DESIGN REVIEW
'WORKSPACES': PRODUCTS OF A MODERN DREAMSCAPE
TO KEEP NOSES TO THE CYBERGRINDSTONE
By HERBERT MUSCHAMP
WORKSPHERES," the new design show at the Museum
of Modern Art, is a bright basket of carrots
without the sticks. It's no secret that
Americans, in particular, are working themselves
to death. To which "Workspheres" offers a bonny
riposte: yes, but what a way to go!
Organized by Paola Antonelli, this salute to the
glories of 24/7 style harks back to the Modern's
"Good Design" shows of the postwar decades. Here
the focus is on products for the workplace in the
age of telecommunications. "Workspheres" does not
deal with blue-collar work or what former
Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich calls
"in-person service providers." Rather, it
showcases tools for the symbolic analyst, the
professional who gives raw data meaning and
shape.
I'd been wondering when the Modern would get
around to doing this show. It covers one of the
biggest cultural subjects of our time: the
extraordinary renaissance in product design
sparked by the push and pull between the old and
the new economies. Marshall McLuhan understood
the potentially startling results when, as he put
it, "information brushed against information."
Too bad he didn't live to see a full-blown
information industry brushing into every corner
of our lives.
"Workspheres" is a celebration of gadgets, all
those goodies that keep American consumers in a
fever pitch of desire. There are more than 200
items, a mixture of prototypes and products
already on the market. They include sleek silver
cell phones, saucy metallic clothing accented
with hands-free devices, veils of woven
electronic circuits, office partitions fashioned
from the same slinky material as Speedo
swimsuits. These objects are anchored by six very
smart projects commissioned by the Modern from
design teams in Japan, Spain, the United States
and the Netherlands.
Like the old "Good Design" shows, "Workspheres"
presents a mythology. It couples the idea of the
Next with the belief that we must collectively
work our way toward it. The Next will not descend
from above, without our effort. We must toil to
get there. On the other hand, our travel expenses
will be paid, and the work will be performed with
tools that have vast sex appeal. Isn't that a
good deal?
The show's approach is unabashedly promotional.
It draws heavily on the values of humanism and
ameliorism to divert attention from the dark side
of the digital: the discomforts of jet lag, eye
strain and repetitive stress injury; the
dystopian "Matrix" plot, in which people serve
machines. One wall text touts the proliferation
of comfortable new work areas at airports -- even
for coach travelers! This show gives short shrift
to air rage or other types of frustration.
But it's very long on problem solving. These
designers have solved problems that you never
knew you had. Naoto Fukasawa from the Japanese
group Ideo, for example, has provided the sky you
wish you could see from your windowless office. A
touch pad on the desk can dial up about 50
different skies, from tropical to Saharan to
rainy to a night sky with the constellation
Orion. These are projected onto a translucent
canopy suspended over the desk, a technological
version of the sky domes that were a common
feature in churches and other public buildings
before the invention of electric light.
Jet lag got you down? Inspiration flagging? Belly
up to the vending machines stocked with pills
conceived by the Spanish designer Martí Guixé.
The 21-unit pseudopharmaceutical system includes
a Go Crazy aluminum pill that reacts with dental
fillings to produce a mental jolt; Concentrate
tablets in the form of worry beads for the
tongue; and a selection of regional spice pellets
to make generic airline food taste like home
cooking. Bad breath from recycled air? Try the
Pocket Window, a white capsule of Alpine
atmosphere.
Try the whole show. Ms. Antonelli is my idea of
the model symbolic analyst. People walk into an
Antonelli show and smile: Ah, yes. We're going to
like this one. "Work spheres" overflows with
surprise, color, pace, humor, generosity and
heart.
But sadly, it falls just short of greatness. It
does not focus sharply enough on the extravagant
theme represented by the best of its displays:
the concept of time as an elastic dimension that
can be stretched by design. But it lays out the
evidence that a new perception of space-time is
fast becoming a reality of working life.
Ms. Antonelli's smile quotient takes on
particular significance in this show. Office
workers are aware of the instant mood elevation
that smiles produce. You can feel completely grim
when you walk into a building, but if you return
the receptionist's smile, however insincerely,
the heightened serotonin levels produced in your
bloodstream work better than the caffeine in your
first cup of coffee.
The receptionist here is a gargantuan
sport-utility vehicle called the MaxiMog Global
Expedition Vehicle System. Designed by Bran
Ferren and Thomas Ritter, this behemoth contains
a sleeping deck and kitchen and bathroom pods. It
is road-legal worldwide, can cruise at up to 90
miles per hour and is equipped with video
technology, a fax machine, a computer and other
road-warrior gear.
As an information device, the MaxiMog is out of
sync with the age of miniaturization. As a
building, however, it is dinky. Perhaps it's best
to think of it as a house: an operable version of
the plug-in units designed in the 1960's by the
visionary British Archigram group for projects
like Walking City. This vehicle introduces the
theme of nomadism that runs throughout the
exhibition. And it is useful to think of
"Workspheres" as an architecture and urbanism
show as well as a design show. These products are
already recasting the dimensions of the
contemporary city. And the ideas at work have
much to teach today's architects, especially
those in New York.
Inside the show the focus shifts from the scale
of space to the scale of time. We may not become
fully conscious of this until we reach the
displays of familiar communications products:
cell phones, pocket organizers, laptops. What is
stunning about these products is how quickly they
pass from Hot to Not. Wasn't it only yesterday,
for instance, that we thought that we couldn't
live without the Apple Power Mac G4 Cube
computer? And now all we can think is: what is
this dumb dinosaur doing here? Where's the new
Platinum Powerbook?
But this reaction indicates that the Next is not
purely a matter of consumer exploitation. The
myth of the Next is contingent on a myth of the
Last. It expresses a shift in perception that is
summed up by the question: what time is this
place? In the old days the "Good Design" idea was
to support classics: chairs, plates and other
objects that would never go out of style.
"Workspheres" stands this philosophy on its head.
It is a paradise for morphomaniacs, people who
enjoy the infinite forms that objects can take.
"The shapes of time," the art historian George
Kubler's phrase, perhaps best describes these
collected tools of yesterday, today and tomorrow.
And it is hard to know, from moment to moment,
just what shape we're in.
I must thank Rafael Viñoly, the New York
architect, for giving me the key to another
source of these products' appeal: "They have
rediscovered the pleasure of function," Mr.
Viñoly told me some months ago, referring to the
new breed of designers. That about says it. Until
recently the idea of function had been solidly
embedded in the negative view we had of modernism
and its inclination toward disciplined reform. We
had forgotten how refreshing a plain,
factory-made product must have seemed to those
who felt suffocated by an overdecorated world.
Young designers have extricated function from the
dour context of functionalism and given it the
meaning of ice cream. Every craving you ever had
to devour a banana split comes raging through the
memory circuits, making you want to clutch the
svelte Cosmo digital mobile phone, designed by
Trium for Mitsubishi. Or Lawrence Sarragan's
spiffy Banana Bag, a plastic shoulder bag filled
with banana-shaped containers for hand-held and
desktop work tools.
Me, I want one of the fake-fur toddler blankets
with working green computers stitched into them.
This project is by the Dutch designer Hella
Jongerius. It's shown in sable but also comes in
that 1950's shade of mink called autumn haze.
Tippi Hedren wore it in "The Birds."
You will put your own memories to work at
"Workspheres." At many points throughout the
show, you become conscious of connections between
human and technological storage. The work space
is defined as a field where digital storage
accelerates the interaction of the skills packed
into separate human brains.
Scientists are developing the use of biological
cells for computer memory functions. But there's
no need to wait for hybrid biotech computing
devices. They materialize each time we sit down
at a keyboard. The polymorphic shapes of
information devices are more than visual
analogies for the mutable forms of ideas; they
stimulate memory cells. In this instance,
function follows form.
Mr. Viñoly also suggested regarding these
instruments as architecture. I took this to mean
that, as in his buildings, there is elegance in
the relationship of the parts to a dynamic whole.
The hardware of individual units, as well as the
links between units, constitutes a spatial
system. Once this organic principle is embraced,
you can add on any other information you like,
from colored face plates to MP3 music. Content is
variable, expandable and modular.
The Vitruvian formula of firmness, commodity and
delight is visible everywhere in "Workspheres."
The delight often stems from blurring the
boundaries between form and content. Nowhere is
this more evident than at Hiroaki Kitano's mockup
of a Tokyo atelier for designing robots. Mr.
Kitano, whose team designed the Aibo dog robot
for Sony, has engineered a structure for working
on a humanoid version. A conference table and a
wall divider articulate the space, along with
fabric cocoons into which team members can
retreat for a sense of fetal bliss.
The divider and the table are glass, suitable for
writing on during brainstorming sessions. They
are also screens for back-projected computer and
video images. The surfaces are veils, in other
words. They can be used to bring things into
greater clarity or drive them into greater chaos,
depending on the team's creative needs. Content
can be in the foreground, or it can decorate the
room with suspended ideas.
To the Renaissance theorist Alberti, architects
were responsible for the design not only of civil
buildings but also of military fortifications and
clocks. No one understands better than a 24/7
worker why these three items should be grouped
together. Subtract the conventional 9-to-5 office
from the work environment, and you have an ideal
climate for rapid burnout.
Home office and nomadic workers must learn to
construct fortifications around their time.
Memory storage devices -- answering machines, e-
mail, caller ID -- are more than information
tools. They are defensive weapons that secure
private space against untimely invasion from
without. These boundaries for time compensate for
the loss of buffers in space.
To see the work environment in temporal terms is
to experience it as an event more than a place.
This experience may be the most profound idea at
the show. The electronic appliances are tools for
creating events out of relationships in space,
time and sensibility. An event may be
hierarchically structured, as in a typical
management chart, or its architecture may be
free-floating.
"Mind'Space," another commissioned project,
offers the best demonstration of the
free-floating event. It is a product of one. A
collaboration by Haworth Inc., Studios
Architecture, Optika Studios and Digital Image
Design Inc., "Mind'Space" is one of the most
ambitious projects developed by the new breed of
designers who work in paperless offices in
cyberspace.
Though physically anchored to the floor,
"Mind'Space" uses information technology to
elasticize space and time. The workstation is
housed within a spiral-shaped enclosure that
resembles a compartmentalized nautilus shell, a
design that implies the time dimension. The shell
is an accumulation of events: the formation of
each cellular compartment. Inside the shell are
two curved work surfaces: one horizontal, like a
conventional desk; the second pitched above it,
like a control panel. The surfaces are covered
with simulated touch screens. Information is
organized on the screens in movable, morphing
bubble icons.
The icons resemble blobs of mercury, and this
image suggests that the ancients understood the
tissue of space-time better than we do. Mercury,
inspiration, is winged. His gift is kinetic. He
performs poorly in a fixed position. Thinking,
too, is partly spatial. It relies on the fluidity
of consciousness between different parts of the
brain. It is apt that "Work spheres" is opening
not long after scientists found a means to slow
the speed of light. Mr. Guixé's Go Crazy pill is
not at all futuristic. We already have drugs to
speed up minds.
But we lack a vocabulary with which to speak
clearly about the dimension of time in
architecture. Several essayists who wrote for the
show's catalog try to capture this dimension,
without much precision or persuasion. We can talk
about myth. We can use words like acceleration,
relativity and event, but these are just
metaphors, or analogies for scientific
information that few architects or those who
write about them truly grasp. It's not very
useful to say that you've had moments of
perception in which the dimensions of space and
time have collapsed into each other, leaving no
evident seams.
But I assure you that "Work spheres" offers many
more such moments than any museum show you are
likely to have seen. These flashes of the Next
take us to a place beyond myth. They represent a
transformation of the environment as radical as
any we've seen since the Renaissance, when
Alberti and Brunelleschi recast interior space
along the lines of single-point perspective.
I'm delighted that it falls within my worksphere
to share the good news: modernity is back at the
Modern, and Ms. Antonelli's got it.
www.nytimes.com/2001/02/09/arts/09MUSC.html
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Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
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