Op-ed: The office was once a vital technology, but its time may be over

Medieval and early-modern workers did not have to go to work. Nor did they work from home; they just worked where they lived, or lived where they worked. Double-entry bookkeeping was invented at the end of the Middle Ages, but for centuries before the industrial age all offices were, literally, home offices; special buildings entirely and exclusively devoted to bookkeeping, paperwork, and administration—buildings where no wares were kept, and nobody slept at night—only became common over the course of the 19th century. The golden age of the office building came in the second half of the 20th century—but it coincided with the rise of new information and communication technologies that would soon make the corporate office tower, as well as the physical trading floors at the core of the modern financial districts, equally unnecessary.

The mid-20th century rotary phone was made for the office, and designed as an ideal desktop appliance. It redefined office life, but people who did not have desks at home often ended up hanging their home phone from the walls of their hallway—an unfriendly, if necessary, intruder. Personal computers of the late 20th century, by contrast, were seen from the start as destined to ubiquity, and—particularly in their portable versions—they soon became part of domestic life. In the mid 1990s the late William J. Mitchell, then dean of architecture at MIT, was the first to argue that the rise of the internet would put an end to city life as we knew it. His 1995 best-selling pamphlet, City of Bits, listed a number of building types destined to be replaced by websites, and a number of tasks and jobs that could soon be conducted from home, via the internet. The backlash from the architectural establishment was quick and without appeal. The consensus was, that would never happen: humans will never watch a movie from a computer screen, or download music from a website; no one will ever go online to read a newspaper, or buy groceries. Crucially, humans will never use the internet study or work from home.

Almost 30 year later, that appears to be still the working hypothesis of the architectural establishment—as well as the assumption widely held by many of today’s decision makers, economists, pundits, and opinion makers, regardless of party and ideology. I happen to live next to the City of London, one of the hubs of global banking, finance, and insurance. When the first British lockdown came, in the spring of 2020, I remained stuck there till some travel was allowed again in the summer; so I lived, for a while, in an entirely deserted part of the city. A few janitors still came and went, together with security guards and maintenance crews. Construction work didn’t stop, either, so one could see teams of builders between shifts and sometimes trucks delivering building material. Then there were the homeless, living in cardboard boxes, and gangs of teenagers descending on the City from the impoverished residential districts of East London. As far as I could tell, these were divided into two main groups: the cyclists and the skateboarders. There were tensions, and occasional skirmishes between the two groups; once I witnessed an all-out bagarre in front of the Bank of England.  But bikers and skateboarders never had to compete for space, as they had the entire City for themselves: for months on end, no office worker reported to work in any building within the so-called Square Mile of the City of London. Yet, to the best of my knowledge, no financial or insurance market ever shut down; even retail banking (which had almost entirely migrated online long before the pandemic struck) kept functioning without a glitch throughout the first lockdown, and all the subsequent ones. Apparently, at least for a while, the global banking, financial services, and insurance industries could keep doing business as usual with only a fraction of the physical infrastructure until recently deemed indispensable to the conduct of their trade.