contact_magazine_#36_EN

Office Life
A declaration of love
to the whatnot.
Office decoration – aesthetic horror or emotional
necessity? Our author Wojciech Czaja
remembers his own years spent in an openspace
office and has a very firm opinion
about kitsch at the workplace. Because: “A
noble heart creates its own office world for
itself.”
A former colleague and desk neighbour of mine
in the open-space office, let’s call him Markus, is
a jack of all trades – especially at all meetings and
conferences. A specialised journalist, he jets around
the world, listening to state-of-the-art lectures and
discussions on logistics, technology and digital solutions.
He brings the colourful badges and plasticcoated
name labels back with him to Vienna as souvenirs
and hangs them on the lamp head of his desk
lamp. After a few years it was bound to happen. Our
workmate’s travels – and above all his reappearances
– increasingly intrigued and tickled us because every
imported conference badge challenged the statics
and spring mechanism of his silver-grey desk lamp
with a few more decagrams, until finally – spent at
the end of its luminance and bearing capacity – it radiated
more shade than light and, under the load of
the attached souvenirs, lost its balance and crashed
precipitously onto the floor.
Don’t worry, the old badges disappeared into the
drawer, but Markus was not deterred in his passion
for the chase and for collecting. He decided to start
from scratch and adorn his lamp – the same item
with a little dent in the shade – anew. Whenever I
turn up today at conferences and receive a garishly
colourful whatnot to hang round my neck at checkin,
I have to think of the old times in the open-space
office and the sudden crash-bang of the lamp.
Markus isn’t the only one with a penchant for office
decoration – although his fad is far more sophisticated
than all the cat pictures, holiday postcards
and copyshop coffee mugs with “The Boss” printed
on them that you usually come across. These are the
little touches dreamed up by office workers to fight
the uniformity of their workplaces – so as to escape
the surrounding dreariness and uninspired monotony,
and to diversify their environment with a whiff of
individuality. You can’t hold it against them.
“A noble heart will soon find its way home; it creates,
in still endeavour, its world for itself ”, as Friedrich
Schiller once wrote in his play “Homage of the Arts”.
To be exact, he placed these words in the mouth of
his protagonist Genius. And Genius knows what he’s
talking about. Creating one’s own world has always
been one of humankind’s fundamental needs down
to the present day – whether at home, at work or at
play. And it’s all the more important for employers to
recognise this desire, this urge, and create the necessary
scope to accommodate self-expression.
What may not always be desirable in the traditional
style of office, if tacitly tolerated in most cases,
confronts office designers in times of flexible and
decentralised work with entirely new challenges.
How can you give a place a personal touch if you
change it every day, populate it for only a few hours
a day before vanishing into work-at-home limbo or
orbiting into cyberspace, where you dematerialise all
material settings at the touch of a button? The good
news: you can. Perhaps not with holiday photos,
© Florian Albert
Wojciech Czaja (44) is a
journalist, author and
moderator in the fields of
architecture and urban
culture. He teaches communication
and urban development
at the Vienna University of
Applied Arts and at the
University of Arts Linz.
picture postcards and conference badges, but all the
more with individualised, adapted applications on
the hardware and software level. Like our iPhones,
personalised through colourful silicon cases, coloured
charging cables and optional lock screens and wallpapers,
we can also individualise work islands and
harmonise them with personal needs.
Adolf Loos construes an analogy in his work “Ornament
and Crime” that signally informed the history
of architecture in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, but we must vehemently contradict this
precept in our age of digitisation and New Work
culture. Besides the self-evident aspects of comfort,
concentration and corporate identity, offices also
need beauty, decoration and perhaps even a little
© freepik
kitsch and bits and bobs, whether on the pin wall, the
office trolley or the desktop.
There’s nothing worse than a decoration veto issued
from above. And when your coworkers fight for their
personal trifles and out of pure desperation bring
granny’s ancient aspidistras with hydroculture granules
into the office you, dear employer, shouldn’t fight
the symptom but should scout around for the cause.
My Markus is still into collecting. Simply brilliant.
Wojciech Czaja
© freepik
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