1. No category

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THINKING
AND
THINGS:
SVA
DESIGN
RESEARCH
2015
Celebrating the thesis research
of the SVA MFA Design Criticism
Class of 2015 and the SVA MA
Design Research Class of 2015
Published in conjunction with
the Exploding Footnotes: Design
Research in Action exhibition,
May 13–18, 2015
SVA Department of Design
Research, Writing & Criticism
136 West 21 Street,
New York City
designresearch.sva.edu
@dcrit
#explodingfootnotes
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Introduction
The end of a school year is always bitter-sweet,
but this one seems especially so, since we are
saying a fond farewell to the last graduates of
the MFA Design Criticism program (2008–2015),
even as we cheer over the finish line the first
graduates of the new MA Design Research,
Writing & Criticism (2014–). To mark this transitional moment, we decided to organize an
exhibition that turns the spotlight on the thesis
research process.
“Exploding Footnotes: Design Research in
Action” seeks to retrieve the gold dust often
buried in footnotes at the bottom of the page,
to expose and examine the research trails, the
behind-the-scenes travails, legwork, drama,
breakthroughs, doubts, and dead-ends that are
a part-and-parcel of in-depth research, but normally smoothed over by the linear narrative of
scholarly writing. By zeroing in on these tiny
superscript numerals and the riches they contain, we celebrate the research process as well
as its products. Many thanks to everyone who
has helped us stage this exhibition, especially
Superscript managing director Molly Heintz,
graphic designer Neil Donnelly, and HAO /
Holm Architecture Office principal Jens Holm.
This publication presents excerpts of the
SVA Department of Design Research, Writing
& Criticism Class of 2015’s thesis research,
to accompany the exhibition and the Live
Critique event, which takes place on May 13,
2015. As you turn its pages you’ll be invited to
explore the weird-and-wonderful worlds of: digital prosthetics; design piracy; publishing-asperformance; critical thinking in architecture
education; the branding of Space 2.0; the design
of death; the need for ethics and sustainability
in fashion design education; Design Districts’
contradictory definitions of design; mid-century
modern home preservation; and the rhetoric
that shapes New York City public housing.
As you explore you may note some recurring
refrains underscoring the research findings,
such as the preponderance of peoples’ voices
and of references to primary sources. This is
because here in the SVA Department of Design
Research, Writing & Criticism, we put great store
by first-hand interviewing, archive research,
and on-the-streets-reporting—or “research-bywalking-around,” as faculty member and urban
critic Karrie Jacobs terms it. We put particular
emphasis on interviewing techniques, which
play an important part in gathering fresh perspectives, information, and new leads.
As part of their thesis research, all combined, the students have interviewed more
than 200 people, visited almost 100 locations,
and examined in the range of 500 primary
documents, using skills developed in their
Contemporary Issues and Reporting classes.
But no amount of research and reporting is
meaningful without probing questions, analysis, and interpretation—approaches that have
been honed through their Cultural Theory,
Thesis Development, and History of Design,
Architecture and Urbanism classes.
We hope you enjoy these stories about
thinking and things and the surprising relationships between them.
—Alice Twemlow, Chair, SVA Department of
Design Research, Writing & Criticism
1
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THINKING
6
Mariam Aldhahi on the creation of Design
Districts and their varying definitions of “design.”
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12
Alper Besen on how critical thinking is taught,
learned, and reflected upon in architecture education.
§
16
Brittany Dickinson on fashion design
education’s attempts to stitch sustainability and ethics
into its pedagogy.
THINGS
*
32
Molly Butcher on the values, motivations,
and concerns manifested in the material culture of the
race to colonize Mars.
◊
36
Meg Farmer on the role of mediatization in
influencing the differing approaches to the preservation
of mid-century Modern domestic architecture in
Southern California.
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42
Susan Merritt on what the design of burial
containers say about changing attitudes towards death
and burial practices in the US.
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20
Lauren Palmer on contemporary arts
magazines’ engagement with the rhetoric of the live
performance.
☞
46
Christina Milan on the shifting relationship
between viewer and designed object in the digitization
of design museums.
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26
Lisa Silbermayr on the impact of language
in the political decisions and regulatory frameworks that
shape New York’s public housing.
‡
50
Justin Zhuang on design piracy’s role as
a force for innovation in the third industrial revolution.
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“The thing is, when you look at
other design districts, they’re
retail hubs,” the Dubai Design
District’s Michela Celi explains.
“We aren’t just focused on
retail, our business model is
developed to become headquarters for design companies.”
“If your professor wants fish,
you do fish,” an architecture
student at GSAPP Columbia
University tells me.
“Did we accidentally become a
bar?” Molly Kleiman, the deputy
editor of Triple Canopy, said,
reflecting on the social success
of her publication’s recent discussions, readings, workshops,
performances, and parties.
According to Sara Caples,
principal of Caples Jefferson
Architects, designing [for
NYCHA] is a communicative
challenge as much as it is a
design challenge.
The fashion industry, which
historically dictated its needs
to design schools, now may
need education to take the lead
in enacting change.
4
5
##
THINKING
Mariam
Aldhahi
(Design) Districting:
Urban Development,
Transformation, and
Revitalization in the
Name of Design
KEYWORDS
Mariam Aldhahi is a writer, researcher, and
design editor at Huge, a digital design agency.
Interested in the intersection of design, urbanism, and writing, Mariam has worked with
Rockwell Group, Travel and Leisure, Princeton
Architectural Press, Storefront for Art and
Architecture, and the Wolfsonian Museum on
everything from strategy and marketing efforts
to in-depth design writing. She is also a contributing author to BioArt, a book that examines the
intersection of art and biology, to be published by
Thames & Hudson UK in 2015. Mariam received
SVA Design Research’s 2015 Maria Popova
Scholarship for Homecoming to Purpose.
Commerce
Community-building
Control
Culture
Design Districts
Design manuals
Licensing guidelines
Place-keeping
Place-making
Public engagement
Semantics
Streetscape
Visual cohesiveness
Zoning
6
[email protected]
@mariam_aldhahi
mariamaldhahi.com
ABSTRACT
The Design District is born out of the larger idea of districting—
dividing land into segments as a means of providing order to
a community and its leaders, those who control and regulate
land by assigning specific functions to place.
If executed properly, these districts increase the scope of
a specific industry. By increasing scope, they gain credibility
that spills over into their larger communities. And once credibility is gained, a blending of commerce and culture takes
effect, as districts begin to engage their audience.
This research explores the way in which the definition
of “design” is being manipulated to cater to the wants of big
investors and small business owners. What role does semantics play in crafting a district’s utility within its community?
The creators of Design Districts have taken starkly differing approaches to defining the term “design,” each crafting
language and initiatives that suit the commercial goals of its
developers, community board members, or government entities. Some have opted for control over creativity—borrowing
from the principles of New Urbanism and making visual cohesiveness essential—while others have handed over the duty of
defining design to global consulting firms.
The Design Districts considered in this research—the
Miami Design District, Dubai Design District, and Douglas
Design District—exist in different time zones, amongst communities that speak different languages and with varying political
ideologies. What they have in common, though, are pockets
dedicated to design. I was drawn to the technicalities of these
districts, and the manner in which they evolve in response to
their community. At its core, this research examines one overarching question: Where do Design Districts leave design?
7
##
EXCERPT
The Dubai (Design) District and its
Government
As a faint layer of desert sand drapes Al Khail
Road, drivers swerve through its six lanes with
an excitement that suggests they have room to
play. They’re not wrong, but they are careful—
as the towering Burj Khalifa grows larger in the
hazy distance, drivers pull back, understanding
that the closer they are to the world’s largest
tower and its home in Downtown Dubai, the
better they must behave.
The ten minutes it takes to arrive at the base
of Burj Khalifa from that exact spot on Al Khail
Road feels like a time-lapse. That exact spot,
wedged between Dubai Sports City and Dubai
Healthcare City, stands in opposition to its neighbors. Its starting point is bare, a sharp reminder
that less than fifty years ago, Dubai was desert—no roads, no daring drivers, no Downtown
Dubai and certainly no Burj Khalifa. The emirate’s story—one of a long-ruling monarchy, tremendous amounts of oil, and a level of expatriate
loyalty otherwise unseen in the Middle East—has
benefited from finding undeveloped places like
this and swallowing them whole.1
Scouting locations like the sand dunes off
of Al Khail Road is the first step in Dubai’s
cluster-based business model. Operating like
a Russian nesting doll, Dubai has established
itself as a city of many smaller cities. With areas
like Dubai Media City, Dubai Studio City, Dubai
Healthcare City, and Dubai Internet City, separating industries into visa-regulated zones establishes a means of understanding the emirate’s
quickly sprouting urban landscape. With each
new cluster comes opportunity for the leaders
of Dubai to stake claim in an industry, proving
to both the emirate’s citizens and international
investors that they mean business. Dubai is not
a city of spontaneity.
Michela Celi understands Dubai. She
believes that the emirate’s carefully planned
vision is a means of showcasing its intent and
devotion to something—healthcare, media,
cars, sports—but she knows, especially after six
years of living here, that Dubai is also a place
tethered to visa regulations and licensing guidelines. Dubai, as Celi knows, must be planned in
order to stay alive.
As the Director of Strategy and Development
of the Dubai Design District (d3), the latest
industry cluster to gain traction and news headlines, Celi understands both the logistic necessity and cultural significance of Dubai’s many
business parks. 2 Operating under TECOM
Investments, the Dubai-based real estate developer and member of Dubai Holding, the global
investment firm owned in large part by Sheikh
Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler
of Dubai, d3 is born out of a need for what Celi
calls “a very important sector the city was not
serving properly.”3
Much of the language used when discussing
Dubai’s method of urban development sounds
like this—professional, careful, and planned.
Perhaps this is based in part on the emirate’s
need to recalibrate their methods, shifting from
an oil-based to a knowledge-based economy.
The economic crisis of 2009, in which Dubai’s
development was halted and expatriates fled
the emirate in hundreds, following news that
the government couldn’t repay the $25 billion
debt they had amassed, the leaders of Dubai
were forced to re-establish themselves.4 With
an expatriate population that leaves Emirati
citizens outnumbered nine-to-one, regaining
credibility was necessary to remain afloat. The
international investors who had helped Dubai
establish itself the first time around slowly trickled back in with the expansion of TECOM’s
ventures, all of which have managed to achieve
what they had intended, to become the regional
headquarters of whatever industry base they
had developed. By the end of 2012—just as the
idea of d3 was being toyed with behind the
closed doors of TECOM’s corporate office—
much of the emirate had bounced back. New
initiatives had helped resuscitate the economy,
weaving cultural desire with governmental
requirements.
Dubai’s high population of expatriates makes
immigration and visa guidelines tricky. Add to
that exceptionally difficult citizenship requirements—those interested must live in the United
Arab Emirates for twenty years and speak fluent
Arabic before seeking Emirati citizenship—and
industry clusters become legal necessity. At its
most basic level, as Celi explained, Dubai’s Free
Zone model is based on renting out office space.
These special economic zones, Free Zones, are
developed to offer benefits to those who choose
to open businesses there. With rules and regulations that differ from one zone to another,
these places operate as pseudo-cities. Each
Free Zone is dedicated to one industry, like d3,
and only offers licenses to companies that fall
into a particular category. These clusters are
Dubai’s methods for organizing its immigrants
and keeping track of its economy.5
By the time d3 was announced to the public
in June 2013, TECOM had already seen the success of seven clusters. Like its predecessors, d3
is master-planned to operate as the go-to for one
industry, leaving the job of determining how that
industry is defined to the leaders of TECOM.
Back in the TECOM offices not far from
where they were preparing to break ground on
d3, Michela Celi and her team began searching for other design districts, the ones that had
propelled the industry in the first place. She
and her colleagues set travel plans, scheduling visits to Helsinki, Milan, Miami, New York,
and London to explore the characteristics of
the world’s most popular districts, studying
both d3’s inspiration and future competition.
Celi started noting differences between what
she found and what TECOM had envisioned
for themselves. “The thing is, when you look at
other design districts, they’re retail hubs,” she
explains, “We aren’t just focused on retail, our
business model is developed to become headquarters for these companies.”6
TECOM’s entire method of creating d3,
Celi admits, is backwards compared to already
established communities. While most design
districts are born organically, with designers
and artists staking claim on an area and garnering interest from larger companies over
time, Dubai is building its district to cater to top
designers and attract them to d3 from day one.
Once big name designers and agencies move
into Dubai, Celi explains, locally grown talent
will gain exposure on an international level,
convincing Arab designers to stay in Dubai
rather than leave for more established cities.
TECOM needed to decide what design was
going to mean in Dubai and to its citizens and
Celi found herself stuck. “Basically, we realized
that there’s a lot of confusion around ‘design,’
so we hired a consultancy.” Soon after handing off duties to Deloitte, the world’s largest
consultancy, TECOM received their definition
broken into eight segments: Interior Design,
Architecture, Furniture, Lighting Design, Visual
Arts, Fashion Design, Industrial Design, and
Digital Design.7
The idea that Dubai was thinking big when
developing d3 isn’t surprising. With twenty-one
million square feet of land being developed in
three phases, d3 wraps around Al Khail Road and
The Miami Design District is accented by consistent branding on its
streets and several buildings. Image: Mariam Aldhahi.
8
A rendering of the intended Dubai Design District in 2020.
Image: TECOM Investments.
9
The Dubai Design District aims to be the Middle East’s creative
epicenter. Image: TECOM Investments.
##
faces an expansive waterfront, taking up nearly
three times as much space as the almost sevenmillion-square-foot Miami Design District. With
eight newly defined sectors of design to target,
TECOM’s leaders began reaching out to local
designers who had already established their
brand in the region, giving them a sneak peek
of d3 in hopes of bringing them in early. Part of
Deloitte’s findings suggested that TECOM gather
those top designers and incorporate them into the
development of d3, giving them roles as planners
and collaborators rather than just leaseholders.
The establishment of the Dubai Design and
Fashion Council (DDFC) in October 2014 was
TECOM’s first step in gaining international credibility and support for d3. The fifteen-member
council is made up of some of the industry’s top
Middle Eastern designers and business leaders.
At the front of the pack is Nez Gebreel, a Libyaborn creative business consultant best known
for establishing Victoria Beckham as a successful fashion designer. As CEO of DDFC, Gebreel
is the voice of the council and it is her job to
present d3’s intentions to the public. “We are
here to help emerging, small, and even longstanding businesses that need infrastructural
support and mentoring realize their potential,”
Gebreel explained to Gulf News, a Dubai-based
newspaper, just a few days after the council
was established.8 The fifteen members make
decisions and set goals for the district based on
feedback from focus groups held with Dubai’s
pre-existing design community.
Before the council was established, TECOM
had identified ten “creative clusters” across
Dubai. The clusters are where designers have
already set up shop—malls, other Free Zones,
areas on the outskirts of the city—and TECOM
wants them all to relocate to d3. Beyond being
an industry center, DDFC knows that the district
needs to be an incubator. “There is a tremendous
amount of energy and ambition in our region’s
creative industry,” Gebreel explains, “Yet they
don’t know how to take that next step.”9
TECOM was careful in selecting the members of DDFC. They are Emirati, Lebanese, and
Egyptian, among other nationalities from within
the region, and they are exactly the sorts of
minds that d3 is looking to nurture in the future.
Ideally, d3 will be ninety-percent complete
by the start of the World Expo being hosted in
Dubai in October 2020. Much of the motivation behind TECOM’s timeline, Celi is quick to
explain, is meant to align the district’s development with the World Expo, which is set to create
an enormous demand for jobs and office space,
just as d3 is wrapping up construction.10 Also
in line with the DDFC’s intent to promote local
talent, twenty-five million tourists are expected
in Dubai for the World Expo, providing unprecedented exposure to talent within d3.
With the overwhelming popularity of events
like Art Dubai, an annual three-day exhibition of
Middle Eastern, African, and South Asian art,
and Design Days Dubai, its design-related counterpart, TECOM is careful not to stray from their
intended image for d3, and promoting brand
awareness is one of the main factors behind
their initiative to host events in the district.
When Michela Celi discusses TECOM’s goals
for d3, she notes that they aren’t looking to compete with Milan or Paris in a short time frame. “If
you look at those cities, there are brands that have
been there since the early 1990s,” she explains,
“They also have established educational institutions, design factories, and markets.” Dubai
is interested, however, in becoming the next
Beirut, the city Celi says is widely thought to be
the longstanding capital for art and design in the
Middle East.11
Though untraditional in its conception, the
recent establishment of d3 still says something
about art and design’s heightened prominence
in Dubai, including how its leaders intend to
take it forward. “Once we promote Dubai as a
location for design, companies will start moving into the district,” Celi says, “It’s sort of a
marketing campaign.”12
1“Political System,” UAE Government: Political System. www.
uaeinteract.com/government/political_system; “International
Energy Statistics, EIA,” International Energy Statistics, EIA. www.
eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm; Alini Dizik, “Dubai:
Desert Oasis or Mirage for Expats?” BBC website, February 17, 2014.
2“Free Zone Business Parks,” TECOM Investments. www.tecom.
ae/portfolio/business-parks.
3Michela Celi, interview with author, October 2014.
4Frank Kane, and Hadeel Al Sayegh, “Dubai Stands Taller than Ever
Five Years on from Its Debt Crisis,” The National, November 23,
2014. www.thenational.ae/business/economy/20141122/dubaistands-taller-than-ever-five-years-on-from-its-debt-crisis.
5Sunil Thacker Associates, “UAE Free Zone Guide,” December 2014.
www.uaelawblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/fzco.pdf
6Michela Celi, interview with author, October 2014.
7Deloitte United States. www2.deloitte.com/us/en/services/
consulting.html.
8Pratyush Sarup, “Decoding the Dubai Design and Fashion
Council,” Gulf News, October 31, 2014. www.gulfnews.com/
life-style/beauty-fashion/decoding-the-dubai-design-andfashion-council.
9Ibid.
10Dana Moukhallati, “Expo 2020 Will Create Hundreds of Thousands
of Jobs across the Region,” The National. April 29, 2014. www.
thenational.ae/uae/tourism/expo-2020-will-create-hundreds-ofthousands-of-jobs-across-the-region.
11Michela Celi, interview with author, October 2014.
12Ibid.
The construction site of the Dubai Design District.
Image: TECOM Investments.
10
A Douglas Design District flag hanging on Douglas Avenue.
Image: Douglas Design District, Wichita, KS.
11
ǁ ǁ
Alper THINKING
Besen
ABSTRACT
Invisible Architecture:
Critical Thinking and
Architectural Cognition
KEYWORDS
Alper Besen was born in Istanbul and worked
there as an interior architect until 2011. With an
MA in Interior Architecture from RISD, he began
teaching at Urban Frame, a summer design and
build program at MIT. After moving to New York,
he started working at Deborah Berke Partners as
an interior architect. He is interested in design
cognition and architectural theory, and his current research focuses on critical thinking and its
role in the architectural design process. Alper’s
goal is to develop and teach experimental interior architecture studio courses.
Abstraction
Architecture education
Architecture jury
Cognitive sciences
Critical thinking
Design process
Design studio
Desk critiques
Drawing
Intuition
Rationality
Presentation
Student
Thought processes
12
[email protected]
abesen.com
Our interactions with architecture are mostly physical. Yet
every artificial space that we experience is the result of an
ephemeral and invisible cognitive journey: architects create,
experiment, evaluate, judge, reason, and sacrifice ideas.
Architectural pedagogy is swarming with terminology
that addresses cognitive processes. Words like analysis, synthesis, and critical thinking are not hard to come by in the curricula and syllabi of prominent architectural schools, even the
Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture underlines
the importance of “Critical Thinking” in architectural education in its literature.
However, this term usually remains undefined and gets
conflated with concepts such as criticism, problem solving,
and critical theory. This situation causes confusion, blocks
opportunities for greater understanding and leads to jargon
that shadows the learning process.
This research examines the ways in which critical thinking is addressed and/or neglected in architectural education.
The research encompasses three major East Coast American
architecture departments: Pratt Institute, Parsons The New
School for Design, and Columbia University. Each case study
examines contemporary and archived curricula, syllabi, and
promotional materials in conjunction with faculty and student
interviews. Cognitive psychology and philosophy papers on
critical thinking and design cognition are juxtaposed with
methodologies of design theorists such as Horst Rittel and
Donald Schon to analyze the existing landscape in architecture departments. The thesis argues that architectural education would benefit from more in-school collaborations with
psychiatrists, philosophers, and education theorists.
13
ǁ ǁ
EXCERPT
Critical Thinking and The Architectural
Design Process
Abstract concepts such as critical thinking,
problem solving, rational thought, and reasoning have the tendency to confuse if they are not
adequately explained. According to educational
theorist Larry Cuban, how to properly define
thinking skills is problematic both for scientists
and practitioners. He compares the situation to
a “conceptual swamp”.1
Literature on critical thinking can be tracked
back to three main root sources, each with distinct characteristics: philosophy, psychology
and education. The philosophical approach
focuses on a hypothetical and ideal critical
thinker and preoccupies itself with the possibility of best outcomes, thus limiting how it can
be defined in reality. The cognitive psychology
branch focuses on how people actually think in
real life conditions. The educational approach
relies on practical experiences and observations of student learning, but is limited in its
vague methodology.2
It is important to note here that both philosophy and cognitive psychology are considered to
be branches of cognitive sciences.3 The interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science majors
in colleges allows them to approach elements
of cognition in a holistic manner. The Cognitive
Science Program at Cornell University fosters interdisciplinary approaches. Could it be
assumed, then, that critical thinking would be
best understood with a broader perspective,
perhaps through the lens of cognitive sciences
and education? Certainly it is necessary to
develop an understanding of critical thinking and to look for commonality between the
numerous definitions.
Psychology, philosophy, and educational
theory provide diverse definitions for critical
Architecture studio jury at Columbia
University. Image: Columbia
University.
thinking; most of them include reasoning, logic,
judgment, and meta-cognition in their descriptions.4 A better understanding of judgment and
meta-cognition will help to understand the role
of critical thinking in architecture in a more
meaningful way.
Judgment does not always have to be authoritative or uncompromising. For example, when
an architecture student designs a building,
the model she makes is an embodiment of her
judgments. The scale, material, form, and other
aspects of the design are all decisions that are
ideally based on careful thought. This does not
mean that those decisions are cast in iron or
stiff-necked, but rather inevitable components
of the design process.
Meta-cognition is another concept that
requires clarification. This refers to our knowledge of what we know (or, what we know about
what we know), and how we use this knowledge
to direct further learning activities.5 As a hypothetical example, imagine a student who has
completed a critique. She may begin to contemplate what was gained from the comments of the
jury members or she might start to evaluate her
presentation methods. She may think about how
her thought process would have differed if she
had decided to model the building rather than
draw a section. All of these reflective thought
processes focus on the way the student thinks
and learns and are examples of meta-cognition.
One of the most commonly referenced
definitions for critical thinking comes from
American philosopher John Dewey. His 1933
book How We Think is considered to be one of
the hallmarks of the concept. Dewey actually
used the term reflective thinking and described
it as consequential reasoning. This means that
ideas in a critical thought process are linked in
a consequential manner and follow each other
Architecture studio jury at Columbia
University. Image: Columbia University.
14
in a rational way rather than a random order.6
This research uses the terms reflective thinking
and critical thinking synonymously.
The former president of the American
Psychological Association, Diane F. Halpern,
explains her understanding of critical thinking:
Critical thinking is the use of those cognitive
skills or strategies that increase the probability
of a desirable outcome. It is used to describe
thinking that is purposeful, reasoned, and goal
directed—the kind of thinking involved in solving problems, formulating inferences, calculating likelihoods, and making decisions, when
the thinker is using skills that are thoughtful
and effective for the particular context and
type of thinking task. Critical thinking is more
than merely thinking about your own thinking
or making judgments and solving problems—it
is effortful and consciously controlled. Critical
thinking uses evidence and reasons and strives
to overcome individual biases.7
would consist of the following factors: knowledge of the field of inquiry, attitudes of questioning, temporarily suspending judgment for
the sake of unbiased questioning, and the application of the methods of logical analysis, which
leads to acting on the basis of analysis.8
Diane F. Halpern summarizes professor David
Russel’s approach with an equation that provides
a succinct structure for studying this topic:
Knowledge + Thinking Skills + Attitude =
Critical Thinking
This equation demonstrates that in order to
engage in critical thinking one needs to have
both the fundamental knowledge about the subject of inquiry (based on the discipline) as well as
the necessary thinking skills as discussed earlier
(judgment, meta-thinking, consequential reasoning), and lastly to have the motivation and determination to honestly pursue critical thought.
The emphasis on a desired outcome in
Halpern’s definition is extremely relevant for
architectural education. Architects are responsible for the fulfillment of programmatic and
social needs. They might redefine these needs
or approach them in genuine ways during the
design process, but regardless of the amount of
creativity or experimentation they implement,
there is always a desired outcome.
Another important aspect of Halpern’s definition is that it distinguishes critical thinking
from meta-thinking, judgment-making, and
problem-solving. These skills are components
of reflective thought and critical thinking consciously orchestrates them.
Professor of Education D. H. Russel states
that a complete description of critical thinking
1 L arry Cuban, “Policy and Research Dilemmas in the Teaching of
Reasoning: Unplanned Designs,” Review of Educational Research
54, no. 4 (Winter 1984), 676. In Arthur Lewis and David Smith,
“Defining Higher Order Thinking,” Theory Into Practice 32, no. 3
(Summer 1993), 131.
2 Emily R. Lai, Critical Thinking: A Literature Review (Pearson, June
2011), 5–9. http://images.pearsonassessments.com/images/
tmrs/CriticalThinkingReviewFINAL.pdf.
3 “Cognitive Science Graduate Minor Information,” Cornell
University Cognitive Science Program. http://cogsci.cornell.
edu/?page_id=11.
4 Diane F. Halpern, Thought and Knowledge: An Introduction to
Critical Thinking, 5th ed. (Oxford: Psychology Press, Taylor and
Francis Group, 2014), 628.
5 Diane F. Halpern, Thought and Knowledge: An Introduction to
Critical Thinking, 5th ed. (Oxford: Psychology Press, Taylor and
Francis Group, 2014), 1039.
6 Michael Eng and Dan Buscescu, Looking Beyond Structure:
Critical Thinking for Designers and Architects (New York: Fairchild
Books, 2009), 2.
7 Diane F. Halpern, Thought and Knowledge: An Introduction to
Critical Thinking, 5th ed. (Oxford: Psychology Press, Taylor and
Francis Group, 2014), 636.
8 D. H. Russel, “Critical Thinking in Childhood and Youth,”
The School, no. 31 (May 1943), 764. In Edward D’Angelo,
The Teaching of Critical Thinking, Philosophical Currents, v. 1
(Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner N.V, 1971), 5.
Architecture studio spaces at Columbia
University, 2015. Image: Alper Besen.
Architectural sketch. Image: Biecher Architectes.
15
Architectural sketches. Image: Jeremy Erdreich.
§§
THINKING
Brittany
Dickinson
Fashion Vice: Preparing
Design Students to
Reform the Industry
ABSTRACT
The fashion industry is riddled with problems like poor labor
conditions, wasteful practices, and depletion of natural
resources. Creative solutions are needed from designers who
are skilled in understanding the social and environmental
landscape of the industry, yet few have been trained in the
ways in which they can conduct better practices.
To what extent are fashion design schools addressing
these issues and preparing students with the tools they need
to devise sustainable solutions? Sustainability is often treated
as an add-on, rather than an intrinsic element, in a school’s
curriculum. This mode of compartmentalization is reflected
in the industry where sustainable design appears to be separated from “regular” design. There is also a tension between
training students for the current demands of the industry and
preparing them for jobs that have not yet been formed. This
research explores the ethical responsibility of education to
help build a better future, with a focus on the pedagogical
approaches of the most influential undergraduate fashion
design programs in the world.
KEYWORDS
Brittany Dickinson holds a BS in Fashion
Design from the University of Cincinnati’s
College of Design, Architecture, Art & Planning.
Before coming to SVA, she worked as a clothing
designer at J.Crew for five years. Her research
focuses on the ways in which fashion design
education addresses social and environmental
issues, and she is particularly interested in the
ambiguity and complexity of the word “sustainability.” Brittany sees her work at SVA as the
starting point in a lifelong mission to educate
future generations of ethical designers.
Aesthetics
Ambiguity
Choice
Compartmentalization
Ethics
Fashion
Greenwashing
Language
Mindset
Patience
Responsibility
Supererogatory
Student
Sustainability
16
[email protected]
@brittanyinbrief
17
§§
EXCERPT
Sustainability is not a fixed concept. It is an
ongoing reorientation of the ways in which we
engage with the world. There is no clear path
to becoming a sustainable designer. Because
of this, and the fact that sustainability is not
yet a mandate in the industry, there is no singular, established approach to addressing this
in the classroom.
Sustainability is commonly treated as an
add-on subject sequestered from core fashion
design classes. This mirrors the line of demarcation in the industry that separates sustainable
fashion from the rest of fashion. Some educational institutions might add a single class in
order to tick the sustainability box, which is
not unlike the business approach of creating
an organic cotton T-shirt to convey a message
to consumers on the supposed ethical values of
a company.
Sustainability-focused electives, projects, or
competitions are common strategies in academia.
The Local Wisdom project, launched in 2009 by
Kate Fletcher, professor of Sustainability, Design,
Fashion at the London College of Fashion, partners with international design schools to explore
different uses for clothing in an effort for students to create sustainable design processes.
Other opportunities include the EcoChic Design
Award, a competition established in 2011 which
challenges students to create a collection with
minimal textile waste, and Habit(AT), a research
project developed in 2013 by the Centre for
Sustainable Fashion at the London College of
Fashion that explores how fashion affects our
habits of living in the city.
It does not seem to be enough, however,
for a student to take a single class on sustainability in order to understand or incorporate
it throughout their work.1 Special projects
and design competitions have the potential
to deeply impact a student’s awareness and
engagement in sustainability, especially if creative skills are put to use. Further, these strategies are favorable from an academic standpoint
in that they do not uproot curricular structure.
But in compartmentalizing these activities, it can
reinforce the perception that sustainability is
relegated to a select few individuals who are
free to choose to act responsibly.2
If sustainability is treated as an isolated subject outside the ongoing conversation in school,
it is easy for students to fall back onto common,
unsustainable ways of designing after completing the project or course.3 When people watch
a video revealing an issue in the industry, for
example, they may start adopting more sustainable consumption methods, yet without continued exposure to those issues, they often do not
continue on this track.4
For sustainability literacy to truly take hold,
it must be integrated, incrementally, into the
shaping of a design student’s mind. Skill sets
are then shaped—an idea which reflects William
James’s theory on building knowledge—James
famously said in his 1907 lectures on pragmatism that, “we keep unaltered as much of our
old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices
and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker
more than we renew.”5 James is essentially saying that we are slow to adopt new knowledge,
and even slower to transform that knowledge
into new truths. Because it can be so difficult
to introduce new ideas, it is more effective to
blend the new with the old, such as weaving
ethical issues and tools into the traditional
requirements of fashion design education. A
broad scope of subject matter pertaining to sustainability would help to shape students’ thinking, preferably early on in design school when
they are able to absorb more information.6
My research suggests that there are a
greater number of students entering college
with an interest in sustainability, but there are
still many who do not think to seek it out on their
own. And for students who really do care about
the ecological impacts of design, it can be overwhelming to bear the responsibility of choosing
what is important.7 Should they take a survey
on ethics or a workshop on upcycling? What
does it take to become a sustainable designer?
As students progress in their studies, it
becomes increasingly difficult and overwhelming to absorb new information, especially in
the final year when they are in the midst of
working on their collections and are focused
on getting jobs. A common theme among the
young designers interviewed as part of this
research is that many struggle to keep up with
their required courses in school. This makes it
difficult or nearly impossible to devote time to
electives on specialty topics, especially those
that will not impact the kind of jobs they get
upon graduation. Further, the classes that provide a rich context for sustainability are often
categorized in the humanities and sciences
which, when taught separately, compete with
studio classes that are typically prioritized by
the students because they seem more relevant
to fashion design.8
How can sustainability transition from an
isolated subject to one that is part of the ethos
of design thinking? To quote moral philosopher
Peter Singer, “The issue here is: Where should
we draw the line between good conduct that is
required and conduct that is good although not
required, so as to get the best possible result?”9
In other words, how can sustainability go from
an optional and supererogatory act to an inherent part of the design process?
1 N
oël Palomo-Lovinski and Kim Hahn, “Fashion Design Industry
Impressions of Current Sustainable Practices,” Fashion Practice:
The Journal of Design, Creative Process & the Fashion Industry 6,
no. 1 (2014), 100.
2 Cosette Armstrong and Melody LeHew, “Barriers and
Mechanisms for the Integration of Sustainability in Textile and
Apparel Education: Stories from the Front Line,” Fashion Practice:
The Journal of Design, Creative Process & the Fashion Industry 6,
no. 1 (2014), 78.
3 Sarah Ditty and Lisa Schneider, “8 Ways to Study
More Sustainably,” Ethical Fashion Forum, May
1, 2014. http://source.ethicalfashionforum.com/
article/8-ways-to-study-more-sustainably.
4 Fatma Baytar and Susan P. Ashdown, “Using Video As a
Storytelling Medium to Influence Textile and Clothing Students’
Environmental Knowledge and Attitudes,” International Journal of
Fashion Design, Technology and Education 7, no. 1 (2014), 39.
5 William James, Pragmatism. (New York: Longmans, Green, and
Co., 1907), 168.
6 Tara St James, interview with author, December 16, 2014.
7 Lucy Collins, interview with author, February 17, 2015.
8 Lynda Grose, “Fashion Design Education for Sustainability
Practice: Reflection on Undergraduate Level Teaching,” in
Sustainability in Fashion and Textiles: Values, Design, Production
and Consumption, ed. Miguel Angel Gardetti and Ana Laura
Torres (Sheffield: Greenleaf Publishing, 2013), 140.
9 Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and
Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (1972), 237.
Upcycling project from second-year students at Central Saint Martins
in collaboration with LVMH, 2015. Image: 1Granary.
Participants engage in zero-waste design at the Waste Workshop,
2011. Image: Jim Norrena, California College of the Arts.
A close-up of a garment from the Local Wisdom Project, 2012.
Image: Fiona Bailey, The Centre for Sustainable Fashion at London
College of Fashion.
18
A look from a collaborative project between Nike and London College
of Fashion’s Centre for Sustainable Fashion. Image: The Centre for
Sustainable Fashion.
Parsons The New School for Design hosted a Kering Talk on sustainable fashion, 2015. Image: Kering.
19
¶ ¶
LaurenTHINKING
Palmer
Paper, Pixel, Performance: Bringing Publishing
to Life
KEYWORDS
Lauren Palmer is a writer, designer, and
researcher interested in art, design, literature,
and theory. She has immersed herself in contemporary arts publishing through work and
internships with Paper Monument, Printed
Matter, Inc., Architectural Record, Princeton
Architectural Press, and ARTBOOK | D.A.P.
Lauren has a BA in Biochemistry from The City
University of New York and an MA in Textile
Design from the Chelsea College of Art, where
her research in sustainable fibers placed her
on the shortlist for the University of the Arts
London Fashioning the Future Awards. She won
an SVA Alumni Scholarship Award in 2015.
Audience
Conversation
Distribution
Editorship
Interdisciplinary
Live
Magazine
Publication
Performance
Periodical
Platform
Recital
Social
Stage
20
[email protected]
@llaurenpalmerr
ABSTRACT
Artists’ magazines have traditionally been a place for experimentation in thought and form. The printed page allowed for
ease of circulation and archiving; artists could also reach a
larger audience through the reproduction and distribution of
magazines. With the advent of the Internet and online publishing, the magazine has found new ways to reach its intended
audience, furthering experimentation with form via code.
There has also been a movement toward the experiential,
or the performative, in publishing. Magazines are marketing
“live” issues or portions of an issue—either recording the
content or forgoing the archival impulse altogether—thus challenging the idea of what a magazine is and could be.
The relationship between performance and publishing
can be traced back to the avant-garde artist movement, Dada,
operating throughout Europe during and after World War I.
The United States saw a resurgence in this type of practice
during the 1960s and 1970s, when New York was a hotbed of
Happenings in the Downtown arts scene and artists’ publications reflected the conceptual, collaborative, and, at times,
casual performances.
Today, Triple Canopy and Pop-Up Magazine continue the
tradition of combining publishing and performance in disparate ways. Triple Canopy incorporates live events into its
digital publication through recording in a variety of methods,
while Pop-Up is a completely ephemeral, one-night-only live
magazine—it is not recorded at all. Missing the event means
missing an entire issue.
This research explores the ways in which live events
heighten the social aspect of publishing by highlighting the
relationship between a magazine and its readership, and maintain the publication as a vehicle for social exchange in the age
of new media.
21
¶ ¶
EXCERPT
What Was the Magazine?
A magazine is a periodical, which is also a publication. These terms are rather synonymous
and may be used interchangeably, though the
tendency to substitute one term for the other
illustrates what historian Margaret Beetham
suggests as a difficulty in properly defining
what a periodical is. She acknowledges that the
trouble exists “in part because the periodical is
a mixed genre.”1 In her view, a periodical is “a
catch-all term” used to describe newspapers,
journals, reviews, and magazines.2 To clarify, a
magazine is a type of periodical; the magazine
is a species under the genus periodical. Both
terms can be publications—created for sale to a
targeted readership—but not all magazines (or
periodicals) are meant to be sold. Distribution
of content takes a myriad of forms, from the
zine that is passed out at a concert to the printed
glossy found on newsstands each month.
Traditionally, magazines were vessels for
text and images, printed on paper, with pages
bound for dispersal. Derived from the Arabic
word makhazin, the magazine acts as a storage
facility for content, containing text and often
images on a variety of subjects.3 Though magazines may have an overarching theme, issues
are aggregates and display a diverse range of
ideas.4 Magazines have multiple contributors,
each with a distinct voice, writing style, and
point of view, each claiming authority for different articles (the proliferation of the author,
to counter Roland Barthes’s death-of-the-author
argument).5 The magazine is a space for varied
and distinct forms of writing or image making:
it is interdisciplinary by design.
The relationship to time is a marked characteristic of this type of publication. Readers
look to periodicals for content that is relevant to
their lives in the present—reportage, or critical
Fluxus Collective, Flux Year Box 2 (“A” Copy), 1968.
Image: Conceptual Art.
reflection, on matters of current cultural importance. Regardless of subject matter, magazines
are adept at capturing a particular moment in
time. “To publish a magazine is to enter into
a heightened relationship with the present
moment. Unlike books, which are intended
to last for future generations, magazines are
decidedly impermanent,” writes art historian
Gwen Allen. “Their transience is embodied by
their un-precious formats, flimsy covers, and
inexpensive paper stock, and it is suggested by
their seriality, which presumes that each issue
will soon be rendered obsolete by the next.”6
What Can an Art Magazine Be?
In the case of a magazine where the mode of
publication is performance, the ways in which
one might archive the issue could be problematic (given the transitory nature of performance); new ways of thinking about how
to record the material and how to archive it
are necessary. When a magazine is published
online or made “live,” the magazine has undergone a dematerialization from its printed form
and no longer exists on paper.
During the 1960s and 1970s magazines
became an important new site of artistic
practice, functioning as an alternative exhibition space for the dematerialized practices of conceptual art. […] Conceptual art
depended upon the magazine as a new site of
display, which allowed it to be experienced
by a broader public than the handful of people actually present to witness a temporary
object, idea, or act.7
The idea of text as performance is similar to art
writer and critic Lucy Lippard’s opinion of conceptual art. She writes of this dematerialization
22
Aspen, no. 5+6, Fall 1967. Image: Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative
Space for Art.
happening along two separate pathways: “art
as idea and art as action. In the first case, matter
is denied, as sensation has been converted into
concept; in the second case, matter has been
transformed into energy and time-motion.”8
This dematerialization from print requires that
live magazines form a new mode of distribution, along with methods of archiving content.
Writer and editor Orit Gat’s essay “What
Can an Art Magazine Be?” explores the idea of
the magazine as a possible “hybrid curatorial
and editorial practice.”9 Gat’s hypothesis is that
an art magazine can be a platform for discussions in a way that exhibitions can’t be:
because it allows writers and artists a space
for reflection rather than presentation, but
also because its serialized nature enables conversations that develop over time and for a
reassessment or reaction to previous issues,
and lastly, since a printed magazine does not
have a fixed duration, unlike an exhibition.10
Gat appears to agree with MoMA library bibliographer David Senior’s assessment that the
“central proposition of artists’ publications is
that they are a productive space for experimentation.”11 Thus gallery space can exist as either
in the form of a two-dimensional page or as a
familiar three-dimensional cube: the shape the
space takes is less important than the successful transmittal of ideas. These magazines were
conceived as new media spaces that introduced
and circulated ideas and images through the
direct interventions of the participants. This
genre can be considered alongside the active
alternative space movement that began to flourish in the 1960s and 1970s, where artist-run exhibition and performance spaces were popping
up across the globe. “The artists’ publishing
Pop-Up Magazine Los Angeles program (interior), November 19, 2014.
Image: Pop-Up Magazine.
movement was part of this phenomenon, and in
fact, interwoven, as many of these independent
project spaces also published and kept archives
and reading rooms.”12 Gat explains, “in a comparable way to the study of art magazines as
a way to further our understanding of artistic
practice, we should be looking at publishing as
a curatorial medium. This, in turn, would lead
us to question what an audience or public is,
and what it could be.”13 Gwen Allen explains
how the social situation in the 1960s and 1970s
made the magazine a valid choice for artists as
“the everyday, throwaway form of the magazine mirrored art’s heightened sense of its own
contingency.”14 The magazine is tethered to
where and when it was created.
Inexpensive and accessible, the magazine
was an ideal expressive vehicle for art that
was more concerned with concept, process,
and performance than with final marketable
form. Indeed, the ephemerality of the magazine was central to its radical possibilities
as an alternative form of distribution that
might replace the privileged space of the
museum with a more direct and democratic
experience.15
It is this sense of the democratic inherent in
periodical publishing that allows for the possibility of reception by a large audience; through
the form of a magazine, readers have greater
access to artwork that may not be present in
established art galleries and institutions.
Performance as Publishing as Event
In preliterate societies, storytelling was a mixture of spoken words and gestures. A strong
performative element was needed to communicate a story, as speech was reinforced by
Performance as Publishing, NY Art Book Fair, September 25, 2014.
Image: Performance as Publishing.
23
¶ ¶
gesture. The repetition of sounds with somatic
movements aided memorization and subsequent retellings. Before literacy, there was a
kind of oral publishing as stories were performed over and over again to different audiences. Subtle changes to the narrative would
occur naturally. Oral culture is dynamic and
fluid, as is the nature of performance, across
the more static realm of literacy.
To perform is to do—it is an active gesture.
A performance requires reception by an audience. Both the actor and audience require
the presence of the other. A performance is
a body in space motioning through that space
in a non-replicable path. “Performance honors
the idea that a limited number of people in a
specific time/space frame can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace
afterward.”16
Performances, are social by their nature;
the performer and her audience work together
to produce a unique experience. The French
playwright Antonin Artaud described the live
event, or an ephemeral artwork as that which
can “never be made the same way twice.”17
Because this mode of art making leaves no
record of its own (the nature of performance
lies in its relationship to time, defined by its start
and end points), methods of archiving are often
undertaken by other methods of art-making
such as photography and film. Yet a photograph
or film can never truly capture the essence of a
performance, only a representation of it, and
this is where archiving becomes problematic—
there is no pure way to capture a performance,
except through experience. Social theorist
Brian Massumi writes in Semblance and Event:
Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts that,
“every event is singular. It has an arc that carries it through its phases to a culmination all its
Hugo Ball reciting “Karawane” at the Cabaret Voltaire, 1916.
Image: Dada and Surrealist Performance.
own: a dynamic unity no other event can have
in just this way.”18 Every event is distinctive,
unable to be replicated exactly ever again.
In the case of a live magazine, the performance of an issue will always be unique, in contrast to a printed issue, where the object is often
replicated in the image of the master document.
Nicole Bachmann and Ruth Beale are founding members of the UK-based artist collective
Performance as Publishing. Their practices are
rooted in the performance of texts, which they
define as “publishing.” Every work of performance art is carefully recorded, either by film,
photography, or sound—usually a combination
of all three methods—and uploaded on their
website to archive the work, but also as “an act
of making it public.” It is important to the artists
that their work is documented properly, and
that it is accessible by a wide audience, to further conversations around each member’s individual practices. They choose to perform their
texts, instead of purely printing them, because
they feel performance, or the vocalization of the
texts, is a more “responsive” medium. They are
interested in the relationship between thought
and speech and how an audience responds to
the delivery of the content.19
24
1Margaret Beetham, “Open and Closed: the Periodical as a
Publishing Genre,” Victorian Periodicals Review, Fall 1989, 97.
2Ibid., 96.
3Clive Phillpot, “Artists as Magazinists,” in Numbers: Serial
Publications By Artists Since 1955, Philip E. Aarons and Andrew
Roth, eds. (Zurich: PPP Editions/JRP Ringier Kunstverlag, 2009),
177.
4Ibid.
5Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Participation,
Claire Bishop, ed. (London: Whitechapel, 2006), 41–45.
6Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art,
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011), 1.
7Ibid.
8Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,”
Art International, Vol. XII, No. 2 (February 1968). In Changing:
Essays in Art Criticism (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1971), 255.
9Orit Gat, “What Can An Art Magazine Be?” The White Review,
Issue 10 (2014). http://www.thewhitereview.org/features/
what-can-an-art-magazine-be/
10Ibid.
11David Senior, “Page as alternative space redux: artists’ magazines
in the 21st century,” Art Libraries Journal, Vol.38, No.3 (2013), 10.
12Ibid.
13Orit Gat, “What Can An Art Magazine Be?” The White Review,
Issue 10 (2014). http://www.thewhitereview.org/features/
what-can-an-art-magazine-be/
14Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011), 1.
15Ibid.
16Peggy Phelan, Unmasked: The Politics of Performance (London:
Routledge, 1993), 149.
17Amelia Jones, Perform, Repeat, Record (Bristol: Intellect Ltd, 2012),
11.
18Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the
Occurrent Arts (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013), 3.
19Ruth Beale and Nicole Bachmann, interview with author,
September 27, 2014.
25
↓↓
THINKING
Lisa Silbermayr
“Public” “Affordable”
“Units” in the “Projects:”
The Role of Rhetoric in
Influencing the Politics
and Design of New York
Public Housing
ABSTRACT
This research examines the rhetorical discourse on public
housing in New York City today, as it is variously framed by the
media, the federal and local agencies, and the public housing
residents themselves. In addition to providing a concise summary of the current debate, the research looks at how public
housing is represented in the mainstream media and gives an
overview of affordability metrics, genealogy, criticisms, and
alternatives. Assuming that architecture works in similar ways
to language—that is, unconsciously shaping the way we act—it
looks at behavioral phenomena specific to public housing in
New York City.
This research also portrays the communicative challenges
of designing within the bureaucracy of public housing, and
gives a speculative outlook on its future. This investigation is
inspired by the broader question: Who constructs what? That
is, does the built environment construct its citizens, or does
politics construct them? Or, is it actually the public discussion
that constructs design, politics, and citizens?
KEYWORDS
Lisa Silbermayr is an architect and designer
from Vienna, Austria. She received her MS
in Architecture from Vienna University of
Technology, where she focused on the influence and potential of computation in contemporary urban design. For the past twelve years
she has worked for the Group for Appropriate
Technology (GrAT) and on the wooden highrise research project 8+, both of which are concerned with environmentally friendly building
solutions. Parallel to her work in architecture
and design, she is involved in the independent
biannual art magazine wtf! magazin as well
as Salon Karton, an independent, guerilla-like
cardboard-furnitecture project.
Affordable housing
Architecture
Public housing
Home
Language
Neighborhood community
New York City
NYCHA
Obligations
Projects
Public-private partnerships
Rhetoric
Units
26
[email protected]
27
↓↓
EXCERPT
The Projects and The Communicative
Challenge of Designing for the Community
What will the future bring for New York City’s
public housing? One can only speculate at this
moment in time. However, considering that
the New York City Housing Authority developments allow for further densification, that New
York City is growing, and that NYCHA will need
to fortify public-private partnerships to maintain
the building stock, it is very likely that proposals
to further develop and build on “NYCHA land”
will be implemented within the following years.
The generic architectural language characteristic of NYCHA developments might lead one
to the conclusion that there has been little to no
attention paid to design innovation in the city’s
public housing. Sara Caples, principal of Caples
Jefferson Architects, has experience working in
NYCHA’s bureaucratic environment, and notes
that it poses exceptional design and communication challenges. Nevertheless, Caples sees opportunities for sustainable design in public contexts,
and cities that in the last fifteen to twenty years,
a few significant innovative designs have taken
physical shape within NYCHA developments.
Caples describes the works for some of her
firm’s private clients as “almost like stage sets
in their life span—they can be gone in five years,
and they are likely gone in twenty years.” The
firm’s works for public and non-profit clients,
on the other hand, have a much longer lifespan.
The spaces “…need to be durable and flexible
in terms of the non-profit clients changing how
they are operating. We make buildings that the
community is going to have way past our lifetime, so the buildings have to be loved by the
community in their own right. This one community center is going to be there forever and they
are not going to get another chance in getting it
built,” Caples explains.1
Architectural design is first and foremost a
task of finding a consensus: a design that works
for many different people, activities, and budgetary considerations. “Trying to figure out a
durable set of spaces that could engage the public imagination a hundred years from now, or
even two hundred,” as Caples described their
design guidelines, sounds like the ultimate consensual challenge.2
What conclusions can be derived by the
preceding analysis? First, there is little information available on how the city’s government,
or Mayor de Blasio for that matter, intends to
proceed with public housing. It is likely that
the city will pursue plans to build new residential buildings, including a percentage of
“affordable,” subsidized, units. But, as Tyree
Stanback, vice chair of the Brooklyn West
Resident Association, said: “Instead of getting
these partnerships and these P3s to come in and
build right next to what’s falling down, maybe
we should get them to come in and fix what’s
falling down.”3
In any of these cases design can play an
important role in the evolution of public housing. Architecture can influence people’s behavior. In the case of the stairwells of the housing
projects, the situation needs to be improved
before one can even think of getting rid of the
image of public housing being “crime ridden.”
Politics will decide how existing infrastructure will be refurbished, such as whether there
will be new development within “NYCHA land”
and how current public housing residents will
be integrated in future developments. Before a
political decision is made, questions will hopefully be asked in a public, rhetorical debate.
An outcome in favor of the current residents would have to overcome the myth of
the American dream of homeownership as
A meeting room in the Marcus Garvey Houses Community Center,
Brooklyn, New York. Image: Caples Jefferson Architects.
promoted by the mainstream media. Mayor de
Blasio’s goal to repair the relationship with current public housing residents presents a communication challenge as well.
Tyree refers to the recent history of New
York City, the old history of NYCHA, and the
new history of NYCHA and its public-private
partnerships as the “Tale of Three New York
Cities.” This rhetoric could be used in a way
that is beneficial to public housing residents by
enabling the mayor to achieve his goal of building new affordable housing. One could emphasize the success of public housing, learn from
its failures, and correct mistakes in the process
of urban renewal. Renewal is an opportunity
for design innovation and, in the case of public
housing in New York City, it’s not too late for
innovation in the public housing infrastructure.
Sarah Watson, deputy director of the
Citizen Housing and Planning Council of
New York City, shared her speculative outlook on how the future of NYCHA would ideally
look: Money aside, the current infrastructure
would need to be repaired before any new
buildings could be added to the developments.
NYCHA would have to consult with communities more. It would then be the role of the
government to be able to see the big picture
and “make uncomfortable decisions.”4 NYCHA
would also need to be integrated in community
planning processes in different neighborhoods.
Consequently community boards would need
to be restructured, and members challenged
to decide where in neighborhoods NYCHA
refurbishments could be implemented. This
means that boards would need well-informed
and skilled neighborhood managers.
What Watson is describing is a complete
overhaul of the NYCHA management, the community board system, and even the New York
zoning law. Would it be possible to pilot such
a framework?5 How the “Tale of Three New
York Cities” will end remains an open question.
What is certain is that this is a defining moment
for public housing in New York City, and the
political decision-makers will be the ones
deciding which rhetoric will write our ongoing
design history.
1 S
ara Caples, principal, Caples Jefferson Architects, interview
with author, March 2015.
2 Ibid.
3 Tyree Stanback, vice chair of the Brooklyn West Resident
Association, at the Town Hall meeting on the amendment to the
FY2015 Annual Plan, Brooklyn, hosted by NYCHA, March 9, 2015.
4 Sarah Watson, Deputy Director of the Citizen Housing and
Planning Council New York City, interview with author,
March 2015.
5 Ibid.
The amount of open space for development in the Lower East Side of
Manhattan. Image: The University of Michigan MUD Studio.
Skylight Study, Marcus Garvey Houses Community Center, Brooklyn,
New York. Image: Caples Jefferson Architects.
28
29
NYCHA developments in New York, excluding Staten Island.
Image: Nychapedia, 2014.
*◊ ☞
‡
†
The address of the SpaceX Headquarters is One, Rocket Road. But,
you have to park down the street
at Starbucks.
If much of the historic fabric has to be
removed in the preservation of a modern dwelling, what is it we are actually
preserving? The actual physical structure or an idea based on an image?
“A cheap casket or a top end design—
you won’t get to heaven any faster.
In the end the selection is all about
what is meaningful to the family
and what allows them to get on with
their lives in peace,” says Michael
Beardsley, vice-president of Sales
and Marketing Emeritus, for Thacker
Caskets, Inc.
30
“You see retail environments that have
more adventurous displays than what
you would see in a museum,” Kumar
Atre, a designer at Diller Scofidio +
Renfro told me. “They can actually
make more curatorial hypotheses and
intellectual forays [than museums.]”
When I talked to Jerry Helling, president of anti-design piracy organization Be Original Americas, he told
me: “There are more small companies
[today] that can import and sell knockoffs without the major investment of
inventory and retail space. Also, the
makers of knockoffs have easier access
in locating potential sellers of copies.
Additionally photographs and drawings on the web have allowed knockoff
producers to instantly copy items […].
It is all a perfect storm that supports
the ease of copying.”
31
THINGS
Molly Butcher
ABSTRACT
India, China, and the United States, as well as a handful of
private companies, are all working to put humans on Mars.
The space industry is undergoing a renaissance: private companies are entering the space arena, innovating, and driving
down historically astronomical costs. This means that getting
to Mars may be relatively affordable within this century.
Today, Mars is portrayed as a destination and potential
home for humanity. Figments of science fiction—from images
of Martian settlements to images of a green, habitable Mars—
are entering mainstream media. How does the space industry
function in a post-utopian, post-colonial world?
My research mines the material culture of the space industry, from merchandise to twitter accounts, from wall clocks to
spaceship interiors, working to understand how Mars is being
portrayed, and what that says about society today. The branding, designed objects, and interiors all seek to render Mars
banal and everyday in the public imagination, and in doing so
reveal colonialist and techno-utopian motivations. Part of the
effort of this work is to locate the historical influence of the
contemporary space industry. Advertisements from the Cold
War race to the moon, NASA studies from the 1970s, and the
first maps of Mars from the 1890s are examined.
In what ways and to what extent is Mars entering public
awareness? How are governments and companies discussing their missions to Mars and normalizing Mars in the public
imagination? Why are colonialist impulses taboo on earth, but
accepted in outer space?
**
Occupy Mars: Manned
Missions to Mars and
the Material Culture
of the Contemporary
Space Industry
KEYWORDS
Molly Butcher holds a BA in Art Practice from
Stanford University, and has spent the past five
years working in art and design, starting an
independent design research consultancy in
2014. Her personal research centers on how
Mars is designed for the public imagination.
She has spoken on the topic at “Color/Forms:
The Twenty-Fourth Annual Parsons/Cooper
Hewitt Graduate Student Symposium on the
Decorative Arts and Design” in April of 2015.
Commercial space
Domestic
Dystopia
Globalization
Manifest destiny
Mars
Merchandise
Public-private partnerships
Realism
Space colonies
Terraform
Utopia
Vernacular
Westward expansion
32
[email protected]
33
EXCERPT
Mars as Merchandise
“The Occupy Mars Wall Clock is available for
purchase in increments of 1,” reads the SpaceX
webshop entry on their analog “Occupy Mars”
wall clock. “Be the first to review this item.” I
was trying to buy this clock, stuck in the twilight
zone of adding it to my cart, only to have it disappear every time I tried to check out.
There were no reviews that day in November
2014 and there are still no reviews today. For a
company that has built a reputation on flawless execution and technological sophistication
not much effort has gone into this webpage.
A striped gray background provides a somber
shopping experience. Product descriptions
define increments of purchase rather than
describing the objects.
The “Occupy Mars” clock hovers, glossy,
on this gray wallpaper. Highlights dance around
a black frame that encircles the surface of Mars
printed on the clock face. This view of Mars
features the Valle Mariners, the largest canyon
on Mars. The sun illuminates the upper left of
the planet (or clock), leaving the bottom right in
an ominous shadow.
Günther Anders, a German philosopher,
argues that one response to the expansion
of the human experience into the vastness of
space was to bring space back to the scale of
the human body. The television, the portal to
the universe in the 1960s, would be meticulously placed in the living room. “To the right
the record rack, to the left the house bar, and in
the center the universe hovers as a third piece
of furnishing.”1 The SpaceX wall clock, a new
piece of furnishing, brings Mars into the office,
to be positioned to the left of the water cooler.
Space travel has always been closely linked
to merchandising. The 1960s space race “married marketing and war,” and even the first space
exploration—high-altitude balloon experiments in
France in the late 1790s—led to a market for balloon “hairdos, wallpaper, bedwarmers, barometers and chamber pots.”2 These fashionable
items existed as secular relics, fetishized for having transcended Earth’s gravity. These objects
allow consumers to connect to the actual event.
Contemporary space merchandise and social
media are leaving behind the paper catalogues of
the 1980s with pocket protectors and rocket pens
and entering a model where individuals engage
with and espouse their own views of space exploration through their purchases and engagement
with online communities. Consumers can buy
the organic jersey cotton T-shirt as a way to get
a taste of the corporate tech start-up culture, not
space travel per se. Contemporary merchandise
effectively normalizes space.
When I was in elementary school in the
1990s, Astronaut Ice Cream, originally developed by the Whirlpool Corporation under contract with NASA, was the space merchandise
of choice. Astronaut Ice Cream brought the
eater closer to being an astronaut as did other
space-related merchandise products, like “zero
gravity” pens.
Contemporary objects such as the “Occupy
Mars” wall clock are not relics of the space race,
or of space travel, instead they are advertisements for it. This contemporariness is salient:
they are the product of our specific historical
context.3 Instead of the space relic, the “zero
gravity” pen or balloon wallpaper, we have the
mass-produced office product sourced from
the global marketplace. This object is meant
to fade into the background, while offering the
ability to support a corporate culture through
an Office Depot banality. Today merchandise
functions through mass-produced branding
components sourced from China.
Branding is a corporate strategy. Young private aerospace companies are not selling merchandise to make money. Merchandise offers
publicity, brand building, and a way to occupy
visual and market territory, while encouraging
corporate loyalty and enthusiasm. At the SpaceX
headquarters the employees are like football
fans: they bleed the color of their team. Most
employees sport a SpaceX or Occupy Mars
T-shirt. SpaceX initially created their online shop
for employees and hired the e-commerce integration company MashON to design the website
and the products. MashON applied SpaceX logo
and “Occupy Mars” products to out-of-the-box
merchandizing solutions.4 Currently the web
shop offers a “Heat Sensitive Terraform Mars”
mug and a “Welcome to Mars” door mat.
The SpaceX clock, however, has competing
aesthetic influences: science fiction, Occupy
Wall Street, and Office Depot banality clamor
within its black circular frame. “Occupy Mars,”
the words are stenciled like graffiti as though
anyone could participate. But, the task of “occupying” Mars has fallen on the private sector, led
by for-profit companies with male CEOs. The
Occupy movement hoped to lessen the gross
disparities in society. What tools do individual
citizens have to occupy Mars? And who even
wants to occupy it? Is this clock meant to inspire
action? There is tension between the sleek, clean
lines of custom-made space ships and the poor
manufacturing quality of this clock. Perhaps it
is an attempt to fit aerospace engineering into
tech culture—with its swag and lauding of the
hoodie—or to inspire twelve-year-old boys to participate in space travel in the future. Is this is the
contemporary version of freeze-dried ice cream?
Mars, here, is objectified. The frame of the
clock contains the whole planet, cropped right
up to the edge, suggesting an ability to manage
Mars as though the planet is own-able, attainable. Showing the planet without space fails to
acknowledge the long journey to the red planet
and its space in the skies. Consumers can place
a neatly packaged image of Mars on their wall,
in the form of a domestic object. Through this
wall clock, Mars is imbued with a sense of normalcy and a sense of safety: a kitsch object in
a domestic setting contains the unruly planet.
**
Screenshot of the SpaceX “Occupy Mars”
Wall Clock shows the Occupy Wall Street
message imposed onto the unsuspecting
planet. Image: SpaceX.
1 V
olker Welker, “From Disc to Sphere,” Cabinet no. 40
(Winter 2010–11), 25.
2 Nicholas de Monchaux, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011), 16.
3 Joe Moran, Reading the Everyday (New York: Routledge, 2005), 35.
4 “Webshop Privacy Policy,” SpaceX, http://shop.spacex.com/
dresscode_privacy_policy/.
This 2014 image shows NASA’s Journey to Mars, emphasizing its
partnerships with private companies. Image: NASA.
34
Percival Lowell’s sketch of Mars circa 1895,
with instructions to the printer. Image: Lowell
Observatory Archive.
This 1960 Douglas Aircraft ad illustrates a
space tourist peering down at the moon.
Image: Another Science Fiction: Advertising
the Space Race 1957–1962, 2010.
35
The SpaceX Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ship reuses rockets to
drive down the cost of space travel. Image: SpaceX.
◊◊
THINGS
Meg Farmer
ABSTRACT
Modern Preserves:
Mediatization’s Sticky
Role in the Preservation
Design of Mid-century
Domestic Architecture in
Southern California
KEYWORDS
Meg Farmer is a writer, researcher, and critic
with a background in art history, printmaking,
and magazine writing. She received two BFAs
from Massachusetts College of Art in 2005.
She has worked in award-winning interior
design and architecture firms such as BAMO
in San Francisco and Ellenzweig in Boston, and
has contributed to culture magazines such as
CHEEK. She hopes to create new platforms for
artists in various localities to build longstanding
communities. She received the first SVA Steven
Heller Design Research Award in 2014.
Anonymous
Authorship
Cathedrals of design
Domestic activity
Good life
Grassroots
Iconic
Image
Individual performance
Living architecture
Mediatization
Modern living
Participation
Preservation
Time
36
[email protected]
@mega4eva
megfarmer.squarespace.com
In February 2013, I visited the American sculptor Donald Judd’s
artist compound in Marfa, TX. I began to think about the preservation of this domestic space and others like it. Here, daily
activity was a ghost hovering around the objects, furniture,
and other tangibles of domestic life. I became interested in
the philosophical and technical issues of preservation, heightened in the case of modern buildings, which used experimental and non-durable materials.
I focused on three examples of Southern California midcentury modern homes, as this area has a plethora of famous
and anonymous examples due to the proximity to nearby
wartime industry and factories. The Eames Home (1949) and
the Chemosphere (1960) served as better-known examples
that highlight more rigid approaches to preservation. And a
few hours east were the Jackrabbit Homesteads (1945–1960),
small kit cabins designed to complete land claims from the
1938 Small Tract Act instituted by the US government to
shed unusable desert land. I found that the anonymity of the
Jackrabbit Homesteads provided approaches to preservation
that were in stark contrast to the strict methods of their iconic
counterparts, which had in their time been photographed,
written about, and glorified by the media as exemplars of modern living and domestic bliss.
Paradoxically, the lack of disseminated images of forgotten, anonymous mid-century homes like the Jackrabbit
Homesteads allows for a more dynamic approach to preservation, as the architecture can still be lived in, while the rigorous and often-precious preservation methods employed by
the iconic Eames House and the Chemosphere turn them into
museums, or static cathedrals of residential architecture.
Preservation methods that are developed on a grassroots
level in lesser-known modern houses, with sustainability and
livability as a main goal, might be useful to the preservation
of iconic structures where the approach is too limiting. This
research argues that preservation discourse and practice
would profit from an exchange of ideas between professional
and grassroots schools of thought.
37
◊◊
EXCERPT
Introduction
In July of 2005, W Magazine published a sixty-page portfolio shoot by fashion photographer
Steven Klein entitled “Domestic Bliss.” The concept, devised by Brad Pitt, featured the actor and
his Mr. and Mrs. Smith co-star and purported
new love Angelina Jolie in various scenes of
domesticity aptly set in a Palm Springs mid-century modern home around the year 1963. The
spreads evoke a bygone era, with colorful
scenes of domestic bliss clashing with darker
images of domestic turmoil. Among Klein’s photographs, one bears a strong resemblance to a
1960 photograph of a couple relaxing in the living room of Case Study House #21, built in 1958
by Pierre Koenig and photographed by eminent
architectural photographer Julius Shulman. In
Klein’s photograph, Jolie lounges on a teal sofa
in a Luisa Beccaria silk satin dress admiring her
Harry Winston wedding ring, while Pitt mixes
martinis in the background in a Thom Browne
wool suit. In Shulman’s earlier photograph,
the architecture frames a couple surrounded
by all the accoutrements of a modern lifestyle:
the wife lounges in a bright blue dress with her
arm resting over the back of the sofa, so as to
prop up her wedding ring; the husband (modeled by the home’s architect Koenig) stands at
the Harmon-Kardon stereo system. Shulman’s
image depicts modernism as a lifestyle, which
had by 1960 become codified and stylized after
a decade of absorption into the American public
consciousness through the growing avenues
of mass media, including shelter and lifestyle
magazines such as House and Garden, Life, and
Playboy as well as films and television.1 This is a
process called mediatization, in the sense of the
influence media exerts on society and culture.2
In an exhibition essay, Oriel L. Lucero makes a
keen sociological analysis of Shulman’s image:
Koenig does not appear as the home’s architect. Rather, he is the nonspecific husband
with his fictional wife who together exemplify
the hopes of the postwar utopia[…] Like the
drives of couples who migrated to Southern
California after the war, the man and wife in
Shulman’s photo[…] appear as if they have
realized in Los Angeles their search for the
good life[...] Like viewers who desire the
newest and best products for their home, this
non-specific couple appears as the ideal consumers representative of their class.3
Mid-century modern homes served as
settings to promote a kind of lifestyle that
the masses could aspire to. The W Magazine
shoot perpetuates an image of the past, even
as it is trying to acknowledge the disintegration of that mid-century lifestyle. What the W
Magazine tribute requests is an investigation
into the link between image and modern architectural preservation, both in literal photographs and also value-based perceptions. Three
cases of mid-century residential architecture
in Southern California—The Eames House, the
Chemosphere, and the Jackrabbit Homesteads—
are representations of the approaches in which
modern preservation design is being directed
technically and philosophically.
By any estimation, Los Angeles homes built
between 1949 and 1960 are valued as first-rate
examples of modern architecture.4 West Coast
military industries, the California population
boom, and the Case Study House Program
all contributed to the proliferation of modern architecture in this area. During the War,
the government provided ninety percent of
America’s capital for western industrial growth
and directly invested at least seventy billion
dollars in industries and military installations.5
The aircraft industry soared, while aluminum
plants and steel foundries lined up like motels
in a Monopoly game.
Among the postwar houses built, the three
examples herein illustrate not only the spectrum of modern home design at mid-century,
but also preservation approaches since. The
Eames House (1949) designed by the renowned
husband-and-wife team Charles and Ray Eames,
and the Chemosphere (1960) by American architect John Lautner have surpassed their fiftieth
year mark. This is the point at which historical
significance can be designated, according to
leading modern preservation expert Theodore
Prudon and the National Historic Preservation
Act of 1966.6
The Eames House is being rigorously
preserved because it is now a temple to two
remarkable individuals. It was preserved in photographs and in the daily life of the Eameses
themselves. The Chemosphere is less strictly
conserved, in part because of what it was perceived to be: a bachelor pad and party place.
Architectural historian Alan Hess describes the
two design approaches, noting, “The Eames
structure is rational, modular, and consistent
[while] the Lautner structure is inventive, less
rigid, and exuberant.” 7 Furthermore, The
Eames House is now run by a Foundation and
open to the public, while the Chemosphere
is privately owned. These two structures are
instructive in how their modern images were
introduced through the photography of the
time and how their forms persist through preservation efforts today.
Beyond these examples of residential modern architecture, in an area two hours west
of Los Angeles, Jackrabbit Homesteads litter
the Morongo Basin desert in various stages of
disrepair.8 Built in the mid-twentieth century,
these small cabins are now worn by time, some
more extremely than others. The prefabricated
materials were sold by commercial builders
as kit homes that could quickly be raised in
order to complete a land claim made possible
through the Small Tract Act of 1938.9 While
the Eames House and the Chemosphere have
been professionally preserved, the Jackrabbit
Homesteads are being preserved by their owners, which expands the preservation debate to
include amateur efforts. Interestingly, they are
currently undergoing a version of mediatization
through several avenues. There is the photography project and book by Kim Stringfellow titled
Jackrabbit Homestead: Tracing the Small Tract
Act in the Southern California Landscape, 1938–
2008. In addition, efforts to conserve these
structures have been widely documented on the
photography-based social platform Instagram,
through accounts like JT Homesteader, which
provides immediate documentation of one couple’s current restoration projects.
Architectural historian Beatriz Colomina
argues that modern architecture can be seen
as a frame for social expectations. She writes,
“Many of the most significant houses of this
century were produced for exhibitions, publications, fairs, competitions, and journals. Even
those houses that were built for actual clients
derived their main impact from their publication, before and after construction. In this
sense, it can be said that they are all exhibition houses.”10 This idea helps us understand
how images of lifestyle, namely those captured
by photographs, emerge in the preservation
continuum of important mid-century modern
homes in Southern California. While preservation design begins as a physical process of
prolonging a building’s life, it ends with a structure whose iconic image exhibits the modern
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in the “Domestic Bliss” issue of
W Magazine, July 2005. Image: Steven Klein.
38
Pierre Koenig’s 1958 Case Study House #21 in Arts and Architecture
Magazine, 1960. Image: Julius Shulman.
39
The Eames House Living Room, Case Study House #8, 203
Chautauqua Boulevard, Pacific Palisades, CA. Image: Meg Farmer.
Los Angeles Times magazine cover, April 30, 1961.
Image: Julius Shulman.
◊◊
spirit of yesteryear but whose materials are
often divorced from the original components
of the design.
What makes the preservation design of modern homes delicate at times is the nature of the
experimental materials. They were, in effect,
postwar recyclables of American military manufacturing.11 The raw supplies used for defense
technologies during wartime emerged in the
postwar period as experimental building materials. As Colomina puts it, “manufacturers were
turning wartime industry to peacetime, missiles
to washing machines.”12
American domesticity, the private life of a
family living within a home, became a national
preoccupation during those postwar years,
and publicizing modern domestic architecture
became an image of consumption. For the
first time, it was American and not European
modernism that caught the world’s attention;
Modernism flowered at the end of the 1940s in
Southern California, its birthplace in the United
States and the location of many of America’s
most significant examples of modern residential architecture. For this reason, mid-century
modern homes in Southern California have considerable historic significance. Philip Johnson’s
remarks during a 1955 speech reflect this: “No
magazine publishes, no school teaches anything
but modern, and modern architecture gets more
and more beautiful every year. And without
being chauvinistic, it can be said that architecture in this country is the best in the world.”13
Today, capturing our modern heritage is
gaining momentum in both professional and
popular spheres. In the institutional orbit, The
Getty Institute of Conservation (GIC) leapt forward with its Conserving Modern Architecture
Initiative (CMAI) in March of 2012 to provide
new and expert approaches to the preservation
Lily and Peter Stockman’s “Flat Top” Jackrabbit Homestead,
Yucca Valley, CA. Image: Meg Farmer.
of twentieth-century modern buildings. 14
Along with Escher Grunwardena Architects,
the CMAI has completed the first phase of
preservation for the admired Eames House.
Escher Grunwardena was also the preservation architectural firm for the Lautner-designed
Chemosphere, which landed an off-screen role
as the home of famed book publisher Benedict
Taschen. In the nonprofessional sector, many
Los Angeles based artists, like Lily Stockman,
have taken a tenderfoot approach to preserving what is left of the mid-century Jackrabbit
Homesteads in the Morongo Basin.
Jonathan Crisman, writing for Rice School
of Architecture’s journal PLAT, theorizes that
these cycles have social implications. He writes,
The gap between architectural representation and built form is a zone in which design
intentions and discursive agendas disappear,
shift, and emerge. Another gap however,
exists between a built form and its subsequent
mediatization, a gap whose outcomes, though
less often discussed within the discipline, are
of much greater social consequence.15
It is the latter gap that is of interest in this study,
where midcentury modern homes became
images of American domestic life, and cultural
icons. That gap between physical and perceived space transforms our relationship with
these built forms, and renders our perceptions
of domestic space into an exhibition space of
lifestyle.
There are four basic treatments for historic
properties: preservation, rehabilitation, restoration, and reconstruction. Preservation is the
process of applying necessary measures to sustain the existing form, integrity, and materials
of a historic property. Efforts generally target
40
the ongoing maintenance and repair of historic materials and features rather than extensive replacement and new construction. 16
Conserving our modern heritage usually falls
under the umbrella of preservation due to the
unique quality of the experimental materials
that have a short life cycle.
There lies an essential irony in efforts to
preserve modern architecture: Modernism in
domestic architecture was an enterprise that
by its very nature tried to minimize “historical
fabric.” In other words, the historic material
that remains in these homes today was at one
time experimental, industrial, and composed
of new systems of construction that are complicated assemblies of several parts. As preservation architect Frank Escher explains, “It is
absolutely true that for centuries neither materials nor methods of construction had changed
very much, and now suddenly in the twentieth
century, this all changes drastically.”17
According to Escher, the experimental technologies in building materials were not tried
and tested before implemented. Some held up
really well, others did not. If a common application such as a window wall in a modern home
fails, preservationists are forced to replace the
entire system of glass, gaskets, and the aluminum frame. In many cases, this leaves preservation architects having to remove a lot of the
historical elements that they would normally
want to retain. If much of the historic fabric is
removed in a modern dwelling, what is it we are
actually preserving? The actual physical structure or an idea based on an image?
1Thomas Hine, “The Search for the Postwar House,” in Blueprints
for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses,
(Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1989), 166–81.
2Stig Hjarvard, “The Mediatization of Society,” Nordicom Review
(29, 2008), 105–134.
3Oriel L. Lucero, “Selling Los Angels: The Use of Models in Julius
Shulman’s Architectural Photography,” in L.A. Obscura: The
Architectural Photography of Julius Shulman (Los Angeles: Fisher
Gallery, University of Southern California, 1998) 38–40.
4Alan Weintraub and Alan Hess, The Architecture of John Lautner,
(New York: Rizolli, 1999), 9.
5Hine and Faragher, The American West: A New Interpretive
History, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 515.
6Theodore Prudon, Preserving Modern Architecture, (Hoboken,
NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2008), 6.
7Weintraub and Hess, The Architecture of John Lautner, (New York:
Rizolli, 1999), 9.
8A Jackrabbit Homestead is the original term for a small desert
cabin, which was coined by mid-century pioneers and found in the
Palm Springs publication Desert Magazine from that same period.
9Kim Stringfellow, Jackrabbit Homestead: Tracing the Small Tract
Act in the Southern California Landscape, 1938–2008, (Chicago:
The Center for American Places at Columbia College, 2009), 5.
10Beatriz Colomina, “The Exhibition House,” in At the End of The
Century: 100 Years of Architecture (New York: Henry N. Abrams,
2000) 129–30.
11Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War, (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 2007), 12.
12Ibid. 8.
13Philip Johnson, “Style and International Style” (speech, Barnard
College, New York, April 30, 1955), in Writings, (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1979), 75.
14 Christopher Hawthorne, “New Getty Initiative Aims to Boost
Preservation of Modern Architecture,” The Los Angeles Times,
March 21, 2012, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/
culturemonster/2012/03/getty-modern-architecturepreservation-eames-house.html.
15Jonathan Crisman, “Pop-Aganada! Reading Julius Shulman” in
PLAT (Houston: Rice School of Architecture, Spring 2012), 107,
http://issuu.com/alphabetical/docs/pop-aganda.
16Weeks and Grimmer, “The Secretary of the Interiors Standards
for the treatment of Historic Properties with Guidelines for
Preserving, Rehabilitating, Restoring, and Reconstructing Historic
Buildings,” 17.
17Frank Escher, Skype Interview with author, February 2, 2015.
41
††
THINGS
Susan Merritt
ABSTRACT
Lay Me Down to Sleep:
The Design of Coffins,
Caskets, and Alternative
Containers
KEYWORDS
Susan Merritt, graphic designer and professor
emeritus, was head of the Graphic Design program at San Diego State University until 2012.
She co-authored The Web Design WOW! Book
(Peachpit Press,1998) and wrote the teaching
manual that accompanied the fourth edition
of Meggs’ History of Graphic Design (Wiley,
2011). She and husband Calvin Woo co-founded
Design Innovation Institute, a nonprofit that
fosters experimentation and collaboration
between traditional and non-traditional areas
of design.
Anonymous
Body bag
Burial
Casket
Coffin
Compost
Corpse
Death
Decomposition
Industrialization
Preservation
Standardization
Time
42
[email protected]
Throughout our country’s history, coffins, caskets, and—more
recently—alternative containers have been invented or perfected by anonymous contributors working in the factories
that manufacture them. These wood and metal boxes that
have become the standard for American burial are being
called into question due to changing attitudes towards death
and the shift from indifference to action on the part of some
contemporary designers.
This research tracks the journey of a corpse from site of
death to burial, through the containers it may inhabit. First,
I examine the containers that are designed to enclose, and
preserve as much as possible the corpse. These include body
bags, coffins, and caskets. Within this category, I consider:
the evolution from eight-sided English coffin to four-sided
American casket; the desire to preserve the body and methods to achieve preservation; the introduction of gasket mechanisms for sealing bodies in metal caskets to protect them
from the elements; standardization of design, materials, and
casket dimensions, including oversized caskets for bodies
that don’t fit the established standards.
The second part of my research considers an alternative route for the corpse, in which it is not preserved but
rather encouraged to decay and decompose. This section
encompasses Green burial, the rise of Green cemeteries and
memorial preserves, sustainable materials and biodegradable
burial containers, shrouds, and unassembled casket kits. It
also introduces the work of several young designers who are
stretching the boundaries of death by reimagining burial practices and reconfiguring burial containers through the use of
biodegradable materials and sustainable technologies.
43
††
EXCERPT
Human Factors: Industrial Standardization
of Size and Measurements
Dimensions of a coffin were originally determined by the size of the person. A carpenter
would measure the corpse and build a custom
box to fit the body. As in other industries, such
as the automotive industry, a quest for efficiency during the industrialization era led to
standardization. An advertisement for James G.
Van Cleve’s Casket Corpse Preserver printed in
an 1876 issue of The Casket, a nineteenth-century journal dedicated to the profession of
undertaking, references four common sizes:
3 feet 9 inches, 4 feet 9 inches, 5 feet 9 inches,
and 6 feet 2 inches. Standardization was among
the concerns discussed at the 1894 convention
of the National Burial Case Association: “All
caskets will be 6 feet 6 inches by 21 inches.”
Anything over 21 inches was considered “double width,” and warranted a surcharge of $2 for
oak and $5 for walnut, redwood, and cedar.1
Today the standard dimensions of a casket
have settled in at 6 feet 6 inches by 24 inches.2
Heights vary according to design but most are
at least two feet high.
But what if the corpse doesn’t fit into a standard casket?
The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention report that 69% of adults over 20
years old are overweight or obese.3 In response
to the need to accommodate body types that do
not conform to the established standards, casket manufacturers in the United States began
custom-building oversized caskets about twenty
years ago, according to Keith Davis, owner of
Goliath Caskets in Lynn, Indiana, whose largest casket is 52 inches wide and holds up to
1,000 pounds.4 Batesville, one of the largest
industrial casket manufacturer in the country,
features “larger-sized”5 caskets in the Burial
Solutions section of their website. Many of the
caskets in Batesville’s so-called Dimensions
Oversized® line are “available in many of the
same materials, colors, finishes and designs”
that Batesville offers in their “traditionally sized
models” in order to provide a “comfortable fit
for your loved one.”6 These exceptions to existing standards place additional demands on the
architecture and environmental design within
aging cemeteries, many of which date back to
the 1800s.
Reimagining Burial Rituals
Where earlier systems of burial aimed to preserve the individual corpse and protect it from
the environment, new concepts aim to protect
the environment and conserve natural habitat
by integrating the body into the ecosystem.
The following contemporary design proposals
reconfigure the burial container through the
use of biodegradable materials and sustainable
technologies.
Italian designers Citelli and Bretzel are the
first in Italy to promote Green cemeteries. Their
egg-shaped burial containers, called capsula
mundi, are made from “starch plastic,” or
bioplastic, a bio-degradable material derived
from renewable plant sources, in this case sustainable “seasonal plants such as potatoes and
corn.”7 The corpse is placed in the capsule
in a fetal position and planted like a seed. A
tree is placed on top of the burial site with the
hope that it will seed a forest. This counters
the accepted practice of cutting down trees to
make wooden coffins, the burial container currently required in Italy. This is also a symbolic
gesture on the part of the designers: “the tree
represents the union between the earth and the
sky, material and immaterial, body and soul.”8
Placing the body in a fetal position in a seedpod
is an appealing cyclical concept as it returns the
deceased to the posture of the body just before
birth and establishes a discernible connection
between birth and death. This position is in
stark contrast to the sleeping pose of a corpse
in a casket.
Visual artist and designer Jae Rhim Lee
wore the first prototype of her Infinity Burial
Suit when she presented her concept at the
2011 TED Global conference.9 Lee’s concept
hinges on developing a unique strain of fungi,
which she calls the infinity mushroom. The
fungi would be cultivated, the spores infused
into thread, and the thread woven into fabric from which the suit would be made. The
deceased would be dressed in the suit when
buried and these mushrooms would be trained
to decompose the buried corpse while remediating toxins in the body. It is Lee’s hope that
“the cultivation process” will promote “acceptance of and a personal engagement with death
and decomposition.”10
The Urban Death Project, a nonprofit
founded by Seattle architect Katrina Spade,
who studied sustainable agriculture before
studying architecture, proposes composting
the deceased and harnessing “the potential
of our bodies after we’ve died.”11 Spade was
inspired by the “nurse log,” which is a decaying
tree that grows new life as it decomposes in the
forest.12 She developed a prototype of a threestory building with a central vault, a burial container that Spade calls the core. The shrouded
corpse would be ceremoniously carried in a
sling up a ramp that encircles the three-story
burial container and laid to rest at the top on a
mixture of carbon-rich wood chips and sawdust
that fills the core. Imagine the open rotunda of
the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim
Museum filled with wood chips and sawdust.
Goliath Casket custom-builds caskets for
bodies that do not conform to the established
standards. Image: AP Photo.
This flat-packed biodegradable casket kit can
be bought ahead of time.
Image: Natural Burial Company.
Patented in 1870, J.C. Taylor’s Improved
Corpse Preserver used ice to preserve the
corpse. Image: The Casket, May 1876.
44
The “Capsula Mundi” is a burial container
made from a biodegradable material.
Image: Capsula Mundi
Royal Color Line, Springfield Metallic Casket, 1929. Image: Casket
and Funeral Supply Association of America: 100 Years of Service
According to the website this biological process would take about one month to transform a
body into nutrient-rich soil with the help of extra
nitrogen and moisture as needed. Compost
can be picked up by the family and dispersed
however they like. Since there could be thirty
bodies in the core at one time, it seems unlikely
that people could be sure that the compost is
actually the remains of their loved ones. Spade
believes that “connecting death to the cycle of
nature will help people face their own mortality
and bring comfort to the bereaved.”13 In this
case, as Sloane notes, the grave is of no cultural
importance.
All three of these concepts address growing
discontent with current burial practice. It will
take time for the public to get used to these radical ideas if it ever does. Funeral director James
Olson who is also “chairman of the green burial
work group of the National Funeral Directors
Association” likens the Urban Death Project to
the introduction of cremation, “If I had told you
50 years ago that we were going to burn your
loved one at 2000 degrees and pulverize their
skeleton in a machine and give you back the
crushed bones, you would have said, ‘Eww.’”14
1 M
ichael Beardsley, “A Brief History of the Funeral Supply Industry
in the United States,” Casket and Funeral Supply Association of
America: 100 Years of Service (New York: Keith M. Merrick Co,
Inc., 2013), 34.
2 Mike Beardsley, Vice President Sales & Marketing Emeritus, Thacker
Caskets, Inc., email interview with author, February 20, 2015.
3 “Obesity and Overweight,” Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesity-overweight.htm.
4 Aishah Hasnie, “Caskets for the Obese Booming,”
CBSnews.com, June 22, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=_DNe6zPFT5Y.
5 “Dimensions Oversized,” Batesville, https://www.batesville.com/
what-we-do/burial-caskets/dimensions-oversized/.
6 Ibid.
7 “The Project,” Capsula Mundi, http://www.capsulamundi.it/
progetto_eng.html.
8 Ibid.
9 “My Mushroom Burial Suit,” Jae Rhim Lee, https://www.ted.
com/talks/jae_rhim_lee.
10 “Infinity Mushroom,” The Infinity Burial Project, 2015,
http://infinityburialproject.com/mushroom.
11 “Inside the Urban Death Project” and “The Process of Human
Composting,” NPR Next Generation Radio, http://www.askcbi.
org/nextgeneration/?p=360.
12 Catrin Einhorn, “A Project to Turn Corpses Into Compost,”
The New York Times, April 13, 2015, http://www.nytimes.
com/2015/04/14/science/a-project-to-turn-corpses-into-compost.
html?_r=0.
13 Catrin Einhorn, “A Project to Turn Corpses Into Compost,”
The New York Times, April 13, 2015, http://www.nytimes.
com/2015/04/14/science/a-project-to-turn-corpses-into-compost.
html?_r=0.
14 Ibid.
45
THINGS
Christina
Milan
Extending the Sensory
Experience: Digital
Technologies for Design
Displays
ABSTRACT
Design museums are grappling with how to use digital technologies to enrich the visitor experience and to enhance the
display of their design collections and exhibitions. As digital
technologies become increasingly ubiquitous, people expect
them to be a part of the way they engage with the artifacts
collected by museums. This changing behavior pressures
museums to rethink the way they present design. Museum
leadership and personnel changes reflect a growing interest in
the application of digital technologies, specifically, the emergence of in-house digital media teams.
Through theoretical framing and interviews with industry professionals, my research examines a selection of three
design displays in New York City that integrate digital technologies through different tactics and at different scales: “Charles
James: Beyond Fashion” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
2014, which employed robots, visual apparatus, and animations in its display; the 2014 reopening of the Cooper Hewitt
Smithsonian Design Museum, which overhauled its infrastructure to introduce interactive experiences; and “Design
and Violence” at the Museum of Modern Art, 2013, which
bypassed the physical space altogether in favor of accumulating content on a website platform. Through this range
of examples, I explore how digital media technologies can
effectively recontextualize, and thereby enhance, the sensory
experience surrounding design objects in design museums,
yet always at the risk of undermining the authenticity of the
physical object.
☞ ☞
KEYWORDS
Christina Milan completed her BA at Rutgers
University with a double major in History and
Art History and a minor in Political Science.
After a yearlong intermission as an intern
with the Smithsonian American Art Museum,
she earned an MA from NYU in Visual Arts
Administration. Her professional experience
includes project-based work at interactive
design firm Potion and, most recently, as a
member of Microsoft’s App Experiences design
team. Cultural interests run the gamut from
exhibition design to new media, and from fine
dining to agricultural sustainability.
Augmentation
Aura
Authorship
Curation
Data
Digital collection
Education
Immersion
Interaction
Performance
Participation
Prosthetic
Risk
Robot
Storytelling
Visitor numbers
46
[email protected]
47
EXCERPT
In May 2014, The Metropolitan Museum of
Art’s Costume Institute inaugurated its threeyear renovation with the exhibition “Charles
James: Beyond Fashion.”1 The Institute’s new
state-of-the-art gallery space was conceived
to incorporate multimedia presentations. This
afforded the opportunity to present a high-tech
interpretation of the early twentieth century
couturier’s métier.2 Exhibition curators Harold
Koda and Jan Glier Reeder hired interdisciplinary design firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R)
to present James’s construction methods from
the perspectives that inspired his work: sculpture, science, mathematics, and architecture.
guiding the viewer’s eye around the garment.
Cameras closely examined details like a garment
inspector. The lasers scrutinized like a forensic
scientist. Their appearance suggested a type of
tactical interface to pull the viewer into the mental processes of gathering data.5 As a counterpart to the silent robotic dance, the video animations act as a portal into the scientific analysis.
The animations extended the natural limits
of vision and cognition by presenting explanatory detail invisible by observation of a static
garment, extending their physical reality. DS+R
refers to its animation approach as “reflections
about looking.”6 The animations probed architectural views of the garments: petticoat layers,
patterns of the fabric fibers, and panel constructions that revealed the tensile and compressive
nature of movement, geometric drapery, combinations of materials that produced sculptural
effects, and the garment’s relationship to the
human body.7 These views emphasized James’s
architectural use of construction, foundation,
and structure. Explanatory text seems superfluous by comparison.8 These views also provided
a road map to guide an unusual but necessary
research process for the animations.
imaging—approaches usually reserved for
archaeological or anatomical specimens.10 Physical study was as critical to the design
process as physical analysis was to the research
process. Kumar Atre, a trained architect and
DS+R’s media manager for the exhibition, contributed tools common to architectural practice
for further research and deeper analysis. He
assumed the role of designer to explore how to
digitally reconstruct the garment. His approach
combined analog and digital methods such as
study sketches of the garment, patternmaking
standards, analysis of human form, and garment density. To collect data for the three-dimensional animation visuals, he used a combination of 3D scanners, 360° photography, and
visual mapping techniques.11
To compliment these scientific, forensic,
and architectural approaches, didactic documentation helped to ensure that digital narratives were faithful to the specific physical
object. The conservation team’s research process translated curatorial knowledge into educational materials for DS+R. “We had to explain
to the architects what was poetic about a garment,” explained costume conservator Glenn
Petersen.12 Petersen annotated photographs of
garments and patterns with fashion education
notes, for instance, a definition to explain what
it meant to “cut on the bias.” Petersen also created GIF and video animation mock-ups to illustrate the construction from pattern piece to full
garment. The team also scrutinized each animation for accuracy. “The animations couldn’t
show anything that was wrong. For example,
if they used a gridded background that looked
like the grain of the fabric, and it was wrong,
we had them change it. The grain of the fabric
is very important for dressmaking.”13
The research process also yielded a deeper
level of expertise on the material objects that
positioned the conservation team as advisors
to the curatorial team. The curators knew that
James’s patterns were unusual and the seams
of his garments concealed intentional aesthetic and architectural detail, but the analysis revealed information about the garments
not previously known. Because they were
intimately familiar with the garments, the conservators could clarify James’s vague archival
descriptions.14 For instance, some of the garment names were thought to be simply playful,
but they were actually pragmatic descriptions
echoed by their construction.15 X-ray analysis
of his Umbrella Dress revealed that James used
the actual ribs of an umbrella in the panels of the
skirt so that it would fall in perfect triangles.16
The Taxi Dress, named to imply how easy it was
to take off in the back of a taxi, was previously
thought to be a multi-layered item, but analysis
revealed that it was created as a single piece of
fabric draped several times around the body.17
☞ ☞
Prosthetics for Extrasensory Analysis
From the beginning of the planning process,
the design strategy was to demystify James’s
unorthodox garment construction with an
equally intensive and unorthodox visual analysis. “Architects often use fashion as a metaphor,”
explained DS+R co-founder Elizabeth Diller.
“When we started to see the clothes through an
architect’s lens, we could understand James’s
geometry and construction.”3 To express these
concepts, the technical pageantry needed to be
meaningful, not “technology for technology’s
sake.” Diller explained, “We always start with
the same basic question when we’re working
in a museum environment: How do we mediate
the viewer’s relation to the artifact?”4
Camera lenses, lasers, and digital stories all
served as prosthetic mediators to enhance the
natural sensory experience for viewing objects.
In their performance state, the robots were illusionary devices rather than functional tools—a
subtle parallel to James’s own work, which nods
to function but prioritizes visual effect. These
robotic arms behaved as human limbs. They
extended like the arms of a fashion designer,
Forensic Research for Digital Objects
DS+R’s animations prompted a deep forensic
analysis on the physical objects that would not
have otherwise occurred. The conservation
team worked outside of their normal procedures
to collect new types of information.9 Standard
conservation analysis techniques were used
first: archival descriptions, photographs, muslins, patterns, new 360-degree spin photography,
and conservation reports. Additional techniques
to capture visual detail of invisible construction
and materials included X-rays, polarized light
microscopy, and reflectance transformation
The Pen, 2015. Image: Cooper Hewitt
Smithsonian Design Museum.
Upstairs gallery detail with Clover Leaf Ball
Gown, “Charles James: Beyond Fashion,”
2014. Image: The Metropolitan Museum
of Art.
48
Still from the Clover Leaf Ball Gown animation, “Charles James: Beyond Fashion,” 2014.
Image: Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
API Stack pyramid diagram. Image: Cooper
Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.
Archive page detail, “Design and Violence,” 2015.
Image: The Museum of Modern Art.
1 T
he renovation incorporated a new study center, exhibition space,
and conservation facilities for garment analysis, restoration treatment, and long-term storage.
2 James intended his garments to be studied as objects of fashion
history, so he built relationships with his clients so that they would
donate his pieces to the Brooklyn Museum. In 2009 the Brooklyn
Museum donated its textile collection to the Costume Institute. A
subsequent acquisition of James’s complete archives allowed the
Institute to pursue this comprehensive exhibition. “Charles James:
Beyond Fashion,” press release, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
(April 10, 2014) http://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/
press-room/exhibitions/2013/charles-james#.
3 Carol Vogel, “Architectural Underpinnings of Cinderella,”
The New York Times, April 30, 2014. http://www.nytimes.
com/2014/05/01/arts/design/the-dresses-of-charles-james-at-themet.html.
4 Mitch McEwen, “DS+R Scanning Beyond Fashion at the Met,”
Huffpost Arts and Culture, Huffington Post (June 2, 2014)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mitch-mcewen/dsr-scanningbeyond-fashi_b_5421283.html.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Kumar Atre, interview with author, February 12, 2015.
8 Mikhail Grinwald, “Observations on ‘Beyond Fashion,’” Log
Magazine, issue 32 (New York: Anyone Corporation, 2014): 24.
9 Kumar Atre, interview with author, February 12, 2015.
10 Rachel High, “Charles James: Beyond Fashion—Interview
with Conservators Sarah Scaturro and Glenn Petersen,” The
Metropolitan Museum of Art (June 17, 2014) http://www.
metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/now-at-the-met/2014/
charles-james-conservation.
11 Kumar Atre, interview with author, February 12, 2015.
12 Glenn Petersen, interview with author, March 12, 2015.
13 Ibid.
14 Glenn Petersen, interview with author, March 12, 2015.
15 Ibid.
16 Kumar Atre, interview with author, February 12, 2015.
17 Harold Koda, “The Calculus of Fashion: Process and Oeuvre,”
Charles James (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
2014): 53–231; 56.
49
‡‡
THINGS
Justin Zhuang
ABSTRACT
Piracy & Design:
Rethinking Intellectual
Property in the Third
Industrial Revolution
KEYWORDS
Justin Zhuang is a Singapore-born writer and
researcher interested in design, cities, culture, history, and the media. He has written
extensively about Singapore design for various
publications including Design Observer, art4d,
and AIGA’s Eye on Design. Since graduating
from journalism school, Justin has worked on
a variety of editorial projects including the
award-winning online site Reclaim Land: The
Fight for Space in Singapore and several books,
including INDEPENDENCE: The History of
Graphic Design in Singapore Since the 1960s
(The Design Society, 2012). Justin won the SVA
Design Research’s Monotype Scholarship for
Excellence in Design Criticism in 2014.
Authenticity
Authorship
3D printing
Commons
Competition
Copying
Creativity
Democracy
Innovation
Intellectual property
Knockoffs
Language
Legal systems
Makers
Open design
Users
Value
[email protected]
50
@justinzhuang
justinzhuang.com
Knockoffs, fakes, and counterfeits are the bane of modern
industrial design. They are unauthorized copies of designers’
intellectual property. They are the stolen profits of manufacturers. They are the products of piracy: a phenomenon wrecking an industry’s will to innovate and create “original” and
“authentic” design. But to consumers, piracy offers affordable goods, diversity of options, and sometimes, even better
design. Piracy isn’t black and white like a pirate flag, but a
nebulous concept whose edges ebb and flow like the waves
of the sea. What is a copy to some is homage to another, what
is original today is tomorrow’s evolution, what is piracy to the
industry is competition to society.
How will we recognize piracy and intellectual property
with the rise of digital fabrication technologies like 3D printing? By democratizing access to the means of production, it
will become easier for users to copy, remix, and self-repair
objects in ways that traditionally infringe upon a designer’s
intellectual property. This calls for a need to redefine what
piracy means. In response to the digital revolution, some
designers and manufacturers have strengthened protection
over their designs via the law and technology, while others are
opening up access to them, believing that design is a collaborative process that benefits from a community working on it
together. Will the rise of open design see an end to piracy?
This research examines more closely the relationships
between piracy, intellectual property, and industrial design
by studying a variety of case studies and interviews with practitioners. Beyond just a legal and economic issue, piracy is a
reflection of society’s assumptions about the design process,
what a designer is, and what design is for. Piracy is a ghost that
will always haunt the world of design.
51
‡‡
EXCERPT
Fake Originals and Competitive Pirates
It is fabricated in the same way that thousands
have been made since 1950. It is produced
using the same machines built specially for its
assembly. It even matches the drawing on a
patent issued when it was first designed. But the
fiberglass chair manufactured by furniture company Modernica is not an “authentic” Eames
Shell Chair—at least, in the eyes of rival furniture-maker Herman Miller.
To Herman Miller, which first mass-produced the chair for the late American designers Charles and Ray Eames, it didn’t matter if
Modernica made the shell chairs in the same
way it did for close to forty years. Nor was it
important that Modernica had then bought over
the very equipment used by Herman Miller to
produce the shell chairs again in 2000.
Provenance—having a clear record of origin—wasn’t enough to establish “authenticity.”
According to Herman Miller, it was they
who brought back the “Authentic Eames
Molded Plastic Chair” when they restarted
production after stopping for nearly a decade
because the process was deemed environmentally unsound. Never mind that their new
version was now made in recyclable polypropylene. In 2013, the company reverted to
offering fiberglass chairs after figuring out a
new manufacturing process that was safer for
the environment. In each case, the material
was changed, the process was tweaked, but
somehow, Herman Miller’s chair was always
the “authentic” version.
As the company explained in 2014 via a seven-page response to frequently asked questions
about its shell chair, Herman Miller’s version
was in accordance with the “vision and standards” of the Eameses—even though both had
passed long ago.1 Charles died in 1978, and
Ray, a decade later. “Authenticity” in Herman
Miller’s view came from its history of working with the designers, and now, the Eames
Office, an organization the designers’ descendants founded to preserve their legacy. This
was unlike Modernica, which although using
the original machines, had bought them from
suppliers that Ray and Herman Miller had
broke off from after three decades because
of “quality issues”—which also brings to question the “authenticity” of the chairs produced
before. “Modernica claims authority based
on provenance, however, the detail omitted
from its story is that its provenance is one that
Ray Eames flatly rejected,” stated Herman
Miller. “Customers buying an Eames design
from Herman Miller can rest assured they are
investing in an authentic well-made product.”2
Making clear its disapproval of Modernica’s
chairs, Herman Miller sued the company for
infringing on its intellectual property and false
advertising. Modernica was just one of the
many “unlicensed knockoffs” the company has
been combating for years.
But unlike in art, where authenticity can be
traced to a piece of work (consider Leonardo da
Vinci’s portrait of the Mona Lisa in The Louvre
versus print-on-demand copies of it sold at the
museum shop), the concept of the original in
industrial design is a manufactured myth. In his
essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” the late cultural critic Walter
Benjamin theorized that the “authenticity” of
an object lies in its authority of being actually
present in a particular environment and history,
and this unique “aura” depreciates as the thing
becomes easily reproduced.3
What are we then to make of mass-produced
objects, which are essentially identical copies of
one another? Journalist Marcus Boon explains
in his book In Praise of Copying that such capitalist commodities are presented as “perfect
copies” that are cut off from history and the
world, and it is through branding, advertising
and marketing that manufacturers transform
what is “essentially generic into highly charged
objects of desire.”4 This is how Herman Miller
and Modernica lay claim to selling “authentic”
chairs. By owning the trademark to the word
“Eames,” only Herman Miller’s furniture can be
directly identified with the designers. Nowhere
on Modernica’s website does it attribute what
the company calls “[e]asily one of the most
important and recognizable designs of the
twentieth century” to the Eameses. Instead,
the company links its “Case Study Fiberglass
Chairs” to how they were originally made:
“To ensure authenticity of production, the
initial shell chair production was overseen by
Sol Fingerhut and Irv Green, the same team
employed over sixty years ago to develop the
original technology.” 5 So while Modernica
claims authenticity through how its chairs are
manufactured, Herman Miller depends on the
endorsement of the Eames Office. Or as Charles
Eames himself once said, “The details are not
details; they make the product.”6 In this case,
the product is authenticity.
The Gray Market of Originals
Claiming one’s work as “authentic” is a growing movement in industrial design as designers
and manufacturers battle against piracy and try
to distinguish themselves from copycats and
their knockoffs. For anti-piracy organization Be
Original Americas, “authenticity” encompasses
a set of beliefs, such as the idea that designs are
the property of a designer, an “original design”
is more valuable and durable over time, protecting designs would incentivize the creation
of new ones, and that purchasing an “authentic
design” is an investment in the future of design.7
In contrast, copies and knockoffs are “not original” because they “intentionally deceive or confuse the customer regarding design origin.”8
Promoting designs as “original” and “authentic” is a response to existing intellectual property laws lack of protection for design. In the
United States, a design such as the Eames Shell
Chair is not copyrightable, unlike literature and
art, and any patent on this mid-century furniture
has already expired. Utility patents last twenty
years, while design patents protect for just
fourteen years. Modernica can legally manufacture the shell chairs today, and they are not
the only ones. In the eyes of the law, industrial
design primarily produces useful works possibly protected by patents, rather than creative
expressions that automatically deserve copyright protection.9
This is a historical legacy of nineteenth-century Britain, when crafts and mechanical inventions were regarded as things achievable by
anyone who followed a common set of methods, processes and knowledge, according to
historian Adrian Johns in Piracy. An anti-patent
camp even emerged during this period, arguing
against the system that “denied the progressive character of industrial society,” and adding that, “inventors were not heroes at all, but
everymen.”10 In contrast, literary and art works
were expressions of the mind and the property
of an individual. Today, this distinction continues in how the law recognizes industrial design
objects as containing both functional (protected
by utility patents), and artistic aspects (covered
by copyright or design patents). This “conceptual separability” is far from easy to determine,
however, particularly when design is increasingly seen as art.
Shell armchair with wire base by Herman Miller in plastic (left) ($459)
versus Modernica’s fiberglass version ($395). Image: Modernica.
52
53
The first-generation iPod from Apple (right) as compared to Braun’s
T3 pocket radio from 1958. Image: Cult of Mac.
The calculator app on Apple’s 2007 iPhone model (left) and Braun’s
1977 ET44 calculator. Image: Cult of Mac.
‡‡
In a paper supporting copyright protection
for fashion design, attorney Brandon Scruggs
points to how architecture works have since
received copyright protection in the United
States in recognition of their “artistic nature,”
and he argued that fashion deserves the same
because many see it as a form of artistic expression today, and it has become a highly valuable
industry as well.11 The same can be said of all
disciplines of design. Like the art world, design
has christened its own canon of icons and masters—like the Shell Chair and the Eameses—and
it has become an important sector for countries
developing creative economies and districts.
In this context, piracy is a threat to the established design order. To Herman Miller’s Director
of Communications Mark Schurman, piracy
works something like this: “Picture a bunch of
rats running around the feet of an elephant, if
they feel they can come in and grab one peanut
and sell one hundred knockoffs, then they’ll
do it.”12 This view echoes what Ettore Rotelli
and Patrizia Scarzella wrote in their book, In
Defence of Design. Also advocating for industrial design to receive intellectual property
protection, the authors call piracy “detrimental
parasiticism” that wastes resources and exploits
the work of others. But the duo also acknowledged that a copy belongs on a spectrum of
objects, ranging from creations inspired by
existing designs to the “slavish reproduction
of an original” which they term a counterfeit.13
They dismissed the entire range of copies all
the same, but their definition suggests that
piracy isn’t as black-and-white as anti-piracy
organizations frame it to be. What is a knockoff
could be a “replica” and a copy of something
could be “inspired by”—it is a matter of perception, just as how anti-piracy organizations
have tried to build up their works as “authentic”
Patent drawings for the base construction of Eames shell chairs.
and “original” design. The history of piracy
supports this view. In Piracy, Johns recounts
how in the eighteenth century, it was legitimate
for anyone to reprint books somewhere other
than where they were initially published, and
these same books were only regarded as piratical when they were re-imported to their place
of origin. That “piracy was a property not of
objects alone, but of objects in space,” suggests
the phenomenon isn’t static, but the product of
a changing web of relations.14
Consider the case of Apple, the computer
company celebrated for its innovative product
design and recognized as one of the world’s most
valuable companies today. It is also well known
for aggressively fighting piracy.15 Not only does
Apple try to patent all its designs—from the rounded-edged rectangular shape of its iPads to the
transparent interiors of its Apple stores—it also
has a history of suing competitors like Samsung
and HTC for copying its products.16 When asked
about piracy, Apple’s chief designer, Jonathan
Ive, once railed, “It’s not copying, it’s theft. They
stole our time, time we could have had with our
families. I actually feel quite strongly about it. It’s
funny—I was talking to somebody and they said
do you think when somebody copies what you
do it’s flattering? No.”17
But as many have pointed out, Ive’s designs
for Apple look similar to the work that celebrated German industrial designer Dieter
Rams did for the appliance company Braun in
the 1960s.18 Compare the all-white rectangular first-generation iPod to Braun’s T3 pocket
radio. Then there was the first native calculator
app for the iPhone: essentially a digitized Braun
ET44 calculator, right down to the orange “=”
button. Instead of calling out Apple’s designs
as copies, others describe them as “homage” or hail the works as “a great evolution,”
54
suggesting that copying can be creative too.19
In their 2014 exhibition at Mexico City’s Archivo
Diseño y Arquitectura, “Copies: Transformation
and Development in Creative Processes,” curators Cecilia León de la Barra and Jorge Gardoni
found that copying in design could have a positive influence. “When you copy as a part of a
creative process, you understand how things
are done, and then you can make a new version and also a new object,” wrote the curators in an email.20 They concluded that it was
challenging to identify “real originals” as most
objects are evolutions or transformations of one
another. What matters for them is the intention
of the copier. In the case of Apple, many of its
supporters have pointed out the differences in
function from Braun products. Ive has also publicly acknowledged Rams as an inspiration, and
the latter has reciprocated with admiration for
Apple too.21 Another reason why Apple gets
away with copying is evident in a 2012 incident
when Swiss railway operator SBB discovered
its trademarked station clock design had been
copied by Apple for its new iPad. But instead
of accusing Apple of stealing its time—like Ive
did of piracy—the company said, “SBB isn’t
hurt, but proud that this icon of watch design is
being used by a globally active and successful
business.”22
Modernica manufactures Eames shell chairs using machines first
designed for it. Does that make them “authentic”? Image: Modernica.
1“Herman Miller Shell Chair FAQs,” (2014), http://www.hermanmiller.com/content/dam/store/documents/herman_miller_
shell_chair_faq.pdf.
2Ibid.
3Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed.
Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 221.
4Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 2010), 187.
5“Product Details,” Modernica, http://modernica.net/rocker-sideshell.html.
6“Charles and Ray Eames,” Herman Miller, http://www.
hermanmiller.com/designers/eames.html.
7“Our Manifesto We Believe...”, Be Original Americas, http://
www.beoriginalamericas.com/about-us/.
8“Not Original,” Be Original Americas, http://www.
beoriginalamericas.com/not-original/.
9“Useful Articles,” U.S. Copyright Office, http://www.copyright.
gov/fls/fl103.html.
10Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from
Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2009), 271
11Brandon Scruggs, “Should Fashion Design Be Copyrightable?,”
Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property 6,
no. 122–137 (2007).
12Linda Geiser, “Be Original with Herman Miller,” Modestics,
http://modestics.com/blog/beoriginal-herman-miller.
13Ettore Rotelli and Patrizia Scarzella, In Defence of Design: The
Issue of the Faux in the Industrial Production (Milan: Edizioni Lybra
Immagine, 1991).
14Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from
Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2009), 13.
15Charles Duhigg and Steve Lohr, “The Patent, Used as Sword,”
The New York Times, 8 October 2012.
16Matt Macari, “Apple Finally Gets Its Patent on a Rectangle
with Rounded Corners,” The Verge, http://www.theverge.
com/2012/11/7/3614506/apple-patents-rectangle-with-rounded-corners. and Valentina Palladino, “Apple Store Receives
Trademark for ‘Distinctive Design and Layout’,” Wired,
http://www.wired.com/2013/01/apple-store-trademark.
17Anna Winston, “Design Education Is ‘Tragic’ Says Jonathan
Ive,” Dezeen, http://www.dezeen.com/2014/11/13/
design-education-tragic-says-jonathan-ive-apple.
18Killian Bell, “The Braun Products That Inspired Apple’s Iconic
Designs [Gallery],” Cult of Mac, http://www.cultofmac.com/
188753/the-braun-products-that-inspired-apples-iconic-designsgallery/.
19Anthony Wing Kosner, “Jony Ives’ (No Longer So) Secret Design
Weapon,” Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/11/30/jony-ives-no-longer-so-secret-design-weapon/.;
Jesus Diaz, “1960s Braun Products Hold the Secrets to Apple’s
Future,” Gizmodo, http://gizmodo.com/343641/1960s-braunproducts-hold-the-secrets-to-apples-future.
20Cecilia León de la Barra and Jorge Gardoni, e-mail interview with
author, September 8, 2014.
21Taryn Fiol, “A Side-by-Side Comparison of Apple and Braun
Designs,” apartment therapy, http://www.apartmenttherapy.
com/apple-design-doesnt-fall-far-from-brauns-tree-176668.
22Catherine Bosley, “Swiss Railway Weighs Challenge
to Apple over Trademark Clock,” Reuters,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/21/
us-apple-iphone-clock-idUSBRE88K0MK20120921.
55
Key to Footnote Symbols
Before numbered footnotes became common
practice to indicate discursive asides or citations, symbols were used to annotate a text.
Often mocked for their association with scholarly pedantry, in fact this chorus of footnote
symbols is bursting with drama: Greek history,
daggers, death, and stars, all hide within these
tiny superscript marks.
*
Asterisk Our first and oldest footnote symbol, the asterisk was developed by Homeric scholars as a
way to leave critical comments on manuscripts.
Three lines cross at one point to make an asteriskos, or “little star,” in the footnote constellation.
†
Dagger Originally this was a humble “little roasting spit”
for ancient Greek barbecue, although when
wielded by a scholarly editor, it could be used
murderously, to skewer a writer’s words. The
dagger, when placed before a name or year, is
also used to indicate death.
‡
Double Dagger A variant of our friend the dagger, but with two
handles which, depending on its typographic
style, either multiplies or negates the symbol’s
deadly power. (Not to be confused with the
post-punk band from Baltimore.)
§
Section Sign Stemming from the realm of legal code, the
section sign’s double S calls for specificity,
often used to refer the reader to a section of
a text, signaling importance and focus. Much
like our dagger and double dagger, the section
sign comes onstage when the asterisk is already
spotlighted.
ǁ
Parallel Lines Close together but never meeting, and slightly
tilted to suggest a forward movement—a subtle
progression—the elegant parallel lines symbol
is traditionally the fifth in the footnote lineup.
#
Hashtag The contemporary darling of footnote symbols, the hashtag has departed from its humble beginnings as the symbol used to introduce
numbers. It is now embraced by social media
users around the world as a method of labeling
and grouping content and audiences.
¶
Pilcrow P is for paragraph, pulled crow, and thus pilcrow. Sixth in line in the footnote symbol revue,
our handy pilcrow is a waning crescent moon
with two stilted legs, a startling backwards look
at the classic p.
◊
Lozenge A diamond by any other name. Off the page,
the lozenge finds its home in parquetry and as
decoration on ceramics, silverware, and textiles. Often referred to by its geometric namesake, the rhombus, it is also featured in heraldry
and playing cards.
☞
Index (pointing finger) Though we prefer its other namesakes—the
playful printer’s fist and the erudite manicule,
the index symbol is acceptable especially when
Peter Stallybrass reminds us that, “the history
of the hand in relation to the book is above all
the history of the index (in the multiple senses
of that word).”
↓
Down Arrow In its most simple form—a line with a triangle
affixed to one end—the arrow indicates direction. Like many of the more ornamental symbols and fleurons, the index met its demise at
the hands of the nineteenth-century invention
of the typewriter. Since then, the more standardized arrow has been pointing readers
downward and onward.
56
SVA MA Design Research,
Writing & Criticism
Do you care about design and its impact on the individual,
society, and environment? Are you interested in honing your
research skills and developing your unique point of view?
Whether your background is in design, journalism, science, history, or something else entirely,
the SVA MA in Design Research, Writing &
Criticism might just be the next step in your
career or learning trajectory.
Here in the SVA Department of Design
Research we study design in all its manifestations, with a focus on its implications. This means
we don’t just investigate designed products or
buildings, but also the infrastructure that connects them, and the policy that shapes them.
We try to look at what happens
after a designed
product is launched. We go beyond the glossy
images supplied by the manufacturer to discover
how things actually get used and disposed of,
and how they impinge upon our daily reality.
We learn to build arguments, based on
reporting and research, and to develop compelling narratives, which we then aim to get out
into the world in as targeted of a way as possible. Central to the MA in Design Research are
applied media workshops in radio podcasting,
video, exhibition curation, conferences, event
production, and online media. This high-intensity, one-year graduate degree program provides
graduates with a comprehensive set of research
tools and methods to apply to any foreseeable
career path.
We’ve had remarkable success so far, with
our graduates going on to work at museums and
institutions like MoMA, Cooper Hewitt Design
Museum, Vitra Design Museum, Storefront for
Art and Architecture, Public Policy Lab, The Glass
House, and Institute of Play; at publications including Quartz, Metropolis, Domus, Curbed, Arch
Daily, Surface, Curbed, PIN-UP, and Architizer;
at companies such as Real Art and Facebook;
and design firms like Ziba Design, Steven Holl
Architects, Huge, and Project Projects.
Additionally, our graduates have gone
on to teach at schools such as RISD, Pratt
Institute, NYU, Rutgers, University of Lisbon,
and California Institute of
the Arts; to pursue
post-graduate research at V&A Museum and
Harvard University; to publish books with
Thames & Hudson, MoMA, Cooper Hewitt
Design Museum, and Princeton Architecture
Press;
to launch their own enterprises such as
CLOG and Superscript; and to contribute to publications including Design Observer, Dezeen,
New York Magazine, Works that Work, Core77,
Designers & Books, Disegno, Los Angeles Review
of Books, Print, Abitare, Domus, The Architect’s
Newspaper, Design + Culture, and Wallpaper.
They have also won writing awards and grants
from Core 77, Design Observer, Design History
Society, Frieze, and AOL.
For details about the program, tuition, scholarships, and how to apply, visit designresearch.
sva.edu. Feel free to email, call, or drop by the
department for a visit and to find out about our
tuition and scholarships. We’re always happy
to talk about our exciting curriculum, show you
our lovely studio, and introduce you to faculty,
alumni, and students.
57
NOTES
NOTES
58
59
Acknowledgements
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to
the success of the SVA Department of Design
Research, Writing & Criticism over the past
year, and to those who have helped to stage
the “Exploding Footnotes” exhibition and foster
the research documented in this publication.
Molly Heintz, Exhibition Organization
Neil Donnelly, Exhibition Graphic Design
and Identity
Jens Holm, Exhibition Design and
Architecture
Matthew Rezac, Publication Design
Bedwick & Jones, Printing
Alice Twemlow, Chair
Emily Weiner, Program Coordinator
Victor de la Cruz, Systems Administrator
Steven Heller, D-Crit Program Co-founder
David Rhodes, SVA President
Anthony Rhodes, SVA Executive Vice
President
Jeff Nesin, SVA Provost
Guest Critics:
Kurt Andersen, Eugenia Bell, Jeanne Brooks,
Felix Burrichter, Rob Giampietro, Steven
Guarnaccia, David Hajdu, Alex Kalman,
Kelsey Keith, Starlee Kine, Mercedes Kraus,
Alexandra Lange, Pierre Alexandre de Looz,
Geoff Manaugh, Julia Moskin, Alan Rapp,
Damon Rich, Vera Sacchetti, David Senior,
Anooradha Siddiqi, Christopher Sprigman,
Nicola Twilley, Adrian Wilson, Sharon Zukin
Department Design:
Matthew Rezac, Program Identity
Eric Price, Web Design
Department Faculty:
Paola Antonelli, Akiko Busch, Chappell Ellison,
Daniela Fabricius, Russell Flinchum, Steven
Heller, Joshua Hume, Geoff Manaugh, Karrie
Jacobs, Adam Harrison Levy, Andrea Lippke,
Leital Molad, Murray Moss, Robin Pogrebin,
Elizabeth Spiers, Karen Stein, Matthew
Worsnick
Andrea Lippke, MFA Design Criticism
Thesis Supervisor
Daniela Fabricius, MA Design Research
Thesis Supervisor
Gwen Allen, External Thesis Advisor
Julie Vance, Presentations Skills Coach
60
ǁ*¶ ◊
↓
#§ ‡
†
ǁ*¶ ◊
↓
#§ ‡
†
About the Program
The SVA Department of Design Research, Writing & Criticism
is devoted to the study of design, its contexts, and its consequences. The curriculum is geared toward providing
graduates with a comprehensive set of research tools and
methods to apply to research-related careers in publishing,
education, museums, institutes, design practice, entrepreneurship, and more.
The program features an unparalleled core faculty, comprised of celebrated curators, editors, critics, and designers
such as: MoMA Senior Curator of Design and Architecture Paola
Antonelli; design consultant and curator Murray Moss; The New
York Times culture reporter Robin Pogrebin; and urban design
critic Karrie Jacobs. With more than thirty guest lecturers and
critics visiting the department per semester—including The
New York Times senior critic Michael Kimmelman, author and
Studio 360 host Kurt Andersen, New Journalism progenitor
Gay Talese, biographer Deborah Solomon, architecture
curator Pedro Gadanho, urban planning designers Interboro
Partners, MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, and
British design critic Rick Poynor—the program takes particular
care to connect students to inspirational mentors and help
them to forge relationships with potential employers, mentors
and colleagues.
The program’s curriculum charts the cutting edge of
design practice and is responsive to exciting developments
in the media landscape. It aims to generate provocative new
thinking about design and to help shape the ways in which
design is engendered, presented, and evaluated.
designresearch.sva.edu