I take issue with this. For most of my career I worked in a standard office building. False ceiling tiles, cubicles, rectangular concrete 'tilt and pour'. It served the job well. It was relatively quiet, comfortable, intimate and fostered my productivity.
Now I work in an architectural masterpiece of modern green engineering. It is loud, impersonal, distracting, and not at all conducive to actually getting work done. It's like the people who designed the building hated engineers and typical engineering personalities and set out to design a building to torture them.
Apple has a similar problem. Apple's senior vice-president of hardware technologies Johny Srouji refused to move his team into their new, piece of shit exercise in architectural masturbation.