Zombie Layouts

Jeffery Keedy's Zombie Modernism, applied to the floor plans that keep coming back from the dead.

Jeffery Keedy wrote in 1995 that modernism had died but its keepers still enforced its rules. This essay finds the same zombies in event floor plans, from the identical booth grid to last year's file. It gives a field guide to five of them and a 30-minute autopsy that keeps only the reasons still alive.

In 1995 Jeffery Keedy described Zombie Modernism. It was an ideology that had died in graphic design. Yet its keepers kept walking among the living, enforcing its rules out of habit. Event floor plans have their own zombies. Think of the identical booth grid, theater rows for every session, or last year's drawing with this year's logo. Each began as a sound answer and outlived the problem it solved.

Keedy's zombies

The essay is "Zombie Modernism," published in Emigre 34 in 1995. Keedy argued that modernism in design "went from a radical idea to a liberal ideal only to stagnate as conservative dogma." Its defenders, he wrote, refused to admit its death. They policed the profession through annual shows and a canon of masters.

It is a polemic, and it names its targets. They are Paul Rand, Robin Kinross and Dan Friedman. Keedy even admits the "cranky" tone of American criticism, his own essay included. Applying it to floor plans is this essay's step, not Keedy's claim. The nostalgia trap applies the same diagnosis to brand image.

How a good layout dies

Keedy's life cycle has three stages. Modernism began as a radical idea set against a conservative tradition. It spread until it became the ruling ideology. Then it hardened into rules defended for their own sake. Floor plans follow the same path, from radical idea to accepted standard to dogma.

The standard booth module is the clearest case. It answered real problems. It gave fair pricing per square meter, a fast build and a sales map anyone could read. As a default, it now makes aisles of identical fronts. They tell visitors nothing about where to go. That is a problem that space planning for trade shows has to solve again each time.

Theater rows went the same way. They are the right answer when several hundred people need to see one speaker. Used for every session, they turn a workshop into a lecture and a roundtable into an audience.

A field guide to zombie layouts

Each type was born for a reason. Each shows a sign when that reason has died. The last column is a starting point, not a rule.

• The identical booth grid. The reason it was born: Fair pricing, fast build, a simple sales map. The sign it has died: Visitors cannot tell one aisle from the next. Try instead: Mixed stand sizes, with a landmark or feature at the aisle ends.
• Theater rows for every session. The reason it was born: Maximum capacity facing one speaker. The sign it has died: Workshops and roundtables where people need to face each other. Try instead: Clusters, a U-shape or cabaret rounds for anything interactive.
• Rounds of ten in every ballroom. The reason it was born: Dinner service and talk across a table. The sign it has died: Half the guests sit with their backs to the stage. Try instead: Crescent rounds facing the stage, or long tables when talk matters most.
• Last year's file. The reason it was born: Speed, and a plan that was approved once. The sign it has died: Inherited errors, a sponsor who left, exits that have moved. Try instead: Start from this year's venue plan and brief.
• Registration desks across the doors. The reason it was born: Control at a single point of entry. The sign it has died: The lobby becomes a queue and arrivals block the doors. Try instead: Desks set back from the doors, with queue space in front of them.

Tradition is not a zombie

Repetition alone does not make a zombie. Black Rock City, the temporary city of Burning Man, repeats its form every year. Rod Garrett was recruited in 1997 and developed its plan. Radial streets are named by clock position, and lettered ring roads circle an open center (Designing Black Rock City).

The organization publishes a new plan each year, with changes (the 2023 plan). The form repeats because its reasons are checked each time. They are orientation in a featureless desert, the view to the center and emergency access. A repeated plan is alive if someone can state its reasons and has tested them this time. That is also the logic of a pattern language for events.

Why the dead keep walking

Four forces keep zombie plans in use. Drawing an alternative costs time. The familiar is safer in approval meetings, where nobody is blamed for last year's plan. Exhibitors ask for "the same spot," which freezes the grid around them.

Venues hand over a standard plan, and the standard plan becomes the brief. None of these forces is a reason. Each is a cost of change.

The cost excuse is weakening. Software can now make fresh to-scale layouts from a venue plan and a brief in minutes. The reasons still have to come from the designer.

Perform the autopsy

Run this as a 30-minute team session on last year's plan.

1. Print the plan at a size everyone can write on.
2. Write the reason next to every element, such as each aisle, stage, bar, desk and table type.
3. Mark each reason alive or dead for this year's brief.
4. Strike everything whose reason is dead.
5. Redraw from the living reasons, using how to make an event floor plan as the checklist.

Five questions keep the session honest.

• What problem did this layout solve?
• Does that problem exist at this event?
• What does the layout make easy, and what does it make hard?
• Who defends it, and with what reason other than habit?
• What would we draw with no file to copy?

What Keedy asked for

Keedy wanted design to build its thinking "around the particular and exciting context of design." He did not want it to conserve the past. For a floor plan, that context is this brief, this crowd and this room. Copy only what you can still defend.

Keedy's test is whether anyone can still state a layout's reasons. Monet draws a fresh to-scale layout from this year's venue plan and brief in minutes, so copying last year's file is no longer the cheap option.