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 Two office exhibits look at design's role in the changing workplace. July 2001
This isn't a screed against product shows. But exhibiting things we already own (like computers, pens, cell phones) requires a higher level of explanation than MoMA offered: a history of the technological innovations of the ballpoint, a brief on disposability. Either could fit on the awfully familiar looking yellow tags identifying the designers of these products. A Post-It identifying a Post-It just seems the ultimate in cutesy self-referentiality.
For students of twentieth-century design, On the Job provides a quick but fairly complete trip through the iconic buildings, furniture, and machines. The catalog has a handsome punch-card cover, which stands for organization, standardization, and technology. Buildings are presented primarily in photographs, though the curators did attempt a fragmentary reconstruction of the Larkin Building's great hall, accompanied by 3-D computer models and photos of dutiful female employees at work. Desks by Frank Lloyd Wright, Florence Knoll, and Gilbert Rohde are lined up in a row. Around these obvious choices they've arranged an amusing and instructional array of ephemera: huge photos of the order department at Sears, circa 1913; advertisements for office products through the ages; a few of the original business best-sellers, like Building Business: An Illustrated Manual for Aggressive Business Men. It's all very inviting and perfectly clear--but slightly thin. Interest in the office as a defining space of the last century seems to be peaking, and one would like to see more about the culture of offices from newspapers, fiction, even bad designers. Where, for example, is the beige fabric--covered cubicle most of us have at one time done time in? On the Job suffers visibly from the Building Museum's comparatively limited budget. Pentagram's installation has some clever touches, particularly the custom laminates that subtly indicate the advance of technology. Complex, almost alien telegraphs and manual typewriters are displayed on cases patterned with pale green stenographic symbols; postwar office furniture sits on a podium decorated with punch cards. But one wishes the physical changes in office culture would have been installed as three-dimensional dioramas of bygone days. As it is, the stylistic tics of each decade are reduced to closetlike vignettes: a Tizio lamp for the 1980s, a hanging plant for the 1970s, a George Nelson clock for the 1950s. The way to soak up some atmosphere is to watch the exhibit's well-chosen film clips, illustrating the conformity, collegiality, and sexuality of the workplace: Katherine Hepburn flirting with Spencer Tracy's efficiency expert in Desk Set (looking and sounding like a well-oiled piece of machinery herself); Jack Lemmon among a sea of equally clipped-and-pressed insurance agents in Billy Wilder's classic The Apartment; Michael Douglas in the transparent headquarters in Disclosure. Douglas's soft chambray shirt--open collar, no tie--gives you all the information you need about the lack of boundaries in the 1990s office. The contemporary star of On the Job is Haworth's Flo Workstation prototype from 1997, a concept model that informs the company's current thinking about office systems. Flo was part of a series that included Drift, Eddy, and Wake (water currents appear to be the operative organizational metaphor for nonhierarchical free-flowing communication). On the Job doesn't quite point out that we've been here before, missing the connection between late-1990s plug-and-play offices and the work of the Quickborner Group in the late 1960s. The show does include floor-plan photos of Quickborner's rehabilitation of DuPont's offices: a before version shows all the desks lined up in rows; the after image turns the flat office floor into a landscape composition of path and place, with desks coagulating into islets and clusters. Their theory begat Herman Miller's Action Office, an influential set of laminated pieces perched on birdlike legs. The bird effect turns up in recent designs too: Ayse Birsel's work for Herman Miller, seen at MoMA, has privacy petals that look as if they could turn into wings. The Flo desk has been stripped to its skeleton. It looks as if the desktop, virtualized on the computer, has been made physical again, tilted up like a laptop screen to allow for overlapping, tiling, paper rearranging. Users find what they need via spatial memory rather than an arbitrary alphabetical system. The cascade-like Cell filing cabinet works the same way: its pigeonholes are different sizes and shapes so that you can arrange related papers in plain view in adjacent slots, the way they go together in your mind. One of MoMA's six specially commissioned projects, called Mind'Space, conceived by Haworth's design team in collaboration with Studios Architecture, revirtualizes the same idea, turning Flo's cocoon-type curved back into a nine-foot-long shell-like screen. On the cover of its catalog, Workspheres is symbolized by a coffee-cup ring, an irregular circle that stands for the sphere but also for the in-betweenness of today's office, where we eat, drink, chat, and (oh yes) work. The show was divided into sections called "Official Office," "Nomadic Office," and "Domestic Office," and included Maira Kalman's B-Box Bed workstation: a breakfast tray with screen, pad, and keyboard with a quirky handwritten "QWERTY." Hella Jongerius outfitted the one-room My Soft Office with screens, stitching Chiclet-like keys to the kitchen tablecloth and turning one pillow into a mouse and another into a speaker--proving even a 500-square-foot studio can be put to work. Naoto Fukasawa and IDEO's Personal Skies--a white room with white desks, white phones, and projection screens mounted on the ceiling--allowed you to dial the sky of your choice. At the touch of a button you could sit under scuttling clouds or in contemplative gloom. Lot/ek's piece, Inspiro-tainer, also played with the idea of personalized space. An airline cargo container fitted with seats and screens and wired for sound, it created an industrial-style cocoon for work or leisure that served up movies, mood music, even spreadsheets. Basically, On the Job needs more of the typical MoMA show qualities--high concept, big budget, a look to the future--whereas MoMA's show needed history, context, and an explanation of not only some of the more head-scratching special commissions but what the whole exhibit was after beyond the wow factor. Is the office really over? The idea that we could work from bed and carry all necessary information (should we need to leave the house) in the collar of our Prada jacket certainly has some appeal. But the rooms full of desks indicated that the office, like paper, is awfully resistant to announcements of its own obsolescence. By focusing so completely on isolated gadgets and gadgetlike furniture, Workspheres never gave us a sense of what a working world dominated by such products would look like. There was no architecture--no twenty-first-century riff on the Larkin, the Lever House, even Frank Gehry's fun house for Chiat/Day. Maybe next year another museum will step into the breach. Just promise me they'll leave their iMacs behind the scenes. |
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