**A ROOM WITH FOUR WALLS** and especially a well-proportioned public one is neither old fashioned nor anachronistic, and instead fundamental to how buildings contribute to our individual and social well-being (Huntington Beach Oak View Library, Preliminary Study, 2022)

The nursery school model of the workplace that the guys at Google introduced to the world a quarter century ago may have exhausted its novelty. It was supposed to usher in a new era in how we think about work and the workday, collaboration, innovation, and creativity. It spawned the term “creative office space.” It was according to Google’s straight-out-of-college founders modeled not so much on the nursery school play yard as it was the college dorm (obviously) although like a play yard there are few rooms to speak of and instead mainly areas for computer stations, snacks, and playing around. It was supposed to replace the vast mid-century cubicle farms (which had replaced offices along corridors) and convey relaxed confidence in contrast to the old---fashioned uptight office environments of our fathers and grandfathers.

**SO CALLED CREATIVE OFFICE SPACE** engenders neither creativity nor collaboration and instead groupthink and distraction (Google Headquarters, Mountain View, CA)

**HIPSTER SWEAT SHOP** is a more accurate description of where technology companies have ended up in the workplace; and in setting up shop it is indeed renovated 19th century era former sweat shops to which they gravitate. (New York garment factory above; Technology open office workspace, below)

Fifty years ago, libraries had already ditched the reading room which they too saw as old-fashioned and uptight, but also mainly because safety, security and staffing budgets had by the 1970s become their main concern. Designing for surveillance by as few staff as possible across the entire library floor overrode designing anything resembling a place where people wanted to be. By then too, dining rooms on university campuses and at department stores which had until the mid-century enjoyed high regard for their gravity and glamour had morphed into amorphous “food courts.” Train stations and airports got concourses instead of waiting rooms. The single-family home got split levels, conversation pits and open kitchens.

**THE RATE OF CHANGE** at which airports rebuild and expand and the volumes of people they accommodate together present insurmountable challenges for the crafting of anything resembling a humane experience such as was once the case at the train stations of the last century where the waiting room was offered as a place of repose. (Los Angeles Union Station, above; LAX terminal 2, below)

**TWO APPROACHES** neither of which is exclusive of the other but which in combination offer an environment rich in information and social resources are the library reading room (above) and the library as a landscape of collections, furnishings, and people (below) (Boston Public Library, McKim Mead and White, Boston, MA, 1852, above; Seattle Public Library, OMA, below, Seattle, WA, 2004)

Avant-garde modern architecture long ago cast the room onto the trash heap of history with the introduction of the “free plan” (Le Corbusier) and “free section” (Loos) that new materials (steel and steel reinforced concrete) and modern construction techniques (steel and concrete frames) had afforded. While there is still no way to entirely avoid rooms in buildings (bedrooms and bathrooms, classrooms and gymnasiums, concert halls and theaters) most architects view rooms and the walls that enclose them as old-fashioned and to be avoided.

**ROOMS BOTH PRIVATE AND PUBLIC** emerged with the establishment of agriculture and civil society in the eastern Mediterranean, reached an apotheosis of refinement in Hellenistic Athens and Hadrianic Rome and periodically thereafter before waning over the last century. (Knossos Palace, Athenian Stoa, Ancient Greece, above and below left; Atrium and Basilica, Ancient Rome, above and below right)

**THE GREEK CITY** was an ensemble of rectangular rooms of various sizes integrated over time into a complex unity that offered a wide range of conditions of privacy and community, a model that was adopted continuously over the next two millennia.

**THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE MONASTERY** provides one of the most successful models of a community setting that balances time spent alone in study and contemplation with time spent with others in robust social interaction. (Certosia di Pisa, Italy, aerial view above, plan below)

But a room is for more than shelter and a wall’s purpose goes beyond holding up the roof. Annie Murphy Paul in The Extended Mind (2021) a compendium of recent and on-going research in the sciences of the mind shares that the innovation of enclosure afforded by walls (rooms) that emerged millennia ago yielded a revolutionary extension of our cognitive powers. As Colin Ellard an environmental psychologist and neuroscientist (University of Waterloo, Canada) has articulated “the wall was designed to protect us from the cognitive load of having to keep track of the activities of strangers.” With the emergence of cities and their crowds of unacquainted people, or just other people, urban residents built rooms-- places in which to read, think and write alone.

**THE CLOISTER** is not the courtyard but rather the covered outdoor circulation space that encloses it and the primary social space of the monastery where social interactions both planned and unplanned take place.

**THE RECTORY** which was the predecessor of what became the dining hall at universities, institutions and even department stores provided the one room in the monastery devoted entirely to the purpose of community in the context of a meal.

**LIBRARIES** within monasteries have been credited for having kept safe the few documents that survived of antiquity for over a thousand years which in turn established the foundation for the modern age.

We hardly need the empirical findings of neuroscience to validate for us the feeling we receive when we step into a well sized and proportioned room, a feeling that for the most part is one of wellbeing, the quiet that affords the ability to be fully in attendance free of distraction, to focus on our feelings and thoughts. But we do now know from the empirical evidence that it is precisely a room’s quality of sensory reduction that affords its occupants optimal attention, memory, and cognition. As neuroscientist Moshe Bar (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) has found “a high mental load consistently diminishes originality and creativity...” while conversely when people are relieved of the cognitive load imposed by sensory saturated environments, they immediately become more creative.

**AT THE POINT OF INFLECTION** between the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason a period we refer to as the Renaissance, the rooms of the monastery were adapted to become the governing halls and ball rooms of city states and principalities. (Salone, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy, 1314, above; Palazzo Farnese, Giulio da Sangallo, Rome, Italy, 1515, below)

**CONCERT HALLS** subsequently emerged as the great rooms and focuses of aristocratic life of the Baroque and Enlightenment eras (Vienna Concert Hall, 1870 above; Boston Symphony Hall, 1900, below)

**UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES AND DINING HALLS** modeled monastery libraries and rectories often in dramatic and commanding ways that breathed life into communities on campus (Harvard University Annenberg Dining Hall, above; Widener Library Reading Room, 1915; Cambridge, MA below)

Even better, a public room affords both privacy and community, presence and belonging, focused and flexible minds. And it is, it turns out, the ability to toggle back and forth in place between these two states of being that stimulates the highest quality cognitive activity, a facility that the well-configured public room is best equipped to deliver, a facility of which in a world of both lonely and hyper-connected lives there is never enough. And while the room has been with us for 3,500 years or more it nevertheless seems self-evident to us that when it comes to innovation and creativity in the designs of rooms there is always room for more.

**CONCERT HALLS** because of their acoustic requirements are one of the few types of public rooms that has survived the modern movement although their lobbies are subject to no such limitations (Walt Disney Concert Hall, Frank Gehry, Los Angeles, CA 2003)

**ROOMS ENFILADE** those which communicate directly with one another without a corridor—an almost entirely 19th century practice of primarily English origin (Villa Rotunda, Andrea Palladio, Vicenza, Italy, 1571 below; Winton Guest House, Frank Gehry, 1987 WI below

**ROOMS STILL WORK** and can be crafted in ways that are responsive to our contemporary sensibilities (Preliminary study for the Main Hall at The Cambridge School, San Diego, CA 1922, above; View of Children’s Study Room at the Glendale Central Library, Glendale, CA, 1921)

The entirely open interior environment never was a good idea no matter the application (home, office, school, or library) and only worked when in combination with an array of rooms that offered alternative ways of being including being alone, alone together, and together—a phenomenon psychologists have recognized as “intermittent collaboration.” The nursery-school model of the workplace that Google and its imitators dreamed up in the 1990s and the open-stack model that librarians forced on us in the 1970s had their benefits, but like all innovations such benefits could and should have accumulated on top of and integrated with what we already had and knew—our long history of and experience with well-crafted public rooms the benefits which still matter-- perhaps now more than ever.

Room for More and Never Enough /June 21, 2022 by Johnson Favaro

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