“B is like Bauhaus”: how to start understanding the modern world. Dejan Sudzic on why the best design in the world is created anonymously Why depict a nuclear explosion in a children's toy
Strelka Press publishing program has released a new book - “B like Bauhaus. ABC of the modern world”, author – Dejan Sudzic.
What is this book about
"Like Bauhaus" is a guide to the modern world as seen by a historian and design theorist. Ideas and symbols, works of high art and consumer goods, inventions without which it is impossible to imagine our life, and projects that remain unrealized - the reality in which a person exists today consists of a variety of elements, and the ability to understand its structure, the director believes London Design Museum Dejan Sudzic, makes our lives much more meaningful and interesting.
The book is divided into chapters according to the alphabet principle: one letter - one object or phenomenon. “Like Bauhaus” is the second book by Dejan Sudzic in Russian; the first book in the Russian version was “The Language of Things”.
about the author
Dejan Sudjic- Director of the Design Museum in London. He was a design and architecture critic for The Observer, Dean of the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University, and editor of the monthly architectural magazine Blueprint. He was director of the City of Architecture and Design program in Glasgow in 1999 and director of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2002. He was also the chartered designer for the London Aquatics Centre, which was designed and built for the 2012 Olympics by architect Zaha Hadid.
London Design Museum director Dejan Sudjic - “B like Bauhaus. ABC of the modern world." Sudzic is the world's most important historian and design theorist. In his book, he talks, not without grace, about how ideas and symbols, which are embodied in works of high art and consumer goods, create the reality in which people exist today. The ability to understand how design works makes our lives a little more meaningful and interesting.
ZIP/Zipper
One important approach to studying design is to focus on the ordinary and anonymous rather than the artful and artificial. This is done in defiance of those who seek to limit the conversation about design to biographies of celebrities and a list of things that catch you with their spectacularly molded appearance. By studying anonymous design, we recognize the contributions of those who may not have called themselves designers, but still have had a huge impact on the world of things.
Anonymous design is diverse - it includes both mass-produced products and handmade items. It is so broad that it attracted the enthusiastic attention of both Victorian traditionalists and 20th-century modernists.
Japanese scissors, bespoke Jermyn Street men's shoes, 18th-century silver three-prong forks, zippers, airplane screws and paper clips - all these things, each in their own way, can be considered works of anonymous design, although on in fact, they were all created by generations of artisans or teams of engineers, that is, people with specific names and often a strong sense of connection with their work. These things are not labeled with the name of the author, their form did not arise as a result of personal arbitrariness, and they are not engaged in protruding someone’s “I”. When design is humble enough to allow itself anonymity, it stops being cynical and manipulative.
The paper clip, of course, does not have a specific author. This item is an example of anonymous design. The main thing in it is the ingenious and economical use of material to achieve a specific goal. The history of such things is often very complex. It is not a story about a single flash of inspiration, but consists of many episodes in which different people demonstrate their ingenuity. A patent issued in the United States in 1899 protected the rights to a machine that could be used to make paper clips. The paperclip itself is not protected by any patent - and existed long before there was a machine that produced paperclips.
The history of the authorship of the zipper is equally confusing. In 1914, a Swedish-born American engineer named Gideon Sundbäck filed with the US Patent Office for an invention called the No. 2 Hookless Clasp. Sundbäck's product developed the idea of an offset-tooth fastener that had been floating around in the minds of his colleagues for decades. Whitcomb Judson patented a version of a similar metal clasp back in 1893, but it was difficult to manufacture and did not function very reliably. Before Sundback, no one had been able to debug the operation of a zipper: the teeth either held the two sides together very weakly, or wore out too quickly for any practical use.
Sundback provided the top of each tooth with a pointed protrusion, which was matched by a depression on the underside of the next tooth, which provided them with a strong grip. Even if the teeth diverged in one place, the others remained connected. This design was different enough from Judson's that Sundback was able to obtain a patent for it.
The first buyer of the Hookless Fastener Company's innovative products was B. F. Goodrich, which began producing rubber galoshes with zippers in 1923. Thanks to this fastener, galoshes were put on and taken off in one quick movement. Benjamin Goodrich came up with the onomatopoeic name zip-er-up for it, which over time was shortened to the word zipper, which became the name of this type of device in English. Around the same time, the Hookless Fastener Company changed its name to Talon.
For the first ten years, B. F. Goodrich remained its main buyer. Lightning was a relatively inconspicuous product and was used only in the production of shoes. But by the 1930s it had become the most important symbol of modernity - and began to be in widespread demand. The zipper was popular with everyone who didn't have much time to continue to put up with the archaic customs associated with buttons. The zipper did away with the gender and class specificity that buttons brought to any item of clothing: whether they were on the right or on the left, whether made of noble metal or simple bone, or covered with fabric. Expertly crafted, pragmatic, unpretentious, the zipper became a sign of the organized proletariat or those who wanted to be associated with it. Lightning began to be used in military uniforms. The parka, flight suit and leather motorcyclist jacket were zipped up. It could be cleverly placed on one side of the chest - like on Brave Dan's spacesuit - or added as a backup decorative element where it had no practical meaning - say, on the cuffs.
The richest symbolic series was associated with the appearance of a zipper on a trouser fly. After centuries of the dominance of buttons, and despite the fact that careless buttoning in such a case was fraught with serious injury, the zipper became an identifying sign of the new sexual availability. It was celebrated by Erica Jong, and Andy Warhol used it in his cover design for the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers album.
Although buttons are more troublesome to handle, they have managed to survive, and over the years the zipper has lost its association with rationality and modernity.
Paper clips, Japanese scissors, silver forks and zippers - all these things, it would seem, have been stripped of all frills. They are the product of a long process of improvement which, like Darwinian evolution, has led to maximum economy of means. The results of this process reflect the aesthetic preferences of modernism. The modernists always claimed to be allergic to style, but paradoxically managed to develop an extreme sensitivity to questions of style. Marcel Breuer, for example, said that his tubular steel furniture “has no style” and that he was driven by the desire to design devices that people need in their daily lives. However, for some time, steel tubes became a symbol that was used very consciously to demonstrate their aspirations by architects and designers, and often by their clients, who wanted to look “modern” in the eyes of others.
Attempts to understand the nature of the anonymous industrial product are made again and again by curators around the world. They amass collections of paper clips and ballpoint pens, packs of Post-It notes, clothespins, rubber gloves and other, as they are often called, modest masterpieces chosen precisely for their simplicity and practicality. Or - as in the case of gloves designed exclusively for shucking oysters, or a towel that, thanks to shrink wrapping, shrinks to the size of a bar of soap - for the ingenuity shown in solving a specific problem.
Such things first began to appear in museums thanks to Bernard Rudofsky, a sarcastic critic and curator who was born in Austria-Hungary and later moved to the United States. Rudofsky's most famous project was the exhibition "Architecture without Architects", held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1964. It contained a wealth of material on what was then called vernacular architecture - Syrian water wheels, Libyan adobe fortresses, habitable caves and tree houses - which adapted so effectively and elegantly to climatic conditions and specific tasks that they eclipsed much of what what professional architects are capable of. He didn't stop at admiring how easily vernacular architecture dealt with problems like temperature control that plague our energy-wasting age. With a sly squint, Rudofsky began to challenge conventional wisdom about every aspect of everyday life; he explored the premises underlying the way we eat, wash, or sit in a chair.
A very similar approach can be applied to anonymous design - design without designers. We may not know who invented lightning; Perhaps it is generally incorrect to associate this invention with the name of any one designer. But there is no doubt that the lightning bolt is one of the many innovative pieces of design that changed human life in the 20th century. Some of these things have specific origins: the tetrahedral Tetra Pak milk carton, for example, was invented by Ruben Rausing and Eric Wallenberg and greatly influenced a whole generation of Japanese growing up in the 1970s by making milk part of the national diet. The standard shipping container, a low-tech innovation, transformed not only seagoing cargo ships, but also the docks where they unloaded and port cities, and therefore the entire world. Containers required larger ships and spacious open-air docks. As a result, the Thames Docks in London were closed, and twenty years later a new business district, Canary Wharf, appeared in their place. The ballpoint pen, which the British often call biro after its Hungarian inventor Laszlo Biro, is, of course, not an anonymous work, but it arose from a simple but fruitful guess on how to economically and efficiently achieve a uniform flow of ink onto paper.
The idea of looking closely at those things that are so familiar that we no longer notice them helps us find a way to understand the true driving force of design. This approach can resolve the contradiction between the myth-making understanding of design and the reality of gradual improvements, between the cult of the individual genius and the dependence of production on team efforts.
There is neither style nor self-admiration in either the safety pin or the paper clip; they are simple and versatile, like a sea knot. Comparing the modest products of anonymous design with the capricious narcissism of signature design at first glance teaches us that design is not limited to changes in appearance or the activities of celebrity designers. But despite the feeling of holiness that the authenticity of the immediate and anonymous evokes in us, the more closely we look at this anonymity, the more difficult it becomes to answer the question of what it actually represents. Anonymity can be considered a kind of automatic writing, the inevitable outcome of a practical approach to problem solving - a kind of functionalism. But anonymous design is still the result of the work of a specific person making specific decisions. As for the lightning, it continues to be perceived as a timeless design. In some places it may have been replaced by Velcro, but even after more than a hundred years it still seems like a small miracle.
Excerpt from the book “B as Bauhaus” by Dejan Sudjic, Strelka Press
Cover: Strelka press
The book “B as Bauhaus” has been published. The director of the London Design Museum, Dejan Sudjic, created a book where he tried to show how to learn to understand contemporary art and the world around us. The book is about the obsession with collecting, the obsession with authenticity, the value of imperfection and the films of Hitchcock. Each chapter contains concepts that are important for the modern world: B - bauhaus and blueprint, E - expo, G - grand theft auto, K - Kaplický, Y - Youtube. The Village publishes an excerpt from the film chapter.
F - FILM/CINEMA
I can still imagine an architect named Howard Roark, but Storley Cracklight - which is the name of the fat man played by Brian Dennehy in Greenway's film The Architect's Belly - sounds completely unconvincing to me. Roarke, played by Gary Cooper, the hero of King Vidor's mediocre film The Fountainhead, based on Ayn Rand's book of the same name, is a man with sculpted muscles and inescapable melancholy who, having settled down as a day laborer in a quarry, deftly wields a jackhammer and brutally takes possession of his boss's daughter Dominique Francon. Cracklight in Brian Dennehy's version is fully endowed with a belly, which literally - in the best traditions of James Stirling, who weighed about 130 kilograms - prevails over his belt. Both of these films have always fascinated me. But in The Fountainhead, the most compelling character for me is not Roark, that tortured genius who mixes Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, although it’s hard not to warm to the architect who would rather break into a construction site and blow up everything with dynamite than would agree that someone not so gifted would stick decorative ruffles on the steep walls of his skyward tower. You may not want to hire such an architect, but he deserves attention. What really captivated me about The Source was that it features an architectural critic as the main villain. A smarmy scoundrel named Ellsworth Monkton Toohey is shown here as a dangerous enemy of the owner of the newspaper where he himself works: he forces the star columnist to resign and sets readers against Roark. Oh, if only it were like this in life!
Cracklight, although it lacked the menacing masculinity of Howard Roark, fascinated me just as much because it served as a dire warning of the worst fate that could await the handler. I watched a film about him when, like Cracklight, I was curating an architectural exhibition in Italy. He was preparing an exhibition about the work of Etienne-Louis Boullé in Rome, and I was preparing the Venice Architectural Biennale. I did a better job because I wasn’t poisoned, even though the Biennale is known for the destructive undercurrents of its architectural politics. “Beware of the people of the lagoon,” Renzo Piano told me. “The sun is shining above, but underwater they bite.”
On and off screen, cinema and architecture have a long history of relationships, both superficial and deep. Half a century before Brad Pitt became a frequent visitor to Frank Gehry's studio and started building eco-friendly, low-cost housing in New Orleans, Alfred Hitchcock was already interested in architecture. He filmed it, he invented it, he made me think about it. North by Northwest, a film I could watch endlessly, is full of architecture, starting with Saul Bass's credits, which first appear as an abstract lattice before turning into the glass façade of the UN headquarters built in Manhattan by architect Wallace Harrison. . Hitchcock's version of the UN foyer was recreated in a Hollywood studio and, upon closer inspection, closely resembles what Zaha Hadid is designing today (she herself admits that she has a soft spot for this film). Later, Van Damme's house, supposedly located somewhere in North Dakota, appears in the frame - it looks more like a Frank Lloyd Wright work than the actual Wright houses, although in fact it was a set built by Hitchcock. Camille Paglia noted years ago that Hitchcock was always obsessed with architecture, even though his only character even remotely related to the profession was an industrial designer played by Eva Marie Saint. The architecture in Hitchcock's cinema has been documented in great detail by architecture critic Stephen Jacobs. He meticulously studied, frame by frame, the key interiors in his films and, based on these studies, drew the floor plan of each house. The results were published by Jacobs in The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. Jacobs's method allows us to determine the point at which physical reality intersects with the world of the imaginary, and demonstrates how unpredictable the interaction of space, which can only exist in cinema, and more material volumes that can be realized through the means of architecture can be.
Thanks to footage of the street curving in a semicircle, we know what the house in London's Maida Vale, where the film Dial M For Murder takes place, looks like. Jacobs's drawings show that the usual rectangular space - as it appears through the camera lens - would actually fit into the building that flares out towards the rear, which Hitchcock chose for the exterior shots. The two forms of architectural display define two versions of what is meant to be a single spatial experience but requires different physical characteristics.
Cinema and architecture are connected by something else that is worth dwelling on. Both activities simultaneously require the qualities of an introvert and an extrovert from a person. To make a movie or build a house, creativity is important, but to attract financing, you need business acumen; Finally, it takes a strong personality to stand on a construction or film set and be able to impose your will on skeptical workers, actors and crew.
The Strelka Press publishing program has released a new book - "B as Bauhaus. The ABC of the Modern World", written by the director of the London Design Museum, Dejan Sudjic.
"Like Bauhaus" is a guide to the modern world. Ideas and symbols, works of high art and consumer goods, inventions without which it is impossible to imagine our life, and projects that remained unfulfilled - this is the reality in which man exists today.
W
WAR
In 2012, London's Design Museum acquired an AK-47, an infamous machine gun made in 1947 in the Soviet Union, for its permanent collection. This decision was met with hostility by some. Most often, design museums do not collect weapons - perhaps this is explained by the still-prevailing division of design into good and bad. An assault rifle—that is, a rifle designed for close combat, where people trying to kill each other are separated by no more than four hundred meters—can be rugged, reliable, easy to handle, and economical to manufacture around the world. Based on these characteristics, she may be the embodiment of functionalism in its highest sense. The AK-47 has played a huge role in history, it appears on the national flag of Mozambique and was a significant technological innovation in its time. Finally, there are not many objects in the world whose industrial production began in 1947 and continues to this day. Whether or not the AK-47 is evil, it's hard to argue that it's an example of timeless design.
But if museum collections are supposed to exemplify good design—and most collections, at least initially, strive to do just that—guns have no place there. The weapon brings death, and therefore its design cannot be called good, even if it is absolutely brilliant. Neither the New York Museum of Modern Art, nor the Vienna Museum of Applied Arts, nor the Munich Neues Collection have any machines. Exceptions may be made for other military items, such as a jeep or helicopter. But small arms remain taboo for museums, even though they played an important role in the development of standardization, mass production and modular assembly.
Guns should not be glorified or fetishized, but they can help us understand something important about other things. That is why the Design Museum bought its AK-47. The debate over guns is a reflection of the debate about the nature of things. The design of a significant work need not be “good” in either of the two senses in which the word is commonly used: neither morally praiseworthy nor practically successful.
The Spitfire is far less controversial as a work of design, and this is likely due to the fact that it made a decisive contribution to the defense of democratic Britain against Nazi aggression. Numerous technical innovations are combined with exquisite beauty: the way its wings form a single unit with the fuselage makes this aircraft instantly recognizable.
The paradox that any design student must take into account is that many key technological and design advances were made possible by forced wartime investment. The development of the jet engine was pushed forward by World War II. We owe our preventive treatments against malaria to the wars fought by Britain and America in the mosquito-infested jungles of Southeast Asia. The Internet, of course, is a civilian network, but it arose due to the development of distributed military communications systems capable of operating in a nuclear war. 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, was originally used for the emergency production of spare parts on American aircraft carriers at sea. There is no clear line between military and non-military technologies, and therefore the AK-47 can be considered an extremely important example of industrial design, the significance of which is not limited to its immediate function.
