WORK ETHICS.

Work is regarded by most as necessary toil, a condition reinforced by the industrial and electronic revolutions. Architects cannot do much to improve working life, but humane imagination can make some difference.

DO YOU LIKE WORK? Those of us who were lucky enough to choose a profession do on the whole: we have been honed and educated to perform tasks which we enjoy, and which, with some luck, we are not bad at performing. But for most people, work is not all that happy. Working is necessary to keep alive. It is a curse: toil, an unavoidable evil, to be undertaken to earn the bread.

And of course, employers know it. In the late eighteenth century, when the first mechanized factories began to emerge, they were regarded with horror by workers and observers alike, but they had no difficulty in attracting labour. The agrarian revolution had made huge numbers of people under-employed in the countryside so that the condition of the traditional cottager became appalling, at least in Britain, where the process started. People naturally flocked to the towns to get work to live. And so emerged some of the worst cities in the world. Bradford, Manchester, Birmingham, then places like Lille, Chicago, Tokyo and Bombay: dispiriting and wretched precisely because they had no other raison d'etre than work. They were instant places, without any social or even physical structures other than relationships of employee and employer. Dickens brilliantly summed up the essence of such cities in his description of Coketown, which 'was of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it ... It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed for ever and ever and never got uncoiled. It had ... vast piles of buildings full of windows where there was a rattling and trembling all day long ... It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours ... to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow. [1]

IT WAS AGAINST SUCH CONDITIONS that the great Victorian critics railed. High Tory John Ruskin and Communist William Morris were at one in decrying the horrors of the new nature of work. In The Stones of Venice (a bizarre location for the diatribe, but genius is not governed by ordinary rules), Ruskin wrote that 'the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is ... that we manufacture everything there except men ... to brighten, to strengthen, to refine or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages'. [2]

Morris was much more imaginative about machinery. He believed that 'if the necessarily reasonable work be of a mechanical kind, I must be helped to do it by machine, not to cheapen my labour, but so that as little time as possible may be spent on it and that I may be able to think of other things while tending the machine'. [3]

Of course, he was right. When I started in the journalist's trade, I would write leaders, double-spaced in longhand on lined paper with much crossing out and use of scissors and glue. My secretary could then type the whole thing out. I would correct it. She retyped. Then it would go to the compositors, who would re-type the whole thing from scratch on a wonderful machine which had kettles of molten lead and steam coming out of its joints. Then we would have gallery proofs, which had to be laid down on gridded paper with the pictures (glue again). Lead print was assembled into metal forms which were so heavy that it was decreed that women could not do the work. The whole process took at least two weeks. Tonight, I tap this and know that I can see it as a couple of pages tomorrow. A huge amount of time spent by intelligent people was wasted, and now the folk who were doing such ghastly, dull, repetitive jobs have either retired, or taken on more interesting work.

In a similar fashion, CAD has revolutionized architectural practice. Anyone who went through the appalling tedium of altering goldbacks (which themselves seemed a marvellous step forward) to shift a column or a duct must welcome the three-dimensional model of the building, which can be rotated and changed as easily in the machine as it is in the mind. As Frank Gehry showed in the Bilbao museum (AR December 1997), technology now can allow designers to move their thoughts from sketch to building in a more direct way than ever before. It is a comparable transformation to the one we have had in scribbling.

MAKING THINGS has become a great deal more efficient and simple than it was. In some of the richer countries, manufacture is becoming passe, [4] but the ethos of Coketown still permeates life. We had supposed that devices like the Internet would be great liberators of humankind, allowing us all to have more freedom. As anyone who comes to the office on Monday morning to be met with 30 or 40 bits of e-mail correspondence knows, the tyranny of the electronic engine is almost as forceful as that of the mechanical loom in the 1790s. Of course, our conditions are different from those of the early mill-hands, but the machine still dominates how we work. In. many ways, office labour has been made as similar to the routine of factory work as it can be.

The modern open-plan office is intended to crush individuality, to make everyone approximate to the lowest common denominator. The most obvious instances are call centres with their rigid ranks of desks and workers mechanically speaking into their head sets. (These are very difficult to photograph, as employers are naturally embarrassed about them.) Systematically, privacy has been eroded, the sense of personal territory and placedness is intentionally much reduced. There are no walls on which to hang pictures, or even charts of schedules of work. There is an incessant low level braying noise. Serious concentration is not allowed, perhaps because you might have subversive thoughts. Bentham's Panopticon, the jail in which the prisoners were constantly supervised by an Overseer, has been made the norm. The acres of hot-desking are about as spiritually uplifting as a visit to the Gobi Desert, where grey sand is blown in your teeth and stuffs your nose.

THE BRILLIANT AUTHOR OF THE DILBERT BOOKS [5] satirizes life in the modern Californian office: the stupid business bureaucracy and the lack of placedness, but at least Dilbert works in a cubicle. He has his own personal place. Could this be an explanation of why the productivity of the West Coast is higher than that of the East, where open-plan is much more the norm? Could it be that the almost universal provision of private offices in Germany [6] is one reason why that economy is still the strongest in Europe, even after taking in the enormous problem of amalgamating with the rusty contraption in the East, and burdened (as fervent market economists suggest) with high pay, long holidays and very good welfare provisions?

Well, perhaps. Can architects do anything to make working life better? Not nearly as much as Ruskin and Morris hoped. The main determinants of the way in which workplaces are created are perceptions of the economy, and of management structures. Yet because, as professional people, whose primary duty is to humanity rather than being just devoted to making money, we have the task of making the world a better place to live. Architects as fashionable as Gehry, Rogers, and Behnisch have managed to slightly subvert the systems, to make places for people on the gritty windswept plain. The architects shown in this issue, though perhaps less well known, are deploying equally exciting, gently humane invention.

(1.) Dickens, Charles, Hard Times, 1854, chapter V.

(2.) Ruskin, John, The Stones of Venice, Smith Elder, London, 1851, p165.

(3.) Morris, William, `How We Live and How We Might Live', Works of William Morris, vol XXIII. p20. The essay was written in 1885.

(4.) Probably an extremely stupid policy. Britain's comparative prosperity per person has declined dramatically against the ones of, for instance, Germany, Japan and France since Thatcher's disgusting decision to destroy British manufacture.

(5.) Scott Adams. See for instance The Joy of Work, Boxtree, Basingstoke, 1999.

(6.) See for instance Bolles-Wilson's offices in Munster (AR April 1997). The apparently costly and often rather boring office layouts, in which rows of cells are approached down long double-banked corridors, are largely enforced by the power of the German trades unions, which have a high regard for the importance of the individual.