As far as the IRS is concerned, improving your office space is not a business expense, so you can't deduct it; the most you can do is depreciate the cost over time and take the depreciation as an expense. If you build walls to create separate offices, you have to depreciate the cost over forty years. If you buy cubicles and install them, you can depreciate the cost over only seven years. If you lease the cubicles, the monthly lease is considered a business expense, and you can deduct all of it right away.
I'm just remembering the projects where we got the most done. Which were also the most fun (go figure).
One was a 20 x 15 room with 4 desks and a white board.
Another was one big table with 4 of us facing each other. (When I had to be alone, I went out to my RV in the parking lot.)
Another was a conference room with a long table and a bunch of laptops.
We used to call these "war rooms".
(Why is it when we really have to get something done, we throw each other together in a "war room". The rest of the time, we sit in soulless offices and cubicles?)
To each his own of course, but to me they offer just enough privacy to breed mistrust, and just enough exposure to feed paranoia.
It's hard to tease out a central thesis from this article, but I think I would focus on the claim that offices are part of a bureaucratic system that is slowed by paperwork, and that pushing people together encourages them to wander over and chat about work rather than constantly draft memos. I think that view is out of date, in the age of email and IM. Cubicles divide people enough that they don't feel like they're side-by-side on a team, yet distract technical workers and break their concentration.
Indeed, Double Entry is one of those fundamental shifts in business that helped to reshape the economy in untold ways. our entire financial system is build on it.
The BBC show "The Secret Life of Machines" did an excellent episode on the history of the office space. They're even hosted online for free! Scroll down to the second last episode.
Those numbers aren't for cubicle size, they are for (the whole office) / (# of employees). So don't feel too bad about your 7 x 7, as long as you have a nice bathroom, canteen, etc.
He wanted to recreate the downtown of a typical European city, but it ended up as "lots of stores packed together", and he eventually gave up and moved back to Europe, disappointed with the whole thing.
As far as the IRS is concerned, improving your office space is not a business expense, so you can't deduct it; the most you can do is depreciate the cost over time and take the depreciation as an expense. If you build walls to create separate offices, you have to depreciate the cost over forty years. If you buy cubicles and install them, you can depreciate the cost over only seven years. If you lease the cubicles, the monthly lease is considered a business expense, and you can deduct all of it right away.