Workers of the World, Disperse : The office as we know it could soon go the way of the Dictaphone. Think telecommuting,’cockpits’ and ‘hoteling.’

In 1983, when IBM first occupied its splendid new U.S. headquarters building in Purchase, N.Y., designed by I.M. Pei, it was regarded as a state-of-the-art model for corporate offices everywhere. Its neat rows of standardized cubicles, increasing in size through the upper reaches of the corporate hierarchy, its long corridors and ambience of diligent worker bees regulated in a tidy conformity--all projected an image that epitomized the efficient modern office.

Only 10 years later, the $90-million 2000 Purchase Street was abandoned by IBM, after a drastic downsizing of its staff, accompanied by a radical reappraisal of the form of the office as a place to work. This reappraisal, which is affecting the ways in which white-collar work is organized across the developed world, challenges the basic concept of the office that has been familiar to millions of employees for many decades.

In the competitive, leaner 1990s, office-based operations of all kinds, including government agencies, banks, accounting and advertising firms, lawyers, engineers and other professionals, have had to become more flexible, more mobile in their interaction with customers and clients, less desk-bound and more dependent on a copious flow of electronic information that can be processed almost anywhere--at home, in an airport lounge or a hotel room.

“We are now experiencing very rapid, almost revolutionary change in the basic components of office work,” said architect Michael Brill, president of the Buffalo Organization for Social and Technical Innovation in Buffalo, N.Y., a nonprofit think tank. “In effect, the city at large will become the context of the new office. The home, the local copy shop, diners where workers may meet with one another or with clients and customers over lunch, will become de facto workplaces.”

In the new office culture, contact with customers and clients--known as “face time”--is emphasized over internal bureaucratic duties and paper-shuffling. In this vein, IBM has released hundreds of employees from desk jobs in its branch offices and provided them each with $8,000 worth of computers and fax machines so they can operate in the field. Similarly, sales representatives in AT&T;’s Sacramento office were deprived of their desks and given laptop computers, cellular phones and portable printers and sent out to interact with customers in a kind of free-floating, highly mobile “virtual office.” AT&T; expects that as much as 50% of its national staff will be telecommuting within the next five years.

A few years ago, the national accounting firm Ernst & Young eliminated personal offices for all staff below the level of senior manager in its Chicago office. When employees need to spend time at the company’s home base in the Sears Tower, they use a program called “hoteling” and reserve an office for a day. The firm’s “concierge” sets up the designated office with the worker’s files and programs the phones. Earlier this year, the downtown L.A. accounting and consulting firm KPMG Peat Marwick did away with the offices of about 100 of its personnel in favor of hoteling.

These new work patterns have provoked a fundamental reconsideration of the design of the office as a physical space. The conventional office is being reinvented as just one more tool an employee may use, rather than a fixed base they must check into every day at 9 a.m. Especially vulnerable are the already underused glass skyscrapers in America’s downtowns--and this carries some eerie as well as exciting ramifications.

The new office concept goes under the designation of “Non-Territorial Office Solutions,” or NTOS. It marks the end of the old connection between the size and location of your office as a symbol of your status in the organization. Because each office is a tool that’s shared, the new layout also signals the demise of the notion of the company as a pyramid with a boss at the peak and a host of drones crowding the base.

“The old vertical office structure is on the way out,” said L.A.-based architect Michael Pittas, a consultant to major companies such as Xerox and AT&T.; “We’re moving toward a team-based, horizontal configuration where everyone, from the CEO to the secretaries, shares a level playing field.” That’s the theory, anyway.

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To answer the question--How will this work revolution be reflected in the actual look of the office of the future?--architects such as Pittas and Brill have outlined strategies for the physical transformation of office layouts.

Some of their predictions:

* Individual offices will shrink in size, from the current average of 220 square feet per worker to as little as 50 square feet, and no office will be the sole preserve of any staff member below the rank of senior management.

* There will be a much higher proportion of group spaces for meeting, chatting and relaxing, and these areas will be far more casual than today’s formal conference rooms.

* Each floor in the same organization may be different from all the other floors, since areas for work and relaxation will be scattered through the building.

The smallest offices have a desk, a comfortable work chair, a chair for a visitor and a personal computer for accessing the company’s data base. The private software they carry in their “electronic briefcases” could include family photos that can be brought up on the screen when the employee feels the need to contemplate his loved ones.

These 8-by-8 “cockpits” have glass walls with Venetian blinds so the employee can choose to be public or private. Personal files and other materials are stored in lockers outside the office. Programmer analysts for Unisys Corp. in San Mateo have used this system for several years and it is generally well accepted, according to staff surveys.

In this futuristic model, larger areas for meetings and conferences range from a 100-square-foot “huddle room,” accommodating three people around a table or seated in comfortable armchairs, to “temporal” offices where five or more people can gather in privacy. When necessary, cockpit and temporal offices can be grouped together into “team suites.”

As anyone who works in an office knows, most useful communication occurs not in meetings but in the ad hoc gossip conducted in corridors and around the coffee machine. “Serendipity fosters creativity,” as Brill puts it.

In the new office, such vital casual contacts are encouraged by creating private corners and out-of-the way niches, by adding seating in the coffee area and by providing a larger “commons” suite complete with a library where workers can read their mail, use a copier and generally schmooze.

The Xerox Corp. is currently in the midst of a three-year, $35-million program to convert 141 of its branch offices to the new configuration. The company estimates that the program will greatly increase efficiency as well as reduce its office operating costs by 35%.

“We’ve had an excellent response from customers,” said Richard Kennett, the company’s director of strategic planning, “and the gains in work effectiveness average around $17 million a year, which means the program will pay for itself in two years.”

Some employees have had trouble adjusting to the new arrangement, Kennett acknowledged. “They complain that without their own private, designated territory, they feel less than welcome in the office,” he said. One employee explained that at first he thought the new office layout was unfriendly. “It wasn’t a home-away-from-home anymore, and that was hard to take,” he said. “But now I have a lot more freedom to plan my day to suit my work patterns, and that’s terrific.”

There appears to be a consensus among real estate professionals and workplace consultants that these new designs really are the wave of the future. “Though most companies are just starting to think about it, this is a fundamental trend, not a fad,” declared Mahlon Apgar, head of Apgar and Co., a real estate counseling firm in Baltimore.

But not everyone is so gung-ho about cockpits, telecommuting and huddle rooms. William Wheaton, an economist who directs the Center for Real Estate at MIT, holds that, despite downsizing and the enthusiasm for the new workplace, corporate America will still hold onto a large number of conventional office systems. And Jon Torgeson, senior vice president of CB Commercial, a Los Angeles real estate company, said, “The best high-rises, what we call Class A buildings, will always be in demand in the standard office configurations they offer.”

“People like to have ownership of a territory, where, if they put something down, they know where to pick it up the next day,” said psychologist Robert Barron, head of the department of management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. A specialist in the organization of workplaces, Barron believes that territorial security is a high priority among people who work in offices--especially at a time of intense workplace anxieties.

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The revolution in the nature of office work, along with the lowering of staffing levels that has eliminated upward of 600,000 corporate jobs annually every year since the late 1980s, is having another not widely recognized effect: drastically reducing the amount of floor space that downsized companies occupy. This reduction in office area requirements has profound implications for the future of the old downtown centers of many cities, including Los Angeles.

“It seems more than likely that major economic dislocations will occur with the rapid devaluation of the office stock in core urban areas such as central L.A.,” said Pittas, the architect and consultant.

“With current downtown office vacancy rates hovering around 20%, and no sign that that figure will improve any day soon, we should give serious consideration to conversion of the glittering skyscrapers that shape downtown’s horizon.”

Desperate commercial property owners of vacant and under-occupied high-rises across the United States and Canada have already begun to consider other uses for their buildings. Some Toronto developers have been given permission to convert office towers into condominiums. The bleak alternative was to tear down the high-rises to create parking lots.

In mid-Manhattan, which has seen the loss of 100,000 office jobs in the last five years, developer Donald Trump has proposed converting into condos the landmark 44-story Gulf & Western building.

Los Angeles has so far failed in its 20-year attempt to establish a viable residential community in the heart of the city. Of the thousands of units that the Community Redevelopment Agency once hoped to provide in the Central Business District and South Park, barely 650 have materialized. Unlike the center of Toronto, which has a long history of urban housing at all economic levels, Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill residential district was bulldozed in the 1950s.

Other possible uses for excess office space include schools, senior housing, workshops for “pink collar” industrial operations such as computer assembly and “sky malls” (upper-floor shopping complexes). Although such facilities produce less tax revenue than conventional offices, they are better than having commercial high-rises suffer the fate of Bunker Hill’s 52-story Two California Plaza tower, recently forced into foreclosure by a vacancy rate of more than 30%.

Hermetically sealed, climate-controlled high-rise towers aren’t easily converted into apartments, however. The floors are deep--up to 45 feet from the perimeter window to the central elevator core--and that means that only the outer 20 to 25 feet can be used for living rooms and bedrooms. But the windowless inner areas could be used for support and recreational facilities such as shops, cafes, gyms and clinics.

Local planners are just starting to consider the whole problem. Like some ever hopeful building owners, they still mostly seem to believe that the real estate market will turn around. “We have some minor current initiatives dealing with the possible adaptive reuse of commercial properties, but no overall policy,” said senior Los Angeles planner Deborah Murphy. “To really get things going, the City Council would have to agree to a host of building code and zoning changes, and that could take awhile.”

To survive the economic and social changes of the new information-driven office, downtown Los Angeles, like other urban centers, will almost surely have to reinvent itself and soon. “To ignore the social, physical and financial implications of the rapidly changing nature of office work would be fatal,” Pittas said. “To fail to see this revolution as an opportunity would be foolish.”