REMINDER! Please bring your alarm-clock or whatever you use as your alarm clock to the next meeting!

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "REMINDER! Please bring your alarm-clock or whatever you use as your alarm clock to the next meeting!"

Leonard Norman
6 years ago
Views:

1 Professor Erkki Huhtamo UCLA, Dept. of Design Media Arts Desma 10 Design Culture - an Introduction Lecture Notebook 4 This notebook does not contain complete slides from the lecture! It is only meant as an aid to your memory. To get the complete idea, you must attend the lectures! Illustrations will not be included they are only shown in class! Meeting 4 (Oct.20,2006) Design for Public Spaces REMINDER! Please bring your alarm-clock or whatever you use as your alarm clock to the next meeting! ***** Design and the mechanization of office work - With increasing competition, speed of life and demands for effectivity, also office workers had to be taylorized (see lecture 3) - Beside office buildings, furniture and machines also office workers became objects of design - Perfect office workers were developed and tested scientifically to discover the right movements and work routines -This was often claimed to profit the office worker (to avoid exhaustion and physical problems caused by monotonous work), but its real motive was to increase effectiveness and to eliminate or at least minimize the worker s down time

2 Mechanization, design and aesthetics - The mechanization of production was a challenge for design and aesthetic sensibilities - Engineering design gained importance: the need to develop and test new mechanisms and materials. Machines and gadgets needed to be durable (although interchangeability made it possible to replace broken parts oneself, the idea of frequently replacing the device itself was not current) - The big issue: can engineering design as such sell anything, and for whom? Machines were often seen as alien, frightening (Mary Shelley s novel Frankenstein became a cultural icon): the need to make machines more approachable by designing their surface as well - Designers often used current stylistic trends (from neoclassicism to neo-gothic) to embellish the machines: this led to fierce debates - Graphic design began to gain an important role in affecting the imago of the designed product * Design debate in the Victorian era (second half of the 19th century) :Aesthetes vs. utilitarians - Aesthetes like John Ruskin rejected new industrial products as tasteless - Engineers should not encourage any play of imagination, they are producers of useful ugliness (Zarah Colburn, 1871) - Industrial Ornament was one proposed compromise - Critic Henry Cole ( ) tried to mediate: Design has a twofold relation, having in the first place, a strict reference to utility in the thing designed; and, secondarily, to the beautifying or ornamenting that utility.

3 Ornamentation and the role of the machine - Is ornamentation in design objects necessary? What purposes does it serve? - Can a machine (mass)produce anything beautiful, on equal level with (human-made) art? - How does machine production differ from manual (human) production? - John Ruskin ( ) believed that the machine is incapable of "reproducing the irregularity and variety, the Organic Form of nature. Ruskin was an influential writer and critic supporting the Gothic revival and Arts & Crafts. Problematic relationship to industrial production and modern technology. The reaction: Arts and Crafts - Founded by William Morris ( ), an idealist and socialist. Advocated a return to workshop-like small scale design production - Wanted to free natural, organic impulses from the psychic restraints created by mechanization and mechanistic thought - The vast improvements in machinery spread the division of labor by enabling a small group of designers to furnish the pattern to be repeated endlessly by machines watched over by unskilled workers." (Morris) 1900: The Challenge of the Modern - Around 1900 the world was changing: speed, new technology, urbanization, new communications, new media, changing social formations and gender roles. The big question was, how will design be able to reflect these changes and contribute to them?

4 - Art Nouveau tried to be the first truly modern and international design trend, a total aesthetic encompassing all forms of creativity, and - most importantly - bridging art and design. Claimed to be free from the stylistic trends of the past, but in fact was very eclectic. Main characteristic: interest in simulating natural phenomena and ornaments (was this something paradoxical in the dawning machine age?). Art Nouveau -as a design movement active c. 1890s - c Name from L Art Nouveau design shop in Paris (S. Bing, 1895-); Pavillion de l Art Nouveau, Exposition Universelle, Paris, Different names in different places: Art Nouveau (France), Jugendstil (Germany), Stile Liberty (Italy), Modernisme (Spain), Jugend (Finland)... -Attempted to create an universal style, covering all forms of expression ( an umbrella style ) -Abandoned the historicism of the past; attempt to create a modern form of expression -Influences: Ruskin ( turn to nature for inspiration ), Arts and Crafts, folk art, Rococo and Baroque, non-western sources: Japanese design, Islamic ornaments The creation of Art Nouveau was influenced by many issues: -Political (young states asserting themselves internationally) -Social (permeated modern environment from underground to department store) - Cultural (new unity of visual arts, embracing both art and design)

5 -Technological (use of industrial material, wrought iron, glass; use of industrial production methods) Art Nouveau was Against Historicism - "We want it to be modern so that any reminiscence of the past is ruthlessly excluded. (critic Roger Marx about a planned exhibition, 1907) -In spite of modern tendencies Art Nouveau was often seen as a decadent fin de siècle phenomenon; it was rejected by later modernists like Le Corbusier - A strong influence on Art Deco, s, and later on the Psychedelia of the 1960s - In spite of the claims by its supporters, Art Nouveau was stylistically extremely eclectic. Influences: Arts and Crafts, The Aesthetic Movement, French Symbolism, Rococo and Baroque, Islam, Japan/East Asia, Folk Art, nature ***** Classics of Art Nouveau - Aubrey Beardsley ( ), drawings - Louis Comfort Tiffany ( ), glassware - Louis Majorelle ( ), furniture - Hector Guimard ( ), ironwork (Paris metro) - Emile Gallé ( ), glassware - Alphonse Mucha ( ), posters - Victor Horta ( ), architecture - Antonio Gaudí y Cornet ( ), architecture - Henry van de Velde ), tableware, interiors - Charles Rennie Mackintosh ( ), architecture, furniture, interiors; pioneer of the rectilinear style Henri Van de Velde about reconciling art, design, industry: Artist, producer and salesman don t coincide anymore with the collapse of the crafts system. A new unity must be

6 found by collaboration. Machine must be spiritualized. - Henri Van de Velde became the leader of the new Deutsche Werkbund in 1907, an attempt to achieve this goal. This development ultimately led to Bauhaus, the most famous design school of all times (more in the next lecture). Defending the machine: young Frank Lloyd Wright ( ) The most famous American architect. As a young man worked in the office of Louis Sullivan who popularized the most famous slogan in design history: Form Follows Function (1890s). The machine has potential to emancipate the modern mind. By simplifying, it can reveal the true nature of materials. (Frank Lloyd Wright) "My god is machinery, and the art of the future will be the expression of the individual artist through the thousand powers of the machine." (Frank Lloyd Wright) Avant-garde, modernism and design - The avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century offered revolutionary ideas for design: bridging art and design, high and low culture, embracing machine aesthetics - Movements like Futurism, Constructivism, de Stijl and Purism invented new artistic languages in dynamic harmony with the phenomena of the modern world - Influenced many forms of design: graphic design, fashion design, furniture design, kitchenware design, exhibition design, architectural design... "As long as our cities, our houses, our rooms, our cupboards, our utensils, our jewellery, as long as our speech and sentiments fail to express in an elegant, beautiful and simple fashion the spirit of our own times, we will continue to be immeasurably far behind our

7 forefathers, and no amount of lies can deceive us about all these weaknesses." Josef Hoffmann Ornament and Crime The modern ornamentalist is either a cultural laggard or a pathological case. He himself is forced to disown his work after three years. His productions are unbearable to cultured persons now, and will become so to others in a little while. Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime, 1908 * Modernism in Design - The need to harmonize design with the modern world: the world of technology, urbanism, speed - The machine as the central element of modern life and design. Design should embrace both its forms and its functions - Form follows function as a guideline - Ornamentation should be controlled, but preferably eliminated - Barriers between art, design, engineering, science should be removed - The dream of total work design should reach all forms of modern life (László Moholy-Nagy) ** To be continued...

The Age of Self. Place, People, and Process Mud/sun-dried bricks Michaelangelo Da Vinci Bernini

The Age of Self. Place, People, and Process Mud/sun-dried bricks Michaelangelo Da Vinci Bernini The Age of Self Place, People, and Process Mud/sun-dried bricks Michaelangelo Da Vinci Bernini The Photo-Modernist Era of Designing Art nouveau was considered the relation of form to the artifact, which