I spent two weeks last winter in the archives at Hancock Shaker Village, reading the broadsides that the Ministry printed between 1830 and 1860. The sheets were unremarkable at first glance — columns of rules, hymn numbers, seed inventories — and yet I could not stop turning them over in my hands. The restraint was total. Every line of type earned its place on the page, and the empty space between those lines carried as much weight as the words themselves.
The Room as Argument
The Shakers understood something most contemporary designers have forgotten: empty space is not absence but structure. A meetinghouse in Canterbury, New Hampshire, has a single peg rail running the circumference of its assembly room. The chairs hang from it when not in use. The floor is bare. The proportions of the room do the decorative work that wallpaper and molding would do elsewhere.