What Le Corbusier got right about office space An Article by Tim Harford timharford.com In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished. Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives. ...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not. workpersonalityownershipmodularitychoice
Can maintenance save civilisation? An Article by Tim Harford timharford.com Maintenance is a low-status affair: you can confess to being unable to change a tyre in a way that you would never confess to being unable to name a play by Shakespeare. …We understand the expertise of janitors, plumbers and mechanics, and we suffer mightily in their absence, yet somehow we take them for granted. We take for granted, too, the most basic maintenance of all — preparing food, washing clothes, changing dirty nappies. Nobody would boast at a dinner party or on a first date about doing any of this, yet it is essential. …This is about more than breaking bridges and breaking bike chains. There is a missed opportunity here to find something rather wonderful in maintenance. repaircivilization
Ideas behind their time An Article by Tim Harford www.ft.com These days I am more interested in the reverse case [of Da Vinci's helicopter]: ideas that could have worked many centuries before they actually appeared. The economist Alex Tabarrok calls these “ideas behind their time” Curious minds want to know why these ideas appeared so late — and whether there might be anything that would prevent delays in future. One explanation is that the ideas aren’t as simple as they appear. The bicycle is not as straightforward an invention as it seems. To move from ox-hauled cart to human-powered bicycle requires smooth-rolling wheel bearings, which in turn need precisely engineered bearing balls. Modern steel ball bearings were not patented until the late 1700s, and demand from the 19th-century bicycle industry helped to improve their design. Materials and how to employ them inventionideas
The joy of the humble brick An Article by Tim Harford timharford.com The brick is one of those old technologies, like the wheel or paper, that seem to be basically unimprovable. ‘The shapes and sizes of bricks do not differ greatly wherever they are made,’ writes Edward Dobson in the fourteenth edition of his Rudimentary Treatise on the Manufacture of Bricks and Tiles. There’s a simple reason for the size: it has to fit in a human hand. As for the shape, building is much more straightforward if the width is half the length. I am hereWhat the material wants to beWhat the brick really wants. materialbuildingmodularitygeometry
The Interpretation of Microstructures of Metallic Artifacts An Essay from A Search for Structure by Cyril Stanley Smith The meaning of objectsSomething akin to styleFrom the head of JoveThe objects themselves speak loudlyThe way it has been made+1 More
Something akin to style My own attitude toward the microstructure of metals is not unlike that of an art historian regarding a painting or sculpture. There is something akin to style even in a photomicrograph. There are aspects of structure that are not immediately apparent to the untrained eye, and quite minor features may be clues to a deep meaning. style
From the head of Jove A complex structure is a result of, and to a large extent a record of, its past. Though a proton and an electron may, as a pair, be able to spring full-panoplied from the head of Jove, more complex things cannot, or at least do not. Everything complicated must have had a history, and its internal structural features arise from its history and provide a specific record of it. One might call these structural details of memory “funeous,” after the unfortunate character in Borge’s story “Funes the Memorious” who remembered everything. What the advancing interface leaves behind memorytimestructurematerial
The objects themselves speak loudly The written record is very little help in determining the techniques used by ancient metalworkers, though the objects themselves speak loudly to an educated ear.
The way it has been made The internal structure of a work of art in metal can often throw as much, or more, light on its origin as can be derived from stylistic analysis. Moreover, the techniques employed can provide clues to the habits of mind of the people who originated them. …Perhaps the most important reason for structural studies of museum objects is that the intimate knowledge so derived as to the way in which an object has been made adds so greatly to the aesthetic enjoyment of it. Very often some detail and sometimes the whole of an effective design arises directly in the exploitation of the merits and the overcoming of the difficulties of a specific technique, in the reaction between the artist’s fingers and his material. historytechniquemakingobjects
Aesthetically motivated curiosity It seems that the first and most imaginative use of practically every material was, before quite modern times, in making something decorative. People are experimentally minded when looking for decorative effects, but they can’t experiment with the established techniques on which their livelihood depends. / It is of basic significance for human history that, from the cave paintings on, almost all inorganic materials and treatments of them to modify their structure appear first in decorative objects rather than in tools or weapons necessary for survival. Aesthetically motivated curiosity, or perhaps just play, seems to have been the most important stimulus to discovery. materialexperiments