Office Hell: The Demise of the Playful Workspace (Classic)

Summary

Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Episode: Office Hell: The Demise of the Playful Workspace (Classic)
Release Date: August 8, 2025

Introduction

In this classic episode of Cautionary Tales for Grown-Ups, Tim Harford delves into the ambitious yet ultimately disastrous experiment of creating the "playful workspace." Through the lens of Shyot Day, a once-trendy advertising agency, Harford explores how radical office designs intended to foster creativity and collaboration can backfire, leading to decreased productivity and employee dissatisfaction.

The Rise of Shyot Day’s Playful Workspace

Tim Harford begins by recounting the meteoric rise of Shyot Day by the end of the 1980s. Renowned as the most fashionable advertising agency globally, Shyot Day made significant strides in innovative advertising, including collaborating with Ridley Scott for the Apple Mac launch and pioneering high-impact Super Bowl ads. In 1993, the agency’s leader, Jay Shiat, sought to revolutionize the workspace by eliminating traditional corner offices, cubicles, and desks. The vision was to empower employees with mobile technology, allowing them to roam freely in open, playful, and stylish environments designed to spark creativity.

Design Innovations and Initial Acclaim

To realize this vision, Shyot Day enlisted legendary architect Frank Gehry to design their Los Angeles office, which featured a four-story binocular sculpture and curvaceous two-seater pods inspired by fairground rides. Similarly, the New York office, designed by Gaetano Pesce, boasted vibrant murals, multi-colored floors, and whimsical elements like conference tables made of silicone resin and spring-loaded chairs.

“Jay Shiat was going to sweep away corner offices and cubicles and even desks,” Harford explains (01:58), highlighting the radical departure from traditional office layouts.

The innovative designs garnered immense praise from design magazines and architecture critics. The New York Times lauded the Manhattan office as “the apotheosis of the dream factory,” and the agency began offering paid tours, further cementing its status as an avant-garde workplace.

The Onset of Problems: Hot Desking and Equipment Shortages

Despite the initial acclaim, challenges quickly emerged. Shyot Day’s attempt to implement hot desking—where employees have no assigned desks—resulted in chaos. One notable instance involved Monica Miller, an associate director who, after losing her desk, resorted to using a “little red wagon” to transport her documents across the office. She recounted, “It was like a bad dream” (09:35), illustrating the frustration and inefficiency that hot desking introduced.

Adding to the turmoil, Shyot Day's reliance on early 1990s mobile technology—expensive, clunky laptops and phones—led to logistical nightmares. With insufficient equipment for all 150 employees, staff had to queue each morning to sign out devices, often waking up before dawn to secure their tools for the day. This not only caused delays but also significant stress among employees.

Comparative Failures: Le Corbusier vs. Shyot Day

Harford draws a parallel between Shyot Day’s excessive design and the minimalist approach of Le Corbusier’s 20th-century architectural endeavors. While Le Corbusier’s “Cit Fruges de Pesac” featured bare walls and total simplicity aimed at restoring workers' visual senses, his designs were equally met with resistance. Factory workers found Le Corbusier’s vision oppressive, similar to how Shyot Day’s playful spaces initially dazzled but ultimately alienated employees.

“If you focus on the design, this seems paradoxical,” Harford notes (17:05), emphasizing that despite differing aesthetics, both approaches led to similar discontent due to the imposition of top-down designs that neglected employee autonomy.

The Critical Role of Autonomy in Office Design

A pivotal study by psychologists Alex Haslam and Craig Knight is discussed to underline the importance of autonomy in workspace satisfaction and productivity. Their experiment demonstrated that while decorated offices with some personalization elements performed better than strictly minimalist ones, achieving true success required empowering employees with control over their environments.

However, Shyot Day’s attempt to offer autonomy fell short when, at the last minute, researchers reverted the office setup to a standard decorated layout without employee input, creating what Harford terms the “disempowered office.” This led to widespread dissatisfaction, with employees feeling powerless and undervalued.

“People loathed it,” Harford summarizes (17:05), highlighting the profound negative impact of stripping away perceived autonomy.

Steve Jobs and Pixar: A Lesson in Flexibility and Compromise

Transitioning to a more positive example, Harford examines Steve Jobs’ approach to office design at Pixar. Unlike Shyot Day, where rigid adherence to a design vision led to failure, Jobs demonstrated flexibility. Although he initially imposed strict design elements—including a single pair of large restrooms intended to foster serendipitous interactions—Jobs eventually compromised by adding more restrooms and incorporating diverse communal spaces like cafes and game areas.

“The Pixar staff ran riot,” Harford reflects (29:59), illustrating how Jobs’ willingness to adapt allowed Pixar’s environment to remain both functional and creatively stimulating.

The success of Pixar’s office underscores the lesson that while structured environments can promote collaboration, allowing employees the freedom to personalize and adapt their spaces is crucial for maintaining morale and productivity.

Modern Implications: Remote Work and Autonomy

Harford connects historical office design failures to contemporary work trends, particularly the rise of remote work accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. He points out that employees have grown accustomed to the autonomy of working from home, where they control their own environments without imposed aesthetic or functional constraints.

“One of the leading reasons that people give for working from home is the autonomy,” Harford cites (29:59), emphasizing that the desire for personal control over one’s workspace remains a critical factor in job satisfaction.

Conclusion: Balancing Design and Autonomy for Successful Workspaces

Tim Harford concludes that the key takeaway from Shyot Day’s and Le Corbusier’s missteps is the paramount importance of employee autonomy in workspace design. Regardless of whether an office leans towards excessive playfulness or stark minimalism, imposing a one-size-fits-all environment without considering employee preferences and needs can lead to decreased productivity and morale.

“Office design doesn't matter nearly as much as letting people design their offices,” Harford asserts (17:05), encapsulating the episode’s central lesson. The failures of radical office designs serve as a cautionary tale, urging modern organizations to prioritize flexibility and employee empowerment over rigid aesthetic visions.

Key Takeaways:

• Autonomy Over Imposition: Empowering employees to personalize their workspaces leads to higher satisfaction and productivity.
• Flexibility is Crucial: Balancing structured design elements with the ability to adapt environments can foster both collaboration and individual efficiency.
• Avoid One-Size-Fits-All Solutions: Recognize the diverse needs of employees rather than enforcing a singular design philosophy.

Notable Quotes:

• “If you focus on the design, this seems paradoxical.” – Tim Harford (17:05)
• “Office design doesn't matter nearly as much as letting people design their offices.” – Tim Harford (17:05)
• “People loathed it.” – Tim Harford (17:05)

Conclusion

This episode serves as a valuable exploration of workplace dynamics, illustrating that while innovative office designs can initially attract acclaim, their long-term success hinges on respecting and empowering the workforce. By learning from the pitfalls of Shyot Day and embracing the lessons from Pixar’s flexible approach, organizations can create environments that truly support and enhance employee creativity and well-being.

Transcript

[Matt Rogers]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Tim Harford]

Pushkin hello, Tim here and we've got a classic episode of Cautionary Tales for you this week while I'm on my summer holidays. Office Hell, the demise of the playful workspace. I hope you enjoy it. And if you do, maybe head over to Pushkin plus because this Tuesday there'll be a brand new episode, another cautionary tale about a disastrous invention that that shaped the office of today. To subscribe, head to Pushkin plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or go to Pushkin FM plus, as well as an exclusive show every month. You also get all episodes ad free next week here on the main feed. We are back in action with a brand new episode of Cautionary Tales all about the worst poet in the world. See you then. By the end of the 1980s, Shayat Day was the most fashionable advertising agency on the planet. They'd commissioned a short film by the director of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott, to launch the Apple Mac, pioneered the idea of using super bowl spots to create news, and made an unforgettable series of adverts in which the energizer bunny kept crashing through ads for other products. But an ad agenc always needs to keep things fresh. And so in 1993, the agency's boss, Jay Shiat, announced a radical plan to give Shiat Day a jolt of creative renewal. Jay Shiat was going to sweep away corner offices and cubicles and even desks. Armed with the best mobile technology that 1993 had to offer, Chiat Day employees would roam free in open spaces, winning sales and creating great ads wherever they wished. What's more, these spaces would be playful, zany and stylish. Shayatt hired the legendary architect Frank Gehry to work on the Los Angeles office which boasted a four story sculpture of a pair of binoculars. Curvaceous two seater pods from fairground rides were installed with the hope that people would sit together in them and think creative thoughts. The New York office was designed by Gaetano Pesce. It had a mural of a vast red pair of lips and a luminous multi colored floor with hieroglyphs all over it. Pesce had a boyish sense of humor. The floor in front of the men's room had an illustration of a man urinating. His conference tables were made of a silicone resin that would amusingly grab and hold important papers during important meetings. Some of his chairs had instead of feet, springs and they would wobble and tip back. Not so much fun if you happen to be wearing a skirt, but hey, creativity right from a distance. People loved the Shyot Day offices. Design magazines raved about the futuristic spaces. The agency even started charging to give paid tours of their offices. The New York Times architecture critic called the Manhattan office the apotheosis of the dream factory and declared that the agency staff were happily at home inside. The Dream Time magazine added, thoroughly armed with the modern weaponry of the road warrior, the telecommuters of Shayate Day are among the forerunners of employment in the information age. That's not wrong. Laptops and mobile phones, hot desks in zany offices. Shyot Day really was ahead of Its time. But the closer you got to that cutting edge of workplace design, the more likely you were to get hurt. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. At first, the radically playful workspace seemed so brilliant. Jay Shiat had been visionary in hiring Frank Gehry a few years before he became the most famous architect on the planet. Equally visionary was Shiat's idea that the office should be like a university campus. The idea is you go to lectures, gather information, but you do your work wherever you like, said Jay Shiat. That idea is so influential that it's now a cliche. Microsoft has a campus, Pixar has a campus. Google has a campus. And many of the offices which regard themselves as cool today mimic Gaetano Pesce's bright colours, different architectural zones and clusters of couches interspersed with large tables. Shayat Day's free range office really was ahead of its time. But even before the full majesty of the Shayat Day vision was unveiled, problems started to emerge. The agency had experimented by removing a few people's desks to see what would happen. Unfortunately, when what happened happened, they didn't seem to care. One of the guinea pigs was an associate director called Monica Miller. When they took her desk away, she got hold of a little red wagon, the classic children's toy. She described to the journalist Warren Berger how every morning she'd pile the little red wagon high with documents and files, then walk up and down the hallways of shyot day looking for a desk left temporarily vacant. Everyone thought it was so cute, she said. I'd be trudging down the hall and they'd laugh and say, oh, look, here she comes with that little red wagon. It was like a bad dream. Like a bad dream. Well, the New York Times did call it a dream factory. The laugh would be on those mocking colleagues soon enough. When they returned from their holiday break at the start of 1994, the hot desking era had begun. They were confronted with row upon row of lockers. Less college campus, more junior high school. Jay Shiat had sneered dismissively that the lockers would be for people's dog pictures or whatever, but there wasn't room for much. People started hauling armfuls of paperwork along with their clunky laptops. Monica Miller, of course, had her little red wagon. Every day there'd be these frantic email messages like, has anybody seen my binder? Does anyone know where my files are? She recalled. It was a colossal headache. Part of the problem was simply that Jay Shayatt's cutting edge idea had been so badly executed. Using a laptop and a portable phone seems mundane today, but back in the early 1990s, that sort of gear was expensive, temperamental and clunky. Staff wouldn't take their phones or computers home. Instead, they'd sign them out each morning and return them to a concierge when they went home at night. And to save money, Shayate Day didn't buy enough for all of the 150 staff who worked in the Manhattan office. Instead, ill tempered queues formed like breadlines each morning at the concierge desk. Staff who lived near the office would show up at dawn, sign out a precious computer and phone, hide them somewhere, and then go back to bed for a couple of hours. Senior staff would enlist their assistants to rise early and secure their kit. Damned if I was going to get up at six in the morning to get a phone, recalled one. I had to put my foot down. I told my assistant, go in there at six in the morning, get me a phone and a computer and hide it till I get there. I'm not sure that's what putting my foot down really means, but you get the gist. Rather than freeing people to work anywhere and anytime that suited them, Shiat Day's campus had staff queuing before daybreak of basic equipment. In the Los Angeles office, people started using the trunks of their cars as filing cabinets. They'd head out to the parking lot whenever they needed a new document. Staff in the Manhattan office, of course, could only dream of using cars as filing cabinets. The boss, Jay Shiat, seemed to be in denial about how much paper an advertising agency needed. Paper was something he frowned on. He'd send emails around reminding staff that Shy at Day was a paperless office. One creative director remembers Jay mocking the paper storyboards and demanding the removal of posters showing the agency's latest ads. But the truth was that paper was still an essential part of the creative flow. That was doubly true at an organization where people had to queue in the hope of scoring a laptop for the day. Who would switch to digital in a world where they couldn't even be sure of getting a computer? The execution of Shiat Day's new office was disastrously bad, making false economies with clunky equipment. But Jay Shayert made another mistake, one that was more serious, more fundamental, and much, much more common. But he wasn't the first, not by a long way. A century ago, a French industrialist, Henri Fouges, commissioned a rising star in the field of architecture to design some radical new homes for factory workers in Pasac near Bordeaux. The architect's name was Charles Edouard Jeannere Gris. Today we know him as Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier designed Cit Fruges de Pesac, a set of modern cubes stacked into family homes. Le Corbusier, of course, was the arch modernist, a man who dealt in minimalism and concrete. His vision couldn't be more opposed to the spring loaded chairs or four story sculptures of binoculars that adorned the offices of Shayat Day. One creative director of Shayat Day described the experience of working in Gaetano Pesce's radical office as like sitting in inside of a migraine. How he must have yearned for the pared down minimalism of Le Corbusier. We are tired of decor. What we need is a good visual laxative, le Corbusier once explained. Bare walls, total simplicity. That is how to restore our visual sense. And yet the humble factory workers didn't seem to see Le Corbusier's vision quite like that. They hated it and they refused to move in. It was terrible, said one. I felt as if I was being sent to prison. If you focus on the design, this seems paradoxical. Gehry and Pesce and Jay Shiat were offering the workforce a playfully riotous explosion of visual stimulation. Henri Fouges and Le Corbusier were offering the workforce bare walls and total simplicity. The design ideas were radically different. The reaction was the same. People hated it. Cautionary tales will return after the.

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Tim Harford]

Your Life In 2010, two psychologists at the University of Exeter, Alex Haslam and Craig Knight, conducted an experiment to test the impact of different office spaces on how much people got done and how they felt about it. Haslam and Knight recruited experimental subjects to spend an hour on administrative tasks such as checking documents, and randomly assigned these subjects to different kinds of offices. There were four office layouts in the experiment. First was the minimalist office, a clean and spartan space with a bare desk, swivel chair, pencil and paper. Many people in Haslam and Knight's experiments found the sheer tidiness of the minimalist office oppressive. It just felt like a show space with nothing out of place, commented one participant, adding, you couldn't relax in it. The second office layout was decorated. Nothing radical, no binocular sculptures or fairground pods. It was just the simple minimalist office with a few tasteful additions, some potted plants, some large framed prints hanging on the wall. The prints showed close up photographs of plants vaguely evoking a Georgia o' Keeffe painting. All simple enough, but people liked it. In the experiment, workers preferred the decorated office space to the minimalist one, and they got more and better work done there too. But this experiment wasn't really about the effect of having some greenery or a few pictures on the wall. What really interested Haslam and Knight wasn't pot plants, it was power. And so the final two office layouts used the same components as the decorated office. Visually, they seemed much the same, but there was an invisible distinction, something that made all the difference between a pleasant space and a hellhole. That invisible distinction was all about autonomy. The most successful office space offered the same tasteful prints and the same little shrubs as. But it offered something else too control over the space. Participants were invited to spend some time arranging those decorations however they saw fit, or even having them removed to perfectly mimic the minimalist space, if that's what they wanted. The researchers called this arrangement the Empowered office. The empowered office could be just like the minimalist office, or exactly like the decorated office, or it could be something else. The point was that the person working in the office had the choice. The empowered office was a great success. People got much more done there than either the minimalist or the decorated office. And they liked it more too. And you can guess what Alex Haslam and Craig Knight did to produce a hated environment. They simply said they were offering people control and then took the control away. They invited people to arrange the prints and the plants. But then, at the last minute, a researcher returned and undid all that personalisation, instead setting everything up as it was in the decorated office. If they were questioned or challenged, they simply said that the previous arrangement hadn't been suitable for the experiment. The scientists called this condition the disempowered office. People loathed it. I wanted to hit you, one participant told the researchers later, after the experiment had been explained, Several people felt physically unwell. And remember there was nothing actually wrong with the physical design of the disempowered office. It was exactly like the decorated office, which people had found perfectly pleasant. What mattered was the sense of powerlessness, of implicitly being told that you'd done it wrong, that you weren't in charge, that you didn't matter. The lesson? Office design doesn't matter nearly as much as letting people design their offices. And this explains why the simple, clean homes that Henri Fruges commissioned for his workforce met with much the same revulsion as the crazy, chaotic workspace that Jay Shiat commissioned for his. It wasn't a response to the aesthetics themselves. It was a response to being powerless, as those aesthetics were imposed by an overconfident employer. As one of Jay Shiat's deputies recalled. Jay didn't listen to anybody. He just did it. But this study doesn't tell us everything about why Jay Shiat's experiment failed. The scientists looked only at how office aesthetics affected a worker's productivity on an administrative task. And people didn't just do admin at Shiat Day. They came up with creative ideas. When Gaetano Pesce and Jay Shayatt swept away the cubicle farms and the office doors, they were trying to stimulate a certain kind of serendipitous, imaginative way of working together. Pesce thought that office doors and cubicle walls were just barriers to that creative teamwork. You'd you don't need the office, he recalled in an interview with the Planet Money podcast. His vision was different. Somewhere that would encourage collaborative chats. It was an open space with a lot of corners, with a sofa, comfortable chair, with a coffee shop. Because I think people, when they meet, they like to have a drink. You can see the logic. A coffee shop is just the kind of place where you might serendipitously bump into a random colleague and unexpectedly have a creative conversation. Sometimes you just want some peace and quiet. You felt totally exposed, recalled one executive at Shiat Day. There would be six conversations going on around you. I tried to think and I couldn't. We were the laughing stock of the industry. It was weird. You just had no idea where you should go. There was a rush for the only enclosed spaces in the place, the meeting rooms. The rooms would quickly fill up with people, and then they'd say to everyone else, get out. This is mine. And what about when you wanted to talk to someone in particular and you just couldn't find them? When the journalist Warren Berger wrote an epic magazine feature about the Shiat Day experiment, he titled it Lost in Space. I can remember coming back from a presentation and being unable to find my creative department for two days, complained one creative director. Another developed what he called the three time around rule. If he walked around the entire office three times and he still couldn't find the person he wanted, he'd walk back to the concierge, hand back his laptop and his phone, and go home. And if someone needed me, they could find me on my virtual couch. It's hard to bump into random colleagues when everyone's given up and gone home. And that's a problem because Shiat and Pesce weren't wrong about the need for personal proximity to spark creative conversations. Back in the 1970s, a management professor named Thomas Allen measured how communication between workers dropped off exponentially as their desks were further and further away from each other. 50 yards apart, and it was like they were in different states, different floors or buildings. They might as well have been different planets. Let's leave Jay Shiat's unhappy nomads behind for a while and travel forward in time five or six years to another employer with a strong aesthetic sensibility, a clear sense that he was right about everything, and a creative, collaborative office space to design. He needs no introduction, because Steve Jobs is one of the most famous entrepreneurs in history. He was the force behind the Apple Mac, the iPhone, those little round glasses. But for our purposes, he was the force behind the headquarters of Pixar, the animation studio that's produced films from Toy Story to Wall E. Steve Jobs was a man who hated ugliness and demanded beauty everywhere he looked. In Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, one of the saddest and most eloquent stories describes Jobs, semi conscious after receiving a liver transplant, ripping off his oxygen mask because it was ugly, and demanding that the medical team bring him five alternative designs so that he could pick the best. In happier times, he had much more to say about Pixar's headquarters. The construction budget was almost unlimited and the building, set in Emeryville, near Oakland and San Francisco, was crafted in an industrial style, full of exposed steel, wood and brick, with Jobs obsessing over every detail. He pored over samples of steel from across the country and selected a particular steel mill in Arkansas, which he judged to have the best colour and texture. He insisted that the girders were bolted rather than welded and the bolts were designed with circular caps to look like rivets, even though rivets hadn't been much used for half a century. Jobs commissioned a brick manufacturer from Washington state and told them to precisely match the bricks on the Hills Brothers coffee plant across the bay on the San Francisco waterfront. Then Jobs kept sending back samples, insisting they didn't match the exact colour palette he had in mind until the manufacturer threatened to quit. Steve Jobs was one of a kind, but when it came to dictating how his underlings office spaces should look, you can draw a direct line from Henri Fouges and Le Corbusier, through Shiat, Gehry and Pesce, to Steve Jobs at Pixar. And Steve Jobs didn't limit himself to the patina on the steels and the palette of the bricks. Like Jay Shiat and Gaetano Pesce, Jobs had become fascinated by the idea of random meetings sparking creative conversations, pixar's president, Ed Catmull explained. Steve had this firm belief that the right kind of building can do great things for a culture. Steve wanted the building to support our work by enhancing our ability to collaborate jobs. Hit upon a plan Pixar's headquarters should have just a single pair of large restrooms off the main lobby. People would make new connections or revive old ones because everybody would have to head to the lobby brought together by a shared human need to urinate. It starts with the most benevolent aims, doesn't it? One moment you're trying to make a place that looks elegant and beautiful, the next you're trying to control people by manipulating their bladders. The road to office hell is paved with precisely the right colour palette of good intentions. Cautionary tales will return in a moment.

[Bowen Yang]

You.

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Tim Harford]

Le Corbusier had demanded a visual laxative with bare walls and total simplicity. The eventual residents of Pesach did not agree. They added old fashioned shutters and windows. They erected pitched roofs over the flat ones. They put up flowery wallpaper over the uninterrupted monochrome walls and marked out little blocks of garden with wooden picket fences. Their gardens were decorated with gnomes. I can't imagine anything that Steve Jobs would have hated more than a garden gnome. Like Pesach's residents, Jay Shiat's employees gradually began to chip away at the purity of his vision. They figured out a system where you could sign up in advance to reserve a particular place. Rather than queuing each morning for laptops and phones, they'd store them overnight in their lockers. Makeshift desks started to appear, and before long, desktop computers, too. Chayot Day's dream factory. Like Le Corbusier's, Pesach was steadily being retrofitted by the people who had to live with it every day. These 20th century cautionary tales feel to me like they have lessons to teach us about work Life in the 2000 and 20s. On one hand, knowledge workers are finally equipped with genuinely portable computing technology, the kind of thing that might actually make a functional workspace out of Gaetano Pesce's cool sofas, hot desks, and nowhere to put your dog pictures. On the other hand, this technology means we could easily work from home during the pandemic, and much of the office workforce has since been in no rush to get back to the office. In the United States, for example, nearly half of all paid working days in 2021 were worked from home, and that figure barely shifted as effective vaccines were made available to everyone who wanted them instead of eagerly returning to their creative office spaces to boldly strut from one collaborative huddle to another. People preferred to stay at home, dialing into zoom calls. Homeworking isn't always fun, writing emails on a laptop while perched on a bed, or trying to stop the kids from crying during a client meeting. But many people noticed one thing that more than makes up for all these strains and sorrows at home. Nobody complains if you leave your dog pictures on your desk. People got a taste of control over their own space, and they didn't want to give it up in surveys. One of the leading reasons that people give for working from home is the autonomy Alex Haslam and Craig Knight could have predicted that it is no small thing to be the undisputed boss of your own desk. But that's a problem for serendipity. Zoom is fine for the meetings we plan, but it's hopeless at facilitating chance encounters with colleagues we don't know so well. A large study at Microsoft during the first wave of the pandemic found that virtual workers tended to connect only to people they'd already been close to. And when we need to urinate, we're going to feel something very far from serendipitous to light if we bump into a random co worker outside our own bathroom door. When Steve Jobs got an important idea in his head, it wasn't easy to dissuade him. His plan to impose a single pair of serendipity inducing mega bathrooms on Pixar seemed to be a very important idea indeed. Proximity mattered, thought Jobs, and he was right. And what better way to ensure that different people from different departments spent some time in close proximity than by forcing them all to go through the atrium several times a day at intervals governed by the call of nature. He felt that very, very strongly, says Pam Kirwin, Pixar's general manager. So Jobs explained his idea to Pixar's staff at an off site meeting, and the staff didn't like it at all. As Kirwin recalls, one pregnant woman said she shouldn't be forced to walk for 10 minutes just to go to the bathroom. And that led to a big fight. Some senior Pixar staff stood up for the pregnant woman. Jobs was frustrated. People just didn't understand the vision. They didn't get it. But then Jobs did something extraordinary and out of character. He compromised. The Steve Jobs building contains not one, but four pairs of bathrooms. There is still plenty of opportunity for serendipity thanks to an atrium that focuses activity with the main doors of the building, a cafe, a game area, the mailboxes three theatres, conference rooms and screening rooms all spilling into it. Pixar's bosses said that Jobs basic instincts had been correct. I kept running into people I hadn't seen for months. I've never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one. People encountered each other all day long, inadvertently. You felt the energy in the building. No doubt that's true. But the serendipity at Pixar wasn't just down to Steve Jobs ideas, but to his willingness to let them go. Junior staff were able to stand up to Steve Jobs, the owner, the legend, the control freak's control freak, and get their own way about something that mattered to them, that was more important than all the bolted steel and elegant brickwork Pixar's success could buy. Inside Jobs. Beautiful building. The Pixar staff ran riot. The most famous example is a concealed room that can be reached only through a crawlway, in which was originally designed merely to provide access to the air conditioning valves. Once a Pixar animator discovered the secret panel into the space, he installed Christmas lights, lava lamps, animal print furnishings, a cocktail table, a bar and napkins printed up with the logo the Love Lounge. The animators who work here are free to no encouraged to decorate their workspaces in whatever style they wish, explained the Pixar boss, Ed Catmull. They spend their days inside pink dollhouses whose ceilings are hung with miniature chandeliers, tiki huts made of real bamboo, and castles whose meticulously painted 15 foot high styrofoam turrets appear to be carved from stone. Steve Jobs apparently hated all that juvenile mess, but he let it happen. And the serendipity he craved became a daily feature of life at Pixar. Even if not precisely as set out in his original blueprint. Steve Jobs wanted to create an office space that would still be beautiful and functional in a century. We'll have to wait a while to know whether he succeeded. All we know is that Jay Shiat did not. He sold his company to a bigger advertising conglomerate, helped, perhaps by all the attention that had been lavished on his radical office space. Yet neither the Gehry offices in Los Angeles nor the riotous Gaetano Pesce offices in Manhattan survived the merger for long. The entire experiment had lasted just a few years. Jay Shiat declared that it was the only thing I ever did in business that I was satisfied with. Very few of his colleagues seemed to agree. And while the giant binocular sculpture remains in Los Angeles, the interior designs are long gone. In contrast, Le Corbusier's modernist homes for workers at Pesac did last a century. Pesach is now viewed as something of an architectural destination. It's full of people with money and modernist tastes, people who love Le Corbusier's visual laxative, even though they're very far from being the kind of people Pesach was designed for. Long after Le Corbusier himself had died, these new residents cleared away the picket fences and the pitched roofs and the garden gnomes and restored the purity and simplicity of his original vision. But I don't think it's a coincidence that that vision withered when it was imposed on workers and blossom when people who loved it got to choose. As the pandemic receded and bosses started to worry that working from home was undermining workplace serendipity, many decided to mandate a return to the office. But maybe they should instead try harder to create the kind of office that workers will freely choose to come into. Maybe the principle for a flourishing creative space is that if we build it, they will come, provided we don't try too hard to control what happens there. Le Corbusier himself might have agreed. When he was told about the garden gnomes of Pesach, he said something that I wish all the tasteful, powerful people like Jay Shiat could understand. You know, life is always right. It is the architect who is wrong. For a full list of our sources, please see the show [e-mail] Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes with support from Edith Rousselot. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Julia Barton, Greta Cohn, Lytal Millard, John Schnars, Carly Migliore, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Marano and Morgan Ratner. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It helps us for, you know, mysterious reasons. And if you want to hear the show ad free, sign up for Pushkin plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or@Pushkin FM Plus. Sam.

[Ryan Seacrest]

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