Yea Nifty -- but total BS
The building's wide-open rooms were divided by mobile cubicle partitions of wood, which made the large space flexible, but gave a feeling of solidity, Miner said.
"Suddenly if you're sitting in the middle of one of those you're only 25 feet away from seeing light and sun and rain and whatever the weather is otuside," said Alex Anmahian, principal at Anmahian Winton. "That idea had to do with human productivity – feeling bette, a sense of well-being."
Some of my most productive time in the past 20 years came in the mid 90's when the start-up we had just booted -- rented space from Cummings Properties in Woburn - our space was once an upper floor storage area behind a freight elevator and right alongside the indoor smoking space
But it was ours and we made it incredibly productive -- later with a bit more money in the same building we had views and openable windows plus much more space -- it was a much less productive period
I'm not saying definitively that being cooped-up like lab-rats makes you productive -- but I don't think in necessarily makes you un-productive
Actually come to think of it my most productive periods and the kinds of locations:
1) MIT in old Building 20
2) MIT in the basement of the old Magnet Lab
3) University of Texas -- basement lab under the courtyard in front of the Physics Math and Astronomy bldg
4) Lincoln Lab -- in a windowless area -- could be referred to as a bunker
5) Woburn -- in the former storage area
6) Woburn -- in a space above a warehouse on New Boston
7) Waltham -- we really had no permanent space -- just temporary space offered to us by our collaborators and some of the most critical stuff we did in space that mostly was underground
No -- offence to Google -- but from personal experience -- I think that being highly productive and innovative is much more based on the quality of the team and the leadership and much less on the physical surroundings, i.e. glass boxes on top of parks on top of parking garages
