Howard Roark's buildings
In the movie adaptation of Ayn Rand's novel 'The Fountainhead,' the architect's blueprints were structurally unsound. Originally Rand had intended all the blueprints on screen to be drawn by Frank Lloyd Wright, but the cost proved prohibitive. So someone--I don't know who--drew up modern-looking skyscrapers that, in reality, would have collapsed.
SDR...Well, there you go again, triggering thought and comment...
and making me go on too long. 🙂
Though I have not yet read Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us," it sounds like a growing number of discourses in various media that give voice to an unfortunate, rising tide of self-loathing among intelligent persons in the west. The persons these texts appeal to appear most often to be bright, well-educated persons acutely frustrated by the persistent lack of responsive feed back in our systems of government and business; systems now with even less feedback, because of their shameful subordination to, and hamstringing by, an effectively totalitarian central banking system. These bright persons seem to feel self-loathing, because of their inabilities to make government and business work better.
Woe is us. Often when the bright, productive persons in societies become disillusioned to the point of misanthropy, nihilism follows, and the oligarchy and demogogues inevitably rush to exploit mercilessly the paralysing effects of nihilism on the people they rule and seek to exploit further whenever possible.
Let us hope USA dodges that bullet, but it already appears that USA is not only not dodging the bullet, it is rather taking lead repeatedly.
Hi SDR..
". . . why such important aspects of our lives, like the shortage and depletion of oil, the access to water, the erosion of the trust in the democratic system, the stratification of power etc. does not seem to find a way into the cultural expressions of our times, design included."
Yes I might have overstated the context. On the other hand, I did not limit myself to design but to "all" cultural expressions (I will edit and ad the ?all in my first comment.
Designers in general and particularly those who have been doing this for a while know that there are indeed limits to the influence the designer has on that general context. This being said, we can not wash our hands completely in innocence when it comes to the seemingly uncontrollable consumption. Our societies discard well functioning products at an unbelievable rate. The dumps are full with products that work perfectly well but that have been discarded in a moment of disillusion with the service it renders or it has been made obsolete by the next technical or functional development. On this subject you might want to spend some time in looking at Chris Jordan's book or exhibition: "Running the numbers" or at the link under this comment.
Contrary to popular believe, the major drive behind this level of consumption is not technical obsolescence, but the often unfounded expectation that the new product will be better. This optimistic expectation can be positive in the sense that the new choice seems to be better, but most of the time it is negative in other words based on the fact that the older product did not live up to the original expectation. I know that these expectations are blown up far beyond reason by advertising. Car companies promise that you will be able to jump over the traffic jams, beer companies promise you a joyful bunch of short pant girls happy to replace your buddies in your tent and cosmetics companies promise either thick youthful hair or no hair at all depending if you are thinking of your head or anything under the belt. But?these exaggerations are most of the time understood by the consumer as typical advertising material and thus remote from any kind of reality. That the product does not live up to the consumer's expectations certainly is a designer's responsibility. The second responsibility of the design community is to formulate the "utopian" vision that shows society a number of alternative ways to go.
http://www.kopeikingallery.com/artists/view/chris-jordan
cont.
Norman Bell Geddes, Henry Dreyfuss, Raymond Loewy etc. are not often mentioned on this forum, but they certainly had a sense of this responsibility to give people some insight in what the future could be. It did not always work out that way, and the American people were not used yet to the idea that these proposals were visions to be discussed (not to be abused by advertising like the "concept" car that are shown at car shows) but the willingness to show solutions was strong and sustained. I suspect that within the context that I overstated, we could and should formulate what that new society looks like, in what kind of houses they live, what kind of cars they drive (if there is still a need for it) North America, with less than 5% of the earth's population consumes almost 1/3th of it's resources "and pretends to be a model to the world"
Designers have been part of the development that created this situation, so we have no other choice than either hide in shame or become part of the solutions.
Sometimes the very best...
Sometimes the very best questions beg not for an answer, but another question. dcwilson asks
why are so many designers unattuned to the state of their culture?
I don't honestly know.
But here's an old joke that comes to mind: why did the punk rocker cross the road?
Because he was pinned to the chicken.
As far as quoteable people go, Picasso is one of my favorites. Those artist retrospectives that Dover published a few years ago contain a lot of great quotes - and of course today, you are just a couple worldwide interweb fingertaps away from just about anything: can you say/type wikiquote ...
Speaking so, probably my favorite quote from a painter is actually from Edward Hopper, who is said to have said
maybe I am not very human - what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.
*
Patrick...
DO try to...
Patrick...
DO try to keep up will you?
You may recall an asinine post from dcwilson with my name in the subject line.
Seems he got his pretty lace panties in a twist because some people found his pretentious masturbatory navel-gazing a bit nauseating.
oh...um....Eames Nelson Knoll etc etc etc... now it's relevant
Renzo Piano shows a vision of the possible future of buildings at CalAcad...
He builds a vision of the possible future of design and architecture, an engineering driven vision. It is full of creativity and maturity and wonder. It is presently, the light of humane architecture shining in the darkness of the cult of Childe Virtuouso.
While my once beloved Frank Gehry perseverates in making thematic statements about the state of Western Civilization, and others seek naive silver bullets in thinking green, or reducing carbon foot prints to hedge off global warming that empirical research keeps indicating is just not occurring, a few like Renzo Piano and Koen de Winter take a mature, rational view of the problems at hand and pursue individual visions of neo-functionalism to show how it could be done better.
There is room for all approaches in the tent, but we are no longer at the point of needing to let people know that something is deeply wrong in Western Civilization, and increasingly in global civilization. Who doesn't get that? We can't even reliably predict the sky is falling from global climate catastrophy? It isn't. We can't even predict correctly that the oil is running out. It isn't. How in the hell are we going to virtuouso our way out of the current crisis? Our oligarchs can't even create a depression where the stock market falls. They can only create a depression where the market stays pinned to between 8000 and 8500 based on funny money infusions by the Fed.
continued
We are now at the point of having to design our way beyond the crisis as a community of human beings. The elites have failed. The cult of the virtuouso has failed. The oligarchy has failed. The central bank centric new world order has failed. All the would be divas couldn't sing as well as they thought. We let ourselves be lead around by the noses instead of organizing and working together to solve problems.
Oh, it is time to "find," as Picasso did, but it is no longer time to find that which in the process obsoletes and alienates us from our past. This is where Koen's philosophy and ethic come in. He was years, probably decades ahead of everyone in thinking this way. He may still be. But sooner or later design, architecture, commerce, government, central bank centric order itself, have to return to a broadly humane, rational and aesthetically pleasing approach to making choices that respect the past, present and future simultaneously to the best of human capacities.
It is time for the world to grow up. It is time for the world's doers to reassert the primacy of social responsibility and humane society--to put them back into the calculus of their most fundamamental choices and actions.
If we refuse to grow up at this time, if we insist on the David myth, if we insist on the child prodigy model any longer, then we are inevitably going to slip into a quick sand of self-loathing and misanthropy due to disillusionment that is tantamount to consigning humanity to a dark age.
continued
What creative people do not apparently yet widely grasp about enlightenments is that they do not hinge on the cult of the virtuoso. The virtuosos are effects, not causes of enlightenments. In fact, enlightenments have to occur almost inspite of the cult of the virtuoso. Enlightenments need virtuosos but only after the committment to enlightened and humane choice has been broadly made. Enlightenments occur primarily because the doers in society, and the people they do for, have taken a long hard look at the viciousness and futility of life lived when determined by magical thought and belief, and decided that life is too precious to consign to another age of vanity fair. The doers have decided that humane choices have to be made for the enlightened self interest of all. Reason, however limited in its capacity, has to prevail come what may.
In enlightenments, the doers decide that despite a Vatican's rancor and wrath, it has to be admitted that the earth is not the center of the universe. It is this commitment to human reason and its capacity for elegant function and beauty and even faith, and this simultanteous letting go of the determinants of vanity and of magic and grand delusion, that unleashes the photons of enlightenment.
Modernism tried throwing away most of the past and reviving a small part of it. It made some great advances, but created too tenuous of a fit to be feasible.
continued
Post Modernism tried reconnecting with the past without respecting the past, or respecting the present. It failed to make profoundly rational and humane choice about its eclecticism. Instead, it made ironic statements that juxtaposed present and past, rather than integrating them into enlightened, humane choice.
Contemporary design and architecture, as well as contemporary society, experiencing disillusionment from modernism and postmodernism, have settled into a philosophy of doubt that anything can be done other than amuse one's self and society, or loath one's self and society.
Contemporary civilization's leaders and great doers have, it seems, to a large extent, chosen to live out the myth of Gunter Grass' "The Tin Drum" not just as the book alluded to in the narrow confines of Nazi, Germany, but around the world. When things go wrong, we bang our drums like children, rather than make humane choices that solve problems. We try to get what we want and let the past, present and future be damned.
The problem is it is not a rational way to live and it leaves the world as if it were a roomful of infants banging drums, not a peaceful, happy, working society of hominids evolved over millions of years, which is what recurrent enlightenments reveal us to be, at least as much as children banging drums and refusing to grow up.
Always the choice is ours.
We cannot blame the oligarchy for our failure to insist they grow up.
We cannot blame the central bankers for our failure to insist they return to the democratic fold and resume acting as part of the family of humanity, rather than as our omnipotent new lords.
continued
We cannot blame our children for our failure to insist they act like human beings, rather than pixel inebriates drenched in the child's play of video games riddled with dungeons, dragons and black magic.
We cannot blame our generals for our failure to insist that they pound their WMDs into ploughshares, when there is no more enemy requiring them, when enemies have to be invented for them.
And we should not blame ourselves either. Blame and guilt are the tools of gods and dictators, not of enlightened human beings making humane choices.
We should roll up our sleeves and set about the process of bringing the oligarchy and their elites pounding their tin drums in from their chateaus and castles and play grounds and war games and bunkers and say, "Time to put away the drums and get on with fixing this mess, lest some of you children reach the breaking point and unleash the WMD."
If you need any help, please contact us at – info@designaddict.com