Perpetual Noon: Fluorescent Lighting and the Modern Office more

02 Dean’s Letter 03 Editor’s Introduction 06 Margaret Maile _Perpetual Noon: Fluorescent Lighting and the Modern Office 16 Nina Rappaport _The Vertical Urban Factory 24 Kent Kleinman _Valuable. Return to Albert Kahn 40 Natalie Fizer and Glenn Forley _Tailoring Form: A Brief Look at the Anonymous History of the Template 54 Ed May _Design and the Elastic Mind SCAPES 7 FALL 2008 SCHOOL OF CONSTRUCTED ENVIRONMENTS PARSONS THE NEW SCHOOL FOR DESIGN 58 Franca Trubiano _Team 10 and Richard Rogers: Paris + Protest 40 Years Later SCAPES 7 FALL 2008 02 Dean’s Letter 03 Editor’s Introduction SCHOOL OF CONSTRUCTED ENVIRONMENTS PARSONS THE NEW SCHOOL FOR DESIGN 06 Margaret Maile _Perpetual Noon: Fluorescent Lighting and the Modern Office 16 Nina Rappaport _The Vertical Urban Factory 24 Kent Kleinman _Valuable. Return to Albert Kahn This issue of Scapes was edited by Joanna Merwood-Salisbury. Scapes 7 was designed by Lisa Maione. Thanks to Jeremy Jansen and Richard Petrucci. Typefaces used are Arnhem Blond and Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk. Correspondence may be sent to Scapes, c/o School of Constructed Environments, Parsons The New School for Design, 66 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10011. 40 Natalie Fizer and Glenn Forley _Tailoring Form: A Brief Look at the Anonymous History of the Template 54 Ed May _Design and the Elastic Mind 58 Franca Trubiano _Team 10 and Richard Rogers: Paris + Protest 40 Years Later www.parsons.edu/sce SCAPE S 7 5 SCAPE S 7 4 “This life life? What a joke. This situation this room. . . You look terrible Mr. Waturi. You look like a bag of shit stuffed in a cheap suit. Not that anyone could look good under these zombie lights. I can feel them sucking the juice out of my eyeballs. Suck, suck, suck…These lights give me a headache. If these lights don’t give you a headache than you must be dead, so let’s arrange the funeral.” From the scene “Joe Quits,” in Joe Versus the Volcano, 19901 SCAPE S 7 6 Perpetual Noon: Fluorescent Lighting and the Modern Office Margaret Maile Fig. 1 The heavy Victorian aesthetic of this turn-of-the-century office reveals the close connection between the organization and decoration of the domestic and office environments during this period. F.G. Day Compiling Company, Glenwood, Iowa, undated. Courtesy Wittemann Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress SCAPE S 7 3 4 7 5 Fig. 1 6 2 7 1 — Joe Versus the Volcano, written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, 1990, produced by Amblin Entertainment; Warner Bros. Pictures. 2 — Joe Versus the Volcano. 3 — Donald Albrecht, “Introduction,” in On the Job: Design and the American Office (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 17. 4 — In the early twentieth century there was some focused discussion within architectural and design communities about the role of light as an architectural “material” or form giver. This discourse was most highly developed in Weimar Germany in the debates surrounding lichtreklame and lichtarchitektur. However, after the Second World War this discussion largely was abandoned. See Werner Oeschslin, “The Architecture of Light,” Lotus International no.75 (1993), 8-29 and Dietrich Neumann, “Lichtarchitektur and the Avant-Garde,” in Architecture of the Night: The Illuminated Building (Berlin: Prestel, 2002), 36-53. 5 — Albrecht, 19. 6 — Charles Rice, “Rethinking Histories of the Interior,” The Journal of Architecture vol.9 (Autumn 2004), 275–287. 7 — For a historical overview of the modern office, see Élisabeth PelégrinGenel, The Office (Paris; New York: Flammarion, 1996), 9-30. SCAPE S 7 8 Fig. 2 The reliance on daylight and natural ventilation is evident in this early twentieth-century office. Large exterior windows allow maximum daylight into the interior of the office, while internal operable transom windows provide natural cross ventilation. Notice also the privacy afforded the individual worker by the semi-enclosed desk. Early twentieth-century American shipping company office, undated. Courtesy of the Bettman Archive SCAPE S 7 Fig. 2 12 9 Perpetual Noon: Fluorescent Lighting and the Modern Office Margaret Maile 13 Fig. 3 The organization of equipment, furniture and workers in Sears and Roebuck’s order entry department into a kind of stationary assembly line illustrates the radical effects of scientific management in the early twentieth-century white-collar work place. Order entry department at Sears, Roebuck and Company, Chicago, Illinois c.1913. Courtesy Sears, Roebuck and National Museum of American History Fig. 4 King Vidor’s 1928 silent classic, The Crowd, critiques the dehumanizing conditions of the city as well as the rationalization of the modern workplace. The Crowd, 1928. Directed by King Vidor. Courtesy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. All rights reserved 8 Fig. 4 10 14 Fig. 3 11 15 16 9 8 — Albrecht, 18. 9 — On the history of the “vernacular period” of skyscraper design in New York City and Chicago see, Carol Willis, Form Follows Finance: Skylines and Skyscrapers in New York and Chicago (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995). 10 — Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911). 11 — The typewriter itself is a significant example of the influence of standardization in the modern office. After the introduction and popularization of the electric typewriter, many other aspects of clerical production were standardized —letter paper took on a precise format, as did envelopes, mail trays, folders, files, filing cabinets and so on. For more on the standardization of office equipment, see Pelégrin-Genel, 36-38. 12 — The Modern Efficiency Desk, developed in 1915 for the Equitable Assurance Company, is a physical manifestation of the ideals of scientific management, and in particular notions of worker surveillance. Primarily a low table with shallow drawers, the Modern Efficiency Desk allowed managers to easily survey a room of workers and their work. Albrecht, 22. 13 — In his cultural history of street lighting Wolfgang Schivelbusch suggests that, “Surveillance and light, visibility and control: these pairs compliment each other, as much as crime/conspiracy and darkness/night are paired in myth and psychology.” See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, “The Policing of Street Lighting,” Yale French Studies no.73, Everyday Life (1987), 61-74. 14 — David Lyon, The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 123-4. 15 — Throughout the history of the modern office, many sociologists and efficiency experts argued that light levels in the workplace might have a direct effect on the productivity of workers. For example the famous Hawthorne Works study of 1924 was conducted to measure the effects of increased and decreased illumination in the workplace on productivity levels. It was eventually discovered that worker knowledge of being tested had more of an impact on productivity than any change in light levels. However, many researchers have returned to this question of the relationship between light levels and productivity. Current research indicates that significant gains in worker productivity can be achieved if workers are given access to daylight and views. On the Hawthorne experiments see, Richard Pearson Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Regarding contemporary research into daylight and increased worker productivity see, Heschong Mahone Group, “Windows and Offices: a Study of Worker Performance and the Indoor Environment,” for the California Energy Commission (2003). 16 — Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Readings in Social Theory: The Classic Tradition to Post-Modernism, 3d ed., edited by James Farganis (New York: McGraw Hill, 2000), 149-157. SCAPE S 7 10 Perpetual Noon: Fluorescent Lighting and the Modern Office Margaret Maile Fig. 5 The inclusion of luminous ceilings, as employed in the executive offices of the Seagram Building, provided a uniform field of ambient light as well as cleanly organizing the visual appearance to the horizontal ceiling plane in the midcentury corporate office environment. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, Seagram Building, New York, 1958. Photograph by Ezra Stoller ©Esto Fig. 6 The cool diffuse, shadowless fluorescent lighting of the post-war era unified the great expanses of the whitecollar workplace. The round-the-clock abundance of fluorescent lighting in combination with powerful HVAC systems resulted in environments of total artificial suspension. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, typical office floor, Union Carbide Building, New York, 1960. Photograph by Ezra Stoller ©Esto Fig. 7 (opposite, top) Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Connecticut General Headquarters, Bloomfield, Connecticut, 1957. Photograph © Peter Mauss/Esto 17 SCAPE S 7 11 17 — James S. Russell, “Form Follows Fad: The Troubled Love Affair of Architectural Style and Management Ideal,” in On the Job: Design and the American Office (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 48-73. SCAPE S 7 SCAPE S 7 19 Figs. 6, 7 Fig. 5 12 Perpetual Noon: Fluorescent Lighting and the Modern Office Margaret Maile 13 Fig. 8 20 Fig. 8 In Billy Wilder’s dark comedy The Apartment, the protagonist played by Jack Lemmon acquiesces to a series of ethically compromised agreements in the hopes that he might escape the dehumanizing office pool, with its endless rows of orderly desks under a glowing sea of fluorescent lamps. Photographic still from The Apartment, 1960. Directed by Billy Wilder. BFI stills 21 18 Fig. 9 23 Union Carbide’s structural system, its fenestration, its luminous plastic ceiling panels, its metal partitions, its filing cabinets, and its desks all these were ordered by a single module of thirty inches. It may once have occurred to the designers that only sixty-inch-tall workers should be employed, but some exceptions to the module were finally allowed.22 18 — A survey of some of the many articles praising the technological advancements of the Seagram Building’s architecture and building systems, reveals the broad cultural interest and architectural pride in such iconic modern office towers. See for example, “The Seagram Building,” Arts and Architecture vol.77 (January 1960), 14-15; William H. Jordy, “Seagram Assessed,” Architectural Review vol. 124 (December 1958), 374-8; Building is Designer’s Testament,” New York Times (10 November 1957), Section 8, 1, 8; “Seagram’s Bronze Tower;” Architectural Forum vol. 109 (July 1958), 67-71. 19 — The prolific mid-century architectural lighting designer Richard Kelly, in collaboration with Philip Johnson, conceptualized Seagram’s luminous ceiling, which was realized with technical consultation and development from Lightolier’s principle engineer in this period, Noel Florence. See, Margaret Maile Petty, “Illuminating the Glass Box: Architectural Lighting Design and the Performance of Modern Architecture in Post-war America,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians vol. 66, no. 2 (June 2007), 194-219. 20 — Robert Bruegmann, Modernism at Mid-Century: The Architecture of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 55. 21 — Jüreng Joedicke, Office Buildings (NY: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962), 136. 22 — Stanley Abercrombie, “Office Supplies: Evolving Furniture for the Evolving Workplace” in On the Job, 81-97, 89. Fig. 9 Plan by Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnell (Quickborner Team) for Eastman Kodak, Rochester, New York, 1967. From John Pile, Open Office Planning (London: The Architectural Press, LTD, 1978), 163. Fig. 10 23 — John Pile, Open Office Planning (London: The Architectural Press, LTD, 1978). The organizational, and therefore also the architectural, tasks of the office design can easily be represented by an electric circuiting diagram: While keeping the voltage as steady as possible, working impulses introduced into a widely ramified network are required to lead, as directly as possible, to a productive power output. . . For a long time already, this model concept has been adopted in practice on the basis of careful studies: Efficiency experts organize the flow of papers; suitable office furniture and equipment of all kinds serve to eliminate more and more of the “resistances.”24 SCAPE S 7 14 Perpetual Noon: Fluorescent Lighting and the Modern Office Margaret Maile SCAPE S 7 15 27 25 28 Fig. 10 German bothers Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnell, of the Quickborner Team, developed a radical approach to office layout organized in the later 1960s, which followed patterns of communication, rather than notions of regularization or power hierarchies. Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnell (Quickborner Team) with Walter Scholer and Associates, Administrative Services Building Offices for Purdue University, Indiana, 1970. From John Pile, Open Office Planning (London: The Architectural Press, LTD, 1978), 163. 26 29 24 — Reinhold Hohl, Office Buildings: An International Survey (New York: Frederick A. Prager, 1968), 2. 25 — Pile, 29-32. 26 — Pile, 120-121. 27 — Pile, 125. 28 — Steve Lohr, “At Google, Cube Culture has New Rules,” New York Times (5 December 2005), 8; and Jade Chang, “Behind the Glass Curtain,” Metropolis Magazine vol. 25, no.11 (July 2006), 136-147, 178-179. 29 — Heschong Mahone Group, “Windows and Offices: a Study of Worker Performance and the Indoor Environment,” for the California Energy Commission (2003); Tove Fjeld and Charite Bonnevie, “The Effect of Plants and Artificial Daylight on the Well-Being and Health of Office Workers, School Children and Health Care Personnel,” Floriade, Norway (2002); Joel Loveland, “Daylighting and Sustainablity”, 2, Design+Construction vol. 5, no.5 (September/October 2002), 28-33.