The Bürolandschaft ("office landscape") movement of 1950s Germany was the first serious attempt at an open-plan office, and it was explicitly anti-hierarchical: no private offices, desks clustered by workflow rather than rank, plants used to soften sightlines instead of walls used to block them. It was an idealistic response to the rigid, corridor-and-corner-office bureaucracies that preceded it.
The cubicle as a correction
Bürolandschaft's total lack of acoustic and visual privacy produced exactly the complaints you'd predict, and the cubicle — Robert Propst's 1968 "Action Office," ironically designed to give workers more autonomy, not less — was the industry's correction. It was itself later corrected, in the 2000s, back toward open plans, this time justified by collaboration and cost rather than egalitarianism. The pendulum wasn't solving a problem. It was trading one set of costs for another and forgetting the first set until it reappeared.
What actually varies is the task
Research consistently shows open-plan layouts help spontaneous, low-stakes coordination and consistently hurt sustained individual focus — which means the "right" answer was never open versus closed, but which task a given hour of work actually requires. The office design that survives isn't the one that picks a side; it's the one that gives people a real choice of environment for the specific task in front of them, rather than one plan applied uniformly regardless of what anyone's actually trying to do.
The office hasn't been redesigned five times because the first four attempts failed. It's been redesigned because work itself keeps changing shape.
Anyone proposing the next office layout might do well to ask which task it's optimising for, and which task it's quietly sacrificing.