Postmodernism - GD05

One must begin an analysis of Postmodernist architecture with that important work, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, written by Robert Venturi in 1962. In the book, he argues against the boring, formulaic architecture of modernism, particularly that most boring architecture of the 40's and 50's, which by then had adopted modernist thought as the rule that should not be broken. This either resulted in typical international style office buildings and flats, or in obnoxiously reductive star-chitecture from the likes of Mies Van Der Rohe and Phillip Johnson.

The main source of his argument, which is in favour of the difficult whole and a gentle symbolism, is found in the complex, variegated and often confused architecture which makes up the streetscape of classical cities, most prominently Rome. Having said that, in the book he often praises the work of many of his contemporaries, notably the PSFS building in Philadelphia and the works of Louis Kahn, who, while modern, accepted an overall symbolism as a core part of his work.

The book was described by Vincent Scully, in the introduction to the second edition (1977), as a "brilliant, liberating book". This is because what it did was shift the focus of architecture from an anal and ideological pursuit towards pure, cartesian 'functionalism' into the wider realm of symbolic meaning and social effect. The impacts of this shift can just as well be seen in the subsequent movements of late-modernism, which focused on much more symbolic and retinal values which promoted modernist thought, as it can be seen in Post Modernism, which went beyond this gentle manifesto to systematically reject the firmly held modernist principles. I will therefore aim to categorise and explain various movements in Post Modernism as specific and exact rejections of certain modernist dogmas.

1) Rules are rules Break the rules

Modernism came with a lot of rules, the height of the style was specifically defined in The International Style, and various other dogmas. Venturi instead had an affection for both traditional and classical styles, in terms of classical, those of Mannerism, Baroque and Roccoco, which found in their spirit-of-the-times a passionate subversion of more established Virtuvian classical orders.

His rejection of the modernist dogma came via the means of pitched roofs, added ornament and and a cluttered interior form derived from the mass of the building. This is in direct contradiction to the rules of the international style established by the great mover Phillip Johnson in the International Style. 

Johnson himself, famously, rejected his own modernist style in his AT&T building of 1984.

It wasn't as simple as adding pitched roofs to otherwise modernist buildings however, you see, Le Corbusier himself began his editorial affections by declaring his love for the Parthenon (which at the time was definitely not believed to be painted in expressive colour) as an example of rigorous, mathematical, proportional and ultimately perfect design. The Parthenon was, and continues to be, a standard model for building, It's 8-column facia and plain doric columns an example of the timelessness of classical western architecture, in both style and material.

Me and the Parthenon

While postmodernism reacted to the tyranny and constraint implied by the modernists, certain movements also recognised that the same restriction had been enforced by the academic architecture of the neo-classical and gothic revival projects that preceded it. Therefore, their goal was to subvert both by using both vernacular and traditional-esque forms in a completely new and uncontrolled manner.

On the one hand, it did this by re-interpreting classical forms and using them on modern building forms to create an entirely new an unpredictable system of anti-proportions.

Ricardo Bofill's Les Espaces D’abraxas

We can see these rejections and re-hashes in postmodern product design too, the Proust Chair by Alessandro Mendini takes a historic form and re-introduces it with a garish pattern.

Proust Chair, Alessandro Mendini, 1978

 Similarly, the Capitello Chair takes an architectural icon and ironically re-introduces it as a soft piece of furniture.

Capitello Chair, Studio 65, 1972

This rejection of academic tradition is less of an easy pursuit in product design however, because unlike architecture, industrial design up to this point had almost been synonymous with modernism; Industrial design began with the Thonets of the world and has therefore been intrinsically linked to simple mass production. It is especially hard to mix up traditional forms in products that have only existed since mass production, or were once only considered tools.

One way of getting round this problem, and present a product design as a traditional re-hash is to elevate it's scale to that of architecture, where the ironic references become easier. This is how Michael Graves introduced his first set of kitchenware for Alessi.

Silver tea and coffee set by Michael Graves for Alessi

While there is a certain merit, and a low-brow 'power to the people' charm to this kind of design, it was still nearly always a middle-class cultural pursuit, and in any case, once the shock of the rejection of plain-white modernism had sunk in, it quickly died as a relevant style. It can be seen today in the wonky roofs and half-arsed colour blocks of any late 80's or 90's dockside development, but the grand cerebral anti-modern movement did little to influence common tastes. (arguably the 'common taste' had only just moved onto modernism in 1996 with the 'chuck out your chintz' IKEA advertisement)

Beyond this argument, Exploding The Myths of Modern Architecture explains that the core point of modernism was "to be shocking", highlighting Duchamp's toilet as an example from the world of art, reflecting the shocking pace of change in the industrial and technological worlds at the turn of the century. In this sense, this strain of postmodern architecture has actually failed to really grasp and counteract the tide of modernism, as it still fundamentally observes the concepts of 'now', 'new', and 'next' as if these are things to appreciate.

2) Form follows function What function?

When given the post complexity-and-contradiction freedom to freely symbolise, the late modernists chose to use this to represent the same old modernist, progressive views, albeit in an exaggerated, retinal sense. What certain postmodern forms did was to reject the idea of functionalism altogether.

The memphis design movement is the easy example in this case. In many examples, Sotsass and his crew rejected the functional, volumetric efficiency of modernist design in favour of expressive shapes. These projects are worse in every measurable sense of the term, but in the time would have had a radical, revolutionary fervour.

We can see the Valentine Typewriter is Sotsass still contained in by 'proper' product design, emotional but still constrained by function, in this sense, despite the touch of emotion, it is strictly late-modern and shares more in common with designs by Dieter Rams and Richard Sapper.

Ettore Sottsass, Olivetti Valentine typewriter, 1969

 Then, once the eighties and a loftier, looser self-initiated brief came around, surrounded by his memphis colleagues, he was truly free to reject function and sense - the result was a wide range of showy, colourful furniture.

Ettore Sottsass, Carlton bookcase, 1981

Now I'm not ready to suggest with such clarity, as Deyan Sujic does in The Language of Things, that artistic value and functionality are inversely proportional, but what the memphis designs 'gained' in their shedding of the 10 Principles is a higher degree of expressive potential. They in turn used this expressive potential to challenge the idea of function itself.

What these designs do, in their rejection of dubiously derived functional ideals, is in some way give the user more freedom; the asymmetric, illogical, non-prescriptive shapes do not treat the user like a formula, fully accepting that products aren't used as they 'should' be.

Stronger rejections of function, that go beyond aesthetic realisation and into actually consciously making products more difficult to use can be seen thereafter.

David Carson's design for RAY GUN magazine comes to mind, where the grunge typography took an extra step by setting an entire article in dingbats.

The Reversible Destiny Architecture, by Arakawa and Madeline Gins,  makes an excessive point about being hard to use. In their own, lofty, words:

Arakawa and Gins designated Biocleave House as an "inter-active laboratory of everyday life” whose terrain and walls are deliberately realized in unexpected ways to keep a person ‘tentative’ so that they must actively negotiate even the simplest tasks. This heightened body awareness and the challenging of senses can, they believed, allow the body to constantly re-configure itself and with time become a means to strengthen the immune system*. Bioscleave House fundamentally proposes an architecture of viability that helps to sustain one throughout life, and even extend human lifespan indefinitely. 

Long claims, but this is definitely the opposite impulse to that which designed places like Preston Bus station with definite, prescribed, calculated passenger and vehicle flow corridors, which ended up undoing their original intentions through the inaccuracies in their ideological social models.

2) Less is more More and more

In the late-modernism post that preceded this one, a tenuous link was almost made between late modernist structural expressionism and the parametric architecture of architects like Zaha Hadid. What we must recognise in this teardown however, is the difference between what designers say motivates them, and what really does. At face value, Schumacher of ZHA presents 'logical' arguments  for the need for and the power of computationally aided parametric design. At the same time he is a practitioner of a purely aesthetic pursuit, one that was originally termed 'de-constructivism'.

The intuitive, expressive process has always been a component of architecture, in fact it is probably a more definite component of architecture than the mystic functionalist logic that the modernists applied to the word.

 Pilgrimage Church of the Assumption of Mary, Vierzehnheiligen, Germany, 1744-72

Granada Charterhouse, 1727-64

Modernism 'destroyed' this, and despite the fact that popular retinal styles such as arts and crafts, art deco and streamline moderne persisted though the time of the International style, extraneous non-functional detail wasn't really considered a necessary part of academic architecture for a long while.

Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban, Bangladesh, 1961-1982, Louis Kahn

Post-war, things started to slowly move towards symbolism, which can be seen in the architecture of Louis Kahn, who introduced 'useless' geometric details into his work, and most famously in the Sydney opera house which introduced frivolous, needlessly expensive 'sails' over the top of a concert space that was less than useful in the first place.

These functionless (but not necessarily anti-function) extravagant conceptual pieces of architecture became icons. The market for architecture wanted expressive icons, and the only barriers in the way of architecture to providing these icons were those of a strict, reductionist methodology. These were soon torn down once a new generation of architects got a sniff for 'exciting' competitions and large public purses.

Frank Gehry - Guggenheim Bilbao, Walt Disney Concert Hall LA; Zaha Hadid - MAXXI Rome, Riverside Glasgow; Norman Foster - Sage Gateshead; Daniel Libeskind - ROM Ontario, Imperial War Museum Salford; Coop Himmelb(l)au - Musee des Confluences Lyon, International Conference Center Dallan.

Now any second-rate city (that includes you, Glasgow!) could buy an off-the-shelf, maximalist architectural 'icon'. Perhaps it makes sense to include a fancy footbridge in the scheme too! Why Not?

The market forces behind this can't be ignored, Cities, Governments, Dictators and Architects all were desperate for statement pieces that would place them on the forefront of some imaginary line of progress. Wether or not these lucrative buildings were "influenced by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida" or not, is beyond the scope of this superficial study, but perhaps It does deserve a later 'serious' study.

More than any style before however, this asks serious questions about the final goal, implementation. These grand aesthetic projects, after 30 years, are still, in their own terms,  cerebral studies in form and space. That these projects 'deconstruct' established values of what architecture and design should be, can't be questioned. But perhaps these projects separate themselves from realistic study, in the same way that modernism did, and this intellectual separatism means they are immune to criticism in that respect.

“THESIS 8:  The avant-garde segment of architecture functions as the subsystem within the autopoiesis of architecture that takes on the necessary task of architectural research by converting both architectural commissions and educational institutions into substitute vehicles of research.”

-Patrik Schumacher 

Now, Mies and Corbusier did make dramatic and sometimes random architecture, but they were at the forefront of both glass and steel and concrete. These have since (despite or otherwise) seen implementation worldwide as cheap and efficient construction methods, despite the problems that they had as 'avant-garde' architects (leaks, costs, and the like). Wether this dramatic and ostentatious aesthetic has something to offer to 'the people' is to be questioned, but the pretence is that they are 'aestheticising' new production themes and methods, as the modernists did. But it is not going to be any time soon that the industrial parks and social housing schemes of the world adopt a "complex variegated spatial order" as the simple and cheap rule of thumb.

The dramatic Shonandai Cultural Centre , celebrated as an example of the future in Architecture for the Future is now almost on the cusp of becoming a historical relic, 20 years since it's construction. We see modernist housing, for better or for worse, all around, and still today. What does separation from the cartesian grid, emotional or otherwise, really have to offer? Despite it's erogenous use of CAD and parametric design, it is yet to be taken on by all but the richest of governments, or billionaires.

4) The future is bright  The past was great

“I am an architect, because I don’t build”

-Leon Krier

If the cult of egotistical architecture itself is the problem, then what is the solution? The consensus of the 'people' (although i'm not sure it has been researched properly) is that people generally like the traditional european cityscape.

So why not just regurgitate that again?

Poundbury, Dorchester, HRH Prince Charles & Leon Krier

Since the 1980's, there has been a resurgence in 'neo-traditionalism', often, especially in Britain, attributed to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, who has authored (or at least authorised) several developments, including the famous Poundbury, but also Fairford Leys, et cetera.

Such design, collected under the 'New Urbanism' umbrella, is much the opposite of 'new', as it attempts to re-find the spirit of traditional townscapes, as if the lack of community in other new towns such as Milton Keynes, Chandigarh, and, um, the whole of the USA, can be attributed to the downfalls of modernist (or at least pseudo-logical) thought. 

Masterplan for Chandigarh

Such townscapes, designed and planned by the likes of Leon Krier and Quinlan Terry advocate not just random-esque, carefully formed, streetscapes and urban planning, but also a return to a variety of 'past' styles, including Neo-Classicalism, Vernacular and Arts and Crafts. The central idea is that modernist cities give way far too much to modern car traffic, a function of their naive belief in modern technology, and the real solution lies in close, walkable townscapes. But can one just 'make up' an organic town layout?

The movement is not just particular to the UK, the same can perhaps be seen in neo-traditionalist movements in Germany, mostly in Berlin by architects such as Sebastian Treese, Tobias Nöfer and Petra and Paul Kahlfeldt

I really, really, want to go to Poundbury to scope this whole scene out. But I have been to the modernist Chandigarh, and I can attest to the fact that Corbusier's city of dreams is both highly understandable and functional, but also very un-human, at least compared to the rest of India and the world. The centres of London, Prague and Athens are randomly and accidentally non-panned, but they do have a certain 'energy' and 'community' that modernist developments have failed to yet fully realise. However, Paris, New Edinburgh, Barcelona and Glasgow, which were all planned have also re-claimed a certain culture, so it seems that the real answer is that 'planning' is not the mistake, being wrong is.

Visually, and according to a guy at the pub (who is an architect) this resurgence in Arts and Crafts aims to give back freedom to the building contractors to produce period details upon new buildings. This sounds like a brilliant idea, if the problem is, as postulated in the introduction to this section, that architecture itself is the problem. This brings back the massive existential problem that has existed since the 1850's for all designers and architects of any kind, however, that of the role of the architect or designer in the system as a whole. 

On the one hand, engineers and scientists are the best placed to solve our problems, and the best 'Designers' can do is to guide those technicians through the route to do it 'properly'. This results in, hopefully, 'high tech' design, or at least a design which is functionally and/or structurally sound. But the inevitable result of this is that those late modernist designers such as were at Vitsoe or Braun or LAMY have found themselves 'Engineered out' of the situation.

Similarly, If the main goal of architecture is to let the Prince to allot visual rules to the property developers on his own accord, and to have the result delivered by 'low-end' builders and traditional craftsman, then the architect finds himself with little to do, besides suggest the general volume of the building. The 'big-D' designer finds themselves 'crafted out' of the situation. This is nowhere near a bad suggestion, but it becomes a very hard argument for an egotistical architect or designer to suggest they they themselves are the problem.

Another problem with this method of thought, which comes to a point in Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture's suggestion that the in-between architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, Mackintosh, Loos, Eliel Saarinen or Art-Deco in general is the most forward-thinking, or at least most 'appropriate' architecture we can find, is both backwards and a logical Argument to moderation fallacy. These have been since discounted as both more expensive that the real 'functional' architecture of industrial chicken-factories, and less marketable than the vague, sloppy but quaint architecture used by the massive housing developers like Taylor-Whimpey.

***

So the post-modern thought train did a lot to dispel the myths of what modernism had made out architecture and design to be. Now, apparently design didn't need to try, or at least pretend, to be functional. This made design realise it's expressive potential, but due to the high costs involved, especially in architecture, this expression failed to affect building in the 'real world'.

If design isn't just constrained to the middle-class bubble, then a study of what the 'real world' really engaged with may be more pertinent than the before cerebral discussion of 'design icons' that took three very long blog posts. This is hard to achieve because contemporary readings on past design focus on the 'canon' of design. Perhaps the design community better interact properly with antique collectors, art and craft resurgents and the like.

There is also the question of wether the contemporary strain of 'clever' architects such as Rem Koolhaas and BIG represent a new movement in real design, or are just another ripple in the familiar sphere of architectural discourse. Does anything need to change? Designers may yet argue and design themselves out of the picture, and that may be the best situation the world could put itself in. Or maybe 'Design' is the only quality that gives products and building a real, positive meaning.

*This concept of more challenging, naturalistic, conditions having a positive effect on the immune system has come back round into modernism, with Vitsoe's new highly funtional building "we will be warmer in summer, cooler in winter, and exposed to daylight because no lights are on during daylight hours" https://www.vitsoe.com/gb/voice/arrival

Late Modernism - GD04

The first post in this series, Modernism, dealt very accurately with the themes and features of Modernism, the philosophy that defined much of the first half of the 20th century. What happened next?

For whatever reason; boredom, restriction or a new cultural awakening, Modernism was replaced by a multitude of differing styles. In the post on Modernism, I defined it using 4 rules:

1) Rules are rules

2) Form follows function

3) Less is more

4) The future is bright

I see what happened after modernism, that is, after the 1960's roughly, that design went into two camps - late modernism and post-modernism. In support of a 'pluralist' theory of styles, I believe that after modernism, what we have is not a single defining style, but a range of different styles. I see late modernism as a refinement or exaggeration of certain specific aspects of modernism, and post-modernism as a rejection thereof. We can construct a picture of both philosophies by considering exaggeration or rejection of the above four rules.

Late Modernism

HSBC Headquarters  Norman Foster; Lloyds building, Richard Rodgers; House in Str Tropez, John Pawson; City of arts and sciences, Santaigo Calatrava; Pompidou Centre, Rodgers & Piano; Museo Jumex, David Chipperfield; National Theatre; Barbican Estate; Munich Olympic Stadium, Frei Otto.

What we se here visually is arguably less cohesion and agreement than in the picture of modernism I formed. What we have here is not a single style aiming to continue the utopian dream of modernism. In the real difficulty of merging objectivity, functionality, neutrality & optimism all into one design, late modernists have given up on the wider dream and instead focused on and represented one of these points, usually at the cost of the others.

1) A new objectivity

Munich Olympic Complex, Frei Otto, 1972

The modernists believed that rules were rules, often dissolving design theories into simple lists and manifestos. This reflected a belief that truth and human nature were definite things that could be worked out objectively. This manifested itself in square, rigid buildings; useful but technically-minded products and extremely prescriptive urban planning.

Since the seventies, this objective spark has not gone anywhere, but the realisation that structural problems and human nature are more complicated matters than can be solved using only the orthogonal, cartesian plane has elevated the design solutions to a higher, more complex level. Buildings such as the Munich Stadium, designed to some extent by observing the formation of bubbles, still carry the fundamentally modernist belief that the solution is real, definite and specific.

The complex, structural forms epitomised by the architecture of Renzo Piano, Santiago Calatrava, Norman Foster and Nicholas Grimshaw indicate and express complex design parameters, creating a performance of science and technology. This can be impressive, but they can also be rather facetious and tiring examples of self-congradulation. They focus fully on (unnecessary?) objective resolution at the expense of simplicity and clarity.

Kartal Masterplan, Zaha Hadid, Patrik Schumacher

This objective but 'oh so complicated, look how hard we worked' approach finds its culmination in the 'Parametric' designs of Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry, which, despite pretensions of computer generation, probably owe more to artistic vision enabled by a hard working team of CAD monkeys. This is the latest manifestation of 'objectivity' and despite the claim that they are inspired by the likes of Frei Otto, might actually not be modernist or objective at all.

2) Form follows over-exaggerates function

Pompidou Center, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini, 1977

While arguably intelligent modernist design like Gropius' bauhaus building in Dessau and Wagner's Postal Savings Bank moved forward the world of design by omitting ornament and utilising glass and steel, by the 60's this had become the International Style, one that was boring, formulaic and repetitive, especially when done by minor architects not vested with the poetry of Le Corbusier. The solution was reached with the completion of the Pompidou Center in 1979, which is desperate to make a 'punk' statement, but is still reluctantly beholden to the rules of modernism.

It achieves it's objectives by using the functional systems that it is required to have as the ornament itself, proudly displaying them as a sculpture to the rational mind. There are a more than a few contradictions here. There is no real reason to paint the air ducts blue, and i'm sure insulation and security are also hindered, not to mention longevity of the exposed parts. From my experience with it though, it is actually a functional, flexible and open space.

Richard Sapper's IBM Thinkpad: Why is the screen so off centre? Why are the hinges so different? Dieter Rams wouldn't have allowed this.

It is in product design where this high-tech style often shines, as the focus is fully on the legibility of the product. One can't avoid mentioning Richard Sapper here, who's designs, especially the ThinkPad, communicated and exaggerated both the functional details and the mechanisms required for the portable computer which, rather accidentally and conveniently probably enhanced the usability of the machine, but most importantly gave the humble PC a solid, confident, emotional and highly marketable form.

Despite Dyson's claim to the contrary, their products are self-conciously high-tech. They are another example of the over-exubirant celebration of functional matters. This is not a bad thing, high tech design is often a bit babyish and condescending, but the philosophical attitude which puts functionalism at all costs front-and-center is probably the easiest and definitely least compromised way of delivering both utility and 'Big-D Design'. Again though this comes at the cost of attaining the 'Zen' of more sedate versions of modernism.

3) Less and less

While 'Less is More' was an integral part of modernism, from Crystal Palace to Adolf Loos to Mies Van Der Rohe, most pre-seventies modernist architecture of academic regard (Johnson's Glass House and Mies' Farnsworth House excepted) represented a balance between function and reductionism. As the above late-modernist movements of the seventies looked to do more with more, there became something to react against. Tadao Ando's Azuma House (although not as minimalist as we may think) does a lot to represent less as a goal in itself.

Adolf Loos' very clear arguments for less at the turn of the century were focused on reduction of ornament for 'civilisation' but also for reduction in labour. Late modernism's less focuses fully on the aesthetic effect of minimalism - the zen peace of mind associated with lack of distraction, and the communication of luxury through excess space and premium materials.

We also see a turn backwards in minimalism, while the modernists broadly attempted to re-invent forms at any opportunity as part of a forwards thinking desperation, in the effort for 'essentialism', we see in the work of Naoto Fukasawa and Japser Morrison, and in the Architecture of David Chipperfield, a tendency for reduction away from innovative form to more traditional or stereotypical forms. This is part of the goal of minimalism to enhance the anonymity of their design. This does enhance the unobtrusive point that modernism sought to address, but can't be argued to be as forward-thinking as 'proper' modernism.

Sam Hecht of Industrial facility says:

"The less you see the designer's effort in the work, the better - effort should not be a visual commodity, it's simply a means to an end"

But it's also his design that results in extraordinary prices for simple MUJI electronic goods, so if minimalist product design doesn't exemplify the designers effort in an overt visual sense, it does in it's communicating the designer's commitment to the reduction of visual detail, which is even harder.

Minimalism probably does come from an innocent and pure philosophical standpoint, but in today's market economy, it has found it hard to separate itself from the very attractive fashion of less being understood to be more, the very symbols of less becoming a kind of ostentation in themsevelves.

4) The future is bright great?

Brutalism is where this late-modernist argument gets sticky. Does the gritty aesthetic of something like Le Corbusier's Chandigarh parliament building exemplify optimism or does it channel the exact opposite? 

I feel like I can use brutalism as an example of modernist optimism exaggerated , if only in the sense that if it was sensible optimism it wouldn't try so hard. Regardless, the subject-matter of brutalist development in the 60s and 70s was nearly always publicly funded and optimistic.

Even in other types of design, such as Kenneth Grange's designs for National Rail, there remained a collective, ambitious longing for proper 'Design' to be a part of the fabric of life. Helvetica wouldn't be the first option for the independent train services of today.

Late modernist design, especially in Britain, usually found it's embodiment in social brutalist developments. As I have previously argued, the aesthetic may derive from a certain contempt for the conditions of the lower-class built environment, but there remains a thread of the architects effort in doing as well as they can. They tried. Postmodernism had a significantly different way of communicating that effort. Brutalism did more than any other visual movement to deliver the optimistic goals of the post-war housing plan, and in all regions across the world it still stands as a symbol of futurist (if naive) belief in the power of concrete and technology to deliver real social change.

***

So here we have explored the world of late-modernist design. In this article, I have argued that late modernism is a movement that spans from the 70s to today that exaggerated modernist tendencies at the cost of the whole goal. There are criticisms of such an approach:

I have only studied the most obvious aspects of 'Big 'D'' design in my approach. therefore, I have given later movements, which benefit from higher historical resolution, the credit of being more variegated and nuanced than older movements. The early 1900's had it's fair share of senseless visual fashions, from Art Deco to Streamline Moderne to Googie , which are irrelevant to contemporary study in the sense that they don't tell the story we are trying to tell. I Ignored such styles in my 'modernism' post and I continue to ignore 'popular' visual styles in my attempt to explain the very superficial movements that define what is considered important 'Design'. People weren't actually buying Richard Sapper lamps in the 70's, they were too busy being distracted by the likes of the Russel Hobbs 'Futura' kettle.

Having said that, Modernism is definitely still a movement that refuses to die, even in this narrow, superficial and misguided sense. The very idea of ideal form, committed, minimal and logical is something that is universally hard to argue against, despite despair-inducing historical (and current) experiences of places like Chandigarh Sector 16C, which prove more than anything that architecture and design needs to be something at least marginally more than less.

The high culture of the 80's had something different to say. This made it's impact in the form of a radical diversion from the modernist trend, a design theory that sought to reject every core of modernism with gay abandon. But perhaps the real damage had already been done by this point. Complexity and Contradiction or otherwise, what we can see from these examples is an architectural model which has reverted totally to retinal representations of the real problems that modernism honestly sought to actually solve. Less, more or anything else, it is clear that by the 70's the academic design practice was only really in the game of designing lamps, chairs, cathedrals and museums; the hard theory finding it hard to interact with the fabric of the real world.

What is Design? - GD03

There are two very different definitions of design, 'Design with a capital 'D'' and 'design with a little 'd''.

This year, we are being asked very explicitly to define what it is we think 'great design' is. A good first step is to look upon the dictionary, where we can find a definition of design in a very loose sense.


Dictionary.com:

Design:

Verb (1) to prepare the preliminary sketch or the plans for (a work to be executed), especially to plan the form and structure of.

Noun (1) an outline, sketch, or plan, as of the form and structure of a work of art, an edifice, or a machine to be executed or constructed.

So to design is to plan or sketch, the result is the design. But this is a very limp definition of design; what man-made things are not either art, machine or edifice? The conclusion here is that design is the plan, and the outline of anything, and also the planning and outlining thereof.

What we must also remember however, is that despite design being seen as a process in itself, it more often occurs as an intuitive and direct part of the production. When we make a cake, or dress ourselves, organise our desk, make a cup of tea or write a memo we are planning and structuring the form and the arrangement of the following decisions; we might prefer a cup with 80% tea water brewed for 1:30 with 1.5g of sugar and 20% semi-skimmed milk, and these considerations are 'designed in' at every stage of the process. design is a component of basically everything we do.

Can we design the perfect cup of tea? The modernists probably think we can.

So there we have it, design is one, but such a definition is very unhelpful. In this context, 'great design' is anything that anyone wants, which might be the one truth at the basic level, but it carries little of instructive value. The above is what I will term 'design with a little d' - design as a process and result to meet certain external ends.

The reason I have approached a split in the definition comes from a number of sources. I was quite annoyed by Nikolaus Pevsner when, in An Outline of Eurpoean Architecure, he opened by saying:

"A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. The term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal"

But in the context of him writing his book, this is an essential statement, he aims to write about proper, fancy buildings and their development over time. This will tell us a very different, higher-class version of philosophical history than a study of vernacular building over the same period.

Peter Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects was once angry that design criticism focused too much on political correctness:

In a way, he is right: 

"as if the delivery of social justice is the architects competency" 

being a key quote. One way of looking at design is first asking what is the designers core compitency? A proper Designer wakes up in the morning, makes themselves a coffee in their Bialetti Moka, puts on the all black Yohji Yamamoto gear, drives to work in their Audi TT, arrives at their Richard Rodgers office building, picks the Moleskine up from the Vitsoe 606, sits in the Herman Miller, gets out the LAMY, turns on the Tizio, and gets to work. But what are they there for?

For that, we must look at some more aloof definitions:

Le Corbusier, 

"If my house works well, I am grateful, as I would be to the railroads and the telephone company. But my heart has not been touched. However if the walls, rising up against the sky, affect my feelings, I become aware of your intentions. You were harsh, charming, or dignified. Your stones tell me so"

John Dewey, 'Art as Experience'-

"The word "design" has a double meaning. It signifies purpose and it signifies arrangement, mode of composition ... A work of art is poor in the degree in which they exist in separation ... Only when constituent parts of a whole have the unique end of contributing to the consummation of a conscious experience, do design and shape lose superimposed character and become form"

Bruno Munari, Design as Art

"What is a Designer? ... He is a planner with an aesthetic sense ...  He gives the right weight to each part of the project in hand, and he knows that the ultimate form of the object is psychologically vital when the potential buyer is making up his mind"

Paul Rand, Conversations with students

“Design is relationships. Design is a relationship between form and content.”

What we can garner from these more academic, authoritative statements is that the Designer's job is to control the aesthetic experience of any given solution. And I don't take the word aesthetic very lightly, I don't mean mere styling. Yes, the look of the product is a big part of the end result, but to be a completely controlled experience one must take into account the weight, feel, impact, sound, and most importantly the user experience too*.

A design that focuses on delivering aesthetic experience as one of it's core goals is therefore an example of 'Big D' design. At the start of the year I came to school with the following piece of paper.

Here, Great Design is considered something of philosophical purity. And that is what we see when we consider most of the 'icons' of academic Good Design. It is the result of such a complete process where style, production, feel and use have all been considered with the aesthetic experience as the final goal.

In class, this ruffled a few feathers. The Tizio is flawed, masculine and overly expensive, but is is also aesthetic, which was really it's only job. This is why the split between design and Design was necessary.

'design', that is, design-with-a-little-d, has many factors; these are the factors concerned with production in a wider sense: Financial concerns, Marketing, Legality, Safety. There are, more viscerally, the Ethical concerns of design: mass second-world labour, the environment, the emancipation of the poor and the disabled. Victor Papanek is our greatest source on such Ethical issues:

"Only a small part of our responsibility lies in the area of aesthetics."

"Much recent design has satisfied only evanescent wants and desires, while the genuine needs of man have often been neglected by the designer."

The above are totally true, but we flip-flop back to Peter Schumacher.

"as if the delivery of social justice is the architects [designers] competency" 

In fact, both are true, and I look to belittle neither point of view. Having said that, Peter Schumacher is obviously the candidate for the 'most evil man in design' prize.

With two definitions of design, we can have two definitions of 'great design'.

From the view of 'design' as a tool, design is a process and a capability with which we get from point A to point B. The question here is what do we do with this ability, which is an ethical question. In little-d design, 'great design' is 'great' done via 'design'. This is what Papanek advocates. The problem here is that there is a very, very large field of 'great' possibilities, most of to which Designers are not directly in a position to help; their solutions are Political, Financial and Charitable. 'Great' but not 'Design'. We could spend all day doing directly good things, but then why did we even bother becoming designers in the first place?

From the view of 'Design' as an aesthetic end in itself, we are in a clear, but more ethically ambiguous place. We all enjoy good food, music, art and so on, but what is their real value? In this context, it doesn't matter. The designer, artist, architect and chef are here to make great things, that is what they are for. Is a phone worse because a seven-year-old child died mining the cobalt for it? Most of us have one and enjoy one regardless. 'Design' is fenced away from these concerns. 'great Design is 'Design' done well' that is all it can ever hope to be.

***

Why didn't I just call one of the 'designs' planning, or aesthetics? Because I am not yet ready to relegate one of them to 'not-design' just yet. Clearly there is a very tightly strung network of concerns around the whole subject, the subject-matter of design is one that can be delighting and horrifying in equal measure.

Notes:

*The common assumption is that user experience design is necessarily the practice of 'good' user interaction. This is not always the case. A well-thought-out and aesthetic negative user interaction is just as valid.

What is Luxury? - GD02

One of the questions that has been thrown up at the start of my new design project, one focusing on selling items in a rather middle-class shop, is this; What is Luxury? Anything aiming for added-value sales must go beyond meeting functional requirements (or ignore them) and seek to extract value in some other, more mysterious way, one commonly defined as 'luxury'.

Google image search is no help:

What we see here is actually quite a maximum of variety in style, from ultra-functional aeroplanes and sports cars to ultra-modernist building to classical architecture and car styling. What we do see is a range of images that stop at nothing to display wealth. What comes first, style, luxury or wealth? Is it possible to obtain luxury on the cheap?

In a more rounbdabout way, I get close to this question in one of my series of kettle posts (it still isn't over!), my answer being that the price gap between functional product and anything more expensive is by definition design, or at least the result of 'Design' with a capital 'D'.

A key theme of one my often-referred blogs, Misfits Architecture, goes more accurately to the question of wealth and luxury by considering the history of canonical Architecture and Design (classical - gothic - modernist - high tech - postmodern.. ect..) as a history of styles that are necessarily expensive displays of wealth and ownership.

“Aesthetics give shape to our values and aspirations. This is not necessarily a good thing.

An aesthetic loses its usefulness when its connotations of status are lost, and any process of refinement stops.

Buildings require money and land to build. The history of architectural aesthetics is the history of articulating the ownership of wealth and property.”

It considers the canonical history of ‘meta-aesthetics’ - movements such as high-modernism, high-tech, post-modern and minimalism as styles that contain inherent status as they yearn towards results that are neccecarily expensive. We can observe ourselves that nearly every canonical 'Design' style of the last century overt displays of wealth:

The awe-inspiring Looshaus in vienna, despite being a rejection of traditional form and style, is gladly assisted aesthetically through it's use of ostentatious marble cladding.

Corbu's Villa Savoye, despite it's enthusiastically poetic interior, is assisted externally by the fact that it has a 'stance' which dominates and indicates ownership of a large, flat piece of land, and in it's day would have presented ownership of the river-view as well. These might not be the core reason for it's aesthetic value, but they are certainly what mark it out as an object of luxury. The same can be said for FLW's Fallingwater.

http://cf.ltkcdn.net/interiordesign/images/std/210787-769x450-memphis-room.jpg

Postmodernism isn't hard to debunk as a style of materialism and ostentation, but it's easy re-emergence into relevance on dezeen these days tells us a lot about how it gains it's weight as a cerebral, intellectual adventure into 'fun' expression. If this was the natural style of human expression then it would be what all the chavs would be doing. No, it relies very heavily on it's middle-class understanding as something of artistic and philosophical merit, and it is this potential for subtle bourgeois inter-communication from which it derives its value.

https://artsation.com/images/johnpawsonhouseinside_0.jpg

Minimalism seems to perhaps be the antithesis of showy 'Design', but look deeper, what does it rely on? Fundamentally it relies on lack of panel gaps and honest, plain materials; removal of the real, inconvinient details such as mechanisms and handles. Rumours suggest that an apple store table in all it's solid-wood, seamless glory costs in the region of $10,000 - 20,000. Seamless 'extrusions' of real stone cost orders of magnitude more than Corian, not to mention the half-assed coated chipboard that we have to put up with. Imagine being able to actually keep a house clean too, no John Pawson house could last 5 minutes past it's photographed state without an army of housekeepers, think of the status that demonstates.

High-Tech is another style that has failed to keep to it's socialist roots, the star-status of Rodger's NEO Bankside is enough to make it premium property on it's own, not to mention the well-communicated view over the thames (despite stares from Tate Modern guests) afforded by it's expensive massive plate glass windows and it's probably-useless exterior 'structure'.

Brutalism proved (up until the last few years) as something which legitimately was a canonical 'Design' style which avoided luxury. It communicated honesty to materials, but the subject of that honesty was thick pre-cast concrete, decidedly cheap and ugly (especially in wet climates). It managed to make this into an aesthetic, but due to the medium, the only aesthetic available was one of strength and despair in equal measure. It found it's outlet in social housing schemes in and in monumental public building, the heavy hand of the government giving us what we want? Maybe, but certainly not luxury until millennials realised that any dream of housing at all was a luxury and decided that the only way to retain their self-identity was to re-brand brutalism as aspirational.

A guide that will take us away from the already-done architectural criticism and towards a more Product Design scale is the good example of car interiors. These are all designed for exactly the same human interaction, but do it in completely different ways. All still communicate 'luxury' but their version of what luxury is is "same same but different". We also all have a well established internal hierarchy with regards to the social degree of car brands, as these have been heavily enforced by marketing during the course of our lives.

BMW - Premium Materials, but notably the prentention of ‘attention to detail’ and ‘german engineering’ conveyed by it’s accurate detailing.

BMWi - Luxury because it uses premium materials and new technologies.

Rolls Royce - Luxury because it uses premium materials, is hand-crafted, and would be inconvenient for anyone who had to maintain the cleanliness of the car themselves.

Range Rover - Luxury because it uses premium materials and because it is an fetishistic object of functionally overconstrained overkill.

Ferrari F40- Bare bones, but obvious overkill, and the weight savings are the result of things like carbon fibre and Kevlar, which were ridiculously expensive.

Ford by Marc Newson - Okay, not a production car, but we can clearly see another example of hard-to achieve minimalism identified by lack of panel gaps. More importantly it was ‘Designed by the guy who made the lockheed lounge’, giving it middle-class cultural relevance.

Now this isn't the most mainstream study of luxury design ever, one could focus on Rolex, Mulberry and Burberry, all of which are on an even more basic level defined by 'craftmanship' and 'quality (read: cost) of materials'. The question gets more tentative when we introduce Etihad first class flights, Four Seasons hotels and Vegas Casinos but in the same way that Design is an added cost that pays for itself, so is 'premium customer service', always.

Is it possible to generate real luxury with cheap materials? Plastic leather, diamonds and chrome are actually considered cheaper than honest use of real materials in my opinion. If there was a very cheap way of making shiny, seamless, polished, hard, cold and strong door-handles then such an idea would be relentlessly copied in the lower market and would quickly lose sight of any concept of exclusivity. Therefore, luxury is not a style or an objective in itself, but any style which is honest and, more importantly, doubles over on making sure that the end result is expensive.

In conclusion then, Luxury is about display of wealth, however subtle. It is the pursuit of expensive materiality, service and production.

* * *

What does this mean for the definition of good design then? Well, the question really is of what we want to use design for. Strictly, effective 'Design' is something that creates a complete aesthetic whole, but only in the context of that whole adding value and being good value for business.

I make clear here my separation in the use of 'design' and 'Design' (with a capital 'D') there are no two words that say these things more effectively, but there is a massive difference between 'design', which I believe to be mainly a planning, productive process; and 'Design' which is the target and pursuit of aesthetic ends in a functional context. The exact graphical definition of these terms will be saved for a later date.

Everyone 'designs' whether they like it or not - they make a cake, they write their signature, they paint the walls - the question is, what do us Übermensch who have developed the ability to bring 'Design' to it's fulfilment do?