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Macguffin magazine – The Evolution of the Desk as Cockpit
Agostino Ramelli – Le Diverse et Artificiose Machine (1588)
In 1588, engineer Agostino Ramelli published his Le Diverse et Artificiose Machine del
Capitano Agostino Ramelli, a collection of radical mechanical designs for use in architecture,
food production, hydraulics and warfare. The most interesting of them is a design for a
revolving bookcase intended to replace the traditional desk. It resembles a watermill and has a
complex system of cogs that keep the books in position when the user sets the mechanism in
motion.
The book wheel was designed to facilitate the reading of several books at once and to
make possible a form of cross-reading. It would be stretching a point to regard Ramelli’s
design as a precursor to Hypertext, but the contraption does enable the reader to read several
texts next to and immediately behind one another, and therefore to inaugurate a different
world of thoughts and associations.
Ramelli never put his designs from Le Diverse et Artificiose Machine into practice.
Perhaps creating them was a mental exercise for him, or a form of ‘anticipatory design
science’. That would explain why he never tested their feasibility. But centuries later his
revolving bookcase was constructed for the Venice Biennale in 1985 by Polish-American
architect Daniel Libeskind, who presented it next to items including a model of the Theatre of
Memory developed by Giulio Camillo Delminio from 1519 onwards.
The principles of organization that underlie the use of Ramelli’s book wheel are a
striking example of the way in which the structure of human thought can acquire material
form in the world of objects. Every desk and every workstation is after all a reflection of the
thinking of the user.
David Roentgen - Neuwieder Kabinett (1777)
The Neuwieder writing cabinet is one of the absolute highpoints of eighteenth-century
furniture-making and marquetry. A masterpiece from the studio of the Roentgen family in the
little town of Neuwied in Rheinland Pfalz, it was acquired in 1779 by the future King

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Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia for a sum large enough to have bought him a substantial
palace with extensive grounds.
The Neuwieder Kabinett is a hybrid, composed of its sublimated use by an absolute
monarch and the European mythology incorporated into its marquetry. Friedrich Wilhelm II
used it daily as a desk, writing many letters on its inlaid surface. As he wrote he was
surrounded by a multiplicity of decorative elements, scenes and spatial depictions, each of
which evoked myths and stories.
The interior workings are a miracle of mechanical ingenuity, making this a piece of
furniture that seems to consist of an endless succession of spaces that open and close with the
gentlest movement of a finger, accompanied by music that rises out of its innards, a prismatic
visual and acoustic narrative that gradually opens itself up to the user.
The writing cabinet represents an old German tradition of constructing automata and
mechanical musical instruments, as well as an art of building extremely complex and precise
operating mechanisms at which the southern part of Germany in particular excelled.
In the Neuwieder Kabinett the organizational principles of object and user connect
with the story structure of a shared mythical history. By means of a masterpiece of
workmanship and mechanics, the ruler allied himself with the mythology of absolutist
Europe. The cabinet endorsed his mythical status.
William S. Wooton - Wooton Desk (1874-1884)
‘A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place’ was the advertising slogan deployed by
James S. Wooton in the 1870s after he patented his design for a multifunctional desk in 1874.
Blue-collar workers had increased in number enormously with the coming of the Industrial
Revolution, which also created a growing army of white-collar workers required to steer the
administration of large international companies along the right lines. These developments led
to the emergence of skyscrapers, typewriters and fountain pens, aids for tackling the
complexity of a new administrative reality. It was in this environment that Wooton’s idea
emerged of designing a desk that would assist those facing such complexity.
For anyone looking at the extravagant Victorian desks designed by James Wooton, an
association with the Neuwieder Kabinett is impossible to avoid. As well as attempting to
maximize effectiveness, Wooton was clearly aiming to make his products a showpiece for
those who could afford to buy them. The Wooton desk was a typical example of what was

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known as patent furniture, in which the ingenuity of the construction was safeguarded by law
against industrial plagiarism. At the same time the Wooton desk bears all the hallmarks of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ostentation. It is reminiscent of the wedding cakes built for
a new capitalist class.
Although Wooton’s product was made in series, it nevertheless qualifies in every way
as a traditional masterpiece, condensing an entire office into a single object. The Wooton desk
was designed in such a way that envelopes, documents and loose sheets of paper could be
stored without folding, achieving administrative efficiency by eliminating just that one action.
The ordering principles embodied in the desk sped up administrative tasks considerably.
Ernst Mumenthaler and Otto Meier – Magic Box (1927-1970)
Ernst Mumenthaler and Otto Meier were respected architects from Basel, but they never made
it into the premier division of the twentieth-century architectonic canon. They were exponents
of Modernism, but they distinguished themselves by their typically Swiss feeling for precise
craftsmanship, their sense of proportion in architecture and their use of materials. ‘God is in
the details’ might have been the pair’s slogan as far as their architecture was concerned, and
like their buildings, the furniture they designed reflected their social, spatial and aesthetic
principles.
They developed what they called a Typenmöbel-Programm, of which their
multifunctional desk is the best known example, and opened a factory to manufacture their
furniture according to their own quality norms. The desk was marketed under the name Magic
Box, which seems almost frivolous given the simplicity and rigour of the design.
Mumenthaler & Meier’s Magic Box resembles a Wooton desk with all the ornamentation
stripped off, leaving only the naked essence.
The Magic Box was the ultimate cockpit for written work in the twentieth century.
There are no distractions; the user is surrounded by bare planks and openings, and a small
lamp to illuminate the desktop. In its closed state it resembles an anonymous wardrobe.
M&M’s desk celebrates the modernist efficiency of the twentieth- century and relies
for its effect on the amazement that arises as soon as the Magic Box reveals its interior,
inviting the user to fill all those shelves and niches with products of their own. After all, it is
precisely the absence of any diversion that invites serendipity, a series of associations that

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find their place inside the spatial configuration of the Magic Box.
Vannevar Bush – Memex Desk (1948)
Vannevar Bush, an engineer, worked on the atomic bomb, was present at the birth of the first
analogue computer and served as scientific adviser to the American government. In 1948 he
published an article that laid the basis for a system that decades later became known as the
Internet.
In ‘As We May Think’, Bush predicted the arrival of Hypertext and ‘completely new
encyclopaedias’. The associative ordering principles in the human brain required a
counterpart in future technological systems. He was convinced of the necessity to create
circumstances in which human thought would become capable of processing Big Data while
at the same time leaving the door wide open to serendipity. Rapidly advancing technology
would be able to support free association and make new connections between diverse fields of
knowledge.
The typology of the traditional desk would have to be transformed into an object in
which several systems interacted. With the help of Hypertext, a form of hyperassociation
could be facilitated. In his Memex system Bush made a connection with kindred spirits from
the sixteenth century, Giulio Camillo Delminio and Agostino Ramelli.
His fictional Memex desk – a name combining ‘memory’ and ‘index’ – was full of the
storage and communication technologies of his day, with datasets on microfilm. It had two
slanting screens on its surface, which showed microfilm via mirrors inside the desk. Switches
on the desktop controlled the system.
The drawers, storage spaces and niches of conventional desks have gone. In the
Memex desk they are manifested in the microfilms and in the configurations created and
updated by Memex. This organizational magic is contained within an electronic constellation
of datasets.
Apple – (The End of) Skeuomorphism (2013)
When Steve Jobs and his team developed the GUI (Graphic User Interface) for the first Apple
computers in about 1980, they were convinced of the need to use well-known symbols: a

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desktop, a ‘trash’ (recently renamed ‘bin’), the application of digital shadows to simulate
three-dimensional space, and many virtual folders like those that filled the storage spaces of
desks by James Wooton and Mumenthaler & Meier in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Memex system had reached its zenith by storing everything in digital systems
with the help of iconology already familiar for centuries. Physical desks became increasingly
empty, white-collar workers rapidly vacated their places of work and big businesses were able
to move to smaller buildings. A company operating globally, like Unilever, now had six
hundred staff, an unthinkably small number compared to that needed to keep a similar firm
going in the first half of the twentieth century.
For years GUIs simulated real-world workstations, but since 2013 Apple has been
adapting its iOS in an effort to make the digital domain flat and to strip it of all visual
associations with physical reality. Making a connection between digital and physical domains
by imitating familiar objects is now known as Skeuomorphism. Apple believes that the
current generation of users has become so familiar with the abstraction of the digital domain,
represented by the Cloud, that Skeuomorphism is no longer needed.
Designer John Maeda claimed in 2013 that the reduction of spatiality in favour of an
abstracted visual space need not lead to a stylistic debate, the point being that the way in
which the system functions is just as important as the way in which it is visually designed.
The most important aspect of every design is after all the degree of proximity: spatial
proximity, visual proximity, the proximity of information and the way in which the user can
identify with it.
Whether in the form of Ramelli’s book wheel or Apple’s GUI, a desk can function
optimally only if it responds to our need to identify actively with both the physical and the
digital space, enabling us to become one with the system.
Illustration credits and sources:
1. Ramelli - https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/09/13/the-book-wheel-a-rotating-
reading-desk-for-16th-century-perfect-for-those-tormented-by-gout/
2. Roentgen - https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/secretary-cabinet-neuwieder-
kabinett/zAHlK7ERuP17VQ

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3. Wooton - https://www.harpgallery.com/shop/item21507.html
4. Mumenthaler & Meier - http://www.sam-basel.org/de/ausstellungen/ernst-
mumenthaler-und-otto-meier
5. Vannevar Bush - https://history-computer.com/Internet/Dreamers/Bush.html
6. Skeuomorphism - https://www.wired.com/2013/06/the-future-of-design-is-more-than-
making-apple-ios-flat/
(this element is still in need of a suitable illustration)