New York, the birthplace of a management culture that still shapes our offices

Before the West Coast came to dominate popular ideas about innovation and professional practices, New York was a major laboratory for modern management. In the 1930s and 1940s, Manhattan and surrounding areas hosted the headquarters of many leading scholarly societies and professional associations.

Those organizations were not only places of administration. They were also settings where people examined how to organize work, coordinate activities and arrange the spaces in which work took place. The article presents office architecture as part of the history of management, rather than as a separate design question.

François-Xavier de Vaujany, a professor at Paris Dauphine-PSL University and director of the Organologia Institute, explores this connection in “Apocalypse managériale. Promenade à Manhattan de 1941 à 1946.” His research follows the relationship between the New York of that period and the “flex offices” of 2026, asking what workplaces reveal about how people live and work.