American offices are shrinking fast. Since 2010, the average amount of floor space per employee has dropped by thirty-three per cent, to a hundred and fifty square feet. That’s about equal to the footprint of a Ford F-150—and try showing your slide deck in a Ford F-150. Everyone’s going open floor plan for the collaborative synergies, and because it’s cheap. But behavioral scientists have found that the cozier offices get the more territorial we become. Caste systems develop among co-workers. Conflicts break out over conference rooms.
Recently, an upstart martial-arts league called Karate Combat set up its own office, of sorts, in downtown Manhattan, on the hundred-and-second floor of One World Trade Center. This venue, too, was a downsize. Typically, fighting leagues, like U.F.C., stage events in big arenas. Not Karate Combat. The league, which live-streams to an audience of hundreds of thousands, has instead held its fights in unusual locales: a classical courtyard in Athens; a “secret warehouse” in Budapest; a block on Miami Beach, where the fighters pulled up in Rolls-Royces. “It needs to, first and foremost, just be super cool,” Michael DePietro, one of the league’s founders, explained.
The office building’s hundred-and-second floor offered lots of natural light and was cubicle-free. The centerpiece—the hub, a consultant might call it—was an open pit, surrounded by low, slanted walls that made it look like a square salad bowl. One could imagine it as a new workplace amenity: a way for accountants and creative types to resolve the squabbles going on in the offices below. Pairs of men were going to jump inside the pit and punch each other in the face.
At happy hour, about two hundred spectators—friends and associates of the league’s executives, most of them Manhattan office workers—gathered around the pit, sipping cocktails. The floor had acquired a “Batman” vibe. The lights dimmed and flashed; trance music throbbed. “I don’t know what’s happening, but it feels like someone is about to get fed to a shark,” one woman remarked. An announcer explained the rules. Three rounds, no hitting with elbows or knees, no wrestling. “And, of course, all Keanu Reeves ‘Matrix’ moves are legal!”
Standing pit-side was Brandon Lazo, who works in security at the Royal Bank of Canada. “If I were at work, I’d be sitting at a desk helping somebody fix their badge,” he said, happily, as the fighting began. A shirtless Latvian named Edgars Skrivers performed a jump-kick off a wall and brought his foot into contact with the ribs of a Brazilian named Teeik Silva. Sweat and spit misted the air. “Ohhhh!” Lazo screamed.
As another fight began, two men made a wager. “I have the guy that looks like Wesley Snipes,” one of them, a radio producer named Steve, said. He’d brought along his friend, Jack Leary, a writer. “I came here being, like, ‘Man, I’m not sure I want to see people get hit,’ ” Steve said, as the Snipes lookalike knocked his Kyrgyzstani opponent to the mat and threw eleven stiff punches at his head. “And at this point I’m, like, ‘Fucking kill ’em!’ ”
The venue made for intimate viewing. When a fighter clambered up a wall for a flying kick, a few spectators ducked. Someone’s drink coaster rolled into the pit mid-fight, and a referee had to retrieve it. The bathroom doubled as a locker room. “It’s funny,” Steve said. “We saw one of the fighters get wrecked, and I went into the bathroom, and he came in to get changed in the next stall.”
Near the ring, Morgan German, of Lake Charles, Louisiana, was fidgeting. She didn’t work in the area, she explained. Her fiancé, Josh Quayhagen, was set to fight next. “It’s about what you might imagine, watching someone you love get hit in the face,” she said. Quayhagen’s fight was even for two rounds, but then he left his Portuguese opponent woozy with a right hook to the forehead and won by unanimous decision. A successful workday. He and German embraced, and he said, “Where do people around here go after work to get a drink?”
The fights wore on. Jorge Perez, of the Dominican Republic, knocked his opponent down twice, before the wobbly fighter got up to receive a third punch to the chin. He fell like a tree. People in the crowd yelled, “Hit him!”
Meanwhile, some seven hundred feet below, on the forty-ninth floor, a business-operations manager named Matt was getting ready to head home. He builds out new offices. That morning, he and his colleagues had arrived at a job site to find that the lights didn’t work. “There have been times, dealing with the construction process, when I wanted to punch people,” he said. “But I didn’t.” ♦
