We moved our office to this space about 12 years ago, a modest 1,000 square foot corner of a 1950’s bow-string truss warehouse on what was then a sleepy industrial block of Culver City– since then the neighborhood has changed dramatically, with new art galleries, restaurants and bars cropping up almost daily.

Our intent for the space, in addition to being a home for our graphic design studio, was to balance our various activities and interests. To that end there is a soundproofed shop for building things (with a combination of new and inherited tools from Lance’s grandfather), space for making music and storing music gear (the main floor often becomes one big rehearsal room, and our daughter Amanda’s drum kit sits in a loft space above the shop), places to stash Lance and Amanda’s silkscreens and Jennifer’s many objects from nature that she uses both in and for inspiration in her art (tumbleweeds, branches, seed pods, rocks etc.), an area for flat files, samples library, bookshelves, a small kitchen, and a few under-the desk snoozing spots for our two dogs, Ben and Puma.

It is a space unstructured enough to allow for continuous experimentation– the only fixed elements, aside from walls demarcating the shop and Jennifer’s office are the kitchen and the bookshelves- everything else is on wheels or portable sawhorses.

We find that working in this environment brings an open-ended sense to our time there– on those days we’re not crunching a deadline, when the skylight darkens it’s a cue that it’s either time to go home or to step away from the desk (or workbench) and make a little noise…

We began TOUCH from our home, but after a year or so, the business grew and the space felt too small. We found our new studio, this terrific open ceiling space with room for our studio and a showroom for the amazing products we feature.

Above: TOUCH LA showroom

My desk there is usually full of objects, prototypes, samples, new materials, a travel journal and catalogs. I like to have objects around me, they are my inspiration and I constantly change them. I call it a curator’s mind revealed.

Above: Melo and American intern Jessica Hudson at the studio in Brazil.

Right now I am setting up our new studio in Brazil.  It is a fantastic experience opening a new market and developing new projects and products with communities. I have reached my dream by combining travel and work, and have this mobility of using technology to coordinate various projects in different places at the same time. This is very satisfying work for me; to learn a lot about different cultures and places, while helping people to have a better living condition.

Above: A meeting with designer makers at Aglomerado da Serra Slum in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

I now travel to many countries to develop products in artisan communities and to organize exhibitions during design fairs and events. Since I am on the road for work constantly, I can say that my “office” goes with me wherever I am working. So I work from hotel rooms, airplanes, friends’ houses, cafes. In fact, after we created our office in a cloud, things became much simpler. Truthfully, wherever I am connected to the internet feels like an office.

Above: At designer Domingos Tótora’s studio in Maria da Fe, MG – Brazil. This encapsulates Melo’s ideal live/work space – a studio open to nature.

An ideal work/live space for me is the combination of having a studio, showroom, home and nature. It is a place that feels like I can produce much more without much of the stress of the big cities.

But when I am on the road, a library at a hotel is my favorite. The Unique hotel in Sao Paulo, Brazil is a very inspiring social space; the bookshelf, the Campana Brothers beautiful pouf, and the Gaetano Pesce chairs make it a perfect place for a design talk.

Above: Melo meets with designers at Unique hotel in Sao Paulo, Brazil – another ideal work space.

Maybe the best of all worlds would be a mobile office space, where I could travel around showing our projects and exhibiting our products and living deeply within the talents of the world’s creative peoples.

Our whole home is 1200 square feet.  200 of it is dedicated to the studio room, but the lines tend to get blurred a little. For example, right now, the recording room has some coloring book pages on the floor from our son Niko coloring in here while I am mixing our new record. And, sometimes we use the other rooms for recording a little. And we’ve used the stairs and hallway before as a kind of echo chamber to add a real at-home kind of sound to some tracks.

One of our heroes, Brian Eno, is famous for saying that studios should be treated as instruments. We try to treat our studio and our whole house as a playground – we want it to be fun to play with and to explore and to work. We made this short film called Experiments Around the House with that in mind.

When we were building our house we decided to have as few walls and doors as possible, and in fact, the first floor is all one room.  We want be able to reconfigure things for all of the different projects we tend to have going on here.

We try to be as tidy as possible in everything we do. We built a DIY rolling keyboard stand that hides away to keep our desk clutter free.

Charles and Ray Eames are another big inspiration for us. Not only are they the ultimate couple / partner team. They also tried every medium they could find, and still put their own distinct style into it.

I think we try to do that too.

His paintings have focused on classic examples of modern architecture, including the Eames House, while his more recent work includes installations like the Eames Studio Limerick and Froebel Studio: A History of Play (pictured below). This installation, with its playroom quality, was inspired in part by the fact that Eames, as well as Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Piet Mondrian, were educated using the Froebel method of teaching with blocks and shapes.

Above: Eamon O’Kane and his installation Froebel Studio: A History of Play which was part of the BROODWORK: It’s About Time exhibition.

Here O’Kane describes his live/work studio in a wonderful abandoned plant nursery in Denmark.

The first time that I was able to have my living situation and a good studio in the same place was a few years ago when we moved into a house built in 1905 next to a former plant nursery.

The place is situated in the countryside just outside Odense in Denmark and the dilapidated buildings are working well as studios. At my disposal are an old furnace room, a staff canteen, a packing building, garages and a warehouse in addition to 14 greenhouses.

These spaces offer a range of possibilities for experimentation and storage. I like the idea that these items take on a new life in the history of the place.

In the main house I have set up my library and research office, which I also use as a drawing studio.

My sons Emil and Mikkel were born in 2005 and 2007. They provide a constant flow of joy and inspiration, and continually prove that play is at the root of all creativity.

Becoming a parent opened my eyes up to not only my parents’ influence on us as children (they are both artists and three of my five siblings are also artists, one is a curator) but also how life and art and striking a balance is a continual process and should be approached as such.

Above: Jing and Forian’s house in Brooklyn from Common Ground film, 2011, image by Iwan Baan

We started our office somewhere between Amalia and Francis, our two daughters. In hindsight, it might have been because we did not differentiate very much between work and family, and that we were just ready to explore the possibilities of our own ideas in the real world and to take on the responsibilities. So we did. We got married, had children, moved out of our mouse heaven, east-village studio and opened shop as SO-IL, all at the same time, and all intuitively.

Above: SO-IL offices, Brooklyn, NY

We never got to have the time to think about what kind of parents we wanted to be, nor what kind of architect. We fought the sleepiness through the night feedings by thinking about the window details. We brought the kids along to the numerous site visits on weekends. They were always happy guests at our office dinners and holiday parties, knew the name of every one of our staff members, and proudly invited their friends to the openings of our projects.

Above: Pole Dance for MOMA/PS1.  Winner Young Architect’s Prize, 2010

There are many ways one can learn to become a parent, or to start an architectural office. Our way took its own course rather than being set out by us. The conflicts between the two did not result in compromises, but help us in making wise decisions. We rarely feel the split between the two roles, but one always makes the other more interesting. Sometimes we are impatient waiting for the next step, other times we feel chased by the growth of a child or the office. In time, we learn how to wait for the current and ride it when it comes.

Above: Design for nursery school, Prato, Italy, 2008

Now our older daughter is 4 years old and the office 3, there came a natural convergent point where we sought to rethink the model of the living spaces, as we increasingly find the over-priced housing market in New York structurally ignores the relational spaces in a residential environment. We wanted to test the viability of an architecture that facilitated a communal oasis in a hyper-urban setting.

Over dinners and tea times, we spoke of this desire and our dream with our “extended families”, our diasporic friends who sought out each other in this metropolitan New York. Once planted, how powerful it is, the way in which a seed bursts out of its shell and pierces though the dirt to reach for the light, of possibilities! Quickly, the dream grew in an infectious way. Now it has a name, Common Ground. It is a place to work and to live; to support and to depend; to be and to become.

Above: Conceptual model for Common Ground, currently exhibited at BROODWORK: It’s About Time.

Above: A still from Common Ground film.

Space is an awfully difficult thing to deal with. It’s not even really a thing, which I suppose is sort of the problem. I actually wish that space was just an emptiness waiting to be filled, a vacuum to easily occupy with dancing fantasies and comfortable sofas; a clean, well lighted place, but it, perhaps unfortunately for us, isn’t. For any space to exist, it has to have some parameters of reality, some boundaries or markers that make it a space. Take Montana, a spacious place by most popular reckoning, it has that huge blue dome painted with wisps of lonesome clouds, the horizon line stretching in all directions giving way to fields and plains and badlands and the feel of the earth and grass beneath your feet, the smell of dust or cattle or big-rig exhaust and the sound of Hank Williams or lowing cows or wind or Eminem echoing in your ears. Or, let’s take another space. Even the whitest white box of an art gallery, all accouterments stripped down to their most starkly minimal, still has all the connotations of what it is: the drywall and white paint, the polished concrete floor, the spot lamps. They all mean something, a spatial language developed over years and years of showing art. Even when reduced to what seem the simplest and most spacious places, they all still give shape to the liquid of space.

Thus, problem firmly if unresolvably in hand, the most ideal space to live and work in is even more troubling: the ideals of what can be and the necessary reality of what is. My current work space is a large wooden desk imported from Winnipeg by the artist who carved me out a corner of his studio, a couple hundred yards from my previous and still alternative workspace, my apartment. The desk is strewn with empty coffee cups and unused tea bags and brambles of sinewy cords. An overstuffed ashtray and a battered electric tea kettle preside over all the mess with a certain regal abjection. There’s an experimental bottle of since abandoned St. John’s Wort from Trader Joe’s hanging out next to lemon from the tree next to my house that I like to idly roll in my hand and sniff its citrus clarity when I’m blocked. A stack of art catalogues, magazines, and novels, supports the plastic CD case of my girlfriend’s most recent album as she, clad only in a see-through top and pumpkin orange tie that I gave her, alluringly beckons from a field of wallpaper paisleys.

Is this my ideal work space? This dank, windowless studio, this dirty desk. Yes it is. Perhaps one day I’ll find myself with laptop overlooking the Casbah or the ocean, with a view of the Eiffel Tower or some other obviously awesome sight, in the most comfortable chair ever built in the most beautiful space ever designed, but this space, the room I write from now, is here, ready right now for me to sit down in the ratty leather armchair with the broken leg, ready to simply and happily support my time and weight. As Virgina Woolfe once wrote, what every writer most simply needs, male and female, is a room of their own and the time to work in it. This dark untidy cell very happily affords me both. It’s joyous mess is the joyous mess of life. It’s bare fluorescent light-bulb gives me more than enough light to write. It’s simple existence, that it can exist, this free place for me to create, is ideal enough.

As I take another sip of cold black tea and I roll myself another cigarette, I lean back and survey my humble domain. Finally after all these years of struggle and sacrifice, I am so grateful to be here, now, in my ideal workspace.

I have my studio at home and a workshop down the road. I love the area in which I live, it’s in the heart of the East End, situated close to Brick Lane flea market and Columbia Road flower market. I love the atmosphere and characters you find as well as the odd bits of bric-a-brac. I am by nature a collector and cannot help arriving home with some strange artifact that I’m sure will come in handy one day.

Our live-work space is hidden away from the densely urban populated area in a very narrow cobbled street.  According to our local pie and mash shop owner, who holds the collective memory of the neighborhood, it is a former sausage factory. When we acquired the space an artist had been living there and it was a raw shell. I worked on developing the space, it was a labor of love! It is unusual in many ways, and somehow secluded in this urban melee. It would be nice to have more space as we are constantly accumulating bits and pieces and the space is becoming increasingly cluttered.

I love working from home but it also means that there is little separation between work and family life.  My studio is part of our open space living room and kitchen.  I can’t claim that I’m juggling the work, life and family situation very well, but being a designer helps a lot - when the kids comes back from school they find the tables and floor full of drawings, paper models, glue gun and scissors and they join in as if it had been set up for their playtime.

It is a bit trickier when I’m working on the computer — as the kids are always happy to get on a computer in the studio the good thing, I guess, is that at least I’m around and the kids can participate in or follow what I’m up to. Weighing it all up, I can’t imagine working in a different way.

The perfect work-life balance does not exist; I’m always working or never working, depending on who is doing the judging. My kids do not think I’m ever working. How can you call making doodles in your sketch book work? Or cutting shapes in paper and cardboard? Achieving balance in our family life is dependent on our weekend chalet on the beach. This is the one place in the world where I can’t work. I fish, cook, play, swim, sail in my canoe and socialize with friends. This stream of unconscious stuff fuels the soul and body. It is kind of magical but also puzzling how places can define moods and energies.

The chalet is a simple timber construction sitting on steel frame, clad with cedar shingles on the exterior and roughly cut pine on the interior. Every time I enter the smell of the pine hits me, and serves to evoke the nature of the place. Here time takes on a different dimension: even being there a short time somehow feels longer and you leave feeling recharged. There is never any plan, but always things to do. I feel a strong connection to the place and the bleak landscape which has its own strange beauty.

I love to see the changing seasons and the contrast of light during the course of the day. The sea is often out for hours, uncovering mudflats for us to walk on. We have learnt to forage for food, collecting seaweed and salt as well as cockles and mussels.

I love this contrast between the dense urban living and the open, spacious, visceral nature of the coast. I feel that this relaxing state of mind stimulates and nourishes the soul and in turn stimulates creativity.

All of the Greenberg-Jordan books are featured in the BROODWORK: It’s About Time exhibit.

When I was a teenager growing up in St. Louis, I loved to read and daydream. My favorite class was English. We talked about books. We wrote poems and stories. After that, it was all downhill, except for lunch. When the noon bell rang, I would stow my books on top of the lockers. My friends could identify my pile because of the papers sticking out every which way and the uneven stack of books ready to tumble down. My room at home wasn’t much better. Clothes lying in heaps, wastebasket overflowing, movie magazines, photos of Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, and novels piled on the desk. It wasn’t until after I was married and had children that I became a neatness freak. If you come to my house now, you’ll notice that both the art and the décor are fairly minimalist. The first and second floors are all orderly and carefully arranged much like in our living room, below.

Here is the ideal study to go with the aesthetic of my house – spare, and pristine, paperless and modern.

Unfortunately, this room belongs to a friend of mine, in an apartment with a view of the famous Saarinen Arch. But I’m a writer of non-fiction. I need my reference books, computer, notes, etc. within reach. Her stylish, tasteful study just might intimidate and would definitely inhibit the flow of creative juices.

My house was built in 1910 and looks like a cross between Wuthering Heights and the Bastille. Here is the ideal study to go with my Gothic Revival house.

Notice the built in bookshelves, the paneling, and the elegant chandelier. The fireplace almost makes the room look cozy. This isn’t my study either. It is in the Morgan Library in New York, the former home of the banker, J.P., himself. J.P.’s taste was refined and worldly, befitting a turn of the century tycoon.

But now…my real study, where the ghost of that messy teenager still remains. My study is tucked away on the third floor of my old house. No one ever comes up here to bother me. My husband texts me, wondering when I’m coming to bed. I sit at the computer looking out at the expanse of green lawn lined with towering old oaks and maples. The flowering pears and cherry trees are in full bloom now that it’s spring.

On the long desk in no particular order are writing projects in process: a mystery I’ve been fiddling with for four years, notes for magazine articles, and reference books and an outline for a new children’s book I’m researching. I don’t understand how some people can keep everything on a computer and have a paperless study. There are notes to myself stuck all over the desk, bills in a cubby hole, correspondence in another, invitations, and concert tickets in a special file next to…well…other special files. There are photos of my family on the mantle, along with my collection of green matte American pottery.

Photos tacked on my bulletin board of me with some of the people I’ve written about, including Chuck Close, Frank Gehry, Richard Serra, and Ellsworth Kelly. There are also pictures of my grandchildren, close friends, and my standard brown poodles Henri and Thiebaud. A charming letter my mother, who was in the advertising business, wrote to a colleague in the 50’s and award certificates for some of my books are framed and propped on a shelf.

If you come to my study, you’ll see my whole life spread before you. I cannot imagine working anywhere else.

Our art and design collaboration, BROODWORK, has an exhibition called “It’s About Time” opening at Otis College of Art and Design this Saturday (April 30, 4-6 pm).  The show explores the synthesis between family and the creative process. The photo above gives you just a little taste of what to expect.

One of the participants is an Irish artist named Eamon O’Kane (pictured in his studio below). His interactive installation work, A History of Play, relates the teachings of Friedrich Froebel. Froebel’s teaching methods influenced some of the most brilliant designers –  including Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Ray and Charles Eames. In fact, you’ll see quite a bit of Herman Miller furniture throughout the exhibition.

We want to thank Herman Miller for the generous loan of the Eames pieces. Having such references that link the inter-generational nature of family and creativity is integral to this installation.

If you live in Los Angeles, please join us at the opening and make sure to introduce yourselves. And for the next month and a half we will be featuring the workspaces of some of the incredible participants in this exhibition. We very much look forward to sharing these with you.

About 3 years ago, my wife, our daughter and I moved to Silver Lake, CA. As the second owners of a house built in 1937, we’re getting towards the tail end of a fairly substantial renovation. By far, the best feature of our place is the concrete regulation badminton court in the backyard. On first sight, it was obvious that this fairly unique feature would not only be ideal for hosting badminton tournaments (natch), but would be a fantastic outdoor studio for photography, film & video productions.  On days when I’m not shooting, the court additionally works great as a roller-skating rink for our daughter. The goal is ease of use for shoot days and play dates alike.

As we get closer to finishing the overhaul, we’re still weighing the best direction to go in terms of setting up office space.  Our project manager is my wife Andraleia, an interior and exterior designer who’s hands-on construction experience and amazing taste have made this a family effort. Andraleia would like nothing less than to get my butt out of the breakfast nook, where my temporary office is.

So we have our sights on one end of the badminton court as a place to build a small office plus multi-purpose makeup/wardrobe/equipment/guest room.  Those are a lot of purposes. We’ll have to be efficient if we want to allow enough room to keep the court functional for the Silver Lake Badminton Club.

I often daydream about this perfectly organized space with its array of shelving, storage space and open desk area. Also of key importance will be the ability to allow for complete range in light levels. I prefer ample daylight when I’m writing or editing the magazine. But when working on photo editing and video editing, it needs to be very dim. This should be easily accomplished with a good set of blackout drapes or sliding panels.

The entire house serves also as a case study for Andraleia. Her clients see what the rooms actually look like and she can figure out first hand what certain materials work for what particular purpose (fixtures, patio pavers, etc.). It’s a tactile proof of concept.

Because of all this multi-functionality we regularly move furniture all over the place. I consider this a good thing.

Friends are always saying the place looks different when they come over. They’re always right, and always welcomed.

I started playing with my food when most people do, in childhood.  After a windy path through Louisiana and Texas and Italy, I ended up in Los Angeles at Cal Arts getting a Masters in experimental animation.

After having some jobs in some pretty nice offices (including producing piles of music videos), I realized that while I had a good job that was fun and challenging and lucrative, none of it was really mine. I was doing this funny sculptural cooking at home that was important in my everyday life and it felt good; maybe I could make other people feel good too. I wanted to inspire and encourage folks to be creative and express themselves in their everyday ordinary actions. Soon I found myself with the kitchen as my studio figuring out how to make a new career. I made a website with animated cartoons of my recipes called www.yummyfun.com. Make a sandwich and tell the world who you are.  A book deal showed up and The Secret Life of Food was born.

And I guess to prove that I practice what I preach I decided to produce the photos in my home. I didn’t want the pictures taken in a studio. I wanted them to be in my life. With the food stylist Lisa Barnett, I made all of the food in my house. Eric Staudenmaier shot all the little tableaus. The house was completely transformed into some kind of mad scientist’s photo studio. Then came Hey There, Cupcake!

From my home office I continued to toy with business ideas that would make my dream grow more branches.

I designed food for a Spongebob Squarepants episode. I cooked my wackiest creations on the Today show, Good Morning America, CBS Sunday Morning, and many, many Food Network shows. I wrote recipes for magazines and books. I considered a brick and mortar bakery but thought it might squash my spirit, so I started the renegade pop-up bakery Treat Street with Crystal Meers and Mary Wigmore.

But I had always wanted to do a show. The Food Network asked me to do a traditional cook-in-the-kitchen cooking show. But I had a new daughter at the time and I wasn’t so interested in leaving her every day to go to some soundstage; and honestly, I wanted to do a really crazy fantasy kids show with puppets and a band and animation. So I gathered friends from the music video days (including my nice talented production designer husband, James Chinlund) and made it happen. Choosing NOT to follow anyone’s advice, we built a set in my two-car garage and created The Yummyfun Kooking Series. The DVDs have sold well in places like The New Museum, The Whitney, and Amazon.

And now, low and behold, the production company Fremantle Media has decided that they like Yummyfun too and will produce an episode. I am now working on Yummyfun with a writer and producers and all sorts of nice talented people. This time we won’t be in my garage and it has been a little struggle for me to figure out how that’s going to work, but I am ultimately excited to have a little more space.  I still have my home office filled with petrified Jaws cookies, glitter, leopard cupcake liners, three million cake sprinkles and other assorted art supplies. And I have my kitchen where I can do my work and play with my food.

First, let me say this: there is the workspace I fantasize about, and there’s the one I actually need.

In my dream, I lean back in my simple, comfortable chair and gaze across an empty maple desk, sunlight streaming in from the windows. My books are all neatly arranged on a bookshelf. I hide my Macbook in a desk drawer when I’m not using it. I swivel around in my chair to pour another cup of Sumatra coffee and adjust the volume on my stereo, which plays only my favorite songs.

But back to reality. I’m sitting at my desk in the Reuters News Beijing bureau. It’s a big, open—and sometimes chaotic—room, where about 100 journalists work, including cameramen, web designers, translators and reporters writing about everything from earthquakes to money. A drab Chinese official is speaking on one of the dozen TV screens around the room. Someone is yelling to me – “Can you believe that someone just called me to say that radiation from Japan has already arrived in Beijing? Ridiculous!”

I’m a reporter. Or, rather, an ex-reporter who now attempts to run a news operation through email, blackberry, online chatrooms, phone calls, meetings and conversations with the writers sitting a few feet from me.

When there is breaking news—and there’s been a lot lately, with Japan’s crisis and China’s crackdown on reporters—we have to work quickly and together. Hence the absence of walls and our desks, which are arranged in clusters of four so we can easily discuss stories, complain and tell jokes, all without getting up. That’s important, because nearly every story is a collaboration. At times five people will all be on the phone, conducting interviews for a single article that one person is typing up.

Every desk has at least two computer monitors, to make it easier to keep an eye on messages while writing.

The bureau isn’t the tidiest place. There are stacks of newspapers, and some broken printers and unused fax machines. Several of my colleagues keep great heaps of unsorted papers and books on their desks — treatises on China’s environmental policies, statistical almanacs and well-worn Chinese dictionaries. One especially prolific writer has so many papers that he can barely find his computer screen. The building management sent me a note the other day suggesting that his desk violates some fire code.

My office wasn’t always like this. In earlier days, I was a magazine writer. I had a dim, but warmly lit office with a mahogany desk and a shelf full of reassuringly familiar books. Pictures of my wife and two girls—babies back then—were on the wall under my favorite poster depicting Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow. There was always an iPod nearby so that I could find just the right music to match whatever I was writing. Astor Piazzolla for the long articles, Frank Black for the stories that called for a little aggression.

In other words, pretty close to my fantasy. (I’ve also tried to get close with my desk at home — pictured above — but in truth my daughters spend more time there drawing than I do writing.)

But my newsroom, rough around the edges, noisy and friendly, has its charms. At least there’s someone to talk to.

My ideal workspace is spare, sparse, empty and clean. That way I can walk in, set down something I have in mind to draw, and draw it. Or I can sit my computer on the empty desk and write clear, succinct expressions, unhampered by the clutter and clumpy detritus that clogs my home.

Children (and cats) are exceptionally messy.  Their boundless enthusiasm makes life one big tangle that is constant.  How to untie the knots of an over-scheduled day. How to clear the rubble of snack time, meal time and glitter-glue time. How to cleanse the crustiness of the growing child. Dried cheerios in the jacket pocket. Rocks in the washing machine. I am not particularly neat, but the messier my life is, the more order I crave.

In fact, I find I cannot work at all without a clean empty space to retreat to.

My studio is such a place.

It is a separate building (hallelujah!) that sits in the back yard. I try to keep it empty and clear but it never fails to get clogged with projects in various stages of production after a while. At least the cats and the kids don’t bring their unkempt habits into my workspace. They are only allowed to visit, empty handed. Spiders are the only creatures who can work alongside me. They spin their orderly webs in the corners which are clean and clear, so they love them. But once a month I escort them out, vacuum up their creations and cleanse the space entirely.

I love cleaning day and in the spring it is even more thorough. That is when I take out every object, empty every drawer, box, cabinet and shelf.  I take off every book and dust and clean and wipe the storage areas before putting anything back. Only those things that I have used in the past year go back.  Everything else is given away or discarded.

I have to escape my life to write about it.  I have to clear the table to be able to sit down and draw. Just a desk. And the work gets done.

How to Set Up and Maintain Your Home Office

First of all, determine how big a home office you’ll need. For most purposes, a queen-size will do. If you have lots of paper work to deal with, or if you have a spouse or significant other who insists on using your office to sleep in, you might want to step up to king size, or even California king. You can get away without using a bedframe, and, indeed, proximity to the floor makes stacking papers much easier; but you’ll find that your morale is much higher with a nice, inexpensive frame.   Make sure to get one with a handy ledge, for your coffee cups, pencil holders, and alarm clock.

Furnishing your office:  You’ll require the usual—a laptop, stapler, telephone, good quality cotton sheets (nothing less than a 180 count, preferably), and several comfortable pillows to prop yourself up on.  A two-drawer filing cabinet is also a good idea, and it can easily double as a nightstand. Same for a mini-fridge, which will also eliminate those interruptive and exhausting trips to the kitchen. A warm quilt or comforter is optional, but is certainly nice to crawl under during those post-lunch “brainstorming sessions!”

For maximum efficiency, you’ll want to make sure that you can reach everything you need without getting up from your office.   I suggest a power strip (within reach, as well, of course) into which you can plug your chargers—laptop, cell phone—as well as a printer, shredder, coffee maker, and night light.  Most printers are wireless now, which makes it much easier to print documents without your feet ever touching the floor.   You will, eventually, have to retrieve any printed documents, so if you can’t keep your printer within reach, I suggest combining document retrieval with meal or bathroom breaks.

Many people who work from home appreciate the fact that you never have to dress up to go to work, or, for that matter, dress at all. I find this attitude lackadaisical. Just as the British prisoners of war shaved and bathed every day to keep up their spirits, the home worker should still attempt to dress neatly and maintain at least a minimum standard of personal hygiene. That said, if you do happen to be in your  “You Have Died of Dysentery” T-shirt, and your last shower is a distant memory, it will make absolutely no difference to the person on the other end of the phone.

Video chats are a boon for the Home Worker, but have the distinct disadvantage of requiring you to be dressed.   I suggest avoiding them whenever possible. If, for some ridiculous reason, you absolutely could not get out of one, it’s best to put on a decent shirt, and, unless you’re in the entertainment industry, a tie. Pants are optional, unless, again, you’re in the entertainment industry, when it will be taken for granted that you’re not wearing any anyway.

Of course, some people might find the sight of your headboard on the other end of a video chat “unprofessional,” so I suggest using a simple but dignified background. There are nice ones available at office supply stores like Office Depot or Bed Bath & Beyond. Styles include “Modern Loft,” “Executive Suite,” and “Knotty Pine,” all designed to fit temporarily on the headboard or wall behind your office. But you will have to temporarily ditch the pillows.

Remember: Why work standing up when you can sit, and why work sitting when you can lie down?

Next time we’ll discuss decorating the home office, and how items brought from other rooms of the house can help “personalize” your workspace.

First, what is ideal about working? The best thing about my work is that it takes place while I’m doing other things.

I empty the dishwasher because the dishwasher is nine feet to the right of the end of my kitchen table, and ten and a half feet from my computer that sits on the kitchen table. I need to get away from that workspace and go dominate another. One percent of that need is that the dishwasher needs emptying. The other 99% is that I need to get away from that bad idea, that half a good idea, the almost idea, the stupid idea, the internal editor that called my idea stupid, the idea that is almost fully formed Athena-like but then evaporated when I went to check my email.

As I empty the dishwasher, I hope the dishwasher simultaneously washes away whatever I was thinking about and recovers the original, best thought. I would like to erase. I would also like my pristine idea.

I like to pretend that if I could record every idea, get the idea at the moment it happened, then the true and good work would prevail. But that’s not what happens. In the middle of Harry Potter, I have an idea of humans and adaptability. Should I get up from where I’m reading in bed and write it down? Should I have some technology that allows me to nod in the general direction of that idea and have it permanently imprinted on a document that one day, if I put it through the dishwasher of revision, it will come out clean?

That idea, if it’s a good one, will emerge again. And so my ideal workspace is wherever there is other work to do to allow the ideas to resurface.

I should go outdoors without shoes on. I should sit in the middle of my garden with my laptop and type the words, “let’s all adapt.” I should pull a weed or two and write, “there’s something very much like the movie Waterworld about humans adapting. I don’t want gills.” I should go find a hoe and dig a trench. Into it, I should plant tiny carrot seeds. “But maybe I do want gills. Who am I kidding? Gills would be rad.” Now I stand up. “If I had gills, would food still taste good?” I both wonder this and write this and I’m so glad my computer doesn’t mind a little dirt and tiny carrot seeds.

The ideal workspace is a place where my computer can be and I can escape from it. It should be in an open enough place where I swear I just saw a fox run out the backyard and with just enough open windows and doors that my kids can find me and bring the kitchen forks outside and take the pinecones inside and the wind can send me away and the flicker of a hawk tail can draw me back. It should be in reach of both popcorn and tea. It should be loud enough that I have to stand up and ask, “what?” and quiet enough that when I do get one of those pristine ideas, I can hear it echo, resound, resonate and come back until it’s finally ready to be written down.

Back in 2000, almost by accident, we bought a 1923 Mediterranean in the middle of Hollywood. We happened by an open house, instantly fell in love with it and without ever looking at another house, offered to buy it. Maybe it was the grapefruit tree, or the easy walk to the Larchmont Farmers Market, or the legacy of the Hollywood sign looming in the distance-we just had to have it. We knew it would be the perfect place to start building a family. Well, almost perfect, after we made a few additions here and there. We now have two beautiful girls ages 2 and 6 to mess it all up.

We are both actors, but work as a team on our numerous writing projects. Being able to work out of one’s house is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing in that you can write or memorize dialogue for hours without ever having to find your pants. However, when one needs to concentrate with two kids running around, it can be a bit of a curse. It is difficult for us to think in clutter…chaos. Our home is decorated in 18th and 19th century furnishings and the juxtaposition of the inevitable brightly-colored plastic toys can be a bit maddening. We do our best work when we can find that one area of the house that has been untainted by the detritus of the kids’ day.

For instance, the only official “office” space is a small detached room in the corner of the backyard. We don’t want to say “converted garage” because, like a lot of structures behind Hollywood homes, the transition from garage to office was not a city-permitted venture. It’s where we house our library and is where we tend to do most of our research and organized thinking.

The antique partners desk enables us to face each other as we bounce ideas back and forth, the baby monitor hissing gently in the background. The oversized windows and a glass door allow us to see the backyard in it’s entirety, as the girls play on the swing, in the sandbox or up the apricot tree.

But the real heart of the house is the kitchen. As actors, we work together to memorize lines in preparation for an audition or a shoot. These rehearsals most often end up at the kitchen table in spare moments snatched from the day’s schedule. The deep red tones, Regency chairs, the giant rooster staring down at us are lit by the ever-present California sun. And at nightfall, the kitchen is where the post-dinner dance happens, usually to a Rosemary Clooney song or the likes, as the family, en masse, blows off a little steam. After the girls are asleep, the kitchen table is where the brainstorming begins. A legal pad… a bottle of wine… invariably leads to the evening’s furious scribble-fest.

To generate new material we often link up two keyboards and connect them to the television in the living room so both of us can have control over the same document. At night the uncluttered space, low light and more formal setting makes it a place free from the physical and psychological happenings of the day. It’s the room where we can light a fire, swirl a medium-bodied red and dig in.

When reading through and evaluating drafts, we often treat ourselves to an outdoor session: sitting on Adirondack chairs, we project the computer onto a ten-foot screen and sit under the stars ruminating our literary efforts.  When school projects and various arts and crafts have consumed our surfaces, we resort to alternative venues: our bedroom window-seat, the front porch, or even the bathroom, with one of us in the tub as the other quizzes from the throne of the toilet seat.

This is how we imagine the first inhabitants of this house, the actors and actresses of the 1920’s, working on their lines. Houses are like handbags. We will always manage to fill the space we have to maximum capacity. If we only had more storage…

All photo: Gary Judson Smoot.

A Lifetime of Studios
We lived and worked for 10 years in a brownstone in Brooklyn. Life was separated by a staircase–work downstairs, life upstairs.  As a young, composed designer most of my day was spent downstairs and then my kindergartener would walk in and change the tune and I would float upstairs – with the intent to do both. This was modeled on the Eames House, two clear volumes with two clear occupations. For years the space was clearly divided where I was not – I existed perpetually on that staircase, never quite sure which floor I should be on.

A radical move to a small town in Mississippi provided another model for working.  A Queen Anne extravaganza, it allowed for rooms to live in and rooms to work in and more rooms and even more dust…I mean rooms.

Photo by Caleb Crawford.

The model for this can be Olana, where Fredric Church resided over epic landscapes (real and painted) and an ever-growing family.  Influenced by his East Asia travels, Church manipulated a beaux-arts floor plan into a Persian court as a sitting room for his family, directly adjacent to his studio.

“You’ll see, great work will be produced in the bosom of your family!” I proclaimed. My studio was a dream studio, a large square room with a pink crystal chandelier, graciously next to the kitchen. I was paralyzed with creative fear and made furniture in the garage, burned a lot of dinners writing “just one more” e-mail and never finished a slew of drawings. The studio remained very neat.

When the Queen Anne house proved too much, a small industrial building (that had been our ill-fated dream café and its small apartment in the back) became our oddly productive construct.

Many might say that a 600 sf two bedroom/one room apartment with a 5’-11” thirteen year old girl was a bad idea. We find the broad space of the café makes for the perfect workshop-atelier.  The density and layering of life suits my work.

For this stage I look to Vanessa Bell’s Charleston, a small cottage used as a refuge from the bombing in London during World War I. Life ebbed and flowed through the house. All rooms were studios and all life was art. My family might be too straight-laced to provide the bohemian drama of Charleston, but I have employed Vanessa’s “all over” method for work and my couch is the anchor.

I know! You’re horrified – I am designer, I should designate a space for work. Be more Virginia Woolf (“a room of your own”), less Vanessa. But finally, with my daughter older I have the luxury to do creative work. That can be done any time, any place, and with my family. My daughter has a workspace in the workshop equal to that of her father and mother.  I can write first thing in the morning on the couch. I can embroider during homework. I can sew in the studio next to the freezer. Furniture is painted as dinner is assembled. The garden can be composed and picked at before coffee is finished and I can read that book at last. This messy blending of life and work is our most productive state.

I would love to believe that the buildings presented these problems, but life did, and happily I have decided to look to Vanessa Bell for more architectural solutions.

Life will present us with another space come this summer.  We are not sure what the square footage will be or what architectural style it will promote but I would like the clarity of thought from the Eames studio, the epic expanse both imagined and real from Olana and the nurturing of ideas and activities at all scales from Charleston….that would make a perfect studio.

All photos except as specially noted by Jennifer Hudson.

My name is Dallas Clayton. I write kids books. I don’t require much space or many amenities to be happy.  I guess I’m lucky like that. To be honest, I would be just as happy living in a van parked next to the ocean as I would in any variety of palatial estate. I’m not much for sprawl or grandeur, or making other people who don’t have any houses feel bad about it because my house has six basketball courts and a television made of diamonds.

But I can recognize that “van” is a pretty lackluster answer to what is my ideal space.  Maybe instead of van, I should say craft. Vehicle. Traveling machine.

What does that look like? It’s going to need to be fast, so I can hurry all over the world meeting new friends and getting into new situations. Maybe even “warp speed” fast. You know, near-instant traveling capacities.

And its going to need a lot of room, so that people can come inside and hang out and eat food and play party games, and draw pictures on the walls if they want to. What good is it being able to get Iceland at warp speed if you can’t have a dance party when you get there?  And it’s going to need to be able to fly, and go underwater also, because – well, you asked me to use my imagination…

…and while we’re at it, it should probably be able to go into space- maybe to the furthest reaches of space- the parts of space that could answer all sorts of questions about mankind and god and science and whatnot.  I would also like it to be painted on the front like a mural at a pediatric dentist’s office (rainbow-colored misshapen animals, wizards, etc).

Oh, and it needs multiple swimming pools for when we travel to desert climates (you’re invited too, you know!) I would also like it if it could play music as it traveled, like an ice cream truck- but less annoying. Maybe it could play something easy on the ears, like Sam Cooke or Bill Withers, man those guys could sing. If only my house could sing as well as Bill Withers, I’d be a happy fella.

I guess since we are on the subject I’d like to make one final request of my ultimate home- if it could end poverty, disease, and global inequality and maybe across the board make people of the world feel better about themselves, well that would be great too. *

Thanks so much!

Love, Dallas!

* They said I could use 600 words. I only used 428 words so far so I would like to use the remaining space to tell you that I love you and that maybe you should call your mom today if you get a chance or maybe if you see someone outside (it’s pretty cold these days) who doesn’t have a house you should try to talk to them or maybe buy them some food or maybe just even a big smile would be nice. I know isn’t much, but at the end of the day we’re all just people, right?

Above: Home. From the window systems to the shower enclosure hardware, from the landscape to the lighting, the house is a laboratory with enough creative inspiration for everyone.

My life’s overarching goal has been to build an environment that instills confidence as much as nurtures creativity of my children.  The objective has always been to provide adequate room to grow with lots of choices along the way.

In 1991, for example, as a pregnant architect setting up my own child’s nursery I could not find much in terms of furnishings that respected the intelligence and sophistication I envisioned human beings possessed from day one. Thus, it was only natural to develop a product line of multi-functional modern furniture and accessories for children, some of which are available through New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Above: Modern Easel + Art Cart. Best Toy Award, 2002, Child Magazine

Specializing in design for children enabled me to enlist my daughters as collaborators and expert consultants. For instance, as I worked on the Discovery Carts for the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens, both daughters, Mia and Nastya, were prototyping and learning with me. We playfully gained new appreciation for the beauty of gardens while producing three site-specific portable educational stations to engage children in learning about the institution through age-appropriate hands-on activities.

Above: Discovery Carts For the Huntington Gardens, 2002

When I found our dream house as a run-down distressed cabin with a 200-bush rose garden, my husband was very skeptical. It was quite a leap to imagine the potential weighing in functional and aesthetic considerations.  I completely renovated the home’s interiors, opening the kitchen, creating a dining room and powder room, and expanding the bathrooms. It was an exercise in merging of old and new—in building, design, and attitude. By marrying new with existing elements I was able to create an ideal environment that offers a fluid variety of spaces to enjoy depending on the mood. I saw obstacles and constraints as opportunities to invent project-specific solutions, such as a free-standing swimming pool on sloping land, or an underground bath house.

Above: Table in the rose garden. To learn how to take care of our roses, the family took a seminar on rose-pruning.

And then, it dawned on me that I have been subconsciously designing not only our house, but our life, as if it were an architectural project. Admittedly, being your own client has been extremely gratifying, enabling me to take the time, to experiment, and to correct mistakes while considering every little-yet significant-detail!

Above: We turned the house into a space showcasing our daughters’ artwork.  Here, our daughter Mia’s painting was translated into a mosaic, a focal point on the wall of the above-ground pool.

As my kids grew, I took up Creativity Coaching in order to continue to have influence in their lives. At that point, I became increasingly interested in psychological impact of architecture and began writing a book that pairs self-help and design with a premise that anyone can “construct” their own life or “engage the architect within.”  I began blogging on the Huffington Post to give me the opportunity to regularly share my thoughts on the subject and to test the concepts while gaining a voice.  To me, engaging the architect within is a matter of mindset — openness to begin before knowing the solution, awareness of different scales, and ability to move back and forth from an over-all concept to a small detail while constantly asking questions.

Above: Home studio

However, acknowledgement and validation that I get from my daughters is most valuable. I am lucky; recently Nastya admitted that our garden “is a hugely inspiring place for her.”  And I heard Mia tell someone: “My mother created our house to be a place for our family to live, work, and grow up. Due to her encouragement and inspiration, I grew up as an artist, just like her.”

Above: Mia’s room.

Our house is a 131-year-old navy blue small folk Victorian for which the front door in our three-year ownership has gone bright green to deep orange and soon, maybe, black.  We move and rearrange our things repeatedly and often make unconventional design based pairings based around our different tastes. And then we find the need to constantly refine the uses for our home.  We began home schooling our daughter over a year ago, which is something we thought we’d never do but rather instantly found it a match for our lifestyle and our daughter’s style of learning. Our ideal is a home where a child can wonder and investigate.

Our days are an adventure stemming from an idea, a jumping off point and we go hunting inside our home and out for illustrations and reinforcements; variations on a theme.

We try and keep our lifestyle organic, fluid, often imperfect, and sometimes a mess.  Perhaps our ideal workspace might have a robot solely programmed to clean up after us although surely an example is to be made of cleaning up the fallen confetti of snow-like cut paper from our dining room floor.

We allow our children to explore our work and our studios in the same way we do our yard or any playground. Everyone in the house is entitled to access of books, baking material, puzzles, musical instruments, dress up clothes, art supplies, and science projects, dolls, cars, trains, and fake money.  We like to use children’s art materials in tandem with professional artists materials.  Jaime assembles quilts on the floor of the kitchen, while Jeff has extended the size of his studio desk so our daughter Charlie makes her own paintings beside him. Additionally our idea of studio often extends into the beyond. Nearly every day Jeff reads and does research for his art amongst the fellow riders on the NJTransit train into the City. We work in fits and starts chipping away at projects as time allows.

We are fortunate to be present in our lives and as we have changed so has the work we make. In 2001, we started a New Year’s edition project inspired by Yves Saint Laurent’s annual “LOVE” New Year’s card. Since the arrival of our children, the card has taken on new forms and directions, less about our art and more about the things that make up our children’s lives.

We embrace a collaborative approach to art and project making, thus we have always sought out people and families who work together, create editions and yearly projects.  The Dolphin Studio in Stockbridge, Massachusetts creates a calendar designed by several members of their family, including the very young.  We especially love the songs our friend Dan Zanes sings with his daughter, Anna, and his approach to music making. With a wild spirit and assortment of musical friends, young and old, he brings varied talents together from all the distant places of this world.

Last year we used a lyric from one of his songs on one of the posters we produce in our family workshop. Most recently we produced a series of silk screened posters that are meant to embrace and reflect on the lives of those we know who are on the Autism spectrum.

For us, ideal workspace as a term seems problematic as it suggests a fixed outcome or an answer. Our live/workspace extends beyond our home, out into the uncertain world and back again.

My business isn’t just about food.  It is about community.  What I do is provide a nutritious environment for my friends and family that supports everyone, myself included.

It is my belief that life is a bounty.  It is incredible to have a store, this incredibly sustaining place, to share my days with people.  We are thankful to share joy, sadness, connectedness, laughter, life’s milestones.  My family comes and goes throughout the day.  My husband is there by my side.  My three-year-old son, a once preemie baby who inspired me to break out, my strong boy now, laughing and swiping a cookie.  My nine-year-old daughter, a strong swimmer, diving through her studies and doing her homework at my office desk.  My eleven-year-old daughter, bringing her girlfriends in and proudly sharing the bounty.  This is my ideal life.

My children get to see work and to learn the process of work.  When our fathers went to work, they went away, we had no idea what they did or where they went.  My kids get to learn about sweaty, boiling pots hard work, but also how fun it is, and they get to do it right along with us.  I tell them that no one can take the hard worker away from you.  Work is no problem when you have this balance of being able to write your own parameters and follow your own creative whims.

My ideal life work space?  This one, with all its highs and lows.  Tired legs and full bellies.  Bring it on.

Little Flower Herb Scones

Ingredients:

AP Flour                                             3 3/4 cups

Baking Powder                                    2 Tbs

Salt                                                      1 Tbs

Salted butter, cold, cut in pieces 12 oz. (3 cubes)

Eggs                                                    4 each

Heavy Cream                                       3/4 cup + 2 Tbs

Buttermilk                                           1/4 cup

Herbs:

Tarragon, chopped                               1 packed cup

Chervil, chopped                                 1 packed cup

Chive, chopped                                    1 packed cup

Flat leaf parsley, chopped                    1 packed cup

Method:

Sift dry ingredients together and place in bowl of large mixer fitted with paddle. Cut in butter. Let mix for 2 minutes on speed 1. Add all herbs and mix until incorporated. Slowly add eggs and cream. Mix until incorporated. Roll out onto lightly floured surface, 1” thick. Cut with plain 3” round cutter and place on lined sheet pan. Yields 15 scones. Brush with buttermilk.Bake at 325F until golden. Approximately 15-20 minutes.

Citrus Pomegranate Compote

Citrus compote:

Orange                                                  1

Lemon                                                   2

Lime                                                      1

Water                                                    1 cup

Sugar                                                     1 generous cup

Pomegranate seeds                                to taste

Thinly slice citrus peel and all. Remove seeds. Place in pot with water. Bring to boil and then turn down heat to simmer. When compote consistency is reached, add sugar. Cook briefly until syrup thickens but take off heat before citrus gets candied. Add pomegranate seeds to taste.

Work, space, some practicalities: we are more interested in how work happens in places than in “places for work.”

We both have multi-disciplinary, collaborative design practices and often work together. We live in a small cabin of a house in Los Angeles with one child, one cat, a Mini, and a dwarf hamster. At home we share a desk located in front of a big window from which we can watch our daughter and her friends play on two tree-swings.

In our future house we hope to build on this small example of telescoping space: where the different parts are simultaneously visible, welcoming different modes of living.

ABOVE: Over-easy house, DurfeeRegn

Iris: I have always admired the way Marguerite Duras worked – stolen spaces in her living room, or in a simple sunny nook. Having work areas in various locations of the house, somewhat defined (by Duras as stacks of books and ashtrays), allows for the different functions and humors.

Duras writes: “There are houses that are too well made, too well thought out, completely without surprises, devised in advance by experts. By surprise I mean the unpredictable element produced by the way a house is used…” (Practicalities: Marguerite Duras Speaks to Jerome Beaujour, Grove/Atlantic, Inc, 1993)

Some situations engender productive improvisation. “Misused” programmed spaces, leftover or residual spaces, selective ambiguous specificity

Iris: When our daughter was an infant we took her to R.I.E. parenting classes, where we learned about open-ended play. Encountering this idea as the result of serious developmental research lent new conviction to thoughts we had about spaces which allow occupants to define their own desires.

Tim: I believe the best architecture balances the use of somewhat abstract, objective systems with subjective specificity. To consider a place for working is equally a process of structuring an environment with an optimistic potential for use, and a somewhat intuitive referencing of places I have experienced. For me, “live/work” inescapably conjures an adolescent memory of the fake wood-paneled basement room we called the “library,” where all of the books not worthy of the living room were shelved: I’m OK, You’re OK, The Amazing Mrs. Polifax. I wrote term papers to the sound of the freestanding dehumidifier periodically shuddering on, pulling gallons of water from the summer air.

Duras: “… most modern houses… don’t have passages… for children to play and run about in, and for dogs, umbrellas, coats and satchels…passages and corridors are where the young go when they’re four years old and have had enough of grownups and their philosophy.“

ABOVE: Rather than being an idle “deck,” an outdoor space could be on its way somewhere. hood-House, DurfeeRegn

At times merely the appearance of utility can be comforting, and inspiring – even when it is not clear exactly what the purpose of a space or object might be. We think of it as a kind of selective or layered specificity that encourages thought, participation, and sometimes even community.

ABOVE: Growth Table, DurfeeRegn. Photographs: Matt Shodorf

Tim: Kitchens in particular, have this quality – they are the most purposeful-looking of domestic spaces, and can lend a certain focus to tasks that have nothing to do with food. A kitchen makes for an excellent place to pay bills, as though the responsible management of money is assured in the location where the food is kept and prepared. As a teenager in Brussels I built model airplanes and plastic Big Daddy Roth hot-rods in a tiny kitchen on the third floor of our house. I sat on a high stool, which afforded a view through a single, small window. The gray patter of low-country drizzle, David Bowie on auto-rewind.

Juliette: The perfect working space is made entirely out of layered sheets of paper: cottony, soft-like-skin paper. In a giant block note, any unsuccessful design attempt is forbidden: trace on the walls, draft, carve the wrong marks and repent: tear the sheets. No one will ever know what went through your mind. Write on the tables, the corridors, the floors, the bed, whenever the promise of an idea arises.

Good pieces are harvested, bad ones systematically shredded and randomly re-pasted in beautiful Ellsworth-Kelly-like, “arranged by chance” collages. Nothing to lose, just recycle; and in the morning, one could start fresh, on blank surfaces.

But here it creeps already: the fear of the blank page. The paralysis caused by an infinite amount of possibilities…I have to rethink this pristine fantasy before I cannot think at all. And as I look around at the desk onto which I am writing — on a minuscule piece of paper — it seems pretty clear that I do not have much control over space after all… My desk has won, a long time ago. The stratification, the piles, the clusters, the collections, the archives, the rejects, the relics, the treasures, the samples, the samplers: everything that has helped me think is right there and seems to be going nowhere.

I clean, I push, throw away, relocate and compile, but somehow, the desk seems on a mission to never clear up. As confusing and ambiguous this abundance might look, its message to me is actually crystal clear: “However testing today’s task will be, I remain the living proof that work gets done on this table. Look, it has been done before, you can do it today.” Every morning, I seem to believe it.

As years pass by it seems that work and life become more and more intertwined. With children now, work time is limited by tighter schedule constraints but also tends to be fueled by more personal/family interests. I still like to keep professional and family activities separated but it happens quite frequently that a child’s nap becomes an opportunity to wrap up an assignment. Before long, tools become toys, books become dinosaurs’ houses, and layouts become coloring books. The partition between home and office disappears and everyone is working/playing. From that view point, I have enormous expectations for my family and professional lives to come. It will have to continue to get better and better by becoming more and more fulfilling, joyous, convivial and creative for all of us. Nothing less and for that, I might need some help.

The office must become very supportive. It starts knowing me better and constantly reminds me of what inspires and interests me. “Let’s not re-invent the wheel, Juliette,” I hear it say, “here are the designers and artists that have most quickened your heartbeat lately; first, clean up your eyes with their amazing work.” Then, in the anguish of the design process, the desk whispers: “Listen, I generated constructive criticism based on what the people you admire the most in your field and family would say about your work at this minute.” A button on my keyboard automatically generates questions. Interrogations like “Could you erase fifty percent? How does this relate to today’s news? Could it be a comment on our food system? Can you make this by hand?” would fire at me along with much needed clear directives: “Hide the best parts. Color-code it all. Try one hundred more. Crop it like Sister Corita would. Make it for someone extremely curious…”

Sensing my adrenaline level go dangerously high, the speakers channel my Nick Drake radio on Pandora. In extreme cases, the desk prepares a quick slide show of unrelated material and mandates it to be incorporated in the work. My thoughts are evaluated at every moment, sorting out the distraction and the analysis. And when the balance materializes, all the time gained, recorded on a little counter, is used to draw on cottony, soft-like-skin sheets of paper.

Obviously, I am not asking for much; just a little bit of balance, once in a while, something good I made to show my family and a few minutes here and there to draw.

Ellen: “I have always looked at my work as an adventure. In the way that rock climbing or exploring new lands or flying are adventures, my work feels like an adventure to me. Rather than scaling the highest peaks or seeking a new land, I have followed questions. Questions that I think matter. Questions that I think will help me if I find an answer. Questions that I think will help others if I find an answer. And in spending my life following questions, I have found that an answer, or a partial answer, always leads to new questions.

There is no lack of things to wonder about, to be curious about, to seek to know. The books I have written are adventures in finding answers to questions: How do parents grow and change led to my book, The Six Stages of Parenthood. What do children think about their employed fathers and mothers led to my book, Ask the Children. And how can we keep the fire of learning burning brightly in children’s eyes led to my most recent book that involved ten years of research, Mind in the Making.

My research has likewise been fueled by the desire to seek answers to questions about how employers and employees are responding to the changes in work and family life today. And the organization that I co-founded 21 years ago, the Families and Work Institute, has been pursuing these questions ever since.

Photography has also been a way that I have sought answers to some of life’s most seemingly intractable questions. The question I have been pursuing for more than three decades is: what happens to what we try to create, try to build, try to maintain, try to preserve? We spend so much of our lives attempting, each in our own way, to leave indelible footprints that will outlast us. Yet on a daily basis, we fight against the encroachment of dust and decay. I have spent the past three decades photographing this stunning nexus between death and rebirth, following how nature re-sculpts our creations all over the world. [One of Ellen's images below.]

It is probably not surprising that I am an iterant worker in my own home and in my workplace. I didn’t even have a home office until about three years ago. At first I had a pad of paper and then I had a portable computer. With each new project, I find a different place to work (her upstairs office is pictured above and below is her latest workspace). My latest workspace is in my son’s old bedroom, but now that Mind in the Making is finished, my computer and I may just find a new place to go.

Norman: I displayed talent for visual art at an early age, but it was my focus and achievements in math and science that led to my first career in the mid 1960’s as a chemical engineer.  Throughout my years in industry, however, I never lost my passion for art and I continued to study painting and drawing. After seven years, I made the decision to leave engineering to concentrate on my art. I completed an MFA program at Columbia University as part of this career shift. In some ways, I didn’t completely leave engineering because my abstract geometric work continues to be inspired by many aspects of my scientific and technical background.  Over the years, my ongoing interest in consciousness explorations, and spiritual issues also has informed my imagery. In addition, my study of Chinese martial arts, specifically Tai Ji Quan, and qigong, as well as various energetic healing practices and meditation disciplines has also had seminal influences on my art.

Just at the time I was transitioning into an art career, we located the building that was to become our home and my studio. It has ended up playing an integral role in both my work and our family life ever since.  It afforded me the room and opportunity to expand and evolve into an art career, and also the space to begin teaching Tai Ji and qigong in the studio, which I have done for nearly 25 years, as well as in regional hospitals and health centers.

When we first saw this building, we realized it had been a victim of neglect. No wonder it had been on the market for years. Yet it was easy to look past the peeling paint, the dilapidated walls, and the unkempt surrounding land.  What I focused on was the huge amount of SPACE that sang to me—the flexible space to create the type of studio I had dreamed of, and a glorious living space to raise our family.

This building became our home and our workspace and has remained so for more than three decades. Located 12 miles north of New York City overlooking the Hudson River, it is a huge 19^th century four story sandstone barn with a seven-stall horse stable enclosed within the building. Although it was converted from a barn into a residence in the 1930’s, we still refer to it as a “work in progress.”

The studio area, which originally housed the carriages, took about a year and a half to renovate into a working studio. The many exposed stone interior walls were left in the upper living areas, but those in the studio had to be covered and insulated to retain heat and provide display areas. The 18-step “commute” from our living areas upstairs to my studio downstairs provided a minimal yet clearly defined separation between work and family.   The close proximity between the creative time in an art studio and the give and take events of family life with growing children provided a uniquely rich environment for inspiration and creation.

“What is my ideal live/work space? It is a well-designed space in which living with the profound is a given. It isn’t an easy thing to accomplish.  This year the world lost the amazing Jane Blaffer Owen, who reincarnated a near ghost town in New Harmony, Indiana into the glorious spiritual retreat it is today.  It took her an entire lifetime of dedicated work, and the process continues.

She involved Philip Johnson, Richard Meier, Jacques Lipchitz, and many other creatives in designing an ideal space to think and to create.

And to love.  It was on a trip to New Harmony that my then boyfriend and I realized we ought to move in together (in a few months we celebrate 22 years together).  Therefore, I’m tremendously honored to be among the artists whose works she chose to populate the complex. I could go on and on about this place and if you haven’t been there, then find a way to make the trip.

What Owen created was a rare place where there was enough breathing space to imagine possibilities.

I’d like that in my ideal live/work space, too.

Imagining possibilities requires the ability to be positive.  Positiveness requires the ability to laugh.  “Dying is easy but comedy is hard,” actor Edmund Gwenn is credited as famously saying.  Similarly, artistic creations which make one laugh or smile or believe are ideal to me. So there needs to be both a physical space that is ideal and a mental one.  Of course they are intertwined.  Following on the conversation begun by Alain de Botton last week—YES, YES, YES how we live in architecture most certainly affects one’s day to day life.  The exploration of this is a significant component to my own sculptural work.  Exploring the experience of the individual-be it works that are large meanderable installations or individual works designed for specific homes-allows for a wide range of play.  There would be a lot of play in my ideal live/work space so that one can pretend to be a very small insect in a paper forest, or the king of the forest.

Speaking of playing at being king of the forest, BROODWORK participant Juliette Bellocq (who will share her views in this space in two weeks) asked me what it would be like to live in one of my sculptures.  She could mean this:

or this

But she got me thinking about the larger possibilities. This would be fun to live amidst.

However, I think it would be ideal to do this:

And as long as I had a place to make a pie, I think my family will happily join me in our special squiggly house.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to fold them into the Lifework family ever since. Along came the Post Family and the birth of the Ideal Live/Work Space. And it became clear that this was a perfect place to explore the work of BROODWORK.

After a productive meeting with Rebecca and architect Iris Anna Regn (who co-founded BROODWORK with Rebecca) we are now ready to launch the latest Ideal Live/Work Space series. I think you’re going to enjoy it. The first participant is acclaimed philosopher and author Alain De Botton. Look out for his post later today. We will also visit Rebecca’s Eagle Rock home and studio;  the home Iris is designing with her husband, architect Tim Durfee; graphic designer Juliette Bellocq and Families and Work Institute founder Ellen Galinsky and painter Norman Galinsky.