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Box Furniture is organized systematically, with the designs increasingly becoming more complex and modular. The text begins with designs for furnishings that keep “The Box in its Simplest Form,” and advances to objects that use multiple boxes in combination. Additionally, each chapter is organized by room and includes illustrations of interiors fully outfitted with box furniture. In this way, while the furnishings rely on the box as their basic unit of construction, the interiors described in this text are also built up in a similarly modular fashion. Box furnishings themselves are building blocks that, when combined, create domestic spaces with a unique, handcrafted materiality (fig. 2) . The illustrations throughout Box Furniture also include simple, rectilinear sketches of each piece of furniture along with written instructions on how to build it (fig. 3) . These were completed by Edward Aschermann, a designer and illustrator who, along with Brigham, studied with the Viennese designer Josef Hoffman of the Wiener Werkstätte. Hoffman’s aesthetic and ideological commitment to geometry, the absence of ornamentation, and a coherent and comprehensive design schema are tangible in both Brigham’s designs and Aschermann’s renderings. Box Furniture , as a text, adheres to Hoffman’s aesthetic ideals: the design and layout are clean and straightforward. The only ornamentation consists of stylized strings of squares and rectangles that form simple decorative borders throughout the book. In this way, the form and aesthetic of the text are coherent with the objects and interiors that are described within. Box Furniture is a gesamtkunstwerk , or “total work of art,” in that every aspect of this project—from the text to the potential objects and interiors it details to the greater aesthetic and social project in which this work was situated—is cohesive in its design. This idea of living in a “total work of art” and engaging with all aspects of its production situates Box Furniture within the scope of the arts and crafts movement, aspects of which were prevalent Fig. 2. “A Corner of the Nursery.” Illustration by Edward Aschermann. From Box Furniture , frontispiece. Fig. 3. “Desk Chair” made from “a box with a hinged cover” and strips of wood. From Box Furniture , p. 101. — 14 —