Donna McNeil, Director of the Maine Arts Commission graced us with her poise and perspective at the Built Energy Forum last January (2009) at the Augusta Civic Center. There she gave an address that is absolutely worth publishing again!
Written and Presented By Donna McNeil
Look around, everything outside the natural world is man made and all of it designed. We are at a global tipping point where the future has the possibility of being radically different from the past, a moment where design is activism. On the eve of the historic election of Barak Obama we were asked to help him remake the nation “block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand. Infrastructure is suddenly a buzzword, so alluring it could be the name of new cologne. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration so titillating it could be the latest gizmo from Steve jobs. Truth is, designers have been on the track of globally responsible design for at least a hundred years. Now is the moment…..
In the next few minutes I will re-present ideas gleaned from folks much brighter than I, reassembled and juxtaposed with the hope of providing stimulus for todays topic.
My presentation revolves around three axioms:
truth is beauty, form follows function and necessity if the mother of invention.
In 1919, Walter Gropius, a German architect, founded the Bauhaus school in Dessau. The aim of the Bauhaus was a "unity of art and technology" – beauty and truth if you will -- to give artistic direction to industry. The design philosophy behind Gropius’ architecture was to retain the importance of function and still remain aesthetically pleasing, form follows function. A respect for materials and a regard for being severely economic are ideas which set the standard for modern architecture.
Responding to events in Germany in the 1930’s including the repression of the work at the Bauhaus, Gropius moved to the United States and became Chair of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. In 1945 he founded The Architects' Collaborative, one of the most well-known and respected architectural firms in the world. Walter Gropius was a great theorist who brought art and engineering together exemplified by his functional and simple architectural style, His theories are still practiced and evidence themselves as particularly relevant and timely today.
Form follows function:
Buckminster Fuller, one of our world’s first futurists and global thinkers was born in 1895 in Milton, Massachusetts. By 1927, Buckminster Fuller pledged to work always and only for all humanity. This personal pledge led him to address the largest global problems of poverty, disease and homelessness. He realized early on that by examining global problems in the context of the whole system—the whole planet—he would have the best chance of identifying large-scale trends that would allow him to anticipate the critical needs of humanity. This “big-picture” approach evolved into a comprehensive assessment of humanity’s global situation—where we have been, where we are now, and where we are going.
Fuller called his approach to global problem-solving “Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science.” The central principle of this approach is “doing more with less,” that is, securing the maximum life-sustaining performance achievable per each pound of material. Simply put, by using the resources on Earth most effectively, we will have enough for everyone to enjoy a high standard of living. This is the principle Fuller dubbed “dymaxion.”
Fuller’s comprehensive research into our global situation led him to pronounce the Malthusian world-view of human overpopulation, resource depletion, and eventual self-destruction to be absolutely in error. Due to advances in technology that Malthus had no way of foreseeing, humanity, he believed, has developed the capability to provide adequate food, shelter, and energy for every man, woman, and child on Earth.
Great scientists and great artists are not only subjective and pure but also objective and responsible inventors. To Fuller’s mind some of the great artists of our time are Henry Ford and Albert Einstein. Because of a comprehensive outlook, their art reflects many disciplines, especially science. Fuller often stressed the importance of blurring the artist's and scientist's roles and envisioned that these two opposite sides of the cultural pendulum's swing would eventually come together. He was perfectly aware that this was not an entirely new thought, as he himself quoted Leonardo da Vinci, who he called a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, inventor of the wheelbarrow and other useful instruments from the speaking tube to the mechanically gyp-proof whore-house, and who wrote: "the further art advances the closer it approaches science, the further science advances the closer it approaches art."
Beauty is truth
The problem of how one may navigate contradiction and complexity is central for those working in art and technology. Fuller provides a model that points to integrity as being key in the work one builds. Although he professed a lack of interest in how his projects looked, he believed that a project at completion was beautiful if it possessed integrity, which to him was the key to aesthetics. Again, form follows function, truth is beauty.
"The great aesthetic which will inaugurate the twenty-first century will be the utterly invisible quality of intellectual integrity; the integrity of the individual dealing with his scientific discoveries; the integrity of the individual in dealing with conceptual realization of the comprehensive interrelatedness of all events.
If everything that can be seen or imagined can be known and made, then everything one makes is worth contemplating. We live in an artificial environment we have collectively created and must collectively use. The appearance of the world as one has made it should be a source of spiritual and intellectual pride.
Look at our built environment with attention and clarity and a sense of its place in the economy of the whole. Gone are the days when craftspeople worked a lifetime on a project to be completed 400 years hence, completely satisfied that they were making an honorable contribution to their society and contentedly delivering to the future without hubris.
Necessity is the mother of invention
During the years of the Great Depression in America, modernist designers developed products and lifestyle concepts intended for middle-class—not elite—consumers. Modernism combined International Style, functional efficiency and sophistication with a respect for consumers’ desires for physical and psychological comfort -- ideas paralleling Gropius’s and Fuller’s architectural design concepts. New Englanders seem to be especially reluctant to embrace modernist design. Living with an abundant historic building inventory, when the opportunity presents itself to build new, they often opt for imitating the past. There exists a deep insecurity around major investment in untested design and enormous security in time honored methods. The predisposition to comfortably appropriating the past does not offer our communities the chance to define this century, this amazing moment. How does rooting ourselves steadfastly in the design concepts of our forefathers identify this age or move us forward with authentic response to the particulars of our age?
In flush economic times, consumers don’t covet the concerts you hear or the books you read, they covet your possessions and then they go and buy cooler versions. In the recent giddily hyper financed years, Michael Cannell writes in a January article in the New York Times, signature architects and designers came to be known by their first names –Rem, Phillipe, Zaha – and they were photographed as prolifically as Bono in new design hotbeds like Miami and Dubai. Brooklyn designers became the apotheosis of indie cool. Now, with those slick Miami condos sitting empty, designers are rethinking their priorities just as American designers took the depression as a call to arms. It was and is a chance to make good on the Modernist promise to make affordable intelligent design for a broad audience. In the scarcity of the 1940’s, Charles and Ray Eames, for example, produced furniture and other products of enduring appeal from cheap materials like plastic, resin and plywood and Italian design flowered in the aftermath of WWII. As with every facet of life, there will be less design, but better design. Design will be vetted for efficiency and usefulness. The economic condition will be the curator. Designers will shift their attention from consumer products to the more pressing needs of infrastructure, housing, city planning, transit and energy. Artists are coming up with new ways of looking at and solving complex problems and if the new administration delivers anything like a works progress administration (WPA) we “could be standing on the brink of the most productive periods of design ever. “
Modernism’s great ambition was to democratize design. Ikea and Target have shown that the battle for good cheap design can be won. The emphasis will shift to greater quality at affordable prices. Expect to hear a lot more about open source design and cradle to cradle, a concept developed by William McDonough and Michael Brangart that calls for cars, packaging and other everyday objects to be designed specifically for recycling so that their parts and materials are used and reused without waste.
So. YOU, voters, consumers, taxpayers, citizens, make your choice
I Died for Beauty Emily Dickenson
I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth - the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.
And so, as kinsmen met a-night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.
Now is the time to resurrect our responsibility to truth and beauty, to integrity and global sustainability.. Fear is neither reason nor philosophy. Avarice a destructive motivator.
We cannot not change the world
Michael Cannell writes in a January article in the New York Times,
Reed Kroloff, director the Cranbrook Academy of Art.
