Yes, the place where we spend so much of our waking hours has a history. From “Bartelby the Scrivener” to “The Office,” from the wood lined corner office to the open plan cubicle farm, where we work says as much about how we have worked with every passing generation as who we have aspired to become. Now in CUBED: A Secret History of the Workplace, n+1 editor Nikil Saval uncovers the surprising, and surprisingly unexplored, truth about how the best intentions of planners, architects, designers and executives have fallen short of producing a happy environment for the American worker.

CUBED begins at the beginning—from the first clerks of the Scrooge and Cratchit era of counting houses to the early skyscrapers of the industrial era. As office workers came to constitute a majority of the American workforce, office design tried to keep up, developing—curiously—what would become the most reviled feature of the workplace: the cubicle (thank you Herman Miller, designer of the “Action Office,” circa 1968). And, as Raval recounts in the latter sections of the book, today a new workplace is emerging, thanks to the utopianism of Silicon Valley and the rise of feminism in the workplace, not to mention the freelance economy.

Brilliantly mining everything from architecture and design to sociology and management theory, from the history of iconic buildings like the Lever House and the Seagram Building to popular depictions of the working life on the page and on the screen, CUBED is a funny, fascinating and thoroughly erudite look at where our white collar world came from—and what it has yet to become.

About the Author and Moderator:

Nikil Saval graduated from Columbia University and went straight into publishing where he worked in, yes, a cubicle. He is an editor of n+1 and also writes forSlate, the New York Times, the London Review of Books, Oxford American, the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post and the New Statesman.

Chad Harbach grew up in Wisconsin and was educated at Harvard and the University of Virginia. He is the author of the bestselling novel The Art of Fieldingand a cofounder and coeditor of n+1.

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