

The desk sits against the wall where the closet used to be. This is significant: the closet, not the window. Light enters from the left, through a window that was never designed to illuminate a desk, and falls unevenly across an office chair whose lumbar support has been compromised by years of use. The desk itself is a kitchen countertop from a big-box retailer, supported by two file cabinets pushed sideways—solutions so common they have become architectural convention, the way a certain kind of American makes do with what the housing market provides. The monitor faces the wall. Not a window, not a view—the wall. A white wall, or near-white, the color of capitulation.

This is the room where roughly a third of American workers now spend their days. Not a converted bedroom with French doors, not a finished basement with recessed lighting—but this: the residual space left over after the program's priorities have been satisfied. The living room got the bay window. The kitchen got the breakfast nook. This is what remains—a leftover rectangle that shares a wall with the hallway, where footsteps and the doorbell become part of the workday's acoustic texture.

The architecture profession has largely ignored this room. When it does appear in design publications, it is dressed in warm wood and task lighting, photographed for its aspirational qualities. But the profession's real failure is not one of aesthetic ambition—it is one of attention. For decades, the American home was designed around the assumption that work happened elsewhere. The home office existed as a niche, a privilege, a room for the partner who occasionally brought work home. Now it is central to how we live, and the profession has not adequately addressed this spatial inversion.

The home office is the worst-designed room in the American house. What was once a private design failure has become a collective one, and the profession's silence on the matter is deafening.