IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

98 Chapter 5
we made was to move two ‘‘front of house’’ human beings from the back of
the building to near the entrance.
My conclusion, after several years of enjoyable experimentation, is that
much office design deals expertly with many different, interrelated elements,
including spatial layout, lighting, furniture specification, material
finishes, technology services, and catering provision; but it does not deal
well with the subtleties of social interaction. Architects and office equipment
designers are usually intelligent and well-informed people. During
many years as a design journalist, I enjoyed numerous interesting conversations
on the subject with leading practitioners. But at the end of the day
their job—and the business model that enables them to do it—is based on
the supply of new buildings, desks, chairs, or lights.
My skepticism about office and workplace design was reinforced by the
year I spent helping the Museum of Modern Art in New York develop a
show called Workspheres. I was a member of the advisory group for this
big-ticket production about the future of the workplace. As a public event,
Workspheres was an immediate smash hit—‘‘off the charts’’ in the words
of one expert on what’s in and hot in that febrile town. There were more
people at the press preview than attend the public openings of big art
shows (or most of the events at the institute I led in Amsterdam at the
time). The private view was a heaving, black-clad throng that contained
everyone who was anyone in New York architecture and design. As one
leading journalist wrote at the time, Workspheres ‘‘falls just short of greatness;
modernity is back at the Modern.’’ 1
The trouble was, for me, that this smash-hit show told a story about the
future of workplace design that was more or less the opposite of the one
that really matters. Workspheres contained a glittering collection of products—but
the story it told was all about gadgets and tools. It was full of
beautiful objects for isolated, narcissitic, and inward-gazing individuals.
The most gorgeous desks, chairs, lights, pens, personal digital assistants
(PDAs), and laptops were on display. Little was said about the future content
of our work: its purpose and meaning, how we would do it, where we
would work, and when—and above all, how—we might redesign it. If
gadget-filled Workspheres was ‘‘the new modernity,’’ as the journalist had
declared, it was a dispiriting prospect.
Workspheres was mounted at a time (this was in 2001) when hard questions
had started to be asked about all the physical assets owned by orga-