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The Coming Age
Take design cues from the natural world.
By Robert Campbell
August/September 2002
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Photo by © James W. Porter/CORBIS
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Let's begin with the requisite disclaimer. As everyone knows, it is impossible
to predict the future. Who in 1900--the age of the Imperial Style in the
redevelopment of London's Regent Street--would have predicted the role of
totalitarian dictators in the twentieth century? Or Cubism, which was right
around the corner? Or Frank Gehry (although the Cubists might have foreseen
him)? Or much of anything else that actually happened? My thoughts on the
twenty-first century are therefore random and inconsequential. I ardently
deny any attempt to sketch a plausible scenario.
The world of design is only part of a larger world, and the two biggest
changes I can make out, in this temporal fog I'm trying to peer into, have
little to do directly with design. One is biological, and the other is planetary.
The revolution in biology is going to change the world radically. Genetic
manipulation of our species is, I think, inevitable. We will be redesigning
the human being. We will be selecting for personality, physical form, and
talent. Perhaps we'll get rid of congenital disease. Perhaps we'll get rid
of Saddam Hussein personalities. We may create a blander, smarter, safer,
handsomer, saner, more predictable, and less interesting human world. Or
a world of specialists, each a genius at one thing. Who knows, maybe somebody
will clone Saddam Husseins. It's an open game at this point. I'm not sure
it won't be a better world. And maybe there will be a major role for designers
in it. And a new specialty: homomorphology.
The decline of our planet as a life-support system is already, of course,
well under way. E. O. Wilson's recent book The Future of Life belongs
on the classics shelf along with those by Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson.
It documents the free-for-all genocide being carried out by humans against
other species--both plant and animal--as we rupture their habitats, consume
the resources they need, change their climates, and generally elbow them
out of existence. It makes the case that we human beings will suffer greatly
from the coming loss of biodiversity. To read Wilson is to be struck with
a terrifying image, though he doesn't suggest it: human beings as cancer
cells, multiplying and spreading rapidly through our host organism, which
is Earth. Wilson believes there is still a chance to preserve an acceptable
planet if we act soon. Maybe when Venice disappears, which I predict will
happen before midcentury, a warning gong will strike. It isn't so much individual
buildings as it is uncontrolled settlement patterns that are eating up the
Earth. Designers and architects are well placed to understand the issues.
Of course, there are some less apocalyptic trends: billboard buildings,
for example. These are buildings that broadcast their values directly and
changeably. Their facades are electronic displays instead of more durable
architectural motifs. They are already among us. Robert Venturi has been
arguing for years that architecture, in the tectonic sense, is dead, and
that the future belongs to the digital facade. I'm sure it will be a major
trend, but I doubt it'll take over as he suggests.
Already we are in a state of reaction, numbed by a world that has ceased
to be tactile or material and has morphed into an endless stream of media
screens. I think we'll see a second Arts and Crafts movement, directed this
time not against industrialism but against the tyranny of media. An example
is the truly desperate solid thingness of a building like Tod Williams and
Billie Tsien's American Folk Art Museum. We're pining for the actual--although
seeking to be authentic on purpose is a loser's game.
We'll also see, by way of contrast, more "environmentally responsible"
buildings like the green buildings of Europe. They will become the legislated
norm in developed countries. The truth is that individual buildings don't
do much for a planet being suffocated by humanity's billions. Green buildings
function more as signposts, as icons of intention, as visible statements
of hope for an international economy that recycles rather than plunders
the Earth's resources. But as such they're valuable.
The preservation movement will continue to mutate, as it has for many years
now, from an effort to freeze the past into an understanding that the best
way to preserve the values of the past is to invent a better present--since
that was what people were trying to do in the past. At the other end of
the spectrum, avant-gardism--the curse of the twentieth century--will finally
begin to fade. To quote the recent New York Times obit for the great
art historian E. H. Gombrich: "His discomfort with modernism was undeniable,
and had to do with his disdain for novelty for its own sake. The modern
era, he said, was unlike previous eras because it was ready to embrace whatever
was new. In other words, art is not a race...'If anybody needs a champion
today,' he once said, 'it is the artist who shuns rebellious gestures.'"
Antiquarians and avant-gardists, in fact, have much in common. Both hope
to bypass the present and replace it with something more desirable. But
it's the present we should be living in and improving.
The language of architecture will continue to evolve, as does spoken language.
But if spoken language evolves too quickly, it becomes unintelligible. It
needs to maintain continuity with its tradition. So does architectural language,
if we expect anyone to like or understand it. Forgive another quote, from
the late Harvard philosopher Willard V. Quine: "We cannot stem linguistic
change, but we can drag our feet."
The world--or the United States anyway--is becoming more diverse, with more
ethnicities, more taste cultures, and less consensus than ever before. A
powerful reaction against that diversity has begun, in the rise of fundamentalist
religious groups, both here and elsewhere, that promote simple dogmas and
provide their members with a sense of belonging to a community of shared
belief. One wonders whether there will be a similar conservative reaction
in architecture. Can people forever tolerate a world in which nobody agrees
on what good design is? Can Robert Stern and Rem Koolhaas continue to be
aesthetic leaders of the same profession? The world of Modernism, which
thought itself so brave and revolutionary, looks like a safe harbor compared
to the choppy seas of today's aesthetic battles. My guess is that this reaction
won't happen. The world of competing and conflicting taste cultures,
the world of the unedited range of human possibilities, will continue to
flourish--at least until those genetic biologists get to work on us.
I have no problem with that. Architecture can be done well in any manner,
and buildings of the wildest formal discrepancy can jostle comfortably together
on a good street, so long as they observe some commonalities of human scale.
In that vein, a final quote, from the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius:
"An empty pageant; a stage play; flocks of sheep, herds of cattle;
a brawl of spearmen; a bone flung among a pack of dogs; a crumb tossed
into a pond of fish; ants, loaded and laboring; mice, scared and scampering;
puppets, jerking on their strings--that is life. In the midst of it all
you must take your stand, good-temperedly and without disdain." |
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