Jon's comments inspired me to pick up the copy of DeMarco and Lister's Peopleware I'd checked out from the library. They talk about a metric which measures the amount of time an engineer or designer can be in the "flow" state of mind, called the "E-Factor", defined as Uninterrupted Hours / Body-Present-Hours. Basically, if you spend 30% of your time working alone, 50% working with a co-worker, and 20% in a group of three or more, then an open office plan consequently results in a very low E-Factor for everybody in the shared area, since at any given time at least one interruption is occurring.
They also site an IBM study, which was "designed by the architect Gerald McCue with the assistance of IBM area managers."†
Apparently, the study found that "the minimum accommodation for the mix of people slated to occupy the new space would be the following:
- 100 square feet of dedicated space per worker
- 30 square feet of work surface per person
- Noise protection in the form of enclosed offices or 6 foot-high partitions (they ended up with about half of all professional personnel in enclosed one- and two-person offices)"
Jon's remark about switching to cubicles to save money on taxes is at once amusing, sad, and completely unsurprising.
† G. McCue, "IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory," IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1978), pp. 320-41