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.
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.
Is there anyone out there?
Or am I all alone?
It wouldn’t make a difference
Still, I don’t wanna know
I thought it’d be over by now
But I got a while to go
I’d give away the ending
But you don’t wanna kn-
Could I interest you in everything all of the time?
A little bit of everything all of the time
Apathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime
Anything and everything all of the time
You say the ocean's rising like I give a shit
You say the whole world's ending, honey, it already did
You're not gonna slow it, Heaven knows you tried
Got it? Good, now get inside
Are you feeling nervous? Are you having fun?
It's almost over, it's just begun
Don't overthink this, look in my eye
Don't be scared, don't be shy
Come on in, the water's fine
If I wake up in a house that's full of smoke
I'll panic, so call me up and tell me a joke
When I'm fully irrelevant and totally broken, damn it
Call me up and tell me a joke
Oh, shit
You're really joking at a time like this?