What the place where we work says about us

We spend the bulk of our working days in the workplace. The office is the nervous system in our knowledge society. But for the backbone of the average human existence, not to say cathedral for workaholics, we generally pay too little attention to the journey that has brought us to a cubicle in front of a screen and a spreadsheet for an entire working day. How we have moved from serial manual labour to the contemporary office. This is the story told in Cubed: A secret history of the workplace, a new book in which Nikil Saval explains the evolution of the office by looking at its architectural and cultural milestones, from the clerk's desk to the cubicle.

"Offices were born as dank caverns, with towers of overcrowded files all over the place like dark stalagmites, but in the 1950s they started to become clean, brightly lit places," warns Saval. The reasons for this are not as obvious as the hygiene. 

By: Mónica Ventilla