice the primitive and unreliable mechanical systems beneath the attractive skin. It took fifty years, and lots of creative goading from Japan and Germany, to produce the nice-looking, quietly functioning car of today.

We enter the workplace today--clean, safe, slick--and dwell there, dangerously unaware of the psychic price we pay as we spend the great majority of our waking hours separated from and thus unmindful of nature. Is that not an architectural equivalent of those flashy land barges of the 1950s?

4. What to Do: The Hidden Corporate Value of Doing Nothing

"Downsizing" has become a pejorative, as companies slim down and cut jobs mercilessly.

Where is the visionary conglomerate that's going to realize that "downsizing" could also be applied to the physical design of the workplace itself? Buildings can be downsized, every office with an outside door through a glass wall leading into a park. A park with benches and tables. Imagine. People could on a whim go outside and sit. Anytime.

As the Italians have it: Dolce far niente. How sweet it is to do nothing.

From such doing-nothing in the midst of nature can come levels of creativity and amplified productivity that no sealed, carpeted, cubicled rectilinear building can ever foster.

A long time ago, New York City passed a "setback" ordinance. In the early days of highrises, developers were building right to the property lines. The buildings went straight up from there, creating dim, claustrophobic canyons. The setback ordinance decreed that the upper stories of buildings had to be set back, and the higher the building, the greater the setback. Which is what gave 20th century skylines their characteristic stairstep look.

The setback ordinance was a humane law, to allow a bit of light and air into in inhumane cityscape. What city is going to be the first to limit the height of buildings to (are you ready) one story, two max? How different would be the events, the growth, the creativity, that happen in hospitals, schools, offices, if all their spaces were at, or very close to, ground level? Let's do more: For every square foot of space in the structure, there must be one square foot of outdoor space.

Republic of Santa Monica, are you listening? Berkeley city council, are you ready for this? Imagine the howls from developers who can no longer build up and up and up on their hapless little pieces of land! Imagine the happy tenants, employees, students, patients who would occupy such ground-hugging, nature-immersed structures!

A motto for the movement? Why, How GREEN is my cubicle!, of course.

END

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