The German language (Deutsch, for the purists) has apt compounds for awful things: You may know schadenfreude, joy from others' suffering; weltschmerz, sadness arising from realizing that the world can never match your ideals; or doppelgänger, a thing eerily like another thing. But you may have not yet encountered another, more nefararious portmanteau: Burolandschaft, or office landscaping.
As this superb BBC thinkpiece sketches out, Burolandschaft was actually a revolt against Nazism. Burolandschaft was an office design movement in 1960s Germany that hoped to make office space mimic ebbs and flows of social interactions--it was "somehow organic," with lots of plants, and, strikingly, a carpet, like the paradigm-dismantling feng shui that the futurists over at Steelcase meditate on.
To read the full, original article click on this link: The Origins Of The Awful Open-Office Layout | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
