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 ------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company ------------------------------------------------- *******