I wonder if many of the same drawbacks of an open office layout affect cubicle farms as well. I have worked in both situations, and I have not found that cubicle walls significantly dampen office noise. Cubes probably lessen other kinds of distractions, but visual distractions are easy to ignore anyway.
Having seen start-up occupying warehouse-sized spaces with plastic foldable tables set up next to one another filling the whole space, there are values of "open space" greater than your typical cube-divided office space.
That office layout, and some technical problems (said shop's first Google result was of a quarter-million passwords compromised by way of a developer's poor password choice, neglecting to use RSAkey auth, and, well, cleartext storage of user passwords), were chief among reasons I declined any further interest in the opportunity. It still ranks high among horror stories I've personally witnessed.
I suspect ultimate causality was sloppy thinking resulting in both the office layout and the multiple security issues, though it's also quite likely that this was something of a cascade failure.
