Herman Miller and Logitech’s Embody: sleeker, lighter, somewhat less Xtreme.

It has been a long time since the world found a new chair. But in the apartments and dens of mostly young men and women, across from the soon-to-be-upgraded PC and multiple screens, there is one, introduced in the past decade and a half: the gaming chair, built for stress-free full-body support when the keyboard and heavy-duty mouse come out. It’s wheeled like an office chair, but it’s also something else. Although both types support the spine, with seats and armrests intended to keep knees and elbows at the optimal ergonomic 90-degree angle when playing or working at a desk, gaming chairs generally accommodate a greater range of movement. Many of the seatbacks can recline to 135 degrees, for cockpit-like play, while the armrests can be adjusted front to back, side to side and angled toward or awry from the body. They also typically come with adjustable pillows to support the lumbar and neck. Is a gaming chair sports equipment? Is it an office chair? Is it personal billboard? The answer is all of the above, and the boundaries are collapsing.

Herbert Gehr/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images.

Picnic basket. Badminton racket. Jigsaw puzzles. Cold-weather gear. All these items and hundreds more spill across the floor, as a sorrowful blonde clutches more rackets and a baseball glove, a Madonna of the closet. This full-page photograph by Herbert Gehr was staged to accompany a 1945 Life story on the storage wall: the revolutionary new system, designed by architects George Nelson and Henry Wright, that was going to help the American family organize the 10,000 objects they had stashed in attics, on shelves, and in basements. Thirteen feet long and 12 inches deep, the storage wall would separate living room from hallway and house a tenth of the average family’s worldly goods, from sports equipment to stereo system, stationery to board games behind closed doors.

I always thought of the storage wall as #housegoals, a place for everything and everything in its place. I dreamed of clearing the decks of clutter, from counters to coffee table to bureau top, and seeing only clean space and that Aalto vase every architect owns. As millennial home décor has trended toward the minimalist — by choice and by economic necessity — mobile versions of the storage wall, by IKEA and others, have achieved their own level of name recognition. Interiors influencers like Sarah Sherman Samuel have even designed semicustom doors for the Besta in Blush, Agave and Juniper, so their closets and their kid can match. As a mother, I knew putting it all away to be largely impossible, surrounded on all sides by LEGO and stacks of graphic novels.

But from the first days of the pandemic, when flour sold out and masks were hard to come by and the (mistaken) powers that be told us to stay inside, my relationship to clutter changed.

Illustration by Naomi Elliott.

When the Vessel at Hudson Yards opened last March, among New Yorkers’ many complaints about the 150-foot-tall, Thomas Heatherwick-designed mirrored-copper sculpture was the fact that you had to sign up in advance to climb its 2,500 steps. A designer who understood New Yorkers — and not just his billionaire client — would have understood that we do not like to wait.

How quaint that attitude (my attitude) seems now, as I watch New Yorkers line up all across the city — on spray-painted and duct-taped lines, inside subway stations, and awaiting entry to public bathrooms, grocery stores, farmers markets, and museums. Signing up months in advance for a summer slot at a rural campground used to seem like a normal inconvenience; in the summer of 2020, though, we’re signing up for slots on ferries to and from Governors Island. Tomorrow, a section of the High Line will reopen on a timed entry system. It’s not difficult to imagine, as temperatures rise and crowds form, that we may soon be reserving six-foot circles in the park, spots in parking lots near public beaches, or 20-minute time slots at the local splash pad or pool. The fall will bring still more time slots — chosen, not by us, but by teachers and employers.

One of the most potent tools for reopening leaves no visible trace: We can make more space in dense cities by taping off chunks of time, not the floors of our buildings.