When they remodeled a building I used to work in, they converted it all to open office space (minus the manager's fully enclosed offices, of course). What we were told was that every person had to have a view of a window. Something to do with the LEED certification? Maybe they were saving electricity by allowing the light to reach all the spaces.

Then our team lead decided we needed to have a morning stand-up meeting every day in the middle of this space, seemingly completely oblivious to the fact that we were bothering all the other teams in the same shared space.