An alternate story in favour of open-office layouts. Here in Aus, the Department of Human Services (DoHS, has had many previous names) is responsible for welfare. The old offices were an arrangement with a counter - staff on one side, clients on the other. Aggressive incidents rose and the counters ended up having old-school bank bulletproof windows installed.
Some bright spark changed that - got rid of the counters, and made the offices all open-office plan. You wait off to the side, and when it's your turn for whatever, someone comes and fetches you to their desk in the open-office plan with some space between desks. Instead of shouting your personal issues across a counter, you could discuss it in a normal tone, and if it was private, you could be quieter or more subtle about the topic. Aggressive incidents dropped off a cliff - and there was much less of an 'us-versus-the-gummint' mentality seeded by the demarcation line of a [fortified] counter.
So in this particular use-case, an open-office layout was clearly superior for employees, bosses, productivity, and clients.
As an occasional DHS client, I partly agree, but there's one crucial thing they severely fucked up in the new layout: the "client" has no idea when "someone" will come fetch them. So you get an intensely frustrated mob of people waiting off to the side, wondering if they'll be stuck there for 10 minutes or three hours, and straining to hear when every few minutes one of the geriatric case workers shuffle over and mumbles horrible mispronunciations of random last names. Which means you can't work, can't listen to music or concentrate on anything, really, just sit on the edge of your seat.
Compare with the normal take-a-number bank queue system, when you have a fairly good idea of how long it will take to go from "now serving 123" to "your queue number is 567".
These are not exclusive, you can have both. In fact, last time I had to visit an administrative office they had an open office for the employee workspaces with numbered desks and a traditional waiting area with a take-a-number queue system (well, actually an online appointment booking system) that directs to you a specific desk if it's your turn.
Some bright spark changed that - got rid of the counters, and made the offices all open-office plan. You wait off to the side, and when it's your turn for whatever, someone comes and fetches you to their desk in the open-office plan with some space between desks. Instead of shouting your personal issues across a counter, you could discuss it in a normal tone, and if it was private, you could be quieter or more subtle about the topic. Aggressive incidents dropped off a cliff - and there was much less of an 'us-versus-the-gummint' mentality seeded by the demarcation line of a [fortified] counter.
So in this particular use-case, an open-office layout was clearly superior for employees, bosses, productivity, and clients.