The Relationship Between Skyscrapers and Great Cities
&gt; These areas boast an abundance of mid-rise, open-floor plan, historic buildings that create street-level interaction, where people and ideas can combine and recombine to form new innovations and startup companies.<p>Historic office buildings are anything but open-floor plan-based. Open-floor plans suck for startups because the square footage is usually immense, which means you can&#x27;t rent office space cheaply. That&#x27;s why early stage startups these days end up working in accelerators where they can share space, if they&#x27;re operating out of commercial space at all. Where startups operate with large open floor plans, it&#x27;s because they&#x27;ve migrated to cheap areas with lots of supply and low demand, namely vacant industrial areas. But those are becoming scarce within cities.<p>The image of startups in open floor plans is really an artifact of necessity, with rationalizations after-the-fact for why they might be better. And in any event, anybody who has worked in the 1970s and 1980s era single-story office buildings in Silicon Valley knows that the layouts were typically neither totally open nor closed, but had spaces with varying qualities.<p>I have a small (2-3 person max) private office in an historic building in San Francisco&#x27;s Financial District. Since the building was constructed in 1890, it&#x27;s been principally occupied by professionals--doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, etc--who don&#x27;t typically have many employees, if any. Over the past 5 years I&#x27;ve increasingly seen more tech startups here and it&#x27;s really ideal for them because they can rent just enough space for what they need. And while the building management has leased a few floors in their entirety to some businesses (a securities trading firm, a game company, a law firm), they seem committed to keeping most of their space in a more traditional[1] layout.<p>And I&#x27;m really thankful for that commitment because I hate open-floor layouts. I like having my own, truly private space that isn&#x27;t subleased from a larger office. These types of buildings are a rarity. I don&#x27;t have to walk past any other desk (other than the security desk downstairs) coming to or leaving from my office. I don&#x27;t have to worry about questions about why I come at noon one day and don&#x27;t leave until noon the next day (all-night hacking session), nobody knows if I&#x27;m taking a nap, doing my taxes, etc. Not that I&#x27;d be offended by such questions, it&#x27;s just that real privacy makes for a much less stressful and more productive environment for me, and I imagine many other people. At the same time, I really benefit from my work space and home space being separate.<p>[1] Very traditional, I should say, given that large open floor plans started in the 1950s. One of the earliest modernist skyscrapers in the now archetypal International Style--open floors, glass curtain walls, highly segregated service areas--the Crown Zellerbach Building, is one block from here, built in 1959. It&#x27;s just a completely different architectural style internally. Night &amp; day.