Office decoration – aesthetic horror or emotional necessity? Our author Wojciech Czaja remembers his own years spent in an open-space 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 plastic-coated 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 check-in, 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, 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 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
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.
© freepik; Florian Albert