It is a little world
- Cubed
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.
Kahn's preferred medium was charcoal. He liked to use the side of his hand to rub out the thing he was drawing in order to draw it over, and over again.
Turning the tracing paper into a palimpsest; where some trace of each previous marking is still there, only blurred out and faded back by Kahn's rubbings-out and re-renderings, so that in what he made there is also the record of how it was made.
Charcoal on trash collected over time acting as ersatz animated film recording how Kahn's ideas developed.
I worry that unlike Kahn's process and tools, the processes and tools we use are aimed at helping us satisfy the demand for moving fast and breaking things, not to be good, or to better ensure the doing of good work.
My son Gerrit told me about a YouTube video from a conference where the presenter asked for a show of hands from video game developers in the audience who could produce or successfully compile their own code from the previous quarter. Or from the previous year. Or from two years ago. And by that time the point had been made: nobody had their hand in the air.
Lou Kahn said that a house is only good if it's good for "the next man."
He knew that the likelihood of its spaces and places continuing to be loved after "the first man" has come and gone requires the kinds of attention to detail you'd have to be paying if the next man and the next-next man were embraced as stakeholders from the onset.