The Office of Good Intentions: Humans, Work traces the American office from punch cards to algorithmic labour, mapping how spatial design has shaped — and been shaped by — the shifting ideologies of work over the past half-century.
About This Book
What does the office actually want from us? Through twelve essays, Florian Idenburg and LeeAnn Suen dissect the spatial typologies and cultural phenomena that have defined the contemporary workplace — the corporate festival, the charismatic guru, the playful campus engineered for digital nomads. This is not a history of furniture or floor plans; it is a critical examination of intent. The book moves between close material readings — the ergonomics of the Aeron Chair, the punch card as temporal disciplinarian — and broader speculations on the future of office design. Photographic essays by Iwan Baan provide post-occupancy documentation of canonical projects, grounding the theoretical in the built. Architects, urbanists, and anyone who has ever clocked in will find their assumptions productively unsettled.
Key Features
- 592 pages of twelve critical essays, four thematic catalogues, and photographic post-occupancy essays by Iwan Baan
- Authors: Florian Idenburg and LeeAnn Suen; photographic essays by Iwan Baan
- Notable case studies include Frank O. Gehry's advertising agency spaces, Marcel Breuer's IBM campus in Florida, and the Ford Foundation's urban garden in Manhattan
- Published by TASCHEN
What You'll Discover
- How the spatial logic of the office has been used to encode ideologies of productivity, play, and corporate identity — from open-plan floors to festival-style campuses
- The way canonical office projects by Gehry and Breuer materialised competing visions of what work should feel like, and for whom
- Four intervening catalogues that bridge built reality and speculative alternatives, including experimental workplace products and renderings of imagined future offices
- The trajectory from regimented industrial labour — measured in punch cards and time clocks — toward the blurred temporality of contemporary “playbor” and digital self-presentation
About the Author
Florian Idenburg is an architect whose practice engages critically with the relationships between space, labour, and contemporary culture. LeeAnn Suen collaborates with Idenburg on research and writing that interrogates the built environments of work. Together, they approach the office as both a spatial and ideological construct.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 592
- Dimensions: 220 x 170 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783836574365
- Publisher: TASCHEN
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects, spatial researchers, and cultural critics interested in workplace design, the politics of office space, and the evolving relationship between labour and the built environment.