The Ever-Present Cubicle
There's an interesting article in Fortune about The Birth of the Cubicle. Interestingly enough, it wasn't designed to pack lots of people into a space at all. The inventor of the cubicle, Robert Pobst, had a vision of a flexible dynamic work space. I liked some of the later designs in the picture slideshow in the article.
In Silicon Valley, space is at a premium, so it's pretty standard to live at work in a cubicle. At Kosmix, until recently, we were small enough that almost all the developers fit in one medium-sized open space room. Surprisingly, I liked the everyone-in-one-room concept. I guess it also helped that the room had a lot of windows. Now, we've grown and needed more space so we all live in a new cubicle-land office :)