Beauty: The Forgotten Function

“Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work. A land full of places that are not worth caring about will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.” ~ James H. Kunstler

During the Thanksgiving Holiday, I’ve come across an interesting conversation. It was from the podcast, ‘Modern Wisdom’ with Chris Williamson. Chris was interviewing Sheehan Quirke, a man I’ve never heard of but one I think everyone should hear about. Sheehan Quirke refers to himself as The Cultural Tutor. He’s a published author and has released a 15 minute film titled The Modern World or How Did The World Get So Ugly? on youtube. As a designer, it struck a chord with me. He makes the argument that simple, everyday functional objects from drain pipes, trash bins, telephone booths, to sewage plants, to air conditioners do not have to be strictly utilitarian, but can and should also be beautiful, interesting designs that can enhance our public spaces. I agree. I’ve designed hundreds of objects. Sadly, most of them have been strictly utilitarian machines and objects that have absolutely no ornamentation. They look cool in the way that one can appreciate the look of an industrial environment for its metallic, intricate, heavy duty aesthetic. Today, I see an interesting trend in which there seems to be a greater appreciation for ornamental design that manifests within the popularity of Steam Punk and Gothic themes, but first I will unpack a little bit of the dichotomy in which we find ourselves living in.

First of all, as Sheehan will explain whenever he speaks of this subject, he will not go all out in denouncing anything modern as a blanket philosophy. There’s something beautiful and interesting when you look at the skyline of any modern city. You see plenty of neo-classical buildings, Art Deco, Mies van der Rohe inspired squares and rectangles of steel and glass, all the way to these egg-shaped and spired futuristic styles. The clash of styles is not necessarily a bad thing. It gives the same impression as one can get while walking down the street of a city or small town in which each house has a unique style and/or were built in different time periods as opposed to those neighborhoods in which every home was a slightly different version of the next. Those tract housing developers think they’ve got us fooled, “Aha! You see these houses are different! We took the same layout, just mirrored it in places, added a few different colors and style variants and voila! We’ve made it interesting!” No, you haven’t. To me, a varied neighborhood street or skyline demonstrates that design is alive, it changes, we can be bold, we can be safe, we can be beautiful, we can be different, we can be interesting, and there are myriad ways and styles to achieve such goals in ways that many can appreciate.

On the other hand, there are plenty of things to be said about a certain elephant in the room that we’ve encountered within our daily lives as children of the modern world. You see, there was a time in which our public spaces used to be valued to the point that every single accessory from lamp posts to drainage grates were each a work of art in themselves. Drain spouts would morph into sea creatures that would emit water from their “mouths,” civic buildings were akin to temples celebrating the importance of these civic functions, lamp posts wouldn’t just light the way, these lights would sit atop a cast statue of a Greek goddess holding up a torch for instance. Sure, we can’t expect the same styles to proliferate for all time. Just like our architecture, things change, new designs are envisioned and employed, and we’re all the richer for it, but something happened particularly after WWI and WWII. As Americans increasingly saw the world through their film and TV screens in Technicolor, the architecture became increasingly black and white and well, grey. So much grey. In much of the mid-20th century, many aging, neo-classical buildings were torn down and replaced with these drab, concrete monoliths of depression and angst. The buildings of civic pride, citizenship, public squares, and the celebrations thereof have morphed into largely oppressive structures that mirrored the intimidating, bureaucratic monstrosities that many of our institutions have become. While major structures have taken on such aesthetics, our lamp posts, mailboxes, etc. have suffered as well. I can’t speak for the designers and their particular visions, but the unfortunate side effects have resulted in a great deal of avoidance of these spaces, anxiety, depression, feelings that we’re not worth it, and so on.

You can reflect on your own experiences. How does a certain place make you feel? How much of it is derived from the aesthetic of a place, its function, its lack of ornamentation of the opposite? I suspect the horrors of these major wars with their uncanny amounts of death and carnage has profoundly affected those who’ve fought, survived, and worked within these industries of design. Perhaps, a subconscious trauma has manifested in their work? Whatever the cause, the motivation behind it all, we’ve suffered along with them whether in a public building, a workplace, a hospital, or a restaurant that is supposed to make you feel like you’re at home, that is if your home was a place that was anathema to everything a home should represent. We’ve gone from beautiful multi-floor department stores to “throw-it-up-in-a-week” fluorescent-lit, rectangular deserts of desperation with their equally as desolate parking lots. I’ve had my fair share of working in office spaces that make cloudy, gloomy snowless winterscapes look like the Land of Oz by comparison and have dined in restaurants in which the food had more color and taste by far than the environment. I suppose that’s a good thing as food is the most important function of a dining establishment, but we often forget that beauty is also a function. One that we’ve taken for granted.

As I’ve touched upon in my post Considerations of Quality, many current markets principally value speed of manufacturing and delivery over many other considerations from quality to beauty. In this environment, you’re lucky just to get a quality product not to mention anyone even remotely considering the beauty of most objects. It’s kind of funny because we have the technology as they’ve also had in the Victorian era to mass manufacture objects with such ornamental flourishes. In fact, it would be even more inexpensive and easier today with an abundance of CNC automation! You can cater to many styles, needs, and desires as products can be designed for simple utility, but you can customize with a variety of add-ons to suit your style preferences and budgets. Why not? We owe it to ourselves to make life interesting again. The Slate Truck is one such trend that is starting in the automobile industry in which you can customize quite a bit of this vehicle with dozens of additions, accessories, wraps, or you could get it as stripped down and as plain as your heart desires! I am all for this more-democratized marketplace if you will. We spend so much money on things that are not quite what we want because our choices are limited and it’s just another example of how it seems like we’re being force-fed certain styles and functions when we should be the ones at the controls steering the market in more personalized directions. It is far more conceivable with our current technology and on-demand manufacturing to achieve this approach without expecting companies to invest in tons of R&D, market research, and keeping stock that may or may not get used up. I believe if we are to bring beauty, interesting designs, and more variety into our lives, we need to demand it, we need to steer the trends from the bottom up. With sites such as Etsy, online store solutions such as Shopify, and a host of affordable machines from cutters, to lasers, to 3D printers, we have more accessible instruments for expression than the days in which more infrastructure was required to create at the same scale. We can add our own ornamentation to mundane surfaces and objects that pervade our everyday locales. We can offer alternatives to the “dollar store chic” that has largely dominated our décor for decades. We don’t need to fill up second hand shops with these cheap cast-downs, we can be high-end designers and artists whose artwork can be cherished by generations. This can be a movement to beautify our surroundings, one that could no longer be ignored by mass manufacturers if this trend were to gain traction.

In conclusion, as a society we’ve lost the ability to celebrate what makes our civilization great when we’ve decided to embrace a minimalist, strictly business attitude. Street lights are an achievement, sewers are an achievement, rainwater management is an achievement, the ability to mass produce products that people need to live better and longer lives are huge achievements. But, we take it all for granted. We celebrate these achievements with cheaply made gadgets that looks like the ass-end of well… anything really. It’s the design equivalent to plates of tasteless slop without any garnish as opposed to a celebration of food, flavor, taste, style, and presentation. Do we want our lives to keep going the way of the infamous Cracker Barrel Logo fail, or do we want spice, pizzazz, sparks, fireworks, and buzz? I say, we demand it. We’re worth it! You don’t visit old, European countries for their mid-century concrete odes to decay, you visit for these amazingly, gorgeous old buildings. You don’t visit museums to look at a piece of art that was made in a sad factory by people who hate their lives, designed by cynical people who cut and pasted some clip art onto some cardboard that was sold at Walmart for $5.99, you go there to see priceless beauty envisioned by geniuses, delivered via blood, sweat, tears, and madness! Not everything could be a visionary work of art, but not everything has to be the opposite either. What kind of environment would you like to live in? What inspires you?

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