Some perspective:

Instead of closed offices, most of people worked or learned under the sunlight, shielded by a glass screen overhead that kept out the rain and ultraviolet, with your own space concealed by curtains that could be opened or shut to indicate botherability. If you needed silence for concentration, you used earplugs. People who needed to have loud conversations without disturbing others would have enclosed rooms with doors and glass ceilings and air conditioning. If you showed the serious people a world where most people never saw the sun while they worked, they’d flip out and then correct the problem. Skyscrapers weren’t much built in dath ilan until we had extremely bright artificial light that could mostly substitute for sunlight, and hey were all put in locations where skyscrapers were explicitly allowed. Blocking out someone else’s sun would be a serious transgression, and symbolic.

We had laser zappers and other measures that destroyed bugs and mosquitos and wasps and bees - these were considered far more annoying in dath ilan than Earth, and our civilization put a lot of effort and technology into rooting them out, or preventing them from getting a foothold within the great city. On the “beware of trivial inconveniences” scale, I suspect that an absence of little flying bugs, to say nothing of bugs that bit and stung and made noises, might be part of why people did their daily work beneath sunlight, in open air. I think there was a variety of butterfly that was bred to pollinate flowers and such within cities, in place of bees - at least I know that we weren’t supposed to crush butterflies.

From here. Basically Eliezer thinks people should work outside but don't because of insect problems (among other things.)