In 1968, Herman Miller launched Action Office. It made the company hundreds of millions of dollars, transformed how most of the world works, and is still for sale today.

The man who designed it spent his last decades calling it « monolithic insanity. »

This is the story of how a system built to get office workers out of rows became the rows. Robert Propst’s patent, which specifies an angle nobody built. The diagram in his 1968 booklet, where he drew the cubicle. A tax regulation from 1962. An expired patent that let the company who copied the idea collect from the company that invented it. And a single piece of hardware, designed by Propst’s closest collaborator, who later admitted it was what « made the cube farm possible. »

This is a history of the design of the cubicle.

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