we are simple, selfish beings
Something Josh wrote was really spot-on and got me thinking about cars and design and cities, etc. Which is something I think about a lot lately, as it is, broadly-speaking, my research topic. Josh wrote this, in reference to soulless designers who talk a lot of shite:
"I’m too young to know, but my godlike intellect tells me that the rapists who built housing projects and superhighways talked this same way."
One: I think he's right. Here's the part that jags me so: the very people who envisioned and designed superhighways and embraced the car-ification of America are the same architects and designers that are the Big Names of the 20th century: Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, et al. These are the biggies, the ones that everyone after cannot help but point backwards at. Interestingly, these dudes loved the hell out of cars and thought that they would change the world and thus they spent large portions of their careers designing cities and buildings around the automobile.
Wright and the rest saw cars as freedom for the people; if you can go where you want, when you want, then it is the ultimate expression of Liberty and Equality and Americanism. In fact, Wright believed that urbanism was over--it was an old, tired concept that was doomed to collapse and go the way of stone tools and leeches as medical therapy.* Wright designed Broadacre City, where each house had an acre of land and the automobile was king. Le Corbusier was famous for his "garden city" designs, with a forest of giant skyscrapers, each separated by a huge green space and cut across by giant ramps to serve the cars.
They were right, in that cars would change the world, but not in the way they expected. Their designs, in fact, did a decent job of predicting housing projects and urban redevelopment (in Le Corbusier's case) and suburbia, sprawl, and urban fringe development (in Wright's case). However, I don't think they ever could have conceptualized what it would really mean for every person to drive wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted; how the separation of people from each other would result in emptiness, waste, a sickening dependence on oil, and environmental catastrophe. They could see the future but not the consequences. They could see the buildings and landscape but not the people and the world.
And so I see this as the key: we designers can come up with elegant designs, logical designs, rational and practical designs, but they may be lacking the key ingredient of humanity. These designs lack soul and purpose to improve life in a real way, to fulfill their very essential reason for being: serving people and the world. So we must be careful and ever-vigilant, lest the people serve the design. There's a maxim to be developed here, a little phrase or mantra that needs to be tacked onto the walls of universities everywhere, but I'm not clever enough to come up with it. If you think of a good one, let me know.
*fun fact: they still use leeches in medicine occasionally because their saliva prevents blood from clotting.
"I’m too young to know, but my godlike intellect tells me that the rapists who built housing projects and superhighways talked this same way."
One: I think he's right. Here's the part that jags me so: the very people who envisioned and designed superhighways and embraced the car-ification of America are the same architects and designers that are the Big Names of the 20th century: Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, et al. These are the biggies, the ones that everyone after cannot help but point backwards at. Interestingly, these dudes loved the hell out of cars and thought that they would change the world and thus they spent large portions of their careers designing cities and buildings around the automobile.
Wright and the rest saw cars as freedom for the people; if you can go where you want, when you want, then it is the ultimate expression of Liberty and Equality and Americanism. In fact, Wright believed that urbanism was over--it was an old, tired concept that was doomed to collapse and go the way of stone tools and leeches as medical therapy.* Wright designed Broadacre City, where each house had an acre of land and the automobile was king. Le Corbusier was famous for his "garden city" designs, with a forest of giant skyscrapers, each separated by a huge green space and cut across by giant ramps to serve the cars.
They were right, in that cars would change the world, but not in the way they expected. Their designs, in fact, did a decent job of predicting housing projects and urban redevelopment (in Le Corbusier's case) and suburbia, sprawl, and urban fringe development (in Wright's case). However, I don't think they ever could have conceptualized what it would really mean for every person to drive wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted; how the separation of people from each other would result in emptiness, waste, a sickening dependence on oil, and environmental catastrophe. They could see the future but not the consequences. They could see the buildings and landscape but not the people and the world.
And so I see this as the key: we designers can come up with elegant designs, logical designs, rational and practical designs, but they may be lacking the key ingredient of humanity. These designs lack soul and purpose to improve life in a real way, to fulfill their very essential reason for being: serving people and the world. So we must be careful and ever-vigilant, lest the people serve the design. There's a maxim to be developed here, a little phrase or mantra that needs to be tacked onto the walls of universities everywhere, but I'm not clever enough to come up with it. If you think of a good one, let me know.
*fun fact: they still use leeches in medicine occasionally because their saliva prevents blood from clotting.
random bits cobbled together by j-dub
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