The Oval Office is among the most recognizable symbols of the American presidency, but if Mayor Bloomberg ends up in the White House, the real business of the country could get done down the hall.

If history is an indication, Mr. Bloomberg will want to reconfigure some area of the White House to make room for an open, newsroom-style office if he’s elected president. Since his days as the founder and CEO of the information technology company Bloomberg L.P., the mayor has opted to forgo a private corner office to work in a “bullpen” surrounded by his top lieutenants and aides. Starting today, Mr. Bloomberg’s bullpen is moving to the city’s emergency command center in Brooklyn for two weeks while the City Hall workspace gets an electrical upgrade and a fresh coat of paint.

The rearranging of the White House furniture hinges, of course, on a lot of ifs — with the top two being if Mr. Bloomberg decides to run and if he wins. But those who have followed his career or worked in the White House say if Mr. Bloomberg does become the next commander-in-chief he will be able to find a space for his beloved bullpen at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

“He could go to the Old Executive Office [Building], which is across the alley. There’s a space on the third floor there where he could create a bullpen about the size that he has at City Hall,” a Republican strategist and former assistant to President Reagan, Edward Rollins, said.

Mr. Rollins, who worked in the White House between 1981 and 1986 with some time off for Mr. Reagan’s re-election campaign, said creating a bullpen in the West Wing would be next to impossible because it would require “knocking down the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, and the Roosevelt Room.”

The chief of staff to President Clinton between 1994 and 1997, Leon Panetta, recalled the strong opposition when the Secret Service recommended closing down Pennsylvania Avenue for security reasons.

“That,” he said, “is just a small sample of the opposition that you would hear if you were going to mess with the history of the West Wing.”
But, Mr. Panetta said it would be “doable with the architecture you currently have in the executive building,” officially called The Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The building is located yards from West Wing of the White House and is where President Nixon kept his private office.

Mr. Panetta said Mr. Bloomberg would probably want to keep the bullpen limited to his key advisers — the vice president, national security adviser, chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, and press secretary. He said most of those officials would probably need to keep their private offices in the West Wing. Mr. Rollins said Mr. Bloomberg could also create a bullpen of his top eight to 12 “assistants to the president.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s office declined to comment, saying the mayor is not running for president. But in his 1997 book “Bloomberg by Bloomberg,” the mayor said his unique office design helped foster a more open and cooperative working environment.

“No one has a private office, including me,” he wrote. “If being invisible from your colleagues is what you crave, we’re not the right place for you.”

“Ours is an open plan layout. People must develop the ability to concentrate, despite myriad distractions,” he continued. “As is true with markets, transparency produces fairness. I issue proclamations telling everyone to work together, but it’s the lack of walls that really makes them do it.”

He went on to predict that the next management team will bring in a construction company to “build barriers” again the “day after my funeral.”

When Mr. Bloomberg came into City Hall, he knocked down the walls on the second floor of that building’s West Wing, which once housed the Board of Estimate chamber. For many the move symbolized a new openness and transparency, and showed that Mr. Bloomberg was not going to follow the same model as those who came before him. Political observers say if he could do it as mayor, he could do it as president.

“The president can do anything he wants,” a political consultant who worked on President Clinton’s re-election in 1995, Hank Sheinkopf, said. “The way that agencies are structured is much more diffuse. There’s more staff, more people, more confusion, more chaos. It would be in his style to want to change that.”

Mr. Rollins — who e-mailed The New York Sun the physical dimensions of the White House, which he said he and a friend were using to compare to the set on the television program “The West Wing” — noted that the National Security Council could not be included in an open bullpen because of the confidential nature of what it discusses.

But he noted that presidents have altered the White House in the past. He said given Mr. Bloomberg’s wealth, the mayor could probably build an extension. “He could build a West Wing annex over the Rose Garden. … There’s a lot of acreage there.”

He also said that if Mr. Bloomberg really wanted a bullpen in the West Wing he could “always eliminate the press secretary and press briefing room, which many presidents have thought of but none ever had the courage to do.”

That briefing room is now undergoing renovation.

Mr. Panetta said even with a bullpen, presidents often spend about 75% of their time at meetings that would often require the use of the Oval Office.

And, if Mr. Bloomberg does work in the Oval Office, “He might appreciate a little loneliness if he becomes president. That’s the one thing they don’t have much of, a little privacy.”