ABSTRACT
The office: building and institution The office’ is one of those terms, like ‘bank’ or ‘school’, which refers both to a particular type of social and economic organization and also to a recognizably distinct type of building [1]. The structure of the office building and the organization of office work have maintained a close relationship since the eighteenth century when early office functions were dispersed throughout the city and offices were little more than rooms in merchants’ houses or coffee houses [2]. As the idea of a fixed office location emerged in the nineteenth century, with the growth of such organizations as banks and insurance companies, at first they still resembled private houses or developed into the ‘chambers’ model of small individual offices in a single building [3]. In this nineteenth-century counting house the predominantly male ‘black coated’ workers enjoyed the gentlemanly status (if not always the income to match) afforded by the scarce skills of above average literacy and numeracy [4].
