The new philosophies are embraced as messianic much graphic design discourse. He focuses on the need to work. The title exterior that passes for creative freedom. Koolhaas fares is based on an essay by architect Adolph Loos entitled better as a creative tour de force. Design and Crime shoots ground three historical shifts in the discourse of art prac- down the circuitous rhetoric tossed out by purveyors of tice, art museum, and art history.
Foster proposes that our thinking to design as a discipline. Although my first reaction is to come to the same multifaceted treatment in his discussion. I suspect this Norman Crowe bias prevents him from examining design or design history in the provocative discussion of criticism and The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human visual culture that follows.
Intention by David W. Reconsidering autonomy in conjunction earlier works. Foster also calls for a nation of case studies and prescriptive approaches re-energizing of historical analysis. For the record, some to design, it is instead a broad-brush background for emerging design historical analysis—which analyzes the environmental responsibility on behalf of designers—in formal qualities of designed artifacts in their historical effect, a mind-set and ethos for approaching design.
He develops this idea in the final Environmental Studies Program. For instance, often treat given genres or mediums as some- he asserts the authority of evolution: biological evolution how completed, they do not pastiche them in a as a model for environmentally conscious design—in his posthistorical manner In design methodologies—that is, the way designs for this way these practices point to a semi-auton- useful artifacts progressed before the advent of modern omy of genre or medium, but in a reflexive way science and technology, thereby avoiding most unin- that opens up to social issues.
Some now familiar examples The examples he sites are fascinating, but they leave of unintended and unpredictable consequences are: the me wanting more—they remind me of the thought- long term effects on biological systems of synthesized provoking contemporary design that is conspicuously chemicals; the use of chlorofluorocarbons as refrigerants missing from this discussion.
The vision its the effects of global warming; and the introduction in this exciting book has one obvious blind spot—the of electronic communication along with the ubiquity of failure to see the full range of developments in contem- automobiles, super highways, and automobile owner- porary design.
These are examples of now recognized and especially broad negative consequences of historically recent inven- tion and design. Neither Loos nor Kraus says anything about a natural "essence" of art, or an absolute "autonomy" of culture; the stake is one of "distinctions" and "running-room," of proposed differences and provisional spaces. Josef Hoffmann, an Art Nouveau interior, "The individuality of the owner expressed in every ornament.
Adolf Loos and I - he literally and I linguistically - have done nothing more than show that there is a distinction between an urn and a chamber pot and that it is this distinction above all that provides culture witii running-room [Spielraum]. The others, the positive ones [i.
After the heyday of the Art Nouveau designer, one hero of modernism was the artist-as-engineer or the author-as-producer, but this figure was toppled in turn with the industrial order that supported it, and in our consumerist world the designer again rules.
Yet this new designer is very different from the old: the Art Nouveau designer resisted the effects of industry, even as he also sought, in the words of Walter Benjamin, "to win back [its] forms" - modern concrete, cast iron, and the like - for 18 Architecture and Design Design and Crime architecture and art. Moreover, the rule of the designer is even broader than before: it ranges across very different enterprises from Martha Stewart to Microsoft , and it penetrates various social groups.
For today you don't have to be filthy rich to be projected not only as designer but as designed - whether the product in question is your home or your business, your sagging face designer surgery or your lagging personality designer drugs , your historical memory designer museums or your DNA future designer children.
Might this "designed subject" be the unintended offspring of the "constructed subject" so vaunted in postmodern culture? One thing seems clear: just when you thought the consumerist loop could get no tighter in its narcissistic logic, it did: design abets a near-perfect circuit of production and consumption, without much "runningroom" for anything else.
Some may object that this world of total design is not new that the conflation of the aesthetic and the utilitarian in the commercial goes back at least to the design program of the Bauhaus in the s - and they would be right. If the first Industrial Revolution prepared the field of political economy, of a rational theory of material production, as Jean Baudrillard argued long ago, so the second Industrial Revolution, as styled by the Bauhaus, extended this "system of exchange value to the whole domain of signs, forms and objects.
Clark once termed it. Beware of what you wish, runs one moral of modernism as seen from the present, because it may come true - in perverse form. Thus, to take only the chief example, the old project to reconnect Art and Life, endorsed in different ways by Art Nouveau, the Bauhaus, and many other movements, was eventually accomplished, but according to the spectacular dictates of the culture industry, not the liberatory ambitions of the avant-garde.
And a primary form of this perverse reconciliation in our time is design. So, yes, the world of total design is hardly new - imagined in Art Nouveau, it was retooled by the Bauhaus, and spread through institutional clones and commercial knock-offs ever since - but it only seems to be achieved in our own pan-capitalist present.
Some of the reasons are not hard to find. Once upon a time in mass production, the commodity was its own ideology, the Model T its own advertising: its chief attraction lay in its abundant sameness.
Soon this was not enough: the consumer had to be drawn in, and feedback factored into production this is one origin-scene of modern design. As competition grew, special seductions had to be devised, and the package became almost as important as the product. The subjectivizing of the commodity is already apparent in streamlined design and becomes evermore surreal thereafter; indeed Surrealism is quickly appropriated by advertising. Our own time is witness to a qualitative leap in this history: with the "flexible specialization" of post-Fordist production, commodities can be continually tweaked and markets constantly niched, so that a product can be mass in quantity yet appear up-to-date, personal, and precise in address.
This perpetual profiling of the commodity, of the mini-me, is one factor that drives the inflation of design. Design is also inflated as the package all but replaces the product.
Whether the design object is Young British Art or a Presidential candidate, "brand equity" - the branding of a product name on an attention-deficit public - is fundamental to many spheres of society, and hence design is too. C6nsumer-attention and image-retention are all the more important when the product is not an object at all.
This became clear during the massive mergers of the Reagan-Thatcher years when new mega-corporations appeared to promote little else but their own new acronyms and logos. Andreas Gursky, Unfitted V, the perpetual profiling of the commodity, of the mini-me, drives the contemporary inflation of design. More recently, the Internet has set a new premium on corporate name-recognition for its own sake.
For dot. A third reason for the inflation of design is the increased centrality of media industries to the economy. This factor is obvious, so obvious that it might obscure a more fundamental development: the general "mediation" of the economy. I mean by this term more than "the culture of marketing" and "the marketing of culture"; I mean a retooling of the economy around digitizing and computing, in which the product is no longer thought of as an object to be produced so much as a datum to be manipulated - that is, to be designed and redesigned, consumed and reconsumed.
This "mediation" also inflates design, to the point where it can no longer be was 22 Architecture and Design Design and Crime considered a secondary industry.
Perhaps we should speak of a "political economy of design. With a distinguished series of publications in classical and vanguard philosophy and history, this imprint is also known for "Bruce Mau Design," whose luscious covers with sumptuous images in saturated colors and layered pages with inventive fonts in cinematic sequencing have greatly influenced North American publishing. Sometimes Mau seems to design the publications to be scanned, and despite his frequent denials in Life Style he tends to treat the book as a design construct more than an intellectual medium.
With his usual wit Koolhaas picked this title to signal not only the various scales of his work - from domestic to urban - but also that hot architects are today like hot designers - they must have lines of merchandise to suit all customers see Chapter 4. Life Style aspires to be the 5, M, L, XL of design; it too is a massive manifesto-formyself, a history of a design studio with an extravagant presentation of its projects, plus little credos, historical sketches, and laboratory studies about design, along with several anecdotes concerning Master Builders like Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, and Philip Johnson.
Here too the title is a play on terms: we may hear "life style" as understood by Martha Stewart, but we are asked to think "life style" as conceived by Nietzsche or Michel Foucault — as an ethics of life, not a guide to decor. For Life Style is a success story: bigger and bigger clients - first academic and art institutions, then entertainment and other corporations - come to Mau in search of image design, that is to say, brand equity.
Bruce Mau Design, he states candidly, "has become known for producing identity" and "channeling attention" for "business value. The apparent product, the object attached to the transaction, is not the actual product at all. The real product has become culture and intelligence. So is history: commissioned to lay out a private museum of Coca-Cola memorabilia, Mau concludes, "Has America made Coke?
Or, Has Coke made America? The remaking of space in the image of the commodity is a prime story of capitalist modernity as told by Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, Benjamin, the Situationists, and radical geographers since e. Today it has reached the point where not only commodity and sign appear as one, but often so do commodity and space: in actual and virtual malls the two are melded through design.
Bruce Mau Design is in the vanguard here. Of one "identity program" for a Toronto bookstore chain, 24 Architecture and Design Design and Crime Mau writes of a "retail environment.
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