Are office buildings mundane, repetitive, and trite? Or has this building practice also initiated unusual designs and constructive solutions? What changes have office work and its office spaces experienced?

This book deals with such questions in examining fifty exemplary buildings. They range from the emergence of the office building as an independent genre in Chicago in the late 19th century, to canonical representatives of the International Style or prototypical experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, to current examples. Among the selected examples are the Monadnock Building by Burnham & Root, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, Kenzō Tange’s building for the Shizuoka Press and Broadcasting Company, and the Gehry Partners’ buildings for the Facebook corporate headquarters.

Five accompanying essays deal with the historical, cultural and economic developments that have shaped office architecture as individual buildings from various specialist perspectives.

Are office buildings mundane, repetitive, and trite? Or has this building practice also initiated unusual designs and constructive solutions? What changes have office work and its office spaces experienced?

This book deals with such questions in examining fifty exemplary buildings. They range from the emergence of the office building as an independent genre in Chicago in the late 19th century, to canonical representatives of the International Style or prototypical experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, to current examples. Among the selected examples are the Monadnock Building by Burnham & Root, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, Kenzō Tange’s building for the Shizuoka Press and Broadcasting Company, and the Gehry Partners’ buildings for the Facebook corporate headquarters.

Five accompanying essays deal with the historical, cultural and economic developments that have shaped office architecture as individual buildings from various specialist perspectives.