On Form
The industrial design desk reports
ON FORM
In which our correspondent — trained on cathedrals, ruined by Brutalism — wanders into an office-equipment showroom, declines to leave, and files the review the twentieth century forgot to commission. The photocopier had a public of millions and never once had a critic. It has one now, and the news is better than anyone deserved.
The photocopier is the largest object anyone ever bought without once considering how it looked. Houses have architects; cars have men in polo-necks; even the office chair found its way into museums. But the copier — the heaviest, most visited structure in the office, a building within the building — was specified entirely from the numbers page: copies per minute, bins, feeder. This review is therefore decades late and entirely without competition.
Begin with the palette, since there barely is one. The trade said “beige” as if it were a single substance; the connoisseur distinguishes at least three. Oatmeal: warm, apologetic, the finish of machines that hoped to be liked. Mushroom: grey with ambitions, favoured wherever the copier wished to be mistaken for a computer. And government cream, the shade of procurement itself, specified by the tender document and impossible to love. The industry’s defence — that the machine declined to be looked at so the documents would be — is the sort of thing architects say about car parks.
Formally, the decade offers two genres. The console copier is civic architecture: a plinth on casters, a feeder for a roofline, sorter wings, service hatches — and by the time Xerox’s DocuTech arrived in 1990, console and towers together, the result was less a machine than a small municipal complex with a print room attached. The desktop is the domestic vernacular, and its masterpiece is Canon’s PC series: put drum, toner and cleaner in one snap-in cartridge and the service hatch vanishes — and with it most of the reasons a copier has a shape at all. Minimalism, for once, by honest subtraction.
Sharp, meanwhile, built the canon’s one kinetic facade: the SF-8300 of 1989, the first copier whose paper drawers rotated automatically — a moving elevation. This from the firm that marked its own anniversary with a quieter fan.
The control panel is where the archaeology runs richest. First the dials — exposure knobs with the honest click of a good oven. Then the membrane key: a sealed, flat, faintly damp-feeling sheet that repelled coffee and affection equally. Then, astonishingly, glass: Xerox’s 5090 of 1988 carried a touch-control screen atop 135 copies a minute, and Mita’s DC-6500 put a touch panel on roughly 245 kilograms of machine. The trade filed both under productivity.
Where the box could not speak, the badge did: Panasonic’s mid-decade flagships wore Medallion Series on the fascia — heraldry for the FP-7735, 7742 and 7750, an award-cited line the brochures name-checked for years after. Nameplate architecture of the purest kind: the building is beige, so the plaque must gleam. And then there is the button. Every panel in this issue is grey keys, grey legends, cream fascia — except one red square, labelled START. It is the industry’s single concession to joy, the doorbell of the whole beige civic edifice, and every child ever lifted up to press it knows it was the best button ever made. A profession that gave us the red button need never apologise for oatmeal.
The Beige Spectrum — a field guide
| Shade | Natural habitat | Register |
|---|---|---|
| Oatmeal | Desktops; anything sold within sight of a stationer | Warm, apologetic, wants to be liked |
| Mushroom | Departmental consoles with computing ambitions | Grey, aspiring to management |
| Government cream | Tendered fleets; anywhere with an asset sticker | The colour of procurement itself |
The Venlo question
Every brand review in this issue was written against the same silent baseline: a copier is a beige box. Then the Océ pages arrived and the baseline failed, because the machines from Venlo look like nothing else in the catalogue — and the reason is structural, not stylistic. The copy press — toner pressed onto the paper by direct contact from a long-lived OPC drum, at modest heat, down a famously straight paper path — is a rotary heart, and the casework admits it: rounded, drum-hearted forms, organised around a cylinder rather than around a row of corona wires the machine does not have. Form followed process, which is what the textbooks always claimed buildings did.
The honesty was certified. The 2400 and the 100-copies-a-minute 2500 both took iF design awards — juried industrial-design prizes, won while the rest of the trade argued about bin counts — making Venlo the only house in this magazine with sanctioned aesthetics. Even the air was designed: near-zero ozone from the corona-free process, so an Océ room does not smell like a copier room. A company descended from diazo blueprint chemistry, named for a Dutch pun, quietly designing the atmosphere itself. One suspects Venlo of enjoying this.
And the wide-format 7050, the decade’s standard A0 plan copier, is the strangest and most likeable structure in the issue: proportioned for architecture rather than correspondence, twin 175-metre rolls in its base, instant-on, copying to paper, vellum or polyester film within half a per cent. It resembles furniture from a civilisation with different priorities — a credenza built by people who measure things — and it stood, fittingly, in the only rooms where anyone was professionally obliged to notice. The architects got the good-looking copier. Nobody else even asked.
DESIGN AWARDS, 1990–2000
Judged by a panel of one, with no right of appeal. Océ is asked to sit out next year to give the beige a sporting chance — the 2400 and 2500 may keep their iF trophies as proof the jury was not mad. The red button’s award is held in perpetuity.