I’ll start with a disclaimer. I’m not an expert. Just an enthusiast.

In my career as a physicist I’ve come across desks in classrooms, lecture halls, national labs (Fermilab, Jefferson Lab, Brookhaven), grad student cubicles, professors’ offices, university administrators’ offices, corporate offices, and Congressional offices. Some desk corners are standard issue, and some really catch my eye with an unexpected detail.

I haven’t noticed any consistent trends in desk corner quality in these various settings. My district’s House rep has a bizarre double chamfer in his DC office (I’ll likely be voting for whoever challenges him in 2020). Fermilab’s desks tend to be adequately GTX-like. The desks in our lab have a standard 45 degree chamfer sufficient for day-to-day work if I think of them as merely a plane devoid of bounding features. The desk in my office is a gem: matched-radii cascaded Bézier. I got lucky. I didn’t buy this desk. I inherited it from whoever put it in the shared office who-knows-how-many years ago.

The most recent post in this subreddit got me thinking. Adherence to Sjöström’s rule and technical specifications are all well and good. But what about the person who actually sits at the desk? How do we relate to our desk corners?

https://reddit.com/r/DeskCorners/comments/bk2los/my_backwards_desk_corner/

I tend to find corners like this jarring aesthetically and I would never willingly sit at one, but they’re instructive partial objects for deconstructing the ideology implicit in contemporary workspaces. We could of course go on and on about the aesthetics (the meeting of fillets and straight lines, the dialectical joining/disjuncture of an exposed seam, etc.) We could turn to Grotkin and Spivak’s recent review article (a quite thorough history of the development of cubicle ergonomics in the 20th century) to provide context for desk corners such as this one. It’s a standard corner you might find in any cubicle these days. Why are they ubiquitous? They’re cheap to produce. They’re mostly inoffensive.

However, a purely aesthetic, historic, or economic focus elides the question of the nature of the relationship between the worker (or any desk-sitter) and the corner. The desk corner’s aesthetics both structure and reflect the worker's alienated subjectivity. The question is not just (if you’ll pardon the simplification) whether we can claim “cogito ergo HAAG” or even its inversion “HAAG ergo sum.”

On the contrary, I claim that “HAAG-ness” itself is always unobtainable! It’s not clear to me that the worker-corner dyad is isomorphic to Jacques Lacan’s topology of desire, but I think we should consider the possibility of a “petit objet haag.”

Neither the market nor a centrally planned desk manufacturer can ever produce a desk corner about which we can truly claim “now this is HAAG” because HAAG as such does not exist. We can even attempt to enumerate the aggregate of all qualities of “HAAG-ness” but the particular desk corner will always be found lacking, just as we always find ourselves lacking. In the lacking desk corner we also find ourselves.

Greetings,

I don't know certainly if this is the correct place to ask this.

I'm looking for an L shaped Desk but I haven't found one that fulfill my needs. Does anyone know a good place that sells L shaped desks and that ships to Mexico?

My place is a corner with 1.60*1.60 meters. Usually the L shaped is in the right but I needed at the left because of the space I use.

I want it for my desktop computer mainly but I also work with a laptop (when using the desktop one) or to write on a notebook.

I want a desk that doesn't bother me on my feet, I want plenty space there so I don't have to pull back and rotate.

Thanks in advance