ITT: The liminality of 80s office spaces

Borrowed from cursed images thread, can we post more stuff like this as this aesthetic is very appealing

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FM0Fig5XIAA-bS2?format=jpg&name=medium
https://weare.guru/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/1980s-Offices-14.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/phfYKxM.jpg
https://weare.guru/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/1980s-Offices-27.jpg

That last one in particular has a kind of but kind-of cramped but almost cozy vibe, reminds me of the place my dad used to work that had a testing lab in the basement, and you had to get in old cage lift to go down there. Some weekends I'd go with him if he was working on a Saturday and I used to sit there reading Stephen King books while he ran his test programs.

I support this thread

good first post
such great vibes

For some reason I would just really like to sprint the whole length of that horrible mustard yellow carpet, love the fact it's so long it has a vanishing point.

https://clickamericana.com/wp-content/uploads/1975-Westinghouse-ASD-open-plan-office-furniture-1-750x763.jpg

Ooh that's great, you can practically taste the fug of cigarette smoke hanging over those cubicles.

I find the whole US cubicle office space so fascinating. Has it mostly died out or does it hang on? I don’t think it was something that ever caught on in the UK (maybe because we just never have enough floor space) and I don’t know anyone has ever worked in one.

🖼

it's increasingly replaced by the "open office" concept which may be worse, but it's still pretty prevalent

I find the whole US cubicle office space so fascinating. Has it mostly died out or does it hang on? I don’t think it was something that ever caught on in the UK (maybe because we just never have enough floor space) and I don’t know anyone has ever worked in one.

I found this while looking for pictures of people smoking in offices because I remember my boss at the windowless, subterranean university IT department telling me about the when 80s everyone smoked at their desks all the time and how the monitors and walls were all covered in a haze of tar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nJbZQEaiaY

Needs ashtrays.

Although the high level management wanted to go to an open space plan a few years ago and staff successfully rebelled against the idea. COVID is the final mail in the coffin to the open plan.

I find the whole US cubicle office space so fascinating. Has it mostly died out or does it hang on?

Up until white-collar workers were sent home because of COVID, it was very much a thing in the US. It's low on the list of things that most workers want to eliminate in post-COVID workplaces; I certainly don't want to go back to cubicles.

In the pictures above, if you crop out the desktop computers, the workspaces look a lot like the FAA offices I used to visit periodically before the pandemic.

I vaguely remember reading somewhere that US tax codes for businesses incentivize cubicles over other office arrangements. If that's true that would explain why they're such a thing in the US.

I've got a copy of this book waiting to be read (I have read a couple articles by the author and they're good): https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/open-plan-9781350044746/

I prefer cubicles to open offices

open offices are the worst

i dimly remember that when i was exposed to office spaces as a kid, there was some kind of magic or romance about it because it was so otherworldly. very much a distant memory.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/22/2d/1d/222d1d3cd279e93d1ab1db7c6316bba8.png

In the 1980s I was a student or a journalist or a student journalist. So my memory of the 80s workspace was that there were bullpen open plans (like the newsrooms in "All the President’s Men" or whatever), and managers had offices with doors. Cubicles came later in my experience.

For a while there was a thing in-between cubicles and offices that we jocularly called "officicles" (rhymes with "popsicles," sorta. Like super-cubicles that had slightly higher walls and a slightly more obvious guest space. You could arrange it so that you didn't have your back to passersby and people couldn't easily see your monitor. Very useful if you mostly played Solitaire and Minesweeper all day.

My memory is that those were 90s spaces, though. Not 80s.

open offices are the worst

Yep. My last job was in cubicles until one day a new boss decided to pull them all down to make it open plan.

I've worked in both cubicle and open spaces. But now, after two years of work from home, I flat out told my boss during my review that I have no desire to return to the office, and any attempt to require it would likely result in my resignation. She agreed. We'll see how that shakes out with upper management.

I can't think of office spaces any more without thinking of Billy Wilder's The Apartment.

https://www.paulmilesschneider.com/bestpictureproject/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Apartment-Office.jpg

I used to work in a large open plan office where my desk was near the centre. People used to continually steal pens and other stationary off my desk rather than walk to the stationary cupboard at the far back of the office.

https://i.postimg.cc/cJg4Nmtx/3-C584805-70-D7-4523-9-EF4-DEB21095-C6-DD.jpg

I’d love a book about commercial interior design through the ages but haven’t seen anything that really fits the bill.

I wonder how true to life those colours are, I like the contrast

My dad worked in computers in the 1970s and 80s - definitely feel a warmth towards certain types of interior design and architecture that evoke the feelings of visiting his workplace. He was an averagely absent 70s/80s dad, and getting glimpses of his day world felt magical and rare.

I feel as an adult I am often trying to reconcile my childhood ideas about adulthood with whatever this is that we are living through.

When I first started working in offices I was definitely able to conjure up some kind of romance about them; borrowed city views and strange new relationships. I found magnetic pass cards particularly nifty. Now I find it all boring and dehumanising mostly.

I’d love a book about commercial interior design through the ages but haven’t seen anything that really fits the bill.

This one may not be exactly what you're looking for, but it's pretty good.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51JbaM6+AqL.jpg

(it's the companion book to an 2001 exhibition at the National Building Museum)

Excellent, thanks!

^ several cheap used copies available on Amazon used. Just bought one for under $6 shipped

We had cubicles at my last place of work, and then we inexplicably moved to an open office plan (which was horrendous) and then they inexplicably crammed two floors worth of people into that open office plan (which was outright criminal). I'm pretty sure they would've had people sitting in other people's laps if they thought they could get away with it.

When I was an adjunct we had cubicles - at least, those of us who were lucky did. I started out working at the community campus of the university, where there were no offices or even desks for the adjuncts, and if you needed to meet with a student you did it in the lobby. Then I moved up to the main campus and shared a cubicle with some grad students for a while. Eventually I got my very own cubicle, along a wall with a window, and I couldn't believe my luck. Of course there was still nowhere to meet with a student if you wanted to talk about their grades or bust them for plagiarism without everyone overhearing.

wow that pic sharivari I've totally worked there

15 years ago I worked in the huge cubicle farm that Dilbert was based on. Loved the endless halls and being able to just blend in

I know it's far from original but the program 'Severance', is doing a good job of 'office space as a setting for an existential crisis'

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/RV-AN417_CUBICL_GR_20140509201519.jpg

https://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/084.jpg

That last one looks like a scene from a KITH sketch

Slightly off topic but is the still from The Apartment a real building or a matte painting?

xxxp ah, the unmistakable Dell OptiPlex G1 desktop computer...

I saw The Apartment recently, and I don't believe there's any trick photography involved in the shot of all the desks. There's a camera movement where you can see the set is all one room.

https://architexturez.net/data/styles/az_cf_core_l-region-content/public/media/office-cubicles.jpg

I find the whole US cubicle office space so fascinating. Has it mostly died out or does it hang on? I don’t think it was something that ever caught on in the UK (maybe because we just never have enough floor space) and I don’t know anyone has ever worked in one.

― Chewshabadoo, Wednesday, 2 March 2022 13:21 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Pre-2008 crash I used to temp in one of the huge Santander offices in Milton Keynes, it had a lot of floorspace but no cubicles as I recall, all just partitioned off desks.

Seems like there's surprisingly few pictures of eighties Japanese offices, but this has a bit of the right vibe to it:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CFTqLF4WoAEr1gh.jpg

Forgot the tags

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CFTqLF4WoAEr1gh.jpg

You think of cubicles as soulless coffins, but some people really balk when they're taken away.

My office went 'open space' a few years ago (to cram more sardines in the can, honestly) and a lot of folks were bummed. They offer a modicum of privacy when you're surfing the web on company time, they cut down on ambient noise, and workers are usually allowed to customize them with photos, cartoons, art, etc.

The irony is that now with covid, I think they'll be coming back in some form

the apartment office scene was a real room but it used forced perspective to get all the desks in so the further away desks were smaller, as were the people sat at them!

Yep! Very cool:

Art director Alexandre Trauner used forced perspective to create the set of a large insurance company office. The set appeared to be a very long room full of desks and workers; however, successively smaller people and desks were placed to the back of the room, ending up with children.

Forgot the tags

🖼

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv8mZh3MHhA

Cubicles allow you to do cool things like hang postcards or photos of your kids, pick your nose quickly, or shoot rubber bands off the ceiling so they fall on a neighbor. Classic

"Severance' feels like a show about an office created by people who have never actually worked in an office

The office scenes in The Apartment were partly inspired by The Crowd (1928):
http://www.thecine-files.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/FIG.2_GLICK.jpg

if we’re doing this don’t forget Tati….. but we’re pretty far afield now

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-e_yNpwRVykw/UY5846qCOqI/AAAAAAAAHY0/cANlP0PJQLo/s1600/Playtime_1967.jpg

Another relevant book: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/steven-ahlgren/the-office-1982-1992

Let's not forget the 1991 Soderburgh film Kafka

https://www.unsungfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/kafka_03-300x164.jpg

And as for

a show about an office created by people who have never actually worked in an office

There is a germ of truth in this old Cracked listicle about how movies and TV get work wrong, because they think most work is like their work.

https://www.cracked.com/article_19611_6-things-movies-love-to-get-wrong-about-workplace.html

why is it that Hollywood thinks clients and presentations are what the face of overworking looks like? Well, because that's what it's like in Hollywood. Work there is always about a big project (a film), or a big presentation (a pitch), or a big client (for agents). That's what being busy and stressed out looks like to them

I used to love Cracked, but I can’t read them anymore. There’s just too many goddamn ads. My iPhone would crash as a page was loading up and eventually I was like you know what, fuck this. I suppose it works as a business model, I guess.

Yeah I remember a time when "the internet" involved looking at Cracked and Buzzfeed and The Onion and Salon and Slate. Nowadays meh

Thanks for that bit on The Apartment visiting, very effective bit of set dressing.

My previous office was the worst of both worlds. A long counter segmented by short cubicle walls, six people to a row. The dividing wall was short enough length-wise that you could lean back and see the next person (who was about an arm’s length away), so it didn’t give the even the little privacy that a full cubicle offers.

Our office is a little bit like the 80s one below. Not quite cubicles, not quite open either.

But let me tell you something: that doesn't make it "just right" either.

https://i.imgur.com/mruXxdo.jpg

it’s bananas i love it

Beehive vibes

as has been noted this isn't really a thing in the UK. all offices are open plan and mostly always have been. I did work at a place (NEC) in the late 90s where there were tall barriers between desks a bit like this, but that was just a temp job and I was only there for 6 months. it's pretty normal for everyone to work in an open plan office even C people.

From a 1982 article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica company magazine announcing the arrival of the "electronic editorial system."

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DnEzGgGW4AUaJar?format=jpg&name=mediumhttps://pbs.twimg.com/media/DnEzHU-X4AAu4lP?format=jpg&name=large

That one lady in jaymc's first pic, truly leaning into it, ouch.
Reminds me---not to derail, but---here's a list of writers, Lewis Carroll maybe the earliest, and their typewriters, with quite a few links to pix of typewriters, also pix of typewriters with their writers (and a film clip of Dylan typing while Baez is singing).https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/typers.html
Came across it while looking, in vain, for the pic of Philip K. Dick, dressed for the office and typing in one (open plan, I think).

used to love Cracked, but I can’t read them anymore. There’s just too many goddamn ads. My iPhone would crash as a page was loading up and eventually I was like you know what, fuck this. I suppose it works as a business model, I guess.

They were all fired or driven out in the first 18 months after Scripps bought them, at which point Scripps wrote down $36 million of the $39 million they’d paid