Whereas in all the different offices I’ve occupied over the years, I’ve never spent any real effort decorating or personalizing them -- apart from the perpetual attempt to keep the overhead fluorescent lights permanently off. I never considered any given office building office an architectural extension of “me,” even when I spent 8 or 16 hours a day there. My undecorated offices weren't the result of some conscious philosophical decision or big aesthetic statement. (Although it could be that my ambivalence about offices has something to do with the fact that my first office job was at a place -- I swear -- called Scrooge & Marley.)

For the last century, lots of ambitious architects, from Frank Lloyd Wright on, have tried to design office spaces that inspire emotional attachment. One of those architects today is Stefan Behnisch, who practices in Stuttgart and Los Angeles.

“Usually people have photographs of their homes in their office spaces,” he told us, “but we will never find a home where someone has, at home, a picture of his office space. It shows us that the place where we spend probably more time awake in our life, the office, is just a pragmatic solution normally, and in our home we create our own world. And I think we should also be able to create our own office world.”

But when we work for somebody else, I’m not sure we really expect or want to pretend that offices to belong to us in that proprietary sense, or that the people there resemble our loved ones. There’s a reason that most of the stories fiction writers and filmmakers tell about the office involve a struggle for control.

Those stories began appearing all at once in the middle of the 19th century, just when offices were first proliferating like crazy to manage all the new factories.

Dickens’ novels are full of horrible offices. Such as Ebenezer Scrooge - here he is abusing his clerk Bob Cratchett on Christmas Eve.

“'You'll want all day tomorrow, I suppose?' said Scrooge.

'If quite convenient, sir.'

'It's not convenient,' said Scrooge, 'and it's not fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you'd think yourself ill-used, I'll be bound?'

The clerk smiled faintly.

'And yet,' said Scrooge, 'you don't think me ill-used, when I pay a day's wages for no work.'

The clerk observed that it was only once a year.

'A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December!' said Scrooge, buttoning his great-coat to the chin. 'But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next morning.'”

And on the flip side, Herman Melville's shockingly modern slacker Bartleby who does only what he wants as an office worker, and to the rest tells his boss:

”I would prefer not to”

As an office worker 100 years ago you might have typed in a cavernous room next to dozens of workers sitting at desks just like yours, arranged in rank and file -- an office pretty much just like a factory. Fifty years ago, your state-of-the-art office would have had each employee hidden away behind the closed door of his or her own little identical private cube -- like a miniature Levittown brought indoors.

These days the design ideal for offices has once again morphed back into big, open, factory-like spaces - and sometimes actual renovated factories. But now that retro vastness is supposed to make you, the office worker, feel good, not oppressed.

Here's the architect Stefan Behnisch again, talking about his new high-tech office building for a biotechnology company near Boston:

"We created was a wall where the daylight gets reflected down off vertical louvers which randomly change their direction so we have the phenomenon of the changing daylight within the building.”

Vibrant and exciting or alienating and oppressive, filled with sunshine or fluorescence, the office today is almost synonymous with work itself. And in our fractured culture, office life is about as close to a universal social experience as we have.