Herman Miller's Action Office: Corporate Interiors in the Cold War

摘要

The development of The Action Office interchangeable furniture system by Robert Propst and the Herman Miller Company in the 1960s has appropriately been considered the first example of open-plan systems furniture, the product category that still dominates the corporate interiors furniture market today. This essay expands that understanding by situating The Action Office more explicitly within the intellectual and geopolitical contexts of the Cold War era. It discusses the sustained and ongoing relationships between Herman Miller's principal designers and Cold War government propaganda agencies. It describes the systemic co-mingling of corporate office interior equipment and Cold War military technologies. It examines the relationship between The Action Office and new paradigms of office work and labor. Finally, Propst's Action Office is shown to have internalized and reproduced Western Cold War ideological assumptions about individual choice, cybernetic function, diversity, creativity, and freedom.