Institutional Atmospherics: The Interior Architecture of the Welfare State

For most of those who interact with it, the state is a place before it is an institution. It is somewhere we go to do something, or somewhere we are summoned to have something done to us. That simple fact has not escaped the attention of scholars of the welfare state, but it has not held it either. Most remark in passing on the glum atmosphere of welfare offices, but only as a prelude to describing the human drama that unfolds in them. To what do we owe this silence? In part, to the offices themselves, which are so ordinary and unremarkable that there does not seem to be much to say about them. But also, to the gravity of the drama that unfolds in them, which makes architecture appear superfluous. In this paper, I argue that such appearances are misleading—that welfare offices are pregnant with meaning, and that their history can teach us much about the political agency of architecture and the challenges of democratic architecture. I introduce a book project that reconstructs the evolution of the interior design of public employment offices in the UK, US, and Denmark from their creation in the early twentieth century to the present. Despite its portrayal as a cold and distant bureaucracy—indeed, partly because it has been portrayed as such—I show that the welfare state has, from the very beginning, been forced to think closely about its physical premises. What is arresting about the architecture of employment offices is not that cash-strapped governments have sometimes neglected it, but that they have often paid close attention to it, even in periods of welfare state retrenchment. I show that their experiments with design provide a window into the challenges of building in democracy (where architecture occupies a subsidiary role, accompanying policy directives over which it has little control), while building for democracy (in a way that upholds democratic values). In particular, I argue that the UK, the US, and Denmark all struggled with the question of how to treat citizens respectfully in the context of a benefits-claiming and placement-seeking ritual that had come to seem degrading. To do so, they enlisted architecture to different ends, as a way to re-frame the ritual (UK), to efface it (US), or humanize it (Denmark), each approach drawing on a distinctive design imaginary, and leaving behind trail of partial successes and painful ironies. By examining the legacy of these experiments in democratic architecture, I aim to offer both a conceptual account of architecture’s political agency, and a cautionary tale about how the architecture of our political institutions can fail us.