On 28 October 1943, nearly two and a half years after a bomb destroyed the chamber of the House of Commons, Winston Churchill told the House that its new chamber should not be big enough to hold every Member at once. The conversational style of debate, he said, ‘requires a fairly small space’.
Eighty-three years on, 28 October falls on the second day of ORGATEC in Cologne, which opens on 27 October under the motto ‘From rooms to relationships: designing spaces in an ever-changing world’. In the organiser's own gloss, digitalisation, hybrid models, sustainability and growing demands for collaboration are changing how spaces are understood and made, and the fair sets out to show purely functional settings becoming spaces of genuine connection. I will be there as a visitor, and the motto needs only one line added to it. A room is already a relationship: where the chairs stand, and how far apart the desks are, orient the conversations held there from the day the furniture is chosen.
A chamber drawn around a way of talking
The debate of 28 October 1943 is in Hansard, and it repays reading in full. Churchill, who had served in the old chamber for more than forty years, said he would like to see it restored in all essentials to its old form, and he named two characteristics. The first was a shape that should be oblong and not semicircular. The second was a size: the chamber should not be big enough to contain all its Members at once without overcrowding, and there should be no question of every Member having a seat reserved. His reasons were practical. A House big enough for all its Members would hold nine-tenths of its debates in an almost empty or half-empty chamber, while the essence of good Commons speaking, in his words, is the conversational style, ‘the facility for quick, informal interruptions and interchanges’. For free debate, he concluded, ‘a small Chamber and a sense of intimacy are indispensable’. Early in the same speech comes this sentence: ‘We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.’
What I take from Hansard is the order of the argument. Churchill starts from the conversation the House needs and derives the room from it, down to its size. It is an order worth borrowing for any office: decide the conversation first, then the furniture.
What the table offers before anyone sits down
Before choosing among conference tables, the question I find most useful is which seats a table makes available, corners and places side by side included, and only afterwards how many people it takes.
The evidence comes from Robert Sommer, who published ‘Further Studies of Small Group Ecology’ in Sociometry in 1965. To learn how groups arrange themselves, he observed pairs of students in a cafeteria, where interaction was encouraged, and in a library, where it was discouraged. In the cafeteria the pairs chose to sit across from one another; in the library they chose seats at a distance. Sommer then used paper-and-pencil tests to gauge where people would prefer to sit for different tasks. In general, casual groups preferred corner seating, cooperating groups side by side, co-acting groups (each person working on a separate task) a distant arrangement, and competing groups seats opposite one another. He also discusses the part that eye contact plays in regulating these arrangements.
These are preferences recorded among students sixty years ago, and I treat them as a prompt for the brief. A long rectangular table, as I read its geometry, offers mostly seats that face across the top and only four corners. For a board that has to reach agreement, that is worth knowing before the order is signed.
Eight or nine feet from the person behind the desk
Edward T. Hall published The Hidden Dimension in 1966, a book about the distances people keep from one another. One of them he called social distance, and its far phase runs from roughly 2.1 to 3.7 metres (seven to twelve feet). Business and social discourse held in the far phase, Hall writes, has a more formal character than it has in the close phase. He then turns to the office. The desks of important people are large enough to hold visitors at the far phase of social distance, and even with standard-size desks the chair opposite is about 2.4 to 2.7 metres (eight or nine feet) from the person behind the desk.
A deep desk, as I read Hall, suits conversations that ought to be formal. If it is the only place in the room where a visitor can sit, every conversation held there starts at that distance, the difficult one included.
Distance on the plan, counted in weekly conversations
Thomas J. Allen widened the frame from a single room to the distance between colleagues. He studied how technical information moves inside research and development organisations, and in 1977 the MIT Press published the result as Managing the Flow of Technology. Among his measurements was the probability that two people communicate in a given week, set against the distance separating them. That the probability falls with distance, he wrote, is probably not surprising to anyone; the actual rate of decay is what surprises. In The Organization and Architecture of Innovation, written with Günter Henn and published in 2007, a chart again shows the probability of communication declining as distance grows.
Inside ORGATEC, the Work Culture Festival has a theme called ‘Connected Cultures’, described as hybrid collaboration and corporate cultures that connect. Allen measured research and development organisations, and his findings belong to them, yet I find the gesture they suggest useful on any plan. Before deciding where collaborative workspace furniture should go, I would list the pairs of people who need to speak every week and mark the distance between their desks on the drawing.
The evidence, room by room
The chamber. Oblong, and not big enough to hold every Member at once, because the conversational style needs a fairly small space (Churchill, Hansard, 28 October 1943). Question for the brief: what kind of talk is this room for?
The desk. With standard-size desks the visitor sits about 2.4 to 2.7 metres (eight or nine feet) from the person behind it, at a distance where conversation is more formal (Hall, 1966). Question: is there anywhere closer to sit?
The table. Preferences recorded by Sommer (1965): corner seating for casual conversation, side by side for cooperation, a distant arrangement for separate tasks, opposite for competition. Question: which seats does the table offer most?
The floor plan. In research and development, the probability of talking every week falls with distance, at a rate Allen found surprising (Allen, 1977). Question: who needs to meet weekly, and how far apart are their desks?
A seating plan is a conversation written in advance
Two weeks ago, writing about Italian executive desks, I began at Chartwell, at the standing desk Churchill was given in 1949, and looked at the room as a portrait of the person who works in it. This time it is his chamber rather than his study, and the subject is the visitor. The benefit for whoever uses the room is simple to describe: the seat is chosen for the conversation, so the conversation does not have to fight the seat. In Cologne I will look at every desk with the visitor's chair in mind, and at every meeting table by counting its corners.
Relationships belong at the centre of this year's fair, and the motto is right to put them there. In 1943 the House of Commons was asked to settle the character of its debates through the size of its room. An office settles the same thing when it is furnished, whether anyone says so or not.
Quick answers
When and where is ORGATEC 2026? In Cologne, from 27 to 30 October 2026, under the motto ‘From rooms to relationships: designing spaces in an ever-changing world’.
What did Churchill say about the shape of the House of Commons chamber? In the debate of 28 October 1943, recorded in Hansard, he asked that the rebuilt chamber be oblong rather than semicircular and not big enough to hold all its Members at once, because the conversational style of debate requires a fairly small space. The same speech contains the sentence ‘We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us’.
How far does a visitor sit from the person behind the desk, according to Edward T. Hall? In The Hidden Dimension (1966) Hall writes that even with standard-size desks the chair opposite is about 2.4 to 2.7 metres (eight or nine feet) from the person behind the desk, within the far phase of social distance, where conversation has a more formal character.
Does the distance between desks affect how often colleagues talk? In the research and development organisations studied by Thomas J. Allen (Managing the Flow of Technology, 1977), the probability that two people communicate in a given week falls with the distance between them, and the rate of that fall is what he found surprising.