Live/Work
At work, you don’t usually get to choose where you sit, but at home it’s a different story. Dwell asked designer Bill Stumpf, whose ergonomically sound chairs make overtime okay, to review five desks.
At the time of this writing, Bill Stumpf can be found in one of his favorite places, sitting at his desk working on a manuscript in the home office he keeps in Stockholm, a small town in western Wisconsin’s hilly Coulee Region. For Stumpf, writing is “serious mind work”—a task he considers, in this day and age, better accomplished at home than at the office. Speaking in a rambling first-draft stream of consciousness, he elaborates, “You can take your shoes off. You can dress any way you want. You can have one hand on your dog. You can optimize the place to work and concentrate. I just got fed up with working in an institutional environment—including my own office.”
A seasoned designer whose distinguished tenure for Herman Miller has resulted in the award-winning Ergon, Equa, and dot-com-synonymous/simply ubiquitous Aeron chairs (with Don Chadwick), Stumpf not only knows enough about offices to be authoritative in their dismissal, he knows a lot about everything. Having previously authored The Ice Palace That Melted Away: Restoring Civility and Other Lost Virtues to Everyday Life, Stumpf’s current manuscript concerns what he calls “the arts of daily living”—a maddeningly broad topic that he approaches with both wizardly acumen and childlike curiosity. In our brief hour-long conversation, Stumpf’s mind raced from his Swiss grandfather’s study to IBM cubicles to beds that rock adults to sleep to an Eames Aluminum Group chair being unearthed in a trash heap of the future to Julia Child’s kitchen to America’s lack of educational programs in design research.
The maelstrom of anecdotes, history, and philosophy is Stumpf’s response to focusing his wide-angled attention on desks—that piece of furniture on the other side of his task chairs. Stumpf asserts that one of the biggest problems in office-furniture design is that while manufacturers regularly produce both desks and chairs, they are rarely conceived by the same designer in tandem. Another frustration, Stumpf says, is that “the serious tools you’ll find in an institutional environment are hard to come by in home offices.” Lamenting the furniture selection in office supply stores, he continues, “If the amount of money being spent on commercial equipment in home kitchens were being spent for use on home offices, you’d see a much higher quality of design.”
At the same time Stumpf remains aloof: “I’m not sure there is a direct correlation between a piece of furniture and productivity.” He adds, “I’m sure Herman Miller wouldn’t want to hear me say that.”
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Kant
Expert Opinion: You can’t really rank these things, but this one is the best to me. It has a Gerrit Rietveld kind of excitement to it. It looks good without anything on it and would look good with stuff too. A design has to embrace the idea of human complexity. In our suburbs the metaphors of design are early American, not modern, but a modern piece can transcend that problem. A Noguchi table can fit in any interior, and this desk could too.
What We Think: When we first saw the Kant series at the 2004 Cologne furniture fair, we were immediately drawn to its simple and adaptable design. Having a desk where the clutter tends to shift to the rear and pile up, the V-shaped notch seems like the perfect organizational solution.
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Eileen
Expert Opinion: I like this one because I think it might be expensive. I know I sound like a heretic, but I would like to encourage Americans to think more seriously about and cherish their furniture more than they do. It’s always called high-end, but I see more durability and better material use. It’s like buying a decent pair of shoes. The idea of designing something that can be handed down from one generation to another is, I think, less environmentally consumptive than the recycling process.
What We Think: While many desks these days are little more than glorified workbenches, this design, especially in Russian leather, takes a step toward the elegant and tactile qualities of an antique. We might even be inspired to write more letters, while keeping the desktop pristinely clear.
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Contours
Expert Opinion: To me this is neither here nor there. The design is very clean, but it doesn’t speak to me of anything that I haven’t seen 100 times before. I believe in advancing the arts of daily living, and design should tag along behind that. I think the notion that all our nerve bundles are tied to our eyes is really stupid. I know the visual arts are an important thing, but to me design is a much more layered process. Things that look simple can have a depth to them that goes beyond one’s eyeballs.
What We Think: Given that the surface of our desk rarely sees the light of day, we appreciate the fact that this design provides a cubby slightly below to stow most of our junk. We agree with Stumpf in that the design isn’t aesthetically revolutionary, but the sturdiness and quality of the materials make up for it.
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Motiv
Expert Opinion: I don’t know about this one—not because I’m too rich to buy something at IKEA, but there’s something in the use of materials that reduces the importance of objects. I would rather have a very simple Shaker desk out of solid wood versus any veneered material—something I could resand and refinish. Something my great-grandson might use.
What We Think: While Stumpf is right in thinking that we wouldn’t exactly hand this down to the next generation, for modernists on a budget, it sure beats what you’d find at OfficeMax. We like the large surface to spread our materials on, but the rear hatches are unaccommodating for anything other than a laptop computer (even our super-thin flat-screen monitor couldn’t find a home).
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Lucy
Expert Opinion: There’s a utility to Holbrook’s solution—he’s the only one here using space above the desk, which is a useful thing. I could see a coat hanging on it. It might engage clutter more easily—which is a good thing. Maybe I shouldn’t criticize it so harshly for being derivative in form, but that swagged leg has been done before. There’s a moral obligation to be more creative than that. A lot of stuff today looks like George Nelson designed it.
What We Think: Perhaps being in the western half of the country makes us inclined to spread out horizontally, but Holbrook encourages us to think vertically—which is perfect for more cramped quarters (like an East Village studio). We’re not thrilled by the aesthetics, but the “hollow-body” surface is both lightweight and, thanks to those swagged legs, sturdy.
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very nice design.
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