Big and small – the convergence of architecture and design Oliver Herwig
Waste, or rather the appeal to collect waste, shines gold. Since 1996 gold-painted prefabricated concrete units have been standing on the outskirts of Landshut with italic lettering, as if Hild und K Architekten had wanted to pay homage to Robert Venturi and the old casinos in Las Vegas (fig. 2). A wall for recycling containers runs between two new transformer stations and bus stops. The Munich architects took Landshut’s motto “Year of Gold” literally to give a touch of class to the banal recycling depot. Seldom has enjoyment of small things been presented so ironically and with such a wink. The wall became an appeal to discover the waste depot as a place of added value. An almost Nietzschean revaluation and a successful marketing idea at the same time. In Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom, many designers are showing an interest in small structures that otherwise disappear in the mass of commonplace mass-produced and cheap goods, seemingly in protest against the seriousness of big business. Microarchitecture is perhaps the last area of experimentation of the modernists, who are generally more focused on large, lofty and long-lasting items. In 1994 Oswald Mathias Ungers described the essence of architecture in numbers, size and proportions: “The ideal structure, the perfect form is the focus of interest.”1 Ungers ends his essay “Mass, Zahl, Proportion” with a quote by Wittgenstein that illustrates much of the thinking of the modernists, namely that architecture is coercive and ennobles and cannot therefore exist where there is nothing to ennoble.2 Microarchitecture attempts bravely to prove the opposite. Nobility and banality appear both to be progressing in step. In 1964 Susan Sontag published her famous “Notes on Camp”, creating the basis for a systematic discussion of kitsch as the ambivalent driving force behind our mass culture. A decade later Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour came out with “Learning from Las Vegas”, an anthropological and architectural investigation of the heart of banality and commercialism, which shows that buildings function with great vitality beyond the sphere of planning and controlled aesthetics, if only as cheap accommodation, rainproof shelters with applied symbols.3
problem solutions, durable or even eternal answers. On the other side are packaging artists, designers and stylists who are more interested in the wrapping than the content. The intensity of the process and the time taken cannot serve as criteria for distinguishing architecture and design. It is more the contrast between one-off and mass-produced items that have set the two disciplines apart since the Industrial Revolution. In 1910, fifty million of Thonet’s chair no. 14 had been manufactured. For all its lack of comfort, it had become a modernist symbol for a chair, combining the functional logic of preformatted square timber and mechanical assembly. Chair no. 14 was mass produced between 1859 and 1930 in a practically unchanged form. No building or architectural design can make a claim of that sort. Until recently industrial manufacture was the typical feature of design, and architecture was characterised by a mixture of craftsmanship and industrial building technology. Computers have changed the rules of the game, however, and the distinctions between disciplines have become blurred as a result. Digital design, rapid prototyping and computer-controlled manufacture are undermining the traditional distinction between one-off and serial production. In contrast to what Adolf Loos claimed, one-off items can be created with the same effort as mass-produced ones. Has design suddenly become a question of scale? Our world is dominated less by megalomaniac buildings than by intelligent interventions, anonymous kiosks, ticket machines, bus stops, toilets, advertising pillars, snack bars and tourist information counters. Microarchitecture in the form
Mass society and its symbols are apparently a source of constant irritation and misunderstanding. The prevailing opinion even today is that architecture is the real thing and that design is just fashion, packaging and application. On one side are the architectural theorists focusing on structures and
2
51