The peeling of a clementine

It is a quarter to four on a quiet Friday afternoon, and a number of journalists are on the verge of celebrating the weekend. Ricky, the artist we invited, is finalising his sketches of the newsroom’s layout. We – Saskia and Sander – are drawn to an editorial staff writer peeling a clementine, evidently taking a break from her work. More and more hot desks are left empty, neat and tidy, and the journalistic buzz of newsworthy happenings and impossible deadlines is conspicuously absent. 

It feels as though the mild overtones of the apparent worldly status quo affect the pace of the newsroom: there hardly seems to be any pressing news to be written, and how do you make a world speak if it’s quiet? Or is it? The newsroom’s atmosphere is gentle and thin – you could almost hold it in your hand. Because of this perceivable calm, the journalist eating a piece of fruit at her desk appears spectacular and unexpected; there are plenty of homely sofas and coffee tables around her desk, and she could have decided to go outdoors to enjoy the fragile sunlight of a mellow February afternoon. We approach her, and she agrees on being interviewed, as long as we let her finish eating. 

She tells us that this isn’t her fixed workspace; it is a hot desk. 'But if it’s available, I’ll go and sit here. (…) There’s not much daylight in the newsroom, and this section has the highest chance of receiving sunlight (…) The plants compensate for the lack of sunlight or at least some of it.’ By being attuned to the specific affordances of the newsroom, she is drawn to the spot that works best for her – it is a corner desk that is relatively quiet and occasionally sun-lit. It shows how she navigates the newsroom’s atmospheric staging: 

'I don’t really believe in hot desks. It’s a nice idea, but you always need to clean up your own stuff and can’t leave anything for the next day. And you need to constantly log in... maybe that’s why lots of journalists always go and sit at the same desk.' 

The staged and spatialised notions of openness, inclusivity, and egalitarianism are rejected: hot desks should allow for non-hierarchical uses of architectural space (as even the chief editor’s workspace is, in principle, a hot desk), but it is not necessarily the ‘right’ kind of atmosphere for all editorial staff writers. As the journalist concludes:

‘I like it when I can see other people’s personal stuff. It’s true, you do get to meet more colleagues who used to sit farther away or whom you’d only see at the coffee machine (…) but the only quiet place, apart from being outdoors, is the bathroom. That’s nice to… it’s quiet there. I think it’s somehow strange to comfortably sit down and chill on a sofa at work, even though I’m regularly relaxing in other ways, for instance, by Googling something. (…) And every day I’m thinking… the heights of all these desks are adjustable. And every day, I intend to take advantage of it, but I never do. I’m a sheep. I’m too lazy, I think.'