Between the Over- and Underdesigned: Session 1

Between the Over- and Underdesigned

Session 1


Moderator

Aric Chen

First off, I’d like to thank everyone—the panelists, our readers, the Guggenheim—for their efforts and participation in this discussion.

The occasion, of course, is the museum’s exhibition marking the fiftieth anniversary of the completion of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim building in New York. Having said that, our goal is not to gild nor to reevaluate Wright’s legacy. Instead, we’ll use that legacy as a starting point from which we might examine contemporary topics: namely, how design shapes—or overshapes, as the case may be—everyday life; its value in enhancing the urban environment; and its possibilities and limits for engaging users, both as individuals and groups.

Admittedly, this is a tall order. So to help focus, let’s begin by thinking about Wright’s work, looking beyond its formal characteristics to how it sought to unify furnishings with interior, interior with architecture, and architecture with landscape. For Wright, the building and its contents were to be thought of as a whole, which was furthermore meant to be of a piece with his idealized image of the American landscape. Yet what makes Wright so fascinating, in part, are his many contradictions. His high-minded, democratic principles came wrapped in egomaniacal tendencies. Within his harmonious compositions, one might see a kind of totalitarianism. Let’s not forget that practical considerations—not to mention his clients’ comfort—seemed barely to register with Wright if they meant compromising his architectural vision.

Taking us into the present, when we in much of the world are coming down (or at least taking a pause) from one of the biggest design binges in memory—from our love affair with megaprojects, iconic architecture, and designer, well, everything—has there been a disconnect between intention and effect? Has design, which has been championed in a way perhaps not seen since Wright’s era as a vehicle for social and environmental good, a wellspring of innovation, a driver of economies, a mover of product, a shaper of cities and, yes, a means of expression, become so omnipresent as to verge on oppressive? Are we overdesigning our homes, our cities, ourselves? Or are we not designing them enough? Are we simply misguided in how we design—or are we doing a fine enough job as it is?

Indeed, how do we now define “good design”? Within Wright’s modernist milieu, it was largely prescribed from the top down. Wright wanted to create an organic architecture that represented a new American vernacular. But whether talking about homes or cities, can the “organic” and “vernacular” be, by definition, designed? How might we apply this idea, from an economic and sociological perspective, to the built environment? Is in fact the city—which was so despised by Wright—our most important organism after all?

These are a lot of questions, and they’ve been cast wide. But I hope they’ll prove to be sufficient fodder for a lively discussion. We welcome and encourage reader comments. And on that note, panelists, please jump in!



PANELIST

Sarah Herda

There are no universal criteria for “good design.” It is impossible to define out of context, because everything is designed. Ultimately, you have to ask who or what is the thing good for? You? Me? The client? The user? The designer? The economy? The environment? Humanity? All of the above?

Some of the common terms used to define good design, such as economy and efficiency, cannot be applied indiscriminately to everything and yield satisfactory results. What if the thing is a handbag, a school, a prison, or a bomb? How we define good design depends on what’s being designed and what it is being designed for. We can’t assume that the intentions of design are always good.

Today, in the midst of an economic recession the likes of which many of us have not seen in our lifetimes, we face extraordinary challenges in nearly every aspect of our daily lives. While there may be some fatigue for design as it has been deployed recently, its potential is far more than fodder for shelter magazines and developers of lifestyle condominiums.

In grappling with this question of good design, I had a revelation: Frank Lloyd Wright was not a good architect. He was an extraordinary architect. In using Wright as our diving board into this conversation, we are not talking about good architecture. We are talking about great architecture—important architecture, architecture that defines architecture’s possibilities. Surely, Wright isn’t the subject of a monographic exhibition at the Guggenheim because he was a merely good designer.

Shouldn’t we demand design that strives to synthesize great things out of the urgent issues and opportunities present in the contemporary situation? Perhaps Wright affords us an opportunity to talk about bold ideas without embarrassment, because sometimes good just isn’t good enough.




PANELIST

Arjo Klamer

Frank Lloyd Wright’s legacy—his love of nature, his belief in harmony, his desire to integrate buildings with their environments—is visibly present in modern society. But when we turn to economics, we observe that the Wrightian values lost out to those embodied by Mies van der Rohe.

Economics turned modernist in the thirties; economists emulated design principles that were more characteristic of Mies (and Piet Mondrian) than of Wright. Like Mies, economists tried to create models of the world with a minimum set of assumptions. Stringence was the hallmark, allowing no flourish in the form of historical, social, or cultural references. In their “buildings,” economists let individuals disappear, to be replaced by atomistic rational calculators—no flesh, no emotion. Their language became mathematical. The economy was conceived as a machine, and the sense of nature was lost altogether. Economics turned abstract, just as architecture after Mies did.

What is the point? Taking developments in economics as our measure of modernity, insistence on integration and on the organic whole lost out to rigor and parsimony. As a consequence, humanity during modernism lost touch with nature and became individualized and ego driven, with the current economic crisis as the inevitable outcome.

We are in need of a more humane world, a world in which modesty, respect for nature, quality, and spirituality are celebrated as values to strive for. Design is the most direct way to express such values. After all, it is the architecture of the buildings and the design of things that we live with every day.

So I put the question to you: Might a reevaluation of Lloyd Wright’s ideology provide the answer to the current crisis?




PANELIST

Ellen Lupton

Imagine walking into a brand-new public building—let’s say it’s a museum, a campus student center, or a mental-health clinic. Every detail has been designed, from the drop ceiling to the polished floors. But taped to the security desk is a paper sign, printed out in all-caps Times Roman, that says Restrooms Are Downstairs in the Basement Behind the Boiler Room or Don't Even Think About Asking Me Where the Elevator Is. These homemade signs boil over with irritation, directed at a clueless public who don’t know how the building works. What’s happening here is not a failure of the public, however, but a failure of design.

Is our environment overdesigned, as Aric asks, or is it not designed enough? Signage or wayfinding is a field dedicated to leading people through buildings and public spaces. In best-case scenarios, signage is integrated into new projects from the beginning. When that doesn’t happen, we see otherwise attractive spaces get patched up ex post facto with do-it-yourself graphics.

Design commentary tends to focus on how things look or what they mean. I’m interested in how design makes people behave. Many designers are starting to focus on patterns of use rather than form and message. How do people find their way through a Web site, a book, a hospital, or a neighborhood? What clues help them get where they want to go—or, in a more sinister vein, what obstacles can we throw in their path to make them hang around longer and buy more stuff? Today’s emphasis on “the user” reflects a shift away from objects as finished, perfected commodities or buildings as symbols of corporate identity or political power. Yet the new human-centered design can be manipulative and controlling, hemming in the user like a mouse in a maze.

Any museum curator has thought about the public this way. How can we get visitors to start here instead of there, look at this before they look at that? The spiral path of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim does a pretty good job controlling people’s behavior. Likewise, the layout of an Ikea store or a suburban supermarket carves the open volume of a big-box shell into a linear gauntlet of distraction and desire.

Balancing freedom and control is a key challenge for designers today. We want to empower people to make their own way through a complex world. But we also want them to find the bathroom.


COMMENTS

  • Jason Edward Kaufman wrote:

    Our world is overdesigned in name and underdesigned in fact. Why the proliferation of name-designed products? We are all alone and want help with our solitude, help with our lives. The named design carries with it the illusion of personal attention-this piece has been carefully designed by another human being, one who had my well being and comfort in mind. This notion of quasi-bespoke production confers upon the name-designed entity the illusion of luxury. And when the designer's objects are known to be owned by persons with attributes desirable to the consumer (perhaps wealth, fame, taste) the acquisition of the designed product elevates the consumer's self-esteem and, when perceived by others, social status. We feel and are seen to belong, thus we are validated. Yet, if there is a problem it is not that too much is designed (indeed, everything need be), but that we falsely believe that a named designer signifies good design. Once the designer obtains a name, there is no need to research the most fundamental needs of the client. Design becomes not a form of service but an act of self-expression and attention-getting. The market co-opts "design" and in the process licenses self-indulgence and mediocrity, the enemies of good design. We need objective critics, curators, scholars and a reliable consumer affairs agency to let the public know when they are being fooled.

  • Reto Moser wrote:

    I am a third-year architecture student from Switzerland living in California and have three questions for you:

    - Arjo Klamer: what would happen if the US started raising more taxes: do you think that would change the state of design for the everyday at all? And would that in the long run be beneficial to the economy?

    - Sarah Herda: what if countries like Holland, Denmark, Switzerland would rethink their subsidy policies and spend money less easily on young designers: would that really result in spaces less well designed or would that result in fewer but more motivated designers and less useless products?

    - Ellen Lupton: I understand your preference for designs that are more focused on patterns of use than on form or message, but would improved patterns of use be enough for the US? Don’t we need better designed spaces?

  • Ryan Witte wrote:

    I'm tempted to wonder if the perfectly designed building should require no signage at all in order for it to be navigated correctly. If in some alternate universe it were possible to design the opposite of an environment by M. C. Escher, where everything is exactly where it should be, wouldn't text/verbal directions be the antithesis of design strategies (graphic design and typography notwithstanding)? Along these lines it seems to me that good design is the expression of a supreme understanding of common sense and patterns of use.

  • Antonio Sánchez wrote:

    Design is always a tricky land paved with all kind of treats, but the nearest to the nature is the most successful.

  • Michelle Alvarez wrote:

    I find it interesting that so far the talk has quickly connected design to the current economic crisis—but only in terms of overdesigning. What about underdesigning? Isn’t it linked with the same laissez-faire capitalism that got us in this mess? Overdesigning and underdesigning might be equally symptomatic. I’m thinking here, analogically speaking, of the way that bifurcation emerges as a cultural motif in late capitalism. For example. image-reproduction technologies have become split so that we become used to having either exceptionally refined and expensive goods and technologies or lousy and cheap ones, with nothing in the middle. It relates to the loss of craftsmanship, which I’d be eager to hear the group address at some point.

  • Judith Rodenbeck wrote:

    I wonder to what degree the totalizing of design, as concept and practice, is symptomatic of (and/or shares the problematics of) Richard Florida's "creative economy"? The latter seems, to me at least, a queasy iteration of one kind of organicism (whether Wrightian or something else). I like Ellen Lupton's hypothetical, though I'd note that the sign is usually handwritten using an illogical mix of caps and lowercase, roman and cursive...a type of "bad design" that has now crept into our "vernacular" via computer security sequences, lolcats, text messaging. Not quite bricolage, but something akin.

  • Alex Stalenberg wrote:

    Design can announce through its form, shape or mechanism a Time for new. The Human species likes to see his evolution, and Design and Art can be signals of further steps in our future. It also can show and express the need of beauty and harmony that we have. And there is the eternal search for the 'perfect form'... As if we could be such a great inventor as Nature.

  • Fiore57 wrote:

    I went to see the Frank Lloyd Wright show at the Guggenheim with a friend who commented, “They’re beautiful drawings, but I don’t think a house can ever change a person’s life.” Put in such bald, caricatured terms–which is how the discussion is often framed–it’s hard not to agree. So it’s good to read that some of the comments here have tried to address design in a larger context, i.e., an acknowledgment that designers and most especially architects must consider factors outside of the object’s aesthetics. A good example was brought up by Prof. Hugo Segawa at a talk last spring: in the late 40’s, Mario Pani built the Conjunto Presidente Aleman, an apartment building quite similar in design to the Smithsons' Golden Lane. But the Aleman is well regarded by residents who take obvious pride in living there, as opposed to Golden Lane, which has become infamous as a dangerous place to live or visit. There are a host of reasons the two were received so differently but the one that seems the most relevant–and obvious–is the residents’ job prospects (or lack of them). Same could be said of Rural Studio in Alabama. The work is gorgeous and smart but most of the houses can’t be properly maintained by the residents because there’s so little regular employment available there. I interviewed a young woman studying to be a nurse, who lived in one of the nicest RS houses. She loved it, but when I asked her what she was going to do when she graduated, she immediately said, “Get out of here.”
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MODERATOR

Aric Chen


Independent journalist, critic, and curator
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PANELISTS

Sarah Herda


Executive Director of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
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Arjo Klamer

Professor of the Economics of Art and Culture at Erasmus University, Rotterdam
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ELLEN LUPTON

Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum
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