Umanizzazione degli spazi per il lavoro. Evoluzione di un pensiero architettonico

The paper aims to relate the structural evolution with the architectural evolution and the relationship between form and function in an emblematic building type: the office buildings. Here, more than elsewhere, we find the echo of social theories and policies, aimed at increasing productivity, and of models directly imported from the industrial production world. The discussion ranges from the unsanitary conditions of the office in the late nineteenth century: «There were still numbers of dens below ground in which ill-paid clerks worked for small firms under all-day artificial light. There were dusty garrets up four pairs of stairs in which six or seven people worked together»; to the American experience of the early twentieth century, born in the name of Fordism and Taylorism, which find their focus in the concept of module and where - with the Chicago School - the workspace becomes an individual place within the office intended as a big production machine, but always within a conception still rigidly and inevitably hierarchical; to finally arrive - after having focused on the Olivetti case, essential example of integration between productivity requirements and respect for social - to the more recent office types introduced by Facebook and Google, to end with the Toolbox case, first example of coworking in Turin.In relation to the evolution of the distribution features, the attention is shifted from the container to the analysis of flows and relationships among workers in three consequential configurations: from "open space" to "landscape office" to reach - through the Action Office model - the current concept of "smart working".