Facebook has been catching heat for hiring Frank Gehry to reshape its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters. Investors don't like the bravado of signing a world-famous architect while Facebook's stock keeps skidding. What's more alarming is Gehry's actual mandate. Facebook wants him to create a vast, open-plan office for thousands of engineers -- in essence, a giant mosh pit.

Back in its earliest years, Facebook was a tiny outfit where software developers zipped around on RipStiks in a small, open-plan office to relieve stress during late night work breaks. Facebook's 28-year-old founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, may miss those freewheeling days. But taking open-plan offices to extremes -- by commissioning an 1,800-foot-long oddity -- is a foolish attempt to revive a bygone idyll.

Industrial psychologists have spent decades studying knowledge workers' productivity in big, open-plan offices, and the results aren't pretty. As a 2009 paper in the Journal of Environmental Psychology observed, "predictions of increased efficiency and better communication have yet to be fulfilled." Authors Tonya L. Smith-Jackson and Katherine W. Klein pinpointed ambient noise, especially other people's conversations, as a prime culprit.

When other people 30 feet away are chattering about something irrelevant, it's harder to think. Stress levels go up. Tuning out ambient noise becomes a task in itself, creating fatigue. That's especially concerning in software development, where small, independent teams have a rich history of being able to outperform bigger, more bureaucratic rivals.

Top executives may like being at the hub of a vast, pulsing enterprise, picking up a moment-to-moment sense of what everyone is doing. That sense of central omniscience has enchanted bosses since the 1700s, when the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham sketched out his panopticon, in which a single monitor in the center of a circular building could track everyone's actions.

Except for prison design, though, the panopticon concept never caught on. And other attempts to create giant, open-plan offices haven't worked out well. A case in point: the Swiss bank UBS''s decision in 1997 to open the financial world's largest trading floor: a 103,000 leviathan in Stamford, Conn.

Fitting so many traders and salesmen together into a single, cavernous room won UBS a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. But giant profits didn't ensue. Instead, UBS got caught up in the herd mentality of foolish deals during the housing bubble of 2003-07 -- and it didn't rebound especially quickly. The bank toyed with leaving Stamford in 2011. While UBS has stayed for now, mutterings persist that it would rather move.

Facebook's predicament is more than just an architectural quandary. The social network has helped create the buzzing hive of information that we all inhabit. At any moment, we can soak in new status updates, tweets, emails and Google searches. It's never been easier to stay up-to-the minute on any area we care about. And yet we all know that to accomplish landmark work, we need to pull back a bit, sacrificing some of that short-lived immediate contact so we can concentrate on a single complex project until we get it right.

In short, we need "idea sanctuaries."

Some idea sanctuaries may be created in the physical world, in the form of dens, nooks or quiet areas where concentrated work can get done. Others may be created online, in the form of low-noise social networks that dial down the amount of chatter so that sustained themes can be developed by a much smaller number of people.

One fascinating example of an idea sanctuary in action is ListenToUs, a 5,000-member community on Reddit, the fast-growing news, discussion and trivia site. ListenToUs is a haven for people interested in offbeat music, ranging from Pink Freud (a Polish jazz band) to little-known psychedelic bands of the 1970s. Only 10 enthusiasts a month are allowed to post.

The result: unusual choices get enough uninterrupted time in the spotlight to find new fans, says Reddit general manager Erik Martin. That wouldn't be possible in a mass forum where everyone can weigh in. In such situations, Pink Freud and its kin would be shouted off the stage by swarms of users with more conventional tastes, before anyone could tell what the new performers are all about.

Facebook's executives (and presumably Frank Gehry himself) are smart enough that they will doubtless look for ways to make their giant new offices into something cheerier than what architecture writer Allison Arieff referred to in The New York Times as a "warehouse for engineers." But when big companies get caught up with size for its own sake, they unwittingly create opportunities for little-known rivals to cook up something better in an idea sanctuary -- and spring that improvement on an eager world.