Anything can be revoked at any time, changed and if you are not currently online, your mistake. In this respect, designers are a real and unexpected avant-garde.
Work and rooms
Rooms
Only recently, after many years, did I remember that strange feeling when I entered the living room as a child. In the parents' room and TV. We were an ordinary family, in the seventies and eighties, together with our father's mother in a house in Prague's Kačerov, then for many years in a block of flats in Jižní Město. Our upbringing was by no means authoritarian, and as the youngest of three siblings, I grew up without her. Despite all this, the boundaries on every threshold were obvious, so the rooms had a different atmosphere, so we felt differently in them. What a closed door meant. When and where we knocked, where we didn't. Occupied bathroom. Naked parents. Taboo. Sure, children's sensitivity is incommensurable with an adult, but I also remember how unsuccessfully we protected each other's status in our children's room.
At the same time, each room was clearly arranged, recognizable at first glance. Every thing, a piece of furniture, its wear, order and clutter, or specific dirt testified to its function and occupants. It was inconceivable to close the room with lunch or write schoolwork in the kitchen. With our growing up, the 1990s slowly dissolved most borders. In the center of the apartment became a hall with a telephone, a brother's room with a computer and later with the internet. During the week we saw the kitchen with the fridge mostly at night, they just walked through the living room, but from Friday evening, when the parents left for the cottage, the whole apartment became our apartment. We enjoyed sleeping in their beds, drinking red wine with cola, eating potato chips, and watching TV all night, or playing computer games.
Today, our two small children completely took over the apartment. Their existing children's room is a room without a clear layout, without a door. Here they only (sometimes) fall asleep and wake up to further expansions. He doesn't spend more time here. Otherwise, they are at home in literally every room, in every situation. Their room, along with toys, books and clothes, is actually in the whole apartment and at the same time nowhere. They easily inhabit every corner, a piece of furniture, they draw any object into their games. The furnishing of the apartment is like liquid sand, moving through space. The appearance of our library (years of books thrown into the chimneys under the stairs) captures the presence, the space was conquered by new barbarians, the experience with the doubts of previous generations awaits its fate in an improvised warehouse.
How much has our privacy changed in those twenty-thirty years? Where did the need to shape and clearly structure one's own apartment disappear, what did it come from? What is our idea of your apartment today?
Work
If I remember correctly, there was perhaps not a single hint of their job in the parents' apartment, their job or place for it. Also, when they returned home from work, after a few sentences, as if it had ceased to exist or did not exist at all. No visible worries or joys, at least for us children. It was obvious and probably annoying that there was no need to talk about it. Just like school. This could be understood well. Today, I can't even imagine their feeling of a clean head at the time after returning from work. It really was, didn't it just seem easy to us kids? In our current flexible working and liberal professions, we basically work constantly, anytime, anywhere. The moments and boundaries of private life have dissipated. The ability to define it itself vanished. It probably requires a bit of courage, confidence, basic security and activity, privacy still needs to be built . Otherwise, returning from work means only a momentary outage and a change of connection. What good would room do us? Privacy with emails, a mobile phone and flexible working hours is just where you fall asleep; office, bedroom corner, kitchen table, children's room or storage room. In a sense, the concept of open space has moved from the offices to our privacy.
The designers also work not only in studios, studios and advertising agencies, but also at home in the kitchenette or with a laptop in a cafe. This possibility is mentioned today as a positive, an expression of freedom and a benefit of new technologies. It also has its downside, which is difficult to resist. Our spatial independence is conditioned by connecting and sharing our work essentially online. The loss of distance is reflected not only in the position of the designer, but also in his work. Deadlines are being shortened, pressure is increasing, work is being fragmented, and several projects are being addressed at the same time. The work, which he previously presented in person as a whole, is usually sent online today, and the proposals thus become endlessly and usually unconceptually commented parts and versions. The motivation of the designer then becomes only the final approval, which is then usually revoked several more times. It is fascinating how the last pinch of security, working, artistic, financial or social, has quietly disappeared from this ever-expanding modus vivendi . It resembles more online currency speculation than anything else. Anything can be revoked at any time, changed and if you are not currently online, your mistake. In this respect, designers are a real and unexpected avant-garde. Then try to close behind you for a while. There is no such door anymore.
A2 , 2012
Children's room, 1930s (archive Šantavý)
Home office, present (flickr.com)