Stills

Well, you'd struggle to get the 30 inch cinema display and the raid storage into this workstation.

Very much my sort of point of view.

Presumably a shot in a museum. Tell us more.
 

Doug, I try never to think of cube-land lest I get depressed, but I can see how you could get there from here.

This is the phone-station of the Meyer May house in Grand Rapids, MI: http://www.steelcase.com/na/meyer_may_house_ourcompany.aspx?f=18708
The house was Frank Lloyd Wright's last prairie style house.

This little nook is on the landing up to the second floor. The dark space at the bottom of the frame is a little opening that looks out on the first floor. It looked exactly like the kind of place a kid up past their bedtime would sit to watch the late night doings of the adults.

The house is nearly a museum, but it is used regularly for corporate dinners etc. The light and sense of scale of the place are great.

Even if you could get the cinema display in here, the light pouring in the window over your shoulder would make it impossible to use.
 

A split-second image on opening up was of the back of a removals lorry - soon corrected. I then idly toyed with the idea that maybe some member of your family had a house with a specially built space for the desk. Phone station - that's a concept before even my time. How very different then: the phone was to be, if not hidden away, then at least not part of the normal way of life (allowing for the design giving privacy). Now the mobile is to hand all day long.

It's an interesting vantage point although the fact that the photo is not totally squared off is a pity as one expects that to be part of the geometrical presentation. But on the plus side one does get a feel of how unusual the space is.

The house in the link is very impressive.
 

John, regarding the phone station, I have a secretary from about this time period that was my grandfather's. The finish is worn off in one spot where the phone was kept. This desk made me think of that; a place to hide the phone away.

About the geometry, I have to admit I was a bit disappointed when this didn't come out all square. The slightly off-kilter placement of the desk in the nook is partly to blame, but the rest is my own sloppiness. I was slightly feverish this day, so many shots are slightly out of whack. I decide the shot was interesting enough to overcome the distorted geometry, and that perhaps it even added to the interest.
 

The convergence of this image is very powerful, the orthogonals draw me down to the desk with its own 'desk' furniture.

I too am a bit anal about 'squareness' and would have composed this to adhere to the right angle and the periphery of the image. Having said that I am comfortable viewing this image and do not have a desire to 'square' it all up, well unless you'd like me to?
 

For the sake of honesty I'd like to admit to being on my second glass of sherry!
 

I don't think that it adds to the interest (lack of squareness that is) but it is just an itch (in this particular picture - I'm not obsessed by needing squareness on principle). I noted that the desk itself is slightly out and wondered whether that then might negate any attempts to square off but think that the desk's jiggle would not be nearly as much of an itch as the overall squareness - indeed, that would possibly add to the interest (if all that makes sense).

The phone is indeed an important invention: I came across a senior (and elderly) civil servant in Whitehall in the mid-'90s, who was still overcome by the invention of the telephone - as the meeting was about introducing an IT system he was totally out of his depth technologically!!!
 

I've been following the 'squareness' comments with interest - mostly because I suppressed a similar comment myself having decided that my 'gut feel' that this picture should be square was not supported by anything. I also reassured myself that as the black line underneath the chair was (very nearly) square, I could at least anchor my viewing on that line and let everything else hang from it.

I think that when I view a real subject, my mind makes up a squareness that isn't there. I mean, I'm almost never going to be seeing it really square, am I?

With a camera, I'm hopeless at remembering that I have to square the camera in all three planes if I want the resulting picture to be square. Most often I pivot the camera on the point of contact of the viewfinder with my glasses such that the right (starboard) edge is further from the subject than the left.

With this image, I think I might have squared off that black line, but left the rest in its natural state.
 

Rex, it would take significantly more than 2 glasses of sherry to square this image up. I tried to square it the other night after large gin and tonic, but I couldn't get anywhere with it.

Eh, perhaps we could view the lack of squareness as commentary of Wright's notoriously bad engineering? Maybe? Work with me here. ;-)
 

Hmm -- interesting. I did not have any big issue with squareness when I opened this, perhaps in part because the desk is not in there squarely in the first place, and as Colin mentioned, it is square with the line from the carpet. (also the pen holder on top -- or at least close enough).

I like it. It has a rather intimate feeling to me. I can easily imagine someone sitting there writing a note, reading a letter, or talking on that old phone.

I very much like the inclusion of the pattern on the carpet, which is very "Wright-like", so offers a clue about the photo.
 

FLW - I really need to get more involved with him as he has a number of fine houses dotted around Japan.

But back to the job in hand...

... this works because of a vanishing point that isn't there. Everything leads me to that 'empty' desk. I have phone, pens, knife and other equipment to hand yet nothing is on the empty place of 'work'.

I live in Japan. I've given up on making anything appear square. My recent post I actually had to measure using a ruler to convince myself that the horizontal of the sign was parallel to the top edge. Those arrows top rightish give me a sense of perpendicular. All the other geometries conspire (enhance?) to give me enough displeasure in the scene to relate to my own work environment.

The chair is rather ominous with its shadow as is the deliberate angle of the paper knife.

This works out rather well. Visually it is stimulating. Object wise it is upsetting. Personally it is inspiring. There is also just enough of a gap top left for me to escape which works well again with the angle of the knife.

Square on this would be flat. As shown it opens many emotions to explore - assuming like me you are a daytime cubicle dweller...
 

One further slightly related comment with respect to rotary dial phones. On a recent Japanese TV programme a young girl (5 years old or so) queried as to how she was expected to make a phone call using such a device. She was in some rural part of the country and needed to phone her grandparents and the public phone had a rotary dial. The older presenter who was with her had a hard time explaining how to use such a device let alone convincing her that it would work...
 

Guy, I think you would enjoy touring some of Wright's houses. The quality of light, the sense of space and the geometry of them are quite something. Much like this little nook I've shown, they are often imperfect, but there is a living beauty to them that many architects can't match.