The passage given below is followed by four alternate summaries. Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
Privacy-challenged office workers may find it hard to believe, but open-plan offices and cubicles were invented by architects and designers who thought that to break down the social walls that divide people, you had to break down the real walls, too. Modernist architects saw walls and rooms as downright fascist. The spaciousness and flexibility of an open plan would liberate homeowners and office dwellers from the confines of boxes. But companies took up their idea less out of a democratic ideology than a desire to pack in as many workers as they could. The typical open-plan office of the first half of the 20th century was a white-collar assembly line. Cubicles were interior designers’ attempt to put some soul back in.
Correct Answer :
Wall-free office spaces did not quite work out the way their utopian inventors intended, as they became tools for exploitation of labor.
Solution :
Option 1 best captures the essence of the passage. The passage explains that while the designers of open-plan offices had a utopian vision of breaking down social walls and liberating dwellers, corporations adopted the design to maximize worker density (white-collar assembly line), which represents exploitation/optimization of labor contrary to the original democratic intent.
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