Our Tutor, Hugh Pizey, gave us an exceptionally long talk on many facets of his design experience, as someone who has worked with multpile materials, not least ceramics; and of his admirations which include the work of Peter Saville, and of Sci-Fi Movies, as well as Jugs. Lots of Jugs.
Earlier in the year, I researched and presented on Peter Saville, which was a very interesting look into the world of factory records, a collective with a certain aggressive despair at the state of the world, and which has utilised various aesthetic devices similar to mine.
One other particularly inspiring example of his work was what he did with Lapland, a series of exhibitions placed around christmas time each year which started, If i remember correctly, in 1995. A collective of artists were invited into a space which became both a gallery and a place to sell directly in the weeks of advent.
It proves there are other ways into design that may not be client-based or a hundred percent 'commecial' int the traditional sense, an opportunity to test ideas that are rather avant-garde or not focused on mass-marketability.
I actually want to give it a go myself...Rent a space... find some artiststs...and hold an exhibition (with others) in the near future. The plant sale went well and was a good experience in sitting down and getting something done. We'll host the GSA Shop Project 4, invite the third years maybe i'll even sell a few pucks!
Despair and Modernism.... ESTHETACORP....or...ÆSTHETACORP...or....ÆsthetapLand??
Like all good event plans, it starts with the poster.
This blog post will continue to be written in spirit into the year....
In the last Post on the future of housing, I asked the following question..
What technologies can the 'proper' disciplines of engineering, urban planning and construction offer that may actually change the course of building and urbanisation beyond the current and inevitable plan for the mass housing of the newly urbanised developing world?
And I have established that mass housing in the future of the developing world both should be and will inevitably be at high density.
I have also expressed my scepticism of the development of architectural form, and noted that of all the styles presented in the past 100 years, brutalism was the one most applicable to mass housing because it represented a new, cheaper way of doing things.
What we can learn from all this, is that a style of housing will only persist if it’s aesthetics reflect a new and economical paradigm. Unless we can find technologies that are genuinely better and cheaper, we will be stuck with this steel and concrete style. I have subsequently studied a few promising technologies and cultural changes hoping to find examples that I genuinely will make a significant difference to low-cost housing in the next 30 or so years.
Pre-Fabricated Modular Buidling
One example of a technology that may make an actual difference is steel prefabrication, currently being trailed in China. For example, mini sky city is a 57 storey building that was under construction for just 19 days. That’s an average of three floors a day.
By pre-fabricating sections in a large factory, there is less impact on the surrounding area during construction due to dust, and installations can be made more accurately in a controlled indoor environment.
Broad Sustainable Building, the company behind this intends to license its technology worldwide and currently has six franchises in China with plans to 150 worldwide. They also have a project, Sky City, on hold which promises to build the world's tallest tower in 90 days. These projects are very large, and internally mixed use, and are probably not the exact solution the world needs, but they are a marketing vehicle for BSB, who's technologies (and similar) could go on to provide fast and cheap building the world over in a variety of form factors.
However, Broad Sustainable Building have seemingly been off the map since the postponing of their Sky City construction date, leading to suggestions that there could be some internal issues which are preventing mass-adoption of their technologies.
Micro Homes , Co-Living and Pods
Homes of small apartment sizes are being built in the west in order to react to high property prices and a new generation of mobile millenials who wish to live at one with the city. One example of these micro-apartments is a micro-apartment tower built in New York by nArchitects.
Such small apartments are an interesting aesthetic expression of the urban housing problem facing the west, but to use the language of Karel Tiege in the Minimum Dwelling, they seem rather 'Petit-Bourgious' in their insistence on the inclusion of a full kitchen range and premium furniture, and so do not strike me as a low-cost solution in themselves.
Another new suggestion in the west is the rise of co-living apartment buildings, where living is treated like a service, such as The Collective's proposed development in Old Oak Common, London.
These apartment types combine small serviced apartments with shared kitchen and dining spaces, gyms and laundry facilites, and according to Common founder Brad Hargreaves these types of accomodation can be "25 per cent cheaper than a studio and about 25 per cent more expensive than getting a room on Craigslist". Although these represent a very new type of social scenario, they do seem at the moment only to be suitable for a very specific kind of graduate young professional, but as millennials and younger grow up with the idea in place, perhaps forms of housing similar to this, but kinder to families and older professionals will be seen as normal.
On a more extreme scale, housing has been provided that seperates homes into 'pods', such as the OPod, a proposal for housing in Hong Kong.
This is visual representation of a very extreme housing issue. But it seems to avoid the obvious issue that the tube is less efficient at housing than the rectangle. In addition to this, modlular housing in this way was tried by the metabolists in Japan 50 years ago:
But the fact of the matter is that making each functional unit a structural whole in itself leads to massive structural redundancies in the either supporting structure, or in the units themselves, as enabling stacking or removal of individual units suggests that the structure is their to support an indefinite amount of pods. For this reason I am skeptical that 'pod' like structures are naturally inefficient and will not be commonplace in low-cost housing, although the social structures they imply may be suggestive of a new kind of living that increasingly more of us will be willing to try.
Cross Laminated Timber
A technology which could make building both cheaper and more sustainable is the use of Cross Laminated Timber. Large wooden structural elements can be used to construct buildings quickly in a way that is more structurally sound than traditional timber building.
CLT, or cross laminated timber, is a timber technology that promises to be Quicker, Cheaper, Cleaner and Quieter than traditional methods. As shown in the above video, these large processed and machines sheets of timber can be used to rapidly build buildings. These buildings may be lighter - which means costs can be saved on groundworks, they may also limit on-site storage in a similar way to the pre-fab steel examples from BSB. One of the main positives of CLT is that it is more sustainable- as trees absorb carbon during their lifetimes, even factoring in transport CLT can have 50% of the embodied energy of concrete, and only 1% that of steel.
However, CLT is still a new technology that is only used in quite expensive looking western buildings at the moment, and Europe already has a well established and fairly environmentally-concious timber industry, so the transfer of this technology to the developing world may not be smooth and cheap initially, as well as sustainability being put into question if governments cannot assure that the wood used comes from sustainable sources.
This software is no doubt used all over current architecture practice, an it's functionality and coverage will be expanded. The use of flexible computer software enables more fluid forms to be produced more easily, as seen in my 8th D&T post, but more than that, it allows for building models to be flexibly changed during the process, and resulting functions can change with that overall model, instead of a complete redesign being made necessary.
The following video (from 2007) shows an application of 'Associative Design' in operation, where general housing design principles ranging from required urban density and sunlight access can be input into a software model, where a top down design approach generates everything from parking and traffic flow to individual dwelling layouts.
This ability for computers to procedurally generate housing of a high level of resolution from a number of inputs is very impressive and looks to make house planning much easier. One thing it does is make multifaceted complex forms more accessible, which can lead to more complex and traditional -looking random-esque streetscapes, such as those proposed by ZHA for Istanbul.
Taking the possibilities to there aesthetic extremes however, as in the case of ZHA's 520 West 28th Street condos in New York, are just a way of architecture looking for ways of making people more money, and are not a signal of what will happen at the lower end of the income distribution. It will still have a profound effect I believe, as it will allow for more complex and helpful models of both urban design - which can be enforced by governments - and for individual buildings - which can be assessed by governments, contractors, architects and developers. This functionality, spread by the dramatic increase in the availability of computing will spread across all economic levels of building, and is not simply a way of adding material cost.
Our ninth talk in the Design and Technology series was from Proffessor Tom Inns, who is the director of the Glasgow School of Art. His talk was about strategy and the role of design within a company. For example, he gave us the example of Zara, which employs a designer to monitor catwalk trends, which are then quickly made into high-street fasion items. Here design plays a critical role, and understanding a companies interaction with designers, and the wider world of design is important for both the employed owner to understand, and for the management to understand and take control of.
He then gave us some papers to read on specific companies in order for us to analyse a stituation ourselves. I read Innovating Through Design, a Harvard Business Review paper by Roberto Verganti. The paper talks about several companies such as Alessi, Artemide and Kartell, based in northern Italy famous for their products, which often come as collaborations between these manufacturing companies and celebrity designers and architects. The Michael Graves Kettle is perhaps the most famous work of any of these companies, and is specifically called into consideration in this 2006 paper.
The paper shows how Alessi is characterised by a 'dialogue' between itself and 'the design world' In the case of the Michael Graves Kettle, this started as an 'Absorb' and 'Interpret' stage in a project called the 'Tea and Coffee Piazza ', where a number of famous designers were invited to reimagine kitchenware as postmodern architecture. The Interpret stage had these items both exhibited at cultural venues, and sold at high prices to collectors.
Gives designers an opportunity to express themselves with full freedom this freedom alows alessi to be purely on the cultural pulse without any distractions. After this stage had been done (Alessi attempts to explore new themes about once every 10 years), a chosen design such as the Michael Graves Kettle is selected and chosen for mass market introduction. Here, a further stage of detailed design in carried out to make sure all practical and functional considerations have been fully taken into account, along with ensuring an efficient manufacturing process.
One observation that I have tried to include in my venn diagram however, is that the majority of Alessi's clientele, even those in the 'mass market' are pretty much part of the design bubble themselves, or at least part of an initiated middle-class. This is not a problem in itself, If this market exists, it deserves to be exploited, but that's what is is and it should be respected as such.
I also read Apple Inc, a 2017 paper by Frank T. Rothaermel and David R. King, which spoke about the Apple of today and the challenges that Tim Cook has in progressing this large moneymaking machine.
Apple is characterised by the internal nature of it's R&D operations, hiring talented designers to work on products internally in total secrecy for years until a product is launched and released within the space of a few months.
“Steve and I spent months and months working on a part of a product that, often, nobody would ever see, nor realize was there,” - Jony Ive
Apple also is seen as an example of a company which has properly bought design to the masses. I don't think that this is a coincidence.
Apple used to be a niche design company, back in the nineties when it was producing computers for a small number of graphic designers. When Steve Jobs was looking for ways to revive his company, he looked at and spoke to several design consultants - including the man who did so much for lombardy himself, Richard Sapper; and car designer Giorgetto Giugiaro. Jobs had also previously worked with Frog Design, who designed the original 1984 Macintosh; and car designer. Instead, he decided to do design totally in-house, giving design responsibility to Jony Ive. This meant that design functions could be fully integrated into overall development processes, but also gave Steve greater personal control over matters if he felt like staging an intervention (which i'm sure happened often).
This integration of internal fuctions happened not only in design but also in technology, when developing the iPad, instead of using Intel processors, Jobs puchased a Palo Alto silicon company and moved microprocessor design in-house.
"It was another example of Jobs's desire, indeed compulsion, to control every aspect of a product, from the silicon to the flesh."
This is highly egotistical and vain, but it leads to products that are totally self constrained and a company and a product line whith a consistent opinon. For this reason, the holistic, self contained approach is likely better for marketing in general. In addition to this, integration with serious advances in technology and work on unknown new problems needs collaborations between designers and engineers, this is specifically of importance at apple where designers are working on completely new technologies and have one shot at getting it right for public release.
The Lombardy, dialogue process is good, but specifically good for selling to 'initiated' design-and-culture focused middle-class buyers, and unless something 'catches on' it has limited scope. The dialoge allows for objects which do not intitially take the most practical aspects of a design too seriously, which puts them in a position to become pure objects of aesthetic contention, but does not guarantee that they will be strictly any better than any other product.
In this comparison we can find our strategic conclusion -
Alessi uses good design to make products, Apple uses design to make good products.
Sylvia Weidenbach is a jewellery designer from Germany who took us for our 8th Design and Technology talk. She is currently a designer in residence at the V&A. Her work focuses on the combination of 3d manufacturing processes with 3d design software tools.
What is interesting about her process is her combination of many different 3D visualisation and design technologies in the run up to the production of the pieces.
These complex and fluid, but fully defined models are then realised using 3D printing technologies. Which results in Sylvia's signature baroque form.
Her work is away from what PDE usually focus on because it is almost in the domain of pure aesthetic endeavour, although it isn't fully because in it's use of pioneering technologies, it explores the geometric potentialities of the future.
Her work is important because it is looking at new technologies and experimenting with them, finding form which is new but draws on previous historical inspirations - for example in Sylvia's case, the 'cabinet of curiosity' and the 'cullinan diamonds'
It is a fact of all design that aesthetic possibilities are strictly related to the constraints of delineation, visualisation, and manufacture. We see this thorough all of design history. One of my earliest blog posts looked at the evolution of architectural form, which was strongly related to new advancements in the ability to produce and understand more ambitious structures.
Modernism was subsequently enabled by new advances in mass-manufacturing and material technology which had an effect at all scales, from the thonet chair taking advantage of new steam bending manufacturing, to the large, brash rectilinear forms of modernist architecture taking advantage of developments in steel, glass, and reinforced concrete.
The urge-to-progress of todays architecture has to answer to this new paradigm of free-flowing design. Straight forms were fine in the age of linear structural analysis, and of 2D drawings which didn't permit much past millimetre lenghts and 90 degree angles.
We can see a practical example of the effect of non-constrained 3D design in the structure of the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium currently being built in London.
The south stand is uniquely constrained by the fact that It has been built over a storage area which is to contain the retractable grass pitch. This means that the massive weight of the stand has to be held up using just two very narrow foundations. This has been achieved through the use of fluid 'tree' structures which hold the stand at various points.
Now, this could have been achieved, perhaps, which rectilinear geometries and could have been worked out using traditional paper-based 2D analysis, but it was probably easier given todays computer-based workflows to 'brute-force' a fully simulated solution using the pre-conceived 'tree' idea. The metal will have then been custom made and will almost certainly be right up to standard.
I think we will see more of this applied to less extreme solutions in the future, as digital workflows make this easier, if not cheaper. This may not become a universal language of all design, but there are many circumstances at many scales where It will be an effective design process.
Our seventh D&T presentation was by Rachael Sleight, a GSA tutor and designer, who's talk mostly fosused on her current design endeavour, Burnbank Leather, a bespoke vegetable tanned leather bag company.
The talk reminded me of a video from a few years ago, by another american based bag company, Saddleback Leather, who promise to make extremely hard-wearing bags out of the best leather. Their video, How to Knock Off a Bag, is an interesting and sarcastic introduction into the efforts they go though to deliver high quality bags.
This is a very interesting insige into the world of leather goods design in general, but I was most taken by the section on 'cutting' leather so that small pieces make up a bigger part of the overall design, compared to the best leather goods which unapologetically have massive leather panels.
This maximising of leather area makes so much sense. And may be the most important bit of the video in thrms of design: Smaller leather panels and more seams make a product cheaper to produce, but the more seams, the more points of failure. The Nike Air Max 90 looks like this on one side:
Nice, seamless 'functional' expression on one side, but on the other side:
On the 'inside' (where less people see) there is a conspicuous cut in the leather (just below the nike swoosh). This will save them costs in production because they can use smaller pieces of leather or other fabric. The fact that large patches of leather (or any material) cost more money than small, indiscriminately shaped pieces, and small pieces cost significantly more money than large, confident pieces of material is a massive factor in the design of everything.
Footware is the biggest expression of this, as shoes have to go though such an advanced level of stress and bending throughout their lives. This is why 'normal' caterpillar boots look like this:
Costing around the £100 mark, and the rest of the search results contain other unwieldy results:
Ugly.
And this isn't because they are just cheap, it is because, through reducing leather use they ignore both functional and aesthetic criteria at the same time.
Take the above. It is not that they are naturally ugly in any way that I can define, although I think they are. What they do do is reduce cost through certain functional compromises. They have many 'interesting' lines on them, which may look to express a certain masculine identity, but what they are really for is to reduce costs through reduces usage of leather.
My mum recently got a pair of 'good' walking boots from Altberg. Fitted perfectly to her feet by specification, and with good leather, these boots will mould to her feet over time and become good boots for years. The most important observation, however, is that they, as can be seen, are made from pretty much one peice of leather in all the regions that matter, This means that when she walks in them, they will crease and fold not on a seam line, but on a straight piece of leather, which is much more durable.
I think our finding here is that, in a lot of ways, that 'cheap' design is demonstratively worse than design which is appropriate to function. Rachel's bags do a good job of making proper bags that will stand the test of time. The real question is, are these bags a sign of a new awakening in 'proper' design, or are they just a re-opeing of a more expensive way to make things?
The other observation is that we should distrust the reintroduction of 'ornamentation' in our postmodern lives. Often, this ornamentation is not a liberation of aesthetic expression in homweares or fashion, but a new finding (and subsequent masking) of economic efficiency.
Clearly, we would all love a modernist black leather bag which has been cut, sewn and dyed in the right way, but do we care that much? If we do, we already have one.
The 90% of people don't realise. The rational argument for the longevity of leather bags, and here, shoes, had been heard. However, most people are still going to buy bad things from high-street stores. These are subject to many life-limiting processes, where one may be better off buying one bag for life. Who needs a leather bag? and can we high-quality our way into sustainability? Certain companies make such an argument, but it may be more of a marketing ploy.
