A Finished Room Is A Finished Argument

The room I am writing this in is not designed.

It's the living room. I took the whole thing - desk, screens, tripod, boxes against the far wall - because the light is the best in the apartment. Windows on both sides, morning sun on one, afternoon on the other, which is also why it overheats so fast we had to put aircon in to keep the screens from baking. The dogs sleep in the adjacent foyer, what we call the marble palace, on account of the marble and on account of the dogs. They are two Bali street dogs we brought over when we left, now living a life of small unearned luxury. We came to Taiwan from Bali as a stopover. It turned into the apartment I do all my best work in, and it is the worst-designed room in the place.

The pattern is old. Le Corbusier - who drew the Plan Voisin to flatten central Paris and replace it with eighteen cruciform towers - chose to spend his summers in a sixteen-square-metre wooden hut at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. He drew it on a restaurant table at the end of 1951, in forty-five minutes by his own account, every dimension derived from his Modulor proportional system. One bed, one table, one window onto the Mediterranean. He died swimming in the bay below it in 1965. The hut is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which is funnier than it sounds.

The reason this repeats is structural. The room you design from scratch is a room you've already finished thinking in. Every decision is made, every surface resolved. It's a closed problem. The room you actually think in has to be open - slightly wrong, slightly under-resourced - because the friction is part of how the work happens. A perfect studio is a finished argument. You can't argue inside a finished argument.

There is one good angle in this room. I point the camera at it. The rest is where the work happens. The two-square-metre version is the version most people see; the other twenty are the studio.

If you are setting up the room you'll do your best work in, the trap is thinking it has to be finished. It doesn't. It has to be available.

Le Corbusier had sixteen square metres and the sea. I have a living room and two dogs in the marble palace next door.

Reply and tell me where you actually do your best work. Not where you'd like to. Where you do.

See you next week,
Danny