This gem provides a ten minute vignette of the 1976 office life of Chicago’s Prudential Building which was built in 1965. At just over 40 storeys it was the first skyscraper built in Chicago after World War Two. This movie introduced by director David Hoffman recalls a time fifty-five years ago when spoken diction was different, job roles more defined, and you could not carry a cell phone loaded with information with you.
People appear to be more softly spoken and you could smoke in an elevator. The telephone is the major communicative currency of this decade’s office, as well as the computer, which the video says is in two million offices in the United States. A quarter century later, it was estimated that 68.4 million computers were in offices and in homes, dramatically challenging the concept of the office as the one place to “get work done”.
Take a look at the YouTube video below.
Even in the 1990s you could smoke anywhere – offices, restaurants, movie theatres, airplanes, …
people were a lot more tolerant back then (it was well known that second hand smoke was unhealthy).
Loved this. I could watch it all day.