After visiting Germany in 1963, Duffy brought these ideas to wider attention in Britain with an article in the Architectural Review, followed in 1966 by a monograph on office landscaping that had, he later joked, \u201ca touch of the messianic about it\u201d. By the early 1970s, the mania for office landscaping had seized Britain, with British Petroleum one of the first to try it. But by then Duffy, who had spent time in the United States designing offices for a firm of \u201cspace planners\u201d who used top statisticians to assess the particular needs of each business, had begun to harbour doubts.<\/p>\n
Why, he wondered, were all \u201coffice landscapes\u201d the same? Surely, he wrote, there should be \u201ca range of possibly types of layout, each reflecting the particular eccentricities or the special demands of, say, lawyers versus insurance brokers, or electronics firms versus banks.\u201d<\/p>\n
His practice, DEGW, which he co-founded in London in 1974, became one of the first space planners to take such differences between users seriously. Too many architects, he said, were retreating into \u201cthe skin trade, the abdication of responsibility for deciding what the building is for, how it is going to be used and how it will be serviced\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n