A transdisciplinary history of the 20th-century office, exploring how its spatial forms, technological systems and managerial ideologies were constructed, challenged and lived with. Throughout the twentieth century, office buildings became central to the organisation of modern societies – yet what went on inside them has remained remarkably understudied. Behind Office Doors explores this history by focusing on users and everyday practices. It examines how office spaces were conceived by architects, designers and managers, and how they were inhabited, experienced and sometimes contested by workers. From filing cabinets and air-conditioning to EU offices and colonial bureaucracies, the chapters trace how design, technology and organisational thinking shaped office life. Alongside new case studies on Europe, Asia and colonial Africa, the contributing authors reflect on how the office has been approached in historiography. Drawing on cross-disciplinary research, this book challenges the assumption that the office is too familiar to analyse – offering instead a fresh perspective on the architecture and politics of work. Acknowledgements Introduction. Retracing Use and Users in the History and Historiography of the 20th-Century Office Building Jens van de Maele Part 1. Categories and representations of office users Chapter 1. What’s the Use? The Users and Usability of the Filing Cabinet Craig Robertson Chapter 2. The Office in Popular Culture, or the “Plight of the Clerk” Nicola Bishop Part 2. The impact of normativity and standardisation on the office as an “environment” Chapter 3. Too Cold? Gendered Conflicts over Mechanical Cooling in Early Post-war Japanese Office Spaces Tatsuya Mitsuda Chapter 4. Thresholds of Comfort : Managing Light, Sound and Focus in the Post-War Office Environment Joeri Bruyninckx Chapter 5. Surviving the Office : Workplace Design, Activism and the Health of Women Workers in 20th-Century Britain Amy Thomas Chapter 6. Measuring, Evaluating and Configuring : The German Debate about Safe and Healthy Screen Work Bernd Holtwick Part 3. Office uses conceptualised by and for the managerial elite Chapter 7. A “Facility Based on Change” (for the Worse) : Leveraging Labour Process Theory to Understand the Evolution of Herman Miller’s Action Office Petra Seitz Chapter 8. The European Commission’s Office Spaces in the 1950s and 1960s : Constructing a Materialised Imaginary Marco Ninno Part 4. Visual essays Chapter 9. “Mimic Men” in the Office Spaces of a “Nervous State” : The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Late Colonial Congo Johan Lagae and Jens van de Maele Chapter 10. Between Hierarchy, Efficiency and Pragmatism : Picturing Portuguese Government Offices in Historic Buildings during the Estado Novo Dictatorship Ana Mehnert Pascoal Chapter 11. Office Life in Chandigarh Ruth Baumeister (text), Shaun Fynn (photography) Epilogue Martin Kohlrausch and Andreas Fickers Contributors Index