CategoriesFurniture and Lighting
Desk
Furniture for writing and work, from sloped writing boxes and cylinder bureaux to steel office desks and today's cable-managed tables.
14 works · 10 related artists
About
The desk began as a portable box with a sloping lid and grew into furniture as literacy, trade and government expanded. In 17th- and 18th-century France the bureau took many forms: the flat bureau plat, the fall-front secrétaire, and the cylinder desk, whose rolling cover hides papers. Jean-François Oeben began the most elaborate of these, the Bureau du Roi for Louis XV, and Jean-Henri Riesener finished it in 1769.
Offices demanded new answers. American patent desks of the 1870s, such as the Wooton, packed dozens of pigeonholes into hinged wings, and Frank Lloyd Wright designed steel desks and chairs for the Larkin and Johnson Wax office buildings. After the war Mathieu Matégot used perforated sheet metal, while George Nakashima and Charlotte Perriand made desks of plain solid wood. Look for the writing surface, locks and hidden compartments, and how storage is arranged.
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