Petra Seitz | University College London (original) (raw)

Papers by Petra Seitz

Networking Knowledge, 2023

Taking up the MeCCSA 2021 conference theme 'Dreaming of another place', this article investigates... more Taking up the MeCCSA 2021 conference theme 'Dreaming of another place', this article investigates the dream of, and path toward, a better, more humane, and more dignified office. Driven by Harry Braverman's assertions regarding the centrality of control over the labour process to the continued success of capitalism (Labor and Monopoly Capital, 1974), this article situates the office as a place and space defined by the necessities of global capital. Looking forward to a better place, this article suggests a regime of vertically integrated unionisation of those involved in the creation and use of office spaces (designers, architects, builders and office occupants) as a way to insert the needs and wants of all workers in a process previously held by capital. By uniting the voices, creativity and interests of all working people involved in the creation of office spaces, perpetual issues such as lack of personal privacy, minimal daylight, limited natural air and cramped, noisy conditions can be addressed at their source, and the dream of a better office brought to fruition.

Pandemic Perspectives: Reflections on a Post-Covid World, 2022

Over the course of the coronavirus crisis, substantially increased attention has been paid to the... more Over the course of the coronavirus crisis, substantially increased attention has been paid to the space of the commercial office. Much of this renewed attention has focused on potential futures of offices, suggesting that as the pandemic subsides, home-working will remain and companies will rapidly shed physical assets in city centres.

This article explores how the demise of the physical space of the office as a discrete category may have been overstated, and how the foundational role office spaces play vis-à-vis white-collar work may continue into the post-Covid world.

Starting with a brief history of the designed space of this office, this article explores three concepts neglected by many in their attempts to forecast office futures: 1) the historic resiliency of office spaces in the face of technological and social change, 2) the immense diversity of commercial office spaces and office workers, and 3) the role of physical office space in the capitalist labour process.

Art Crime in Context, 2022

This chapter explores art crime in the context of design. Arguing that design is a discrete categ... more This chapter explores art crime in the context of design. Arguing that design is a discrete category, distinct from either fine art or antiquities, this chapter suggests that placement of mass-manufactured design objects within markets set up for art or archaeological material poses unique practical, conceptual, and moral questions and complications. This chapter explores and demonstrates these problematics through the specific context of the modernist furniture of Chandigarh, India.

This dissertation examines the evolution in appearance and meaning of the bomb-damaged Victoria a... more This dissertation examines the evolution in appearance and meaning of the bomb-damaged Victoria and Albert Museum Exhibition Road façade. It tracks and analyzes changes made to the site between its initial damaging in 1941 through its current appearance in 2019. Drawing upon conceptual frameworks of memory work and banal nationalism from James E. Young and Michael Billig, this dissertation argues that through the implementation of various design elements the V&A’s site of bomb damage takes a heritage-based approach to crafting a narrative of the Second World War.

Drafts by Petra Seitz

Talks by Petra Seitz

Workshop: Perspectives on Uses and Users in the History of Office Buildings, 2023

Introduced to the market in 1967, Herman Miller’s Action Office II system promised to revolutioni... more Introduced to the market in 1967, Herman Miller’s Action Office II system promised to revolutionize the office furniture and office architecture industries by adding humanity, flexibility, and integrating sophisticated technology into spaces previously ignored by architects and designers. Such optimism, however, was not to last long. Twenty-five years after the system’s launch, Action Office was widely understood as the progenitor of the dreaded, dreary, uniform, and inflexible cubicle style of office interior.

How can this discontinuity between the well-meaning intention of Action Office and the negative spatial realities the system eventually brought about be understood? To date, the literature has suggested that the transformation of Action Office into the cubicle occurred after the system’s widespread adoption; that the cubicle’s most hated features came about as the result of individual bad actors (corporations and managers), and fault in this process lies outside of Herman Miller’s walls.

This paper proposes an alternative understanding of the evolution of Action Office. Through mobilization of Marxist Labor process theory and an interrogation of labor relations within Herman Miller itself, this paper suggests that the cubicleization of Action Office can be understood as a natural progression of understanding of labor within Herman Miller, within the company’s understandings of and attitudes toward work, labor processes, and labor relations.

Examining Herman Miller’s corporate ethos toward labor and work through archival research and examination of the company’s Scanlon (profit-sharing) plan, the paper outlines the idealistic and simplistic attitudes taken toward labor at the company, mapping these attitudes and understandings onto the physical reality of the office furniture systems the company designed.
Broadly, this paper argues that office spaces, places designed explicitly around work tasks, cannot be understood without simultaneous exploration of work and labor – both in terms of the particular corporate conceptions of labor and of the reality of work within and under capitalism.

Introduced to the market in 1967, Action Office II promised to revolutionize the office furniture... more Introduced to the market in 1967, Action Office II promised to revolutionize the office furniture and office architecture industries by adding humanity, flexibility, and integrating sophisticated technology into spaces previously ignored by architects and designers. Twenty-five years after its launch, however, Action Office was widely understood as the progenitor of the dreary, uniform, and inflexible cubicle system appearing in office spaces worldwide.

This paper bridges the well-meaning intention of Action Office with the negative spatial realities the system brought about. This paper positions Herman Miller’s flagship Action Office furniture system within contemporary political and ideological frameworks, suggesting that these frameworks and understandings paved the way for later metamorphosis of the well-intentioned system into the basis for the much-maligned office cubicle.

This paper proposes that Herman Miller’s rosy outlook toward labor relations, the nature of capitalism, and the company’s understanding and implementation of research, testing, and proof lead to the design of an office furniture system which did not anticipate divergent needs and expectations of employees and employers. In not considering this disconnect and friction between employee and employer, Herman Miller was unable to design a system for the true way power and control play out in workplaces, ultimately resulting in the evolution from Action Office to the cubicle.

Drawing upon primary materials from the Herman Miller archives including internal memos, lectures, newsletters and promotional materials, this paper maps the research, design and promotional process of Action Office against the broader contours of Theory Y understandings of work and workplaces. This novel approach allows for exploration both of Action Office as a discrete piece of design and of, but also the relationship of this particular office design system to larger political trends and ideologies popular at the time.

SAH Historic Interiors Group Digital Interiors: Emerging Scholars Symposium, 2022

The initial months of the Coronavirus crisis coincided with the start of a collaborative research... more The initial months of the Coronavirus crisis coincided with the start of a collaborative research project surrounding modernist furniture designed for the city of Chandigarh, India.

As research on this project began to ramp up, borders around the world began to close, taking with them the possibility of first-hand, primary research in Chandigarh itself. After exhausting all accessible secondary material, with a growing interest in the objects of study, research on this project pivoted online, exploring digital materials available on Chandigarh’s chairs, tables, benches, day beds, lighting, and even manhole covers.

This digital turn led to the establishment of a digital database of auction listings for Chandigarh’s modernist furniture, collating descriptions, titiles, measurements, images, attributions, provenances and bibliographies for over 1,500 auction lots, many comprising multiple pieces of furniture.

The resulting database (a version of which is publicly accessible on the Chandigarh Chairs website) has facilitated in-depth study not just of the themselves, but has also begun to shed light on the systems and processes in place regarding the extraction and re-sale of these items.

As discussed in an upcoming chapter in Springer’s Studies in Art, Heritage, Law and the Market series, although digital data collection has been utilized by specialists in art crime and antiquities, compilation and analysis of auction data has yet to be deployed on a significant scale in the fields of Design and Interior Design history.

This talk details the establishment of the Chandigarh Chairs auction database, and highlights the potential such digital research and information gathering have for the study of objects of interior design and architecture, particularly regarding their contemporary movement and use.

Talk presented to SPA Bhopal Students in the Spring of 2022 summarizing the Chandigarh Chairs pro... more Talk presented to SPA Bhopal Students in the Spring of 2022 summarizing the Chandigarh Chairs project and provocation on the importance of design history to design practice - on why looking back and engaging critically with the past is a necessary part of envisioning and manifesting the future.

Ius Commune Conference Maastricht, 2021

This paper takes up the subtheme “new markets, more movement”, utilizing Chandigarh’s modernist furniture as a case study to examine issues within the growing trade in mid-century modernist design. Situated at the intersection of colonialism and extractive capitalism, the journey of Chandigarh’s furniture illustrates the ways in which new markets for modern design result in more than expanded movement of cultural patrimony; they also cause fundamental shifts in how pieces are understood.

This paper outlines how the market for Chandigarh chairs in Europe and North America has resulted in two primary negative outcomes for the furniture: increased extraction from India and a whitewashing of their history. Despite being the product of a large team of primarily Indian architects and designers, a narrative of these pieces has coalesced, centering the white, Western members of the team. Despite formal similarities and techniques shared with works of Indian art and design, Chandigarh chairs are frequently discussed and sold solely as items within the canon of Western Modernism.

This paper argues that as items of mass-produced modern design,Chandigarh chairs pose unique problems to scholars and regulators of art markets and cultural patrimony. Made by hand to varying designs, these chairs, tables, benches and day-beds have limited individual defining features, making contemporary examples remarkably difficult to differentiate from those made during the 1950’s and 60’s. As items of mass-production, the legal status and provenance of individual pieces is almost impossible to determine. Additionally, and increasingly problematic, because they have been produced within the last hundred years, Chandigarh chairs are infrequently covered or protected by laws regulating cultural patrimony. This has made regulating their movement challenging. As the market for these and similar pieces continues to grow, these problems will be compounded, making their study and resolution one of the utmost importance.

Supported by a preliminary analysis of collected data from over 2000 auction records, this paper concludes by suggesting ways design historians can oppose immoral markets and illegal movement of similar pieces, including shifting focus onto the production of these pieces and their use, repair and reuse within India.

Power, Production and Perception: Reconsidering Space and the Built Environment, 2021

The Coronavirus pandemic has brought unprecedented scrutiny upon the space of the office, its des... more The Coronavirus pandemic has brought unprecedented scrutiny upon the space of the office, its design, uses, and future. However, despite increased attention, decades-old assumptions and understandings about office spaces remain unquestioned. Recent literature continues to study and theorize the office as a space disconnected from the broader economic pressures and systems it resides within. This has led to a historiography which portrays the office as an ever-evolving and constantly-improving space targeted toward the specific execution of work duties and functions.

This paper argues that history of the office may more accurately be described as one of continuity, with the form and function of office spaces determined not by specific work functions, but by larger needs and machinations of capitalism.

Expanding on concepts proposed in Harry Braverman’s 1974 seminal volume Labor and Monopoly Capitalism, this paper posits that it is capital’s need to control not only the amount of work produced by laborers, but also the way in which work is carried out which forms the core motivator
of office design. Utilizing Braverman’s labor process framework, this paper suggests that from the factory to the Googleplex, capital’s fundamental need to control how work is executed has led to the longevity of the open-office design.

Further, this paper suggests that in contrast to the remarkable continuity of the design of office spaces, the rationale and reasoning behind these designs – their ‘packaging’ has adapted over time to be applicable and palatable to a changing zeitgeist. The longevity of the open-plan office will be highlighted through exploration of three primary historical periods and designs – the turn of the
twentieth century and the office-as-factory, the mid-century and the enlightened office, and the amenity-filled offices of the present day.

MeCCSA PGN Conference, 2021

The coronavirus pandemic has brought unprecedented attention to the space and place of the office... more The coronavirus pandemic has brought unprecedented attention to the space and place of the office. However, despite recent editorials and articles regarding potential futures of office spaces, little has been written regarding how and why office spaces have evolved as they have. Less still can be found on how office spaces might be improved not just for productivity, but also for enjoyability and humanity.

Taking up the conference title ‘Dreaming of a another place’, this paper investigates the dream of, and path toward, a better, more humane, and more dignified office.
Driven by Harry Braverman’s assertions regarding the centrality of control over the labor process to the continued success of capitalism (Labor and Monopoly Capital, 1974), this paper situates the office as a place and space defined by the necessities of global capital. Within this framework the office serves a fundamental role in facilitating the extraction of labor – the office is a place which is designed not just to enable workers to work faster, but also to work in particular ways. This paper argues the root cause of problematic, uncomfortable, and inhumane office spaces is found not within specific architectural elements, but rather within the foundations of the capitalist labor process itself.
The solutions to these problems, the path to a better office, must then involve a broader struggle against capitalism.
This paper suggests a regime of vertically integrated unionization of those involved in the creation and use of office spaces (designers, architects, builders and office occupants) as a way to insert the needs and wants of all workers in a process previously held by capital. By
uniting the voices, creativity and interests of all working people involved in the creation of office spaces, perpetual issues such as lack of personal privacy, minimal daylight, limited natural air and cramped, noisy conditions can be addressed at their source, rather than tackled piecemeal. In addressing the root cause of suboptimal office spaces – capitalism –though the union of architects, designers, builders and office occupants, this paper argues
the dream of a better office, shaped around the needs and desires of all workers might be realized.

Design History Society 2021 Conference, 2021

Constructed as a new capital for post-partition Indian Punjab, the city of Chandigarh is known fo... more Constructed as a new capital for post-partition Indian Punjab, the city of Chandigarh is known for its Le Corbusier designed city plan and Capitol Complex. From the 1990s Chandigarh’s modernist furniture was removed from the city by French antiques dealers, exhibited, publicized, and sold for tens of thousands of dollars at major auction houses as the work of Swiss/French designer, and cousin of Courbusier, Pierre Jeanneret.

This paper calls into question the now hegemonic narrative of Chandigarh’s furniture – that their designer was Jeanneret, that they were "saved" by the French dealers, and that they should sit among other financially valued objects within the Western canon of Modernist design.

This paper suggests that such a narrative has emerged from, and is continued through, colonial power structures and does not accurately represent the historical reality of the furniture’s design, production, consumption and re-sale. We argue that the absence of solid, provable, and specific evidence has encouraged the propagation of a Western-focused narrative of Chandigarh’s furniture, which has created significant blind spots in its popular history, and risks overwriting the memory of their Indian context of creation and use.

Finally, this paper uses provisional data to illustrate how qualitative and experience-driven research into local histories of Chandigarh’s furniture can begin to address historical power imbalances and erasures of the ties between these pieces and India. Detailed collection of 13 years of auction data highlights the creation of a neo-colonial narrative, while initial explorations into oral histories and alternative sites of memory and data suggest a more complicated and nuanced story.

Such techniques, we argue, empowers design historical research to serve as decolonial activism, returning the story, prestige, and perhaps even physical examples of these pieces to India, as well as assigning India and Indian designers due credit in the broader history of modern design.

As such, these pieces of modernist design have taken on a new, second life in Western Europe and North America, almost entirely indistinguishable from their origins and use within Chandigarh. As they have been removed, refurbished, and re-sold at Christies, Sotheby’s, Wright, Artcurial and through countless private dealers and sales, these now iconic pieces have transformed from Chandigarh chairs to Jeanneret chairs, from utilitarian furniture to pieces of high design.

This paper problematizes the narrative and use of Chandigarh Chairs as it has been popularized outside of India, suggesting that the trajectory of these chairs through the antiques market perpetuates systematic colonial, imperialist, and extractive tendencies and systems.

Further, this paper outlines an all-too-common trajectory of systematic and methodological extraction of materials and items moving from the global south to the global north, and complicates the notion of ‘Second Hand Cultures’ by raising global ethical questions regarding the repair, re-sale, and re-use of Chandigarh’s modernist furniture.

Pandemic Perspectives Conference

Over the past year Coronavirus has heralded a dramatic rise in home-working and an accompanying s... more Over the past year Coronavirus has heralded a dramatic rise in home-working and an accompanying
stream of editorials regarding the future of the office in a post-pandemic world. Much of the
discourse surrounding the future of the office has been negative, forecasting the demise of office
spaces as we know it and the rise of home-working as a permanent replacement fixture.
Informed by Marxist labor process theory and grounded in historical precedents regarding the
evolution of interior office design and use, this paper begins to problematize post-pandemic office
predictions, suggesting that while acute, the impacts of coronavirus on the long-term evolution and
survival of the office may have been overstated.
By situating current debates regarding the future of the physical office within a historical and sociopolitical context, this paper questions the plausibility and efficacy of predicting futures of ‘the’ office.
Instead of singular predictions regarding use of white-collar work spaces, this paper suggests that a
multitude of space futures should be considered. Rather than a wholesale decline in office use, this
paper suggests that while some highly-paid white-collar workers in fields with competitive job
markets may be awarded the ability to work from home, the office as we know it will remain, and in
fact intensify, for many lesser-paid, lesser-respected white-collar workers.
Through these explorations, this paper aims to add nuance to contemporary discussions, raising
questions about who the average office worker is, which industries may see strong pushes for
employees to retu

Constructed as a new capital for the post-partition Indian Punjab, the city of Chandigarh is know... more Constructed as a new capital for the post-partition Indian Punjab, the city of Chandigarh is known globally for its Le Corbusier designed city plan and Capitol Complex. In recent years Chandigarh's utilitarian modernist furniture, once used in government and university buildings, has also been brought into the international spotlight and can now be found in the homes of the rich and famous.
Beginning in the 1990s the furniture was removed from Chandigarh by French antiques dealers, exhibited, publicized, and sold for tens of thousands of dollars through major auction houses as the work of Swiss/French designer, and cousin of Le Courbusier, Pierre Jeanneret.
This paper calls into question what has become the standard narrative of Chandigarh’s furniture – that their designer was Pierre Jeanneret, that they were "saved" by the French dealers, and that they sit among other financially valued objects within the Western canon of Modernist design.
Further, this paper suggests that the commonly known narrative of Chandigarh’s modernist furniture, as told and retold by Western furniture dealers and auction houses, seems to coincide with the financial interests of Western dealers and art market, while side-stepping the interests of Indian designers and users of the furniture.
Finally, this paper uses provisional data to illustrate how undertaking qualitative and experience-driven research into the more local histories of Chandigarh’s modernist furniture can begin to address historical power imbalances and erasures of the ties between these pieces and India.

Star Trek seeks to transport viewers to a utopian future full of fantastically different worlds a... more Star Trek seeks to transport viewers to a utopian future full of fantastically different worlds and events, but achieves this in part by relying on furniture from our own earth’s mid-century past. But how are ready-made pieces of furniture from 1920’s-80’s earth used to create this retro-futurist Trekkian vision?

This paper seeks to explore pieces of modernist furniture used in Star Trek (with guest appearances by furniture from other science fiction media), from Charlotte Perriand’s Cassina LC7 to Eero Saarinen’s Tulip chair - linking the usage of these pieces on-screen to their more down-to-earth history. Through these links we seek to explore how real-world knowledge of these pieces of furniture allows us to develop insights into characters, races and situations on screen and how in turn modernist furniture on screen shapes our understanding of and relationship to this furniture and the time it was designed.

Sold at auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars and prominently displayed in the home of Kim... more Sold at auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars and prominently displayed in the home of Kim Kardashian, modernist furniture from Chandigarh has taken the European and North American design worlds by storm.

Despite this prominence, little is widely known about the Chandigarh chairs beyond their attribution to Pierre Jeanneret (cousin of Le Corbusier), their admired exemplification of mid-century modern design; their supposed ‘under appreciation’ in Chandigarh, and that they are now worth vast sums of money.

This session seeks to probe current narratives regarding Chandigarh’s modernist furniture, problematising previously unquestioned ‘facts’, highlighting gaps in the chairs’ history, and beginning to connect the story of these particular pieces of furniture with wider narratives of capitalist exploitation and neo-colonialism.