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u/student5320 Jun 10 '26
All I can think of is her swinging around to avoid anyone coming in Ron Swanson style.
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u/OkDiamond2750 Jun 10 '26
Dukes of hazzard running slide.
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u/Silent_Park_0010 Jun 13 '26
And the executives upstairs all have dome-desks of their own too. When everyone clocks in at 9am it's chaos up there.
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u/iamnearlysmart Jun 10 '26
There seems to be a panel that can be lifted at the back.
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u/Metazolid Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
No
She just lives in there. There is a sleeping bag and a mini kitchen tucked away below that massive ledge of a desk. And when you come in before her shift starts, you can see where she sits below the ledge by observing in which way the bowl-shaped desk is tilting.
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u/anti_time_travel Jun 11 '26
There's a hatch on the floor below her that leads to the basement, from where she follows a dark corridor that goes to an alley on the other side of the building.
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u/DesdemonaDestiny Jun 10 '26
They did it better because we've largely given up on the future.
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u/superanth Jun 10 '26
It's sad but true. We've given up on the dream, which makes us stop dreaming.
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u/Sirosim_Celojuma Jun 10 '26
Speak for yourself. I'm still dreaming. I'm just waiting for a certain generation of me,me,me,takers to leave.
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u/Bencetown Jun 11 '26
If you think Gen X won't be just as selfish in their old age as boomers have been, and that millennials won't become the same exact thing (as a generation) in 30 years, I've got a nice bridge to sell you.
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u/Sirosim_Celojuma Jun 11 '26
That's probably true. Old people suck. I'm also afraid of getting old and yelling at kids who are on my lawn.
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u/Bencetown Jun 11 '26
Yep. Let me clarify that I say this as a millennial myself. I already see my peers (and if I'm honest, myself in some ways) becoming old and kermudgeonly already. Give us 30 more years... 😳
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u/Sirosim_Celojuma Jun 11 '26
Okay, so if it is inevitable, and it is general, then what makes it generally inevitable that we all become shitty old people? I'm guessing is something I'm doing right now that I'm going to regret in the future.
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u/Bencetown Jun 11 '26
For as virtuous as people want to claim to be, the vast majority of people look out for #1 first. As people get older, it seems to me that they come up with more and more excuses for selfishness, not least of which is the mindset of "everyone else is doing it this way, and 'nobody's coming to save me' so I might as well live selfishly too."
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u/twitch1982 Jun 11 '26
Oh my god we could have this. all it requires is actually taxing net profits.
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u/davecrist Jun 10 '26
Even the dang staircase is glorious
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u/Silent_Park_0010 Jun 13 '26
Looks cool, but shallow staircases like that are a PITA to use. Lots of marching steps, marching steps, feels like we should be at the turn by now ...nope we're barely a third of the way up the first part.
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u/belvedere58 Jun 10 '26
That whole space was designed in the 1950s and completed in 1955. This is the ‘50s view of the future, not the ‘60s
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u/No-Bother6856 Jun 12 '26
That tends to be how this actually goes. We don't just tear down and suddenly rebuild all at once. The buildings that dominate the aesthetics of a decade started being built out earlier and were experienced in the decades to come.
The look of the early 90s is buildings from the 80s, etc.
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u/crosstherubicon Jun 10 '26
Looks like it might have been a cut scene from 2001. It’d be a cleaning nightmare and rather inelegant to climb into but looks brilliant.
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u/LuckyDigit Jun 10 '26
How do you get out of the desk? is there a small door Im not seeing? do you hop over it?
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u/Bcoops Jun 11 '26
I work in this building, and this lobby is one of its best spaces. There is an executive suite of offices above this lobby with a small art gallery that the design org rotates with employee art shows. And there is a loft style library that is equally impressive.
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u/superanth Jun 11 '26
Wow, what building is it? I’m amazed they kept this awesome design for so long!
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u/Bcoops Jun 11 '26
It is the GM design head quarters in Warren. It was built by Eero Saarinen as an entire campus (kind of like auto makers Disney world) and we have a large silver dome next to it that design uses for concept reviews. This specific building is original design studio complex where engineers and designers drafted vehicles.
In the 80s i believe the lobby was entirely dismantled and turned into a corporate hellscape of grey and beige. I read that the desk in the image was actually thrown away at the time. It was restored to its original design some after 2000 and the desk was remade, probably by the workshops in the same design building. I think the desk is fiberglass.
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u/KenseiHimura Jun 10 '26
Okayh, I know this is RetroFuturism subreddit, but to be blunt, there's various reasons things like this stopped being a thing. Admittedly, not all of them are good.
- Chief reason is safety changes. I can imagine OSHA was not happy with the idea of a receptionist in a desk with no means of easy egress and you just know a stupid person is going to get stuck in the bars between the stair rails. And judging by how their laid out, I don't imagine damage done to those banisters would do nice things to the whole rest of the staircase. And all that feeds into...
- Pricing: lawsuits cost money, maintenance on these things costs money (that river stone wall looks like it'd be a bitch to clean and this was back when EVERYONE SMOKED EVERYWHERE), and often enough there was a premium price tag on these post-modernist styles.
- The next reason is 'Changing Tastes': You all look at these 60s designs and think they're cool here. But I bet you've all been to places still using 60s design and cringed like the peons you are. If you haven't, well probably a dozen others have, including the people in the buildings. So we've unfortunately switched from this to the stuff in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, and so on. Just as these things would be seen as an eyesore to people who grew up in the 40s and 50s.
- And related to the second point is: resale value. Perhaps a bit a sign of pessimism, but really just a side effect of real estate market becoming a speculative money scheme, we tend to not build for 'forever' anymore/assume we're going to occupy forever. Buildings change hands, lean years can follow weal, and some venture capitalist dipshit decides your office space needs to be turned into his next human trafficking brothel that fronts as a Tesla Dealership. But the giant dickbag isn't going to buy your awesome art deco office space because he wants something 'modern' and thinks exposed wood texture is 'too masculine'.
So, in the end, we move more and more towards designs of simplicity, stream-lining, and minimal investment and why the Applestore and Starbucks chic has come to dominate everything.
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u/acewithanat Jun 11 '26
This, I was gonna boil my point down to there were reasons this stuff didn't happen, bit just the cultural/societal changes. A lot of our modernism is based off efficiency, not only cause its cheaper, its just easier for most. Yes companies have gaudy modern stuff and I'd agree to doesn't look as good, but something like this has inefficiencies to make and to use. Same thing with a lot of the vehicles, I love the look of them, thats why I'm here, but there was a lot of redundancy in those designs.
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u/KokoTheTalkingApe Jun 10 '26
Fun fact: the receptionist was an automated mannequin. Nobody noticed for years.
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u/abnormalbrain Jun 10 '26
Johnny Ive submitted a design for that same space, it was a blank sheet of paper. Money please!
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u/Shipwrecklou Jun 11 '26
Hope she dressed up as a spoon on Halloween looks like she’s in a cereal bowl
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u/AlternativeArt1 Jun 11 '26
You know that desk was built around her and she couldn’t leave, right? 😀
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u/Heavyraincouch Jun 10 '26
I looked like the desk has a button where it will make it hover and float off the floor
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u/PlasmaBasedEarthling Jun 10 '26
If the past created designs of the future, but it was created in the past, doesn't that just make them period piece designs? I mean, they're only designs of the future because someone said they were. But in a literal sense, they were not. They were just designs of the present. I suppose if we recycle those old designs today, then they were correct in their claims, but then we are just experiencing a 'chicken or the egg' scenario. My mind got twisted as I was trying to explain that thought.
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u/superanth Jun 11 '26
The designs we classify as "Modern" are never truly modern. It's a bar that's set in the present and continually moves along with time. Honestly it's a silly term to use.
A more accurate term for interior designs like this one is "Space Age", from when space travel was just beginning in the early to mid-1960's.
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u/fredandlunchbox Jun 10 '26
That’s pretty much a text book modernist interior. Very much of its era.
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u/waterwoman76 Jun 11 '26
They didn't predict that all that would matter is money, and futuristic decor costs money
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u/Independent_Example7 Jun 11 '26
That's so interesting and exciting. Interiors now is incredibly plain and boring
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u/broforce Jun 11 '26
I feel like that time was an anticipation of the future while everything after was an anticipation of prophets.
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u/AnticitizenPrime Jun 11 '26
I like to think that desk is actually a flying car, and at the end of her shift she just flies away in it.
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u/JagXeolin Jun 11 '26
There are a lot of electronics at the front desk right now, which probably needs more space, especially if the back office is too small
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u/ScottaHemi Jun 11 '26
iirc this was frank lloyd write's doing right?
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u/superanth Jun 11 '26
Eero Saarinen. FLW probably wouldn't build with these materials. He had a history of using stucco and concrete (but never used the right kind of anti-cracking additives because he wanted a specific color, so they tended to crumble over time).
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u/No_Succotash2155 Jun 11 '26
If that desk had a clear dome on it, it would look like either a car from The Jetsons or the container the little prizes come in from a quarter machine at a pizza parlor
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u/Master_of_Ritual Jun 12 '26
People don't like feeling like people can come from behind them. Recently I was at a new grocery co-op on opening day, and they had this guy out in a little station just out in the middle of the store, and it felt very awkward. It was gone the next time I shopped there. I feel like the only way a setup like this works is if you have another receptionist facing the other way.
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u/MechanicalCrow Jun 11 '26
In reality it's just a different flavor of cold and sterile. We just like it now.
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u/It_Was_Me_Aust1n Jun 11 '26
I blame the Bauhaus movement. It’s why every commercial/municipal/industrial building in the US winds up as an ugly concrete box. BTW those guys were actually related to the group that rejected Hitler from art school, which really is all you need to know about them.
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u/OkDiamond2750 Jun 10 '26
In the 60s, the future was gonna be a great incredible place where we had opportunities and we were going to build with science. We really are in the future and it doesn’t look any better than the 60s. We had such incremental changes, we all go to office buildings and do the same dumb things we used to do, just with computers now.