The Sole of a New Generation
Beauty Is In, Irony Is Out, and the Revolutionaries are at Your Door.
A Digital Design Manifesto By Christopher Hawthorne
At the Venice Biennale's International Architecture
Exhibition last summer, in the hulking old shipbuilding yards  known
as the Arsenale, I came across a modest but good-looking entry by
Australians Tom Kovac and Geoff Malone. Its centerpiece was a 17-story
office tower all wrapped up in streamlined, pixelated cool. In elevation,
the building looked like a turquoise water bottle stretched thin
and set floating in coal black space.
But
more striking than the display itself was the text pasted up next
to it. A laudatory bio of the pair by Leon van Schaik, an architectural
dean from Melbourne, it was meant as a kind of safeguard against
the design's aesthetic charms--a "prebuke," if you will. The works
of Kovac and Malone "stem from a polemic that is urgent and biting
in its context," the dean wrote. Then he pulled out his ruler and
got ready to slap some wrists: "They must not be seen as epretty.'
Their inherent rebellion against the narratives of use and of sentimentality
makes them very hot... They are political acts."
I had to laugh.
This
cute turquoise blob? This graceful tower swimming in total darkness,
light years from any kind of social or physical context? Maybe a
thorough analysis of the pair's built work, considering examples
not on view in Venice, would prove the dean's case. But heat and
politics and sharpened teeth were clearly not the reason these two
architects had made the biennale cut; that suggestion was like a
Miss USA contestant bragging that she'd reached the finals because
she could break down the nuances of the Monroe Doctrine.
This
conflict--what certain grammar-challenged pundits would call a "disconnect"--was
typical of the problems that plagued the biennale, and by extension
it sums up the state of design as a whole these days. Creative uses
of new technology  have
revitalized the field, as young designers produce objects from toothbrushes
to museums that are racehorse sleek and unabashedly energetic. The
revolution is an adolescent and gawky one, yes--but it is a revolution
nonetheless. It gains momentum every hour, every time some sophomore
architecture major sits down in front of a computer running form•Z
or Alias. And it has already prompted some defensive theorizing
from the generation now in charge.
So
far, most observers have discussed the movement in solely visual
terms, describing how muscular software is churning out designs
easily grouped together into a blobby school. A few have noted how
it has dovetailed nicely with the revival of interest in spare midcentury
forms, suggesting that the public is thirsting for an alternative
to the mannered styles that have dominated architecture--and to a
lesser extent design--in recent decades.
The
real power of the new wave, however, may lie not in its curvy sex
appeal but in the ways it threatens the theoretical models that
now rule architecture. Already it has begun to chip away at some
of the sturdier monuments of the aging dogma, among them the idea
that to be worth anything a design needs to be difficult and opaque--with
extra points for dreariness.
Of all the notions that have gained currency in the last two decades,
this has been perhaps the most damaging: the suggestion that clarity
is the enemy. It left us with critical writing and built projects
that were oppressive and leaden--worse yet, that wore their drudgery
as a badge of honor--and a slew of schemes that sought to reflect
rather than transcend the unsteady nature of what became known as
"decentered," "postindustrial" life.
 The
signature elements of trendy buildings became advertisements for
alienation, impermanence, and even outright confusion, with the
tortured grids and scaffolding chic of Peter Eisenman's 1989 Wexner
Center at Ohio State perhaps the best-known example. The architect
must have beamed with pride after one visitor described the building
as "disorienting to the point of near nausea."
The
new style could not be more different. It makes fresh tracks. It
has a nose for legibility and directness. It moves toward light
and color and emotion without necessarily losing its sophistication
or falling prey to whiz-bang earnestness. It is not so much free
of irony as it is postironic: it shows the wisdom of having come
through a self-conscious age, and is all the more outward-looking
for it.
And
yet, and yet. The revolution has not even begun to chase out the
old guard--the architects, designers, critics, and curators who write
the official histories, publish the party-approved newspapers, and
mount the retrospectives bowing in the appropriate directions. Most
of them are in their 50s, some in their 40s or 60s. Most of them
came of age in the late 1960s and were educated by the tumult of
1968 and the growing critique of the International Style. For them,
beauty became just one more convention to rebel against.
Now the members of this group are in a bit of a bind. They're only
too aware of the changes swirling below their feet, this army of
25-year-old whizzes turning out one magnificent blob after another.
But they're confused, because they think of themselves as the revolutionaries,
the flexible thinkers, the antiestablishment types. Their confusion
is exacerbated by the fact that architecture--before the computer
lent fresh power to its under-30 wing--has always been an old-person's
game (old-man's game, really). As an architect, or even a critic
of architecture, you waited and waited, and when you were 49 or
56 or even 65, people started paying you mind. The generation now
in its early 50s understandably felt it was just about time to measure
its head for the new crown. And now this.
A few of the '68s have embraced the new cyberstyle, often with the
awkwardness of a father bobbing his head to his daughter's new Jay-Z
CD. Others are taking the old wait-and-see. But most, like our friend
van Schaik, are sizing up the new designs through their own well-worn
lens--smudged and darkened by years of Foucault, Tafuri, and Vidler.
And so at Venice hackles were raised and a broad delusion ruled.
Most of the energy and life in the show shone from examples of the
new liquid style, including work by UN Studio, Asymptote, and dECOI.
Yet nobody dared acknowledge this obvious fact, which was undercut
at every turn by somber pronouncements from people like Bernard
Tschumi (his ant-farm-like student center at Columbia, he said momentously,
promoted not only interaction but "social change") and Robert Venturi
and Denise Scott Brown (they called their work "rich mess--not vapid
minimalism" before comparing themselves, with straight faces, to
Michelangelo). We were informed that the current moment was not
in any way thrilling, that no fun was to be had, that we had to
take our lumps and remember politics. It was like sitting contentedly
at a wedding reception and then watching the parents of the bride
stand up to offer a morbid, jealous toast: You think you'll be
happy together? We have been miserable for years and are therefore
morally superior.
Back home, the same roadblocks are being hurriedly dragged out into
the street. The July 2000 issue of Harper's reprinted a call
to arms against "smooth" design by Mark Kingwell, who teaches philosophy
at the University of Toronto and, if he practices what he preaches,
presumably wears scratchy tattered outfits made of hemp. Kingwell
insisted that blobby objects "act to obscure the conditions of their
own production...in sweatshops that are anything but clean or polished...Anything
that so thoroughly effaces the signs of its own origins [is] worth
regarding with a skeptical eye."
In
the New York Times, Herbert Muschamp used the occasion of
two big stories--one on design's increasing grip on the public imagination
(which he called "scary") and the other on his employer's search
for an architect for its new headquarters--to dust off some of the
most cherished cornerstones of the old philosophy. Here's my favorite:
"The design phenomenon derives its power from denial. It persuades
people to leave unpleasant things out of the picture." And a close
second: "We are living in a time when our liveliest minds are engaged
in challenging forms of authority and the codes that represent it.
Hierarchy, paternalism, control: visual symbols cannot, after all,
be detached from the power relationships that govern social behavior.
Indeed, globalization and its monocultural effects have made it
ever more urgent to reject the idea that symbols can be used as
purely abstract forms."
To
be fair, Muschamp is not quite as stiff in his thinking as I'm making
him out: there are occasional flashes in his prose that suggest he
rather likes some features of liquid design, despite himself. But
I suspect that he will go to his grave shunning "the idea that symbols
can be used as purely abstract forms," that he will comfort himself
to his last days with that three-word mantra, familiar enough to
him and his brothers-in-arms to sound like a kind of lullaby: Hierarchy,
paternalism, control. Hierarchy, paternalism, control.
The
Marxism inherent in the critiques by Kingwell and Muschamp is not
so much dated as simply misplaced. It begins by making design--and,
indeed, art and culture in general --the handmaiden of politics.
It puts the aesthetic world at the mercy of those dastardly power
relationships. It says that art, whatever its virtues, is best
seen as a curtain that either conceals or reveals the real stuff
of life that's going on in the back room. (Art itself, of course,
is never allowed to be the real stuff.) Indeed Muschamp's favorite
new metaphor--the veil, which he introduced in the "scary" piece--is
essentially the curtain idea after a trip to the thesaurus.
All of this operates on the good 1960s principle that American political
society is wholly redeemable. For people my age (I am a few months
short of 30) this rings almost intuitively false. I won't presume
to speak for my entire generation, but for many of us, the marriage
of capitalism and democracy--this union responsible for presidential
races run like marketing campaigns for detergent, math problems
sponsored by Domino's Pizza, and children's books brought to you
by Froot Loops--is assumed rotten from the start. And we realize
something the politicos can't bring themselves to admit: their brand
of engaged design hasn't exactly fired up the masses or helped the
left win the day. Can any of them actually make the case that global
capitalism has been slowed by what they like to call their "interventions"--or
even that those efforts have been effective on a rhetorical level?
The real tragedy, of course, is that architecture and design have
themselves been wounded by the attempt. For years the avant-garde
treated design as if it were a monkey wrench, sticking it into the
engine of globalization, hoping to foul things up. But the engine
kept whirring--indeed roared more efficiently than ever--until the
poor overmatched wrench was mangled and spit out. Fashionable architects
were not dissuaded: they simply assembled the resulting wreckage
into increasingly despondent and inaccessible schemes.
Meanwhile even the most progressive of us were beginning to concede
the obvious: there must be more direct ways to address the uncertain
nature of contemporary life--and its political inequalities--than
putting up buildings with tilting ramps or hallways that don't line
up. I'm sure many design czars of a certain age would howl with
derision when confronted with this line of argument. The nerve of
these kids, they'd shout. How can they be so retrograde as to find
succor in the appearance of "new" forms? How they can forget that
inside the design of a laptop or cell phone is a nest of global
warming and exploitation of Third World labor?
But there is no naivete in the new wave. Our eyes are open. We know
what design is and does--and the same goes for politics. We are socially
conscientious and we appreciate the simple beauty of a line
or a curve. Indeed this appreciation is for many of us the only
known respite from the reach of a crass and commercial age. Crafting
and observing and writing about design on its own terms is not for
us a form of denial; it is a form of oxygen. For the last 25 years
the suffocating alternative has been to avoid leaving "unpleasant
things out of the picture" by mandating that every picture be unpleasant.
(Either that or happily conservative Disneyland postmodernism, which
is surely no better.)
These
developments come with caveats. First of all, irony is going to
be very tough for many of us to do without. We're likely to feel
withdrawal symptoms for some time--compelling us to buy a too-small
Izod shirt or the latest Air-Jordan release, or resort to breezy
cynical comebacks when real thinking fails us. And the charge that
the new style is just shiny consumerist hucksterism will have to
be grappled with. So will the suggestion that powerful software
makes hiding a weak design behind a terrifc surface easier than
ever.
But what all of that means is simply that the new design is young.
Despite its love of speed, it will need time to develop and will
take some wrong turns. We will have to be patient and tend to it,
and judge it carefully and sometimes harshly. We will have to admit
that it may be years before it produces a truly great building.
(The Guggenheim Bilbao, for all its curvy charisma, is not really
an example of the new liquid style: it grew out of a pen-and-ink
drawing and a deconstructionist's love of collision.) Most important
of all, we will need to realize that it is larger than most of us
think--that it has more to do with the influence of new technology
on design than with a particular blobby look. If we turn our backs
on it simply because we fear its slickness, it will fall into the
wrong hands for sure.
There's
no doubt that commercialism--and its promotion of an increasingly
homogenous global culture--is a real danger. But how can design that
is accomplished enough--even smooth enough--to draw attention on its
own terms be considered an ally of that homogenization? The most
insidious kind of design is something altogether quieter: packaging
for everything from potato chips to corporate headquarters that
is so bland and innocuous as to attract no engaged interest at all.
One of the most persistent complaints about liquid design is that
it favors glamour over utility. But if you examine the origins of
the trend, they have everything to do with the basics--talented young
designers churning out a PDA, hairbrush, or cell phone that has
to be ready in about four days. In its best form, the new style
is not an affected one but one driven by pragmatic questions of
use and facility in a fluid information economy.
And
who said a designed product can't be good-looking and responsible
at the same time? Who said designers have to favor theory over intuition,
or bleakness over energy, in every decision? There's no reason to
throw out the Baby G-Shock with the bathwater. We just need to realize
that nasty politics sometimes come wrapped up in very appealing
packages.
Consider
the Nike shoe: Which is better--the sneaker that distracts consumers
from its sweatshop origins, or the ugly sneaker that bears witness
to that birthplace? The class of '68 would say the latter. But to
me that shoe is doubly damnable--for being a sweatshop product and
for bringing more unneeded ugliness into the world. Only a fool
would gather from gazing at the smoothness of the Air Presto that
the company represents an angelic force in the world. Only someone
who has been lost for years in the backwoods of theory would suggest,
as Kingwell does, that the mark of an underpaid working class should
somehow be added to an industrial product designed on a computer,
to remind us of the human costs of getting it into our hands. Now
that is what I'd call affect. There is a simple solution to this
seeming dilemma, and that is to get your information on a company's
labor practices from somewhere other than the sole of your sneaker,
and then take whatever progressive action you think is appropriate.
The fact that such action might lie outside the world of design
is no cause for worry, really.
Luckily quite a few young Americans appear capable of taking just
such an approach. The biggest political movement on college campuses
in the last five years has been the anti-sweatshop campaign, suggesting
that Generation Napster has been anything but duped by Nike propaganda.
Indeed the company's sales have slid during the last three years--even
in the midst of a booming economy--and sneaker sales as a whole have
dropped during that time. The most effective of the antiglobalization
protests have been organized by people born in the late 1970s. And
who not only filled all those Ralph Nader rallies but also conducted
the most articulate dialogue about whether a vote for him was a
boon to George W.? This same group.
They are driving the design renaissance too. Visit any industrial
design office or architectural firm and you'll find that it's precisely
the youngest designers who are most skilled with computer drafting
and modeling software. Visit the cutting-edge studios, and you'll
find that this generation is enjoying a surprising amount of autonomy.
Though it's already been co-opted by older designers, the revolution
in its most organic, utilitarian sense was begun by Generation Y.
In the end, it's too bad the following argument has to be made,
but it does: there is nothing wrong with protesting the WTO in the
afternoon and returning home to admire the clean lines of your Apple
iBook or your Konstantin Grcic glass in the evening. Indeed there's
something admirably coherent in it. This is the new sensibility:
be engaged and savvy in the political sphere; be open to beauty
and innovation in the creative one. With apologies to Venturi, the
point is no longer that there exists some delicious contradiction
between the protest and the glass: anti-globalist political action
on the one hand and a taste for minimalist universal form on the
other. The point is that between the protest and the glass there's
no contradiction at all. |
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