Abstract

"Designing Reengineering: Integrated Transformations of US Architects’ Offices, Office Buildings, and Corporations in the 1980s"

Aaron Tobey, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (tobeya@uwm.edu)

In 1986, American Express moved much of its business operations into its recently completed new headquarters building at the World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan. Like the company itself, which had been transformed from a consumer credit issuing operation into a holding company for financial services, the building was primarily a slickly-designed exterior shell giving an iconic image to a collection of tenants whose volume of leased space changed according to real and predicted financial market fluctuations. Complementing this shell was the much less visible integration of the building’s structural and communications systems. These, too, had been designed not just to allow tenants like American Express to customize the interior spaces they leased or to facilitate easy changes in occupant over time, but more importantly to support what management theorists were promoting as a necessary “reengineering” of businesses in the United States—a move towards continual data-informed changes to the organizational structures, project administration process, work processes, and information technologies. Examining the American Express headquarters and similar projects, this paper analyzes how the architecture of office buildings built in the second half of the 1980s in the United States contributed to transformations in nature of office labor and management theories associated with reengineering from two directions. From the direction of corporate building tenants, the paper examines how structural and service systems layouts designed for reconfiguration supported definitions of knowledge work that saw the labor of adapting reengineered organizational processes take the form of physically navigating changing office layouts, technologies and social settings. From the direction of the architects designing these office buildings, the paper examines how projects such as the American Express headquarters contributed to the reengineering of architectural production and the transformation of architectural labor at large US-based design firms into a practice of computer-supported information management.