Glasgow's Future Housing - DT0B

Following on from my post which introduced my chosed D&T subject; The future of housing for the ninety percent, my second specific exploration of this subject comes in the analysis of Glasgow's Homes for the Future project.

Homes for the Future was an initiative which formed part of Glasgow's year as UK City of Architecture and Design, which took part in 1999. Being an almost 20 years old exhibition, and a physical record of what 1999 thought the future should or could be, it forms an interesting and local example which will help me illustrate certain thoughts in relation to The future of housing.

In the introduction to the book on the development, Deyan Sujic States that the aim of the project is to:

"Give a new sense of identity and life to the area, to bring people back to the city centre, as well as to experiment with new forms of architecture"

It required the collaboration of Glasgow's Planners, roads department and building control, Scottish Homes, property developers, masterplanners, project managers, and, of course, the architects.

The 'phase one' site is a triangular one, facing onto Glasgow Green on one side, and also into it's own semi-public space.

View from Glasgow Green

Path into interior space

The site acts as a public thoroughfare, and potentially connects the east of the city centre (Trongate, Barrowlands) with Glasgow Green. It easily gives its residents access to either.

Rear of south blocks

The Gateway Building, Ian Richie

The Gateway building, designed by Ian Richie is a pretty straightforward High-Tech-esque piece clad in copper. The buildings were intended to be rented as affordable homes to housing association tenants. The mission by Thenew Housing Association expressed as "flexible, barrier-free, affordable rented homes for city centre living, marrying innovative design with energy efficiency, good sound insulation and air quality". Next along the road is the 'Flagship building', Tokyo based architects Ushida Findlay's first building in Europe.

Flagship building, Ushida Findlay

This building has a prominence on the site, a round almost art-deco building with a stepped rear face which gives each level (although not each apartment) a garden terrace at the rear. 

Flaghship Building, Ushida Findlay

Flagship building, rear

 Rick Mather's Building 

Rick Mather's building, not named fully in the 1999 publication, features a series of undulating balconies on the southern face, and a rather statement bridge connecting it to 'The Grand Apartments' by Elder and Cannon.

Rick Mather's Building 

The bridge

Below the bridge is another, more secluded, entrance which via a long staircase provides another point of access, especially to the western terrace of houses.

Western houses: Terrace Houses by Elder and Cannon, Terrace One by McKeown Alexander

Bridge connecting Grand Apartments and Terrace Townhouses

Rear of Terrace Townhouses and Grand Apartments

The Grand Apartmetns are Surmounted by a rather expressive penthouse, a metal box placed at an angle, which I expect has quite an aggressive view over both the central space and Glasgow Green.

Terrace One by McKeown Alexander

The Terrace One houses are rather interesting, but not as avant-garde architecture, rather as examples of architecture which would be happy in 1931's International Style, referencing the kind of formalism present in an Earnst May style Siedlung. Saying that, so does the Flagship Building, which looks like a certain building in Frankfurt.

Terrace One by McKeown Alexander

The Object Building by McKeown Alexander

From certain angles the Object Building looks like a Loosian construction, although from the opposite and more prominent sides, these buildings by McKeown Alexander are less Neue Sachlichkeit and more contemporary.

Terrace One, Left; The Object Building, Right

The Object Builidng, Detail

Wren Rutherford Building

One of the most suprising buildings, in terms of form, is the Wren Rutherford Building, described by the firm as 'modern contextualism'. This house delivers a different, and in some ways stylistically jarring, vision of the future; a building constructed from traditional materials and in an almost neo-vernacular form. When we get to the reasons why, we see that the focus of this building is on "disability access and energy conservation" -  a direction which if chosen probably does result in a more traditional form, stripping away fallacies of modernist design for genuine utility.

Architecture - delivering architecture

So what have been the benefits of imparting architecture upon the previously docile being of housing?

Well firstly, It has become architecture, which means that it does give off some striking expressions at certain angles:

I'm not sure what the mise en scène was like in 1999, but in it's own book, the development gives itself credit for "lead[ing] the way in suggesting that our inner city areas should be considered more imaginatively to offer new modes of living". Wether this was a ground-breaking idea in 1999 is debatable, but it certainly is still a growing trend in my opinion, as millennials reject dreary suburbs for urban living.

The development also promotes, in it's own words, the idea that "good design will sell" giving contemporary local examples on Byres Road:

Byres Road, Cooper Cromar

and Saltoun Street houses by Anderson Christie: (now Anderson Bell + Christie, down the road from me and a purveyor of some more recent additions to the city also, some of which were looked at in a previous post)

Saltoun Street, Glasgow

On a the more enthusiastic level, Deyan Sujic proudly compares his development to the Mies van der Rohe planned Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung development. 

This may be a tad too overzealous - the Weissenhofsiedlung was a development of very shocking forms by a collective of Architects who would go on to be the most influential of their century, the estate is now a UNESCO heritage site and was contributed to by the likes of Le Corbusier, Bruno Taut and J.J.P Oud. But it bring up an interesting topic - architecture that is self-councious - and therefore suffers in the same way that architecture often does.

Architecture - delivering 'Architecure'

Architecture here, and in many other places, ignores the sensible Glasgow canon of sandstone cladding in favour of the more Corbusian white stucco - this leaves the building susceptible to ugly stains caused by rusty bolts and dripping drains.

I'm not sure why Architecture so heavily insists on these white forms, perhaps it exposes the form of the whole better against a clear sky, or perhaps just gives it more modern, favourable connotations, at least to a certain circle of critics.

It does have some demonstrable downsides though.

But Villa Savoye is critiqued - I believe somewhat unfairly - as a failure by certain critics because it failed to maintain an impervious roof (see - Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture) or the Unite D'Habitation for failing to contain certain necessary side windows . These criticisms are besides the point, because Le Corbusier genuinely was making ground breaking work which would go on to become a new paradigm for the future. Glasgow's Homes for The Future? probably not so much - which brings me to my two main criticisms, and concluding points.

Homes for the Future just simply doesn't seem that forward-thinking. It is a collection of buildings by  careful but Second-Division architects who at best create Architecture which merely references past styles, and attempts to look as architectural as possible. Architecture about Architecture. Another desperate attempt at introducing Architecture to the masses, perhaps, but certainly not at the shocking level of aesthetic power - for better or for worse -  of the Guggenheim Bilbao, or even the Shonandai Cultural Centre, both which preceded it.

At it's worst it is dateable developer-friendly little-'a'-architecture, which preceded it's colored-paneled colleagues (see Preston, 2000's) by a year or two perhaps, but comes from the same family of vague form; half interested in real utility, half in form, fully in market-based acceptability. It is this separation between avant-garde expression and housing-as-comoddity which defines my housing question, and Glasgow's 1999 scheme finds itself on neither side of the fence in any convincing manner, preferring to merely do a slightly better job (which would have happened anyway given the assumed Government funding).

The second part of the criticism focuses on the myterious mention in the 1999 book of two future developments - Site B and Site C. Advocated in the book as planned phases which are to follow on from the initial 1999 development, a look IRL or on apple maps proves the same thing, the scheme hasn't caught on.

This proves, however unfortunately, that there is a central problem in this Architecture-for-housing initiative. If such an inspirational, culturally driven project has not even met it's own, narrow and self-contained, goals in 20 years, what is the hope that the lower 90% will get to the promised land of architectural self-realisation any time soon?

The problem is central to the project itself, in being an externally driven architectural program, it can never represent the reality of a possibility, as when the driving hand is removed (after one, ten, or one hundred schemes), the free market invisible hand of 'what would have happened regardless' will return and continue without comment.

My study of housing for the ninety percent may perhaps learn from this example. It may be naiive to look at big 'A' Architecture as an endless well of solutions, as these are often driven, speculative objects, which either rely on name-brand recognition (e.g New York by Gehry, Opus by ZAHA HADID) or on extraordinary budgets set by billionaires and dictators (or both - e.g Apple Campus), neither of which will filter down to the humble abode. 

I may be more diligent inspecting housing as a commodity, defined in it's scope and it's execution, the same way that wheat and weapons are, by rather natural socio-industrial-economic conditions. Modernism arrived on the ground not because of the gesticulations of a few fancy Swiss men, but because concrete, steel and glass got cheap. It will be prudent of me to study both technological advancements, and the economic trends and conditions they exist within, in order to foresee the future of the housing condition. 

The UK Manufacturing industry - DT04

Our fourth D&T provocation was delivered by our course Head, Craig Whittet, and focused on the apparent demise of skilled traditional manufacturing.

In a general sense, it is clear that the UK is losing out if manufacturing is to be the goal. Since the 1980's, the country has shifted to a service based economy, which has seen a decline in the importance of our manufacturing industries in favour of other sectors such as banking.

The United States and France have joined us in this slump, and while these closest cousins continue to do well generally as an economy, they have failed to maintain strong manufacturing bases in the same way that developed nations like Germany and Japan, and recently developed nations like China and South Korea have.

This means that as a country we rely heavily on imports, and have a large deficit in terms of our Imports and Exports, which has developed dramatically over the last 30 years.

U.K._balance_of_trade_in_goods_(since_1870).png

This change can also be seen in terms of employment, which was the main focus of the talk.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/UK_percentage_of_workforce_by_sector.png

So what's the problem? Unemployment itself has not become a greater problem, it is just that these jobs have shifted into the services sector. Economies based on services may be more susceptible to shocks such as the economic crash of 2008. There is also the question of if individuals in the workplace are more dispensable if they are not learning hard, trade, skills.

As the UK and others developed, mines closed and manufacturing of everyday goods was moved to the second world. This is almost inevitable, apart from in luxury items, because most things need to be cheap and manufactured in high numbers. Look at dyson, who began production in the UK, but as the focus of the brand became more international, focusing on selling products in America and Asia, it made little sense to produce in the UK, from a logistical point of view if not any other.

How do we combat this problem? Looking back at the intial graphs, It is clear Germany can be a comparable model. Compared to it's friends, Germany bounced back from the crash fairly easily, It has a trade surplus, and an economy more structured around manufacturing and exports. What does it do differently?

99% of all German companies, and 40% of manufactured goods exported, belong to the German "Mittelstand," which are small and medium-sized enterprises, and are mostly family-owned. While China, Korea and any number of emerging low-labour cost countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia take on more of the responsibility for the production of our everyday goods, Germany has carved out a niche with it's Mittelstand, which are under-the-radar companies producing high-quality goods.

"Most of these companies are family-owned and based in small towns, yet they hold market shares of up to 90% in worldwide markets niches. Hauni (cigarette machines), Webasto (sunroofs and auxiliary heating systems for cars), or Dorma (door control hardware and systems; moveable walls) may not be household names, but they are leading global competitors in their respective industries" - The German Miracle Keeps Running

With razor-sharp focus, and the benefit of being progressive, technological and advanced, these companies show a way of including manufacturing in a mixed, developed, western economy.  One way of retaining manufacturing in the UK would be to follow the Mittelstand model, which focuses on Business to Business supply of anonymous but important high-quality goods.

Michel Aroutcheff - DT03

We were visited by Michel Aroutcheff, who took us through his plans and models he developed over his long and successful career.

Michel made his career, after training as an architect, in the designing and making of high-quality toys. He started making anonymous toys for sale in Parisian toy shops, but later made a name in the production of extremely well finished, high accuracy replica memorabilia toys which were tied into cartoons such as tin tin.

His visit was interesting in a number of ways. Firstly his rather off-piste career in an impressive but niche market, which shows us that there is ambitions and ways to utilise our skills beyond joining a large multinational or joining in with the design festival circuit. He said something similar to Leon Krier's 'I don't build because I am an architect.' reflecting the isolation from the world that many designers and architects may experience once going through such rigorous and sometimes ideological training systems.

I was also amazed at the material finished that Michel had managed to achieve. Fine detail and surface finish I have found to be the hardest part of any final design. This is always made harder the less decoration and detail on the final part, as flat surfaces have to stand for themselves. By utilising craft processes and hand-production, but ambitiously aiming for a very pared-back cartoonish aesthetic, Aroutcheff has made the job very hard for himself. Machines and injection moulding can all, clearly, do this in a heartbeat, But Michel's products still command prestige and a much higher price over his Chinese intimidators. 

Ornament and Crime? - GD07

Note: As written, Certain elements of this post take loos' racism too lightly, my views have shifted since this publication and therefore i have made a few edits, especially in the introduction. There are certainly racist veins in architecture and design, a lot of that connected to modernism as a whole and it's rejection of 'uncivillised' perspectives. The following article is a starting point to see alternative perspectives, but more can be done to acknowledge how certain modernist polemics have ignored different races, ingored humanity, and worked with established power structures to the detriment of minority communities. https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/14738-three-architects-discuss-whiteness-and-racism-in-the-built-environment

I recently went back and acquainted myself with Adolf Loos' Ornament and Crime, specifically a collection of his essays compiled by Ariadane Press and translated by Michael Mitchell.

Having subsequently read much drier but more complex books, such as Art as Experience, I have rediscovered that the book is a rollercoaster, if polemical. It is full of exaggerated stereotypes and angry reflection on the world, giving an interesting picture of 1900's Vienna in the meantime. A lot of the book is naiive, outdated, and contains undeniably racist thoughts. It is important to acknowledge this when coming into this book, especailly because of the strong influence it has had on architecture.

Focusing on the architectural implications of this work, his central argument, specifically in the main Ornament essay, has two components, one, the most famous, is that:

"cultural evolution is equivalent to the removal of Ornament from articles in daily use"

Ornament and Crime, 1908 (1932)

Backed up by analogies to the 'papuan' who tattoos his face, by comparison, in Loos' generation,

"Don't you see that the greatness of our age lies in its inability to produce a new form of decoration? We have conquered ornament, we have won through to lack of ornamentation."

Ornament and Crime

The context for his arguments is twofold, they are both as a reaction against the aristocratic eclectic revival style, which reached a peak before the turn of the century;

"the School of Applied Art sets the tone... over the last twenty years the doorknobs have given us first renaissance, then baroque, then rococo calluses on our hands"

The New Style, 1878

He also argues against the 'new style', that being art nouveau, or in the form it found itself in vienna, as the secession:

"Bing's L'art nouveau in the rue de Provence in Paris, last year's exhibition in Dresden, and this year's in Munich will have to agree: the old styles are dead, long live the new style!"

A Review of Applied Arts I (1898)

He continues, turning away from sarcasm,

"And yet we cannot rejoice in it. It is not our style. It has not been born of our time. There are objects that clearly bear the stamp of our age, objects we like: our clothes, our gold- and silverware, our jewels, our leather goods, things made of tortoise shell and mother of pearl, our carriages and railway cars, our bicycles and locomotives. It is just that we do not make much fuss over them.

These things are modern, that is, in the style of 1898"

A Review of Applied Arts

In product design terms:

"Take the thonet chair. Is it not the fruit of the same spirit as the Greek chair with its curved legs and its backrest, without ornamentation, the embodiment of a whole age's attitude toward sitting? Take the bicycle ...  If the Greeks had made a bicycle, would it not have resembled ours, right down to the very last rivet?"

A Review of Applied Arts

His problem with art nouveau then, and the secession, and the Werkbund that followed, was that they were intending to pursue a 'new style' that was no longer needed. The advance of culture and of the machine age was to eradicate the very need for style.

In his mind, it comes from an attempt by applied artists to barge in on the new manufacturing culture:

"do we need applied artists? my answer is no ... Our carriages, our optical instruments, our umbrellas, our silver cigarette cases and ornaments, our jewelery, and our clothes are modern. They are modern because so far no artist has tried to barge in and take them under his - unqualified - tutelage ... Those barbaric times, where works of art were combined with practical utensils, are over once and for all."

Surplus to requirements (The German Werkbund) 1908

 His main arguments come to the conclusion that most of our objects, our beloved posessions, in the turn-of-the-century middle class at least, were of an indeterminate, accidental, unadorned, but most of all a progressive style: that of no conscious style at all.

So we have got over the secession style, and in fact, the free market did that for us, replacing it with Art Deco, or the International Style, or Streamline Moderne, or whatever else; so what use is all this to us now? Loos' argument comes from the rejection of style all together;

"What is style anyway? It is hard to define ... If you have a lion's head on the nightstand, and the same lion's head on the sofa, on the wardrobe, on the beds, on the chairs , on the washstand, in a word, on every object in the room, then that is style.. Woe betide those unfortunates who dared buy some additional item! Their furniture refused to accept anything else near them."

The Interiors in the Rotunda (1898)

especially that of 'top down' style:

"I am against the trend [Otto] Wagner represents, which sees a positive advantage in having everything in a building, right down to the coal shovel, come from the hand of one architect"

"Who should do it then? The answer is quite simple: Every man his own interior designer"

The Interiors in the Rotunda 

This is an example of how Loos' writing can cut through time and space and give us such relevant insights for our attitudes of today: the above article sees forward directly to the present: to IKEA specifically, and even if it isn't directly inspired, through Corbusier, the CIAM, and Modernism, it has found it's way into becoming a cornerstone of today's attitudes.

But what are the problems of today? Sure, we do not sit at the feet of an all encompassing, applied-artist-led 'style-of-the-day' but as the economy, through the last 100 years, has developed into a giant, consumerist whole, our personal choices have come under scrutiny.

I must note, I do not blame our generation, as a whole, the millennial culture, generally, directly and personally takes action upon global issues. These issues, such as mass-consumption, waste and global warming have been drilled into us and are a central part of our spirit-of-the times, but as designers, we are not sure how to address them. Minimalism, eco-design, and up-cycling are all relevant pursuits. Loos provides an appartent solution for us, in his very famous essay, Ornament and Crime:

"The form of an object should last, that is, we should find it tolerable, as long as the object itself lasts"

Ornament and Crime

He continues:

"A suit will change its style more often than a valuable fur. A women's ball outfit, intended for one night alone, will change it's style more quickly than a desk. Woe betide us, however if we have to change a desk as quickly as a ball outfit because we can no longer stand the old style. Then we will have wasted the money we paid for the desk"
Ornament and Crime

I can illustrate this as such:

So a desk should last longer than a gown, but how do we really 'say' how long things should last? Well ideally, given the climate, forever. We are trying to avoid oppressive, top down braggadocio though, so if we are to be calm suggesters and not polemical, egotistical designers, we should be accommodating to ideas of style and culture. In order to be environmentally courteous though, an idea not really explored by Loos, but more relevant than ever, it appears we are putting things on a scale according to their cultural and material weight.

So we can afford to give the odd evening dress a miss, in terms of our modernist, plain black ambition. But as we climb up the scale, in terms of both the 1900's argument for economy, and our new ideas of conservation, we, stylistically, should be more careful. This gives two important insights.

Given the completely new paradigm of digital technology, music, visual art, and the majority of media comes in a form that barely lasts a day, never mind months. Thus, it can afford to be 'less timeless', which is a phenomenon we see, as the online revolution in entertainment has become more immediate, more in quantity, and arguably less in long-term quality. This is not a bad thing, an instagram post scrolled past in a second might cost the world one milli Amp Hour, wheras before we got a whole newspaper furnished with but four illustrations.

It may ask serious questions about how we define 'timeless' in our generation though. Loos' architecture sought a semi-modernist, semi-classical reduction of ornament in architecture, which went into conflict with the secession architecture of the time, but was arguably already an existing concept in personal objects.

We can see now that, besides a few colours and patterns, objects have pretty much arrived at the non-ornament destination that Loos prescribed and celebrated. None of our phones, from Chinese basics to top-of the range iPhones show any obvious decorative appendage, besides the odd 'interesting' curve. Add to this list our TV's, our computers, our radiators, ovens, printers, toasters and microwaves - essentially everything invented since Loos' time.

Architecture poses a different question. How eager were the modernists in adopting the machine style for their new Villas? But architecture carries an established form. While a bicycle and a train carriage benefit from their birth at a time of new industrial awakening, a piece of building needs to grow as part of the city as a whole. Imagining that timelessness is the most pertinent issue;

Are we better pre-empting the next wave of architectural reductionism, by introducing risky, unadorned forms? Perhaps not. Is an idea that attempts to predict the next two hundred years of architectural progression, to jump to conclusions, the most likely to be timeless?

A conservative answer would be no. Thanks to the Lindy effect, ideas (and that includes architectural theories) last longer the longer they have been about. We are in a place to suggest that architecture, and by extension, more serious pieces of product design, would actually gain in timelessness if they took as much from the past as they did the future. If we invent a totally new thing, we can't look into the past to decide how it should look, but for something so essential, permanent and culturally ingrained as a house, or even more so a library or parliament building, it would be ludicrous to suggest that a tried-and-tested neo-classical form would end up looking more 'dated' than an avant-garde piece.

A vision of the future we could derive from this would be that of neo-classical sandstone brick buildings, furnished with mid-century furniture, and littered with flat, black, technology panels. Sounds like a dystopia? Someone should do a Black Mirror episode on it.

But hang on, isn't that exactly what exists?

Cottam Meadow - DT0A

My chosen subject will be an assessment of the situation of housing going into the future. My blog has often found itself ending up on the subject of housing and urban design, from Urbanism, a post which explored the contrasting urban theories of Le Corbusier and Leon Krier; to my investigations of Paris, which asked questions about developments by Ricardo Biofill; to recent investigations of the state of housing today.

I will begin by investigating a few examples of housing which attempts to straddle the divide which i perceive to be between Architecture and contemporary housing, and then I may investigate wider political and social problems which concern the housing market as a whole.

Case Study 01 - Cottam Meadow

One omittance from my investigation of Preston's housing scheme was the new Cottam Meadow housing scheme, which didn't fit into the narrative of neo-traditionalism which I was trying to portray. This must now be addressed.

Cottam Meadow is a new development on the fringes of Preston's new suburbia which approaches the matter of housing design in a different way to the more traditionally designed housing schemes. It is designed by DK Architects for Barrat Homes, and is certified as a 'Built for Life' development.

Aesthetically, the difference is clear: these homes have a more brash, bold and geometric style, which I believe more reflects purer 'architectural' values than that which merely attempts to re-create acceptable homes, such as the adjacent developments:

The main fundamental difference is that this is a housing scheme, primarily due to it's association with the 'Buildings for life scheme', is that it attempts to addresses the issue of the urban space itself, rather that just being a selection of houses on individual plots.

The Building for Life scheme is a set up by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), which provides 12 points designed to acredit building which provides a high standard of quality.

The most dramatic change to the urban fabric is the way in which the houses and the roads are placed and combined. Pavements are rejected in order to create "homezone" shared space roads. These 'roads' are less like traditional roads, and the effect is that of a traditional streetscape, in that the whole of the space between buildings is regarded as a public space. This may perhaps encourage community integration, by giving less to the car (and maybe reducing speeds) meaning that the spaces can be used flexibly for recreation and other community activities. What they lack is the 'defensible space' of the traditional picket fence garden, and a dramatic lack of greenery from wall-to-wall.

This shift in paradigm from houses and roads to masses and spaces has an influence on the overall nature of the development. The emphasis has moved to, as in point 7, "creating well defined streets and spaces" - so instead of cul-de-sacs, Cottam Meadows aims to design in public spaces and an overall idea of townscape permeates the whole plan.

The plan also aims to seamlessly integrate low-income housing: part of the theory which assumes that closely integrated high and low value housing situated together will prevent both expensive gated communities and low-value ghettos.

The above general approach seems based heavily on the new-urbanism theories of Leon Kirer, who argues, among other things, against the divisive subdivision of the urban fabric into 'zones' in favour of a denser, more mixed-use cityscape.

Contemporary suburban model vs sustainable urbanism, from DK Architects presentation.

The most extreme example of this approach is in Leon Krier's and the Prince of Wales' Poundbury, which combines a phased, streetscape based housing model and neo-traditional housing styles.

The main difference between these schemes, besides the scale, is in the architectural detail. Poundbury looks like a full simulation of a traditional town, minus the circulating ring-road, whereas Cottam Meadow attempts to adopt a more pseudo-modern style, with it's bold black graphics and square, blank features. Poundbury I think is a more clear architectural statement, despite the fact that the aesthetic chosen is one that is backwards-looking.

Assessing the success or failure of these schemes is a very difficult task. Homes today are built into a market which is in a constant state of under-supply. The result of such a market is that homes would find it very difficult to be un-sold, regardless of style or innovation. If the market was in over-supply, then perhaps people would have the freedom to choose between modern and tradtional style, but such a proposal is obviously not an economic suggestion.

Another problem is that communities in general tend to oppose all building in their immediate surroundings- so called NIMBYism. If they had to submit to development , would they rather their neighbours lived in dense, traditional neo-villages or in expansive cul-de-sacs? 

A paper on the architecture of Office buildings suggests that estate agents and end-users have significantly different opinions, with architects generally preferring flat roofed non-traditional forms, and users preferring pitched roofed traditional buildings. This would imply that the developers of poundbury have made an optimal choice with regards to optimum acceptability. The question remains, do we need to educate the public on the benefits of modern architecture, or do we need to un-educate ourselves?

Charles and Ray Eames - DT02

My reflection this week comes in the form of a video, reflecting the style and playing with the output of Charles and Ray Eames. I already was familiar with their strictly product design output, but from the film Eames: The Architect and the Painter I found another side to them, as strong visual communicators.

A video about Charles and Ray Eames, a mashup of their contributions to design and communication. Music from 'Tops' (1969), composed and conducted by Elmer Bernstein. Imagery Collected without permission from Eames Office, Herman Miller, Vitra and Edemco, for educational and critical purposes.

***

The design of impact - DT01

This is the beginning of a series of posts which will explore various aspects of Design and Technology. The main format is that in art school we are to be delivered a series of 'provocations' in the form of videos or visits from guests, and our reactions form a body of work which is a parallel series of blog posts to our already ongoing exploration of 'Great Design'.

The first of many provocations was a film which goes by the name of Underkastelsen (submission), which took the form of an investigation into the scale, scope and effects of chemical pollution in our bodies and in the environment.

The film explored the presence of a wide amount of chemicals including PCB, DDT, Lead, PFOS, oestrogen and flame retardants, which were variously linked to conditions such as Autism, Cancer, Diabetes, ADD and Obesity, as well as observing the emergence of hermaphroditic fish in lakes. Some of the more concrete evidence was levelled at things that have already been banned, (the aforementioned PCB and DDT), which proved an interestingly scary introduction to the film, while the film continued, with the support of various experts to clarify the impact of many of todays problems with statements such as "worrying", "we just don't know" or alluding to a potentially multiplicative "cocktail effect", where these chemicals, in their nanogram/litre concentrations may adversely effect us in a big, big way (perhaps even more than climate change).

The most clear experience I got from the film though, was not of a learning of the subject matter, but a surprise and an interest into the dramatic nature of the film's delivery. It begun by illustrating how the filmmaker's father had convinced him to pretend to be run over by a car, invited in a pregnant actress (Eva Röse) as a parallel subject and narrative, took us very personally through the tests, took us fishing to take our minds off things, went onto a story about his father taking him to the dentist to get his head chopped off, and finished on an image of the aforementioned Eva holding her baby alluding to an image of Mary and Christ. I'm not saying all of this is silly, there is clear artistic vision and commentary in tying up the general idea with themes and images, it adds interest and visual fodder to the documentary. But I can't avoid thinking that if the problem was so great, pressing or interesting, it wouldn't need such melodramatics.

This brings us onto what I want to focus on: not the content of the film per se, but how we can effectively design communication to deliver an impact.

Underkastelsen, in it's delivery, reminded me of a video from a few years ago, KONY 2012, a film which was designed to inspire a new generation of social media activists to pressure their respective governments into doing something about Joseph Kony. Kony is a war-lord of the Lords Resistance Army (LRA), for a time based in Uganda, who has been involved in many atrocities, most prominently the capture and use of young children as child-soldiers. No one can argue against this as a worthy cause, and as something that requires our attention: this is why the central theme was around making an impact and spreading the word.

Spread it did: It became the most viral video ever, with over 100 million views in 6 days, but perhaps it's long-term goals were not met. It was accused of encouraging 'slacktivism' and the planned worldwide movement planned for the night of 20th April, attracted few attendees.

There are many similarities beween KONY 2012 and Underkastelsen: both films are primarily aimed at 'raising awareness' rather than delivering the truest information; both are authored by people who are primarily filmakers (they know their medium well); they begin with grand, symbolic imagery and where possible 'authorities' are used to give weight to the seriousness of the central concept.

More strangely, both prominently feature childbirth, which jerks the emotions, makes us consider the wider long-term impacts, and makes us consider our own children. Further to this, in both, the author literally explains the concept to a 'naiive' subject. In Underkastelsen this is the female actor, in KONY this is the child of the author. Such undertakings allow the author to simplify the concept and deliver it directly. By proxy, we are the naiive.

The main central thematic similarity however is how both are delivered as highly personal stories. In Underkastelsen we are taken through the journey via both the filmmaker, Stefan Jarl, and his 'friend' the mother-to-be, Eva Röse. In KONY we explore the relationship between the filmmaker, his own son, and his Ugandan friend, Jason. This is because, as humans, we are more likely to listen to, respond to, and remember information when it is presented to us as a story. This is a key design principle we can use and manipulate however we see fit.

This concept is brought to a level of intellectual appreciation in the book Made to Stick, by brothers Chip and Dan Heath. In it are outlined the steps to make an Idea 'Stick' - exemplified by Urban Legends and politician's speeches - and summarised with the SUCCESs model:

A successful idea, if it is to stick must be Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and a Story. We can see these tenets in the Underkastelsen film, which we can now see as a shining and successful media manipulation, if not true credibility.

Simple: There are dangerous chemicals in our bodies.

Unexpected: There are dangerous chemicals everywhere, in large amounts, in food, carpets and chairs

Concrete: The fish are becoming hermaphrodites, also, graphs, lots of graphs.

Credible: We have interviewed about 40 scientists (no mention on how many scientists disagree)

Emotional: Eva is going to pass this onto her children.

Story: My father got me run over by a car... I showed submission... etc.


As I said, I do not aim really to disturb the credibility of the film itself, although more balanced sources on a number of issues tend to emphasise the do not know side of the argument, but I do think we should be impressed and suspicious in equal measure when we sense we are at the receiving end of such well-designed messages.

In design, especially at the forefront of egotistical 'rockstar' design, we see how SUCCESs is used, consciously or otherwise, to really greatly deliver concise, understandable and succint design solutions, and is therefore something that we, in presentation and in process, should be acutely aware of.

We see SUCCESs in the work of Philipe Stark, especially his early work.

He was described by Deyan Sujic in B is for Bauhaus as someone who could 'come up with a philosophy of nursery-rhyme simplicity for every new product'. We see this in his products, they have names for one, and upon seeing them we see a conceptual simplicity which is easy to 'get'. We also can read a functional simplicity, which is not always reflected in the final use of the product.

In architecture, Bjarke Ingels of BIG is a master of media, explanations and stories, his 'ideas' are succinctly 'explained' to us in various forms. In comic strips; Images;

And videos;

which are delivered with a wordless, sequential and irrefutable kind of logic. This attaches itself instantly to the mind of the viewer, and is hard to shake, but I am almost certain that the actual design process, or the result, isn't as smooth or logical as he professes.

***

What we can learn from the above provocations is the power of well-constructed messages. These messages can be images, films, products or buildings; but to have a powerful grasp of the subject-matter and manipulate it into a form that is Simple, Shocking and Emotional is a very powerful ability. In design we can learn to create forms that have instant, understandable impact. We can also use these techniques to over-simplify our process-stories to create a device for the continued successful impression of our results.

What we must be wary of however, is how easily this can be done. A lot of the time, in the case of urban myths, it is something that happens organically. In the case of manifestos, new ideas and news stories however, it can often be used in a manipulative sense (or with the aim of self-promotion) we must be careful to not be swayed by simple and engaging polemics, the problem is always more complicated than we give it credit for.