When I took my current job, my family lived three time zones away from the city where the office is, but we've since moved (for largely-unrelated reasons), and now I come in every day. It's simple: my wife and I can't both work from our open-plan townhouse, and I am the more willing of us to commute - it's a pleasant walk, thirty or forty minutes.
The office might be kind of lousy, if it saw heavy use - just a big concrete box with a lot of open desks, no dividers at all unless you count the glass-walled conference rooms. But there's only one other person who comes in every day; the space is built for thirty, but even on Tuesdays and Thursdays there are rarely more than six or eight people here. It's quiet enough that I rarely bother with headphones.
To answer your question, it seems obvious: private offices are better than cubicles, taller walls are better than shorter ones, cubicles are better than open-plan layouts, and dedicated desks are better than hot-desking. Does anyone claim otherwise?
If I'm coming into the office, I'd rather be around other people than locked in my own room (otherwise I might as well be working from home), so I prefer small open-plan offices - maybe 3-8 people in a room. More than that starts becoming too loud and distracting, but fewer than that feels too isolating.
This all needs to be done properly, i.e. no meetings or phone calls in the open space, an expectation that you don't just constantly interrupt people you're working with, spaces available for quieter or paired work, etc, but if it is done well, I much prefer that to cubicles or private offices.
The office might be kind of lousy, if it saw heavy use - just a big concrete box with a lot of open desks, no dividers at all unless you count the glass-walled conference rooms. But there's only one other person who comes in every day; the space is built for thirty, but even on Tuesdays and Thursdays there are rarely more than six or eight people here. It's quiet enough that I rarely bother with headphones.
To answer your question, it seems obvious: private offices are better than cubicles, taller walls are better than shorter ones, cubicles are better than open-plan layouts, and dedicated desks are better than hot-desking. Does anyone claim otherwise?