a new broom

What with the medium being the message an' all, I've pimped my blog and spruced things up around here using blogger's new advanced template editing. It feels a lot less constrained and generic now I think. I might simplify the links too as there are a lot but, then again, not enough. I've kept the links to other stories (as opposed to sites) because it seems a good way to flag up interesting articles without having to write anything about them necessarily. As for the content, well I can't change that I'm afraid. Not sure about the ee cummings style no caps but I hope you like it anyway.

Perhaps I should bolster up this brief post with a couple of links to things elsewhere worth reading. Firstly, via @markasaurus, there's an excellent post on Philip Johnson's Glass House (and the rest of his New Canaan estate) here by David Byrne, which is somewhere I tried and failed to go see when in the states at the beginning of the year. I've long been fascinated by Johnson's Machiavellian role within recent history of US architecture and his high-modernist updating of the picturesque stately home garden in Connecticut.

For reasons wholly to do with petty inter-FAT rivalry I don't think I've ever linked to anything written by one of my colleagues before but, you have to say, this is the bomb.

Always Amazing Value

Via @WillWiles's twitter feed I came across this article by Rick Poyner on Poundland's graphic design. It's an interesting article, or, at least, an interesting starting point, but he comes to some odd conclusions. Along the way, Poyner makes some good points about the relationship of graphics to wealth, taste and, ultimately, class. These are things that I think design critics should talk a lot more about so I don't find any of his observations problematic, despite the comments here, where it seems to be assumed that talking about class in itself is somehow patronising.

Anyway, Poyner's main point is that Poundland's growth and its move into wealthier, more middle class areas makes its brutally direct, eye popping graphic style problematic. Will new, posher, customers, used to the tasteful graphic niceties of Marks & Spencer or Ocado, be able to stomach Poundland's "proletarian" directness? Or will they need to be flattered into shopping there, reassured that it all fits into an aspirational lifestyle distinguished by lime green fonts and reusable canvas grocery bags?

Not a bad question which probes some interesting conceits about shopping habits and the way that stores play on a mixture of social mobility, snobbery and guilt in inducing us to shop there. Inverted snobbery, of course, plays its part in Poundland's success along with a slightly nauseating tendency towards pretend-slumming by people who could well afford to shop elsewhere.

But Poyner is also all over the place in his conclusions. Having described Poundland's graphics as "highly specified and refined" (which is partially true, but they're also cheap in the literal sense) he goes on to denounce them as patronising and crude. Crude possibly, but why are they any more patronising than, say, the subtle shifts in font and graphic style used to denote upmarket brands in supermarkets? Can only the 'proletariat" be exploited? And, more importantly, why would a tasteful graphic signature used to lure in the middle classes not be patronising or exploitative?

Some years ago BA used to have a budget airline called Go. Despite the fact that its no-frills cheapness made the experience of flying with it identical to that of flying Easyjet, its Damian Hurst-esque spot pattern livery and tasteful graphics made it the acceptable budget airline for the middle classes. In the same way that some people prefer flying from Stanstead over Luton, despite the fact that both experiences are equally terrible, design has an ability to lend a patina of acceptability or sophistication, an aura of class, that has nothing to do with the quality of the product or the ethics of the experience.

Poyner has, like most design critics, confused ethics with aesthetics, assuming that his taste is morally superior, more honest, more truthful, somehow simply better. But there are no truths in typefaces, only taste cultures each with their own values.

Thriller

Ok, so I'm happy to admit to being really quite inordinately thrilled about this. The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson (Zero Books) is available for pre-order at Amazon. I have a contribution - about correlations between the design of Neverland and the transformation of Michael Jackson himself- in this collection of essays about MJ. Much more excitingly it includes contributions by Ian Penman, Barney Hoskins and Chris Roberts, as well as a host of excellent writers from the blogosphere including Dominic Fox, Evan Calder-Williams, Robin Carmody and Sam Davies. You could even buy a copy.

Many thanks to the editor Mark Fischer and to Owen (also contributing) for including me in such a fine array.

Ok, gush over. Back to business. (Straightens tie. Goes back to reading RIBA Standard Terms of Appointment).

Object(ion) of the Week

In the various descriptions of Gordon Brown's conference speech one small detail stuck out for me. Apparently Gordon had a full sized replica of the conference podium set up in his hotel room to practice with. Tony Blair always had one too, although in his case you can imagine it wasn't just at conference time.

It's a tragic image though, Gordon standing impassioned in his pyjamas on his fake podium, frantically rehearsing his big ideas of clamping down on binge drinking and incarcerating fallen women to an audience of three snoozing aides.

It raises some interesting questions too. Is it exactly the same as the real one or is it a mock up made from cardboard and sellotape? Does he bring it with him? And who designed it? This is an object which, along with the rest of the conference interior, carries a significant amount of symbolic weight. And yet they are rarely discussed in design terms.

Make no mistake the podium itself is a fucking ugly object, like a huge plastic mushroom with an unpleasant foreskin fold halfway down its length. The whole thing is hydraulic too so the top half actually lowers down at the end of the speech in an unfortunate display of political detumescence.

It's difficult to know where the styling is coming from. There is a touch of the X-Box display stand about it and, obviously, a lot of the pulpit, both of which are probably deliberate. Political symbolism in this country is generally pretty clunky and gauche though from the Conservative's Caran d'Ache oak tree to the Liberal Democrats golden Phoenix rising from the ashes.

At the party conferences such insipid bits of graphic branding are combined with Spearmint Rhino lighting and a love of Union Jack emblazoned plasma screens. It makes for a queasy spectacle, a mix of faux self-effacement, orgiastic self worship and jingoistic mania. I'm not sure it would be preferable if it was well designed but - the vacuous populism of the content aside - its difficult to imagine a more alienating spectacle than the modern party conference.

To The Birds

(Ron Onions' Pigeon Loft, Albany)

I've always loved allotments and, in particular, the little sheds that are built on them. These are artful assemblages of as-found building components; old doors, windows and timber panels lashed together to make hybridised, miniature houses.


(Joe Bridges's Racing Loft, Timsbury, UK)

The same strain of home made ad-hocism exists in the world of the pigeon loft only with the added interest of the obsessive pigeon fancier thrown in. The photographs accompanying this post are taken from here - a South Western Australian pigeon fancier's (who knew?) website, cataloguing lofts from around the world.


(Graham Britton's Garden Loft, Newborough, UK.)

They are a lovely collection, a group of miniature buildings ranging from the almost Miesian simplicity of the one at the top of this post (owned by the fabulously named Ron Onions) through Mittel European style chalets to the (slightly decrepit) LA poolhouse style loft below.


(Fred Thompson's Poolside Loft, Western Aust.)

There is a strong sense that the lofts are far more expansive and luxurious than required. They are clearly an expression of the owners obsessive love of racing pigeons and the dedication it takes to train them. In the world of the pigeon fancier the birds are the 'talent' and these lofts are their Bel Air mansions. They're a far cry from the terrace rooftop lofts of the Northern England stereotype anyway, and the term loft is a bit of a misnomer. These are houses in their own right.


(Advanced Pigeon Loft diagram, Via)

The site also contains detail of each fancier's dietary and training regime should you be interested. Each one has a personal profile offering an insight into a remarkable world of obsessive feeding patterns and slightly obscene sounding terminology ("widowhood cocks"). Like most hobbies it is a sort of parallel universe, one where humans build houses for birds to live in that are quite probably a lot nicer than their own.

(Joe Baker's Racing Loft, Hereford, UK)

A Design for Life?

Surgical Procedure: an incision was made in Princess Margaret’s temple running downward and backward to the apex of her ear. From here a crease ran toward her lobule in front of the ear, and the incision followed this crease around the lower margin of the lobule to a point slightly above the level of the tragus. From there, at an obtuse angle, it was carried backward and downward within the hairy margin of the scalp.

From Princess Margaret’s Facelift, J G Ballard

I was reminded of Ballard’s short story Princess Margaret’s Facelift (from The Atrocity Exhibition) while staring at the endless array of photographs charting the transformation of Michael Jackson’s face that have appeared since his death last Thursday.

Ballard’s cut and paste technique – the insertion of Princess Margaret’s name for that of the anonymous ‘Patient X’ in a genuine medical description of a face lift – is a provocative marriage of form and content. Plastic surgery is a form of collage practised on the body, a grafting of previously disparate features into a new composition. The disjunctive quality of seeing Princess Margaret’s name in the context of a blunt medical description is a graft itself, a similarly violent juxtaposition.

Plastic surgery though differs from collage in an important respect. Or at least it should. While collage stresses the cuts between displaced objects, relying precisely on their lack of ‘fit’, plastic surgery strives to be seamless and invisible. It’s often said that rather than making people look beautiful, plastic surgery merely makes them look like they’ve had plastic surgery. The truth though is that this is only when the surgery goes wrong, or in Michael Jackson’s case, far too far, and the surgery itself becomes the dominant visual characteristic.

If plastic surgery is collage(n) then, it is more digital Photoshop – striving for seamlessness – than analogue cut and paste. Which makes Jackson’s face, along with all those other celebrities with their grotesquely distorted features – a real life version of the website Photoshop Disasters. One’s first thought on seeing a picture of his face towards the end of his life was: can it really be like that? But if his face became a dreadful mistake, what was he striving for?

Someone once said that Jackson wasn’t using surgery to turn himself white but to turn himself into Elizabeth Taylor. Certainly his shiny black bob, white skin, red lips, pencilled eye brows and heavy make up were undeniably feminine. His tiny triangle of a nose (itself a prosthetic, like a little piece of white chocolate Toblerone* literally stuck onto the void where his old nose used to be) was a caricature of female desirability. His clothes were equally fascinating, mutating from the pantomime military dictator look noted by Owen Hatherley, to the bling and badge encrusted blazers of his later years that made him appear like an ageing millionairess tottering around her Miami Beach condo.



Jackson was grotesque not only because his surgery appeared to have gone so wrong but because he no longer bore any resemblance to who he had been before. With his exorbitant wealth and lack of any kind of reality check he had gone further than anyone else in re-designing himself. There are few precedents for this so perhaps it's not surprising he got it wrong.

Stephen Marquardt - a prominent plastic surgeon in California who specialises in rebuilding the faces of crash victims - has attempted to analyse the proportions of the human face in order to help his patients choose their new features. His analysis concluded (somewhat fortuitously) that beauty in human faces was based on the ratio of proportion developed by Pythagoras, the golden section, which was used as the compositional basis for classical architecture and painting. Marquardt produced overlays of ‘classically’ beautiful faces such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor to illustrate how the proportions of the features related to the golden ratio. The only problem with this is (as Robin Evans has noted in different context in his essay Translations from Drawing to Building), the golden ratio assumes a flat surface - such as a drawing or a façade - to work. Dr Marquardt’s overlays treated his faces as if they were flat screens seen perfectly head on, with no allowance for depth or perspective. Importantly Marquardt’s analysis was based on photographs of movie stars and not real faces.


(Image taken from this article in Discover magazine)

A few years ago I reviewed an exhibition of Playboy magazine covers from the 1950’s to the present. What struck me was not so much the way that the design of the magazine had developed over the years but how the designs of the bodies within it had. As the settings and scenarios of the shoots became less elaborately staged the bodies had become more so, pumped, primed and almost literally pneumatic. Their disparate body parts had been grafted like a pornographic version of a police identikit image**. Here was a reversal of Dr Marquardt’s analysis, faces and bodies designed to be viewed through the flat pages of magazines or television screens.

If plastic surgery has a precedent in design it might lie unexpectedly in the picturesque gardens of the 18th century. These gardens were three-dimensional collages based on flat images; in this case the allegorical 17th century paintings of Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin. Objects and landscape features such as lakes, groves of trees, ruins and follies were lifted from these paintings and grafted into the English landscape by designers such as Humphrey Repton. Although highly artificial these gardens were intended to be seen as seamless extensions of the ‘natural’ landscape. In essence they were surgical enhancements; a nice little ravine here, a charming waterfall there.



Today these experiments in re-designing nature occur even more invisibly, in a seam that runs from the reshaping of the countryside for aesthetic pleasure to the development of genetically modified plants and biological cloning.

Which brings us back to the real horror that Jackson’s face evokes. His features were like some picturesque garden that had gone horribly wrong, one where the artificial lakes had dried up and the land begun to rot and fester. Parts of his face had literally died, cut off from their blood supply they had started to turn black and fall off revealing the crude mechanism that held them together. For Jackson was a cyborg, a result of science as much as nature.



The fear of artificiality that runs through all arguments against humans ‘playing god’ ignores the fact that nature itself is a cultural product, the necessary counterpoint to the artificial. The ‘natural’ is impossible to locate except as the inverse of everything else. As Donna Hathaway has argued in her "Cyborg Manifesto", we are all already cyborgs, attached to machines, networked together. Plastic surgery merely makes evident the degree to which we are products of culture rather than nature.

And with that we are alone.

* And, like a piece of Toblerone, melting in the Californian sun.

** In his notes to The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard describes medical textbooks as a “vast, dormant pornography waiting to be woken by the magic of fame”. He describes the two as being on a “collision course”, a multiple pile-up that has indeed occurred over and over through tabloid descriptions of Jackson as well as a litany of lesser stars such as Jordan, Jodie Marsh etc.

More Rocket Baroque

I've been meaning to link to this excellent essay by Naomi Stead for a while, since being alerted to it via Things magazine. Things quite rightly pointed out my ignorance of Reyner Banham's essay on the "Rocket-baroque" phase of the ice cream van when writing my previous post on them. 

Stead's essay on Banham looks at the relationship between his infatuation with ephemeral products of pop culture and his status as an architectural historian. She explores a number of extremely pertinent issues to do with the transient nature of design journalism (and even more so now, blog writing) and the aspirations to timelessness of the historian. Most intriguingly she suggests that it was Banham's immersion in the here-and-now, the seemingly throw-away quality of his prodigious journalistic output, that made him such an important historian.

Banham's interest in ice cream vans* lay in their seeming invisibility to design critics. His attempt to trace the "Rocket baroque" phase of their stylistic development was part of an ongoing project to bring a critical sensibility to everyday objects that generally went overlooked. Ice cream vans are part of a vast landscape of commercial objects that are designed and manufactured away from the glare of art and design culture.

These objects were therefore denied a history, a history that Banham's critical writing was instrumental in uncovering. It was Banham's interest in the objects that resulted from the intersection of pop culture, consumerism and technology - rather than high-art architecture - and his attempt to develop a critical language for looking at them that made him such an interesting and pertinent writer. 

Whilst the outlandish and grotesque designs of custom car owners are hardly invisible, they do exist outside any accepted realm of 'proper' design. Or proper design criticism. In comparison to ice cream vans even they are a marginal enthusiasm, a narrow genre for the most part equally oblivious to notions of good design or, especially, good taste. For which, if for no other reason, they should be celebrated. 

Banham probably wouldn't have approved of the technological redundancy of these vehicles, or, perhaps, their limited, elitist appeal either. Certainly they test the notion of functionality to its limits, some of them only just about capable of being driven and only then to the next prize show. In this sense they are very interesting, 'pure' expressions of design free of commercial or functional constraint, despite their bastardised quality. Classic car shows are pedigree competitions for mongrel design.

Despite the owner's claims to originality and the cliched rhetoric of freedom and self-expression that runs through the custom car world, they are in fact all developed within tight aesthetic constraints from which deviation is frowned upon. And they are un-changing. Like corn dollies or crochet they are an art form that is not moving forward. 

The designs are based on a limited number of types: the elongated limo, the jacked up old timer and the dragster recur. As do the flame paint jobs, lavish amounts of chrome and outlandish projections of the male sexual imagination that adorn them.

Despite, or because of, this they are also fabulous objects, fusions of 50's comic book art, pseudo-medievalism and Rococo ornament. Like the dogs at Crufts they are bred to the point of perversity and beyond. And like dog breeding, along with tattooing and fantasy art, custom cars are, ultimately, a design backwater, a sub-cult with their own incrementally evolving language. A bit like architecture then in some ways.

So, below is a brief photo-essay - partly in tribute to Banham's fabulous Rocket Baroque - of the custom car vernacular. All photos are from this site.

* See his essay Sundae Painters, in A Critic Writes. 

Make Mine A '99: A Brief Design History of the Ice Cream Van

Is there is a more absurdly wonderful piece of vehicle design than the ice cream van? Part restaurant, part piece of street theatre and only a little bit van, they have few precedents. Milk floats, whilst amusingly slow and anachronistic, aren't really in the same league. Burger vans and hot dog stalls are closer but they tend to come linked to an event or side attraction and they have a depressing air of the prosaic in comparison to the exotic flamboyance of the ice cream van.

They are fabulous creations based on prosaic utility vehicles that have grown wings, grilles, lights and special effects. They are covered in stickers of impossibly exciting looking things to eat in the shape of rockets and cones and clam shells. They have lurid paint work and ludicrous names on backlit signs. Sometimes they have giant plastic ice cream cornets mounted like bull's horns in case there's any doubt what they're selling.



The origin of the ice cream van lies in the nature of the product. Ice cream's tendency to melt means that you have to eat it at the place of purchase, or keep it frozen. Before home freezers that meant that the ice cream had to come to you. This simple fact is enough to create an entirely unique genre of vehicle. Ice cream vans are mobile shops, nomadic buildings that can pop up anywhere. They follow us around, suddenly appearing by a deserted beach, at the top of a mountain or lurching merrily around a suburban cul de sac. Their arrival transforms the spaces around them, shifting residential streets into spontaneous events and pavements into instant cafes.



Because they move around they make noises - jingly, sing song noises - to let us know they've arrived. These tinny mating calls match the exotic plumage of the vehicles. On the Flickr site Ice Cream Vans - from which most of these photos are taken - there is an exciting sounding link to The Technical History of Ice Cream Van Music Systems. It doesn't quite live up to its title but it does quote a Professor Alan Earnshaw who has apparently "researched the topic widely". The speakers are pointed down at the road in order to disperse the sound apparently.

According to the Music Thing blog there are very few companies still making ice cream chimes. One is Micro Miniatures in Staffordshire who make the Harmony 64 chime player which can play 3 note harmonies. Standard tunes include Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head (oddly), the Neapolitan Wedding Song and Ride Of The Valkyries. Music Thing also links to here where you can download MP3's of traditional Mr Softee chimes.

In the evolution of the ice cream van the '50's and '60's now seem a particularly fertile period. The designs from this era are by far the most baroque. Bedford Vans, Ford Anglia's and even Mini Clubmen were stretched, cut up and spliced together to make weird hybrid objects. These were vehicles with bits of architecture as well as refrigerators, serving counters and cartoon appendages attached. They are like mobile examples of Googie architecture, or the result of a bizarre design collaboration between Tex Avery and Alec Issigonis. Most endearingly their DIY qualities are always clearly visible. These are prosaic vehicles straining to be something else, home made pieces of wishful thinking trying to summon up some magic at the side of the road.

Images via

Thrifty Business

What is it with thrift? The recession may have given it an empty kind of validity, but it's been creeping up on us for a while. Everyone seems to be taking a lot of (perverse) pleasure in faux-austerity and mock phlegmatic belt-tightening*. Articles that are only partly tongue in cheek calling us to do our bit by buying British fashion. Guides to budget holidays on the English seaside. Advice on how to shave money off the Waitrose bill by going to Netto.

Ostensibly these are reactions to both the recession and climate change, a turning back from credit financed reckless consumption. Given this, an embracement of thrift takes on a knew currency as a gentile form of anti-corporate backlash. And herein lies the rub. A persistent element of all this thriftiness is that it emanates from the relatively well-to-do middle classes. Or the Coping Classes as the Daily Telegraph likes to call them. You might almost say that it was fashionable.



Take India Knight's recent The Thrift Book. This is ostensibly about how to save money by rejecting conspicuous consumption. The book makes a straight appeal to our anxieties, both personal and ecological, encouraging us to take pleasure in being thrifty, make our own presents and grow vegetables. This is all presented as a form of healthy penitence.

Knight's previous book was in celebration of shopping so she obviously feels she has more than most people to feel penitent about. The Thrift Book is her hangover. Like a hangover the tone is self-flagellating, vaguely remorseful and comically self-obsessed. Here's the blurb:

"Feeling poor because of the credit crunch? Feeling guilty because of global warming? No Need to panic. Put down the economy mince and buy this instead. It's a blueprint for living beautifully while saving money and easing your conscience."*

Note the feeling poor bit. Not actually poor, but feeling it, much like you might feel that ankle boots are on their way back. It's a chill wind maybe, but there are ways to button yourself up and stay warm. And still look great. Which leads to the other telling part of the description which is; it really is all about you!

There is no political or social aspiration to Knight's book. It is a straight-forward palliative, something to soothe one's vaguely troubled conscience. There is not even an attempt at altruism. It will stop that annoying nagging guilt and let you get on with your fabulous life. Knight's is perhaps the ultimate decadence: an aestheticisation of poverty. Like a crumbling peasant cottage on a picturesque estate, Knight is attracted by the look of rustic chic.

She's not the only one. Take Labour and Wait, a ludicrously self-conscious shop off Brick Lane specialising in 1950's style household goods: wooden handled pen knives, galvanised dustbins and blocks of coal tar soap. All the really useful stuff. A close up of the window though reveals the affluence behind its apparent back to basics claim: it's only open half the week. Labour and Wait is like a Stuckist installation, a deliberate semi-ironic anachronism. The man behind the counter even looks like Billy Childish.

Just around the corner from Labour and Wait is a cake shop that uses Butlins' 1950's tagline "Our true intent is only for your delight", presumably to summon up the ration-era pleasures of a nice cup cake. On one level this is consistent with the strange inversion of shopping habits that has taken place over the last decade between the city and the countryside. This folding of space and time has resulted in the urban middle classes picking up their muddy potatoes from the farmers market and their Lincolnshire Poacher from the organic cheese shop while everyone in the sticks shops at Tesco.

Our cities grow odd organic appendages at the weekends, temporary infestations from the countryside that spring up to sell expensive organic vegetables to a niche market troubled by supermarkets and urbanity. There is a sort of alchemy at work here, the turning of base metal into gold, or thrift into luxury**. For coal tar soap and muddy potatoes were surely never meant to be luxury products. It takes a particularly weird intersection of class and socio-economics to make them so. And whilst Labour and Wait remains packed on a Sunday morning, my local Woolworths - that most genuinely thrifty of shops - is already a boarded up memory.

* This post takes a big cue from Owen Hatherley's recent thoughts on austerity nostalgia.

**By the way, I'm not denying the actuality of recession, just some of the perverse inequalities of its manifestation.

(Image of bristles and soap via)

Design: A Dirty Word

(Image via)

In the 1970's my father sold pipes. Bing Crosby was one of his best customers. I'm not making this up. Despite this celebrity endorsement, gentleman's pipes were not a boom industry in the 1970's. My father was always looking for ways to expand his limited customer base and find new markets, more potential pipe smokers. So he came up with an innovation: the Lady's Pipe. It was very similar to the standard male version except it was smaller, perhaps a third the size, and had a clear perspex stem instead of the usual black plastic one.

Leaving aside the question of whether a view of the cancerous fumes funneling towards one's lungs was an attractive feature, the Lady's Pipe was a slightly comical, ultimately doomed, attempt at marketing a thoroughly male product to women. When friends of my parents came to dinner, my father would always produce his box of cigars and obscure Turkish cigarettes at the end of the meal. Any female guests would be enthusiastically offered the Lady's Pipe. There were never any takers.

I was reminded of this childhood trauma while reading Adrian Forty's book Objects of Desire recently. In it the author charts the role of design in capitalism's desire to seek out new markets. In particular Forty looks at how assumed differences between the sexes are articulated through design to create parallel sets of male and female products. This creation of superfluous alternatives is particularly acute when it comes to beauty products. Identical versions of the same things - razors, moisturising cream, shampoo etc. - are subjected to nuances of styling to distinguish their intended market. Even to call them beauty products is to ascribe them female characterestics. For men its always called grooming.



The interesting thing about this (leaving aside the dubiousness of the sexual stereoyping) is the role of design in creating this sense of difference. Here design is about pure styling, largely removed from function, practicality or use. The Gillette M3 Power razor, for example, works just as well in Barbie pink as it does in sci-fi neon green. The obsessive articulation of sexual difference (and therefore the appeal these products make to our sexual desires and the possibility of satisfying them) masks the fact that the products involved are basically the same.



So male products appear like a combination of custom car and training shoe; all fins, grills, rubber pads and bulbous curves. These add-ons are given automotive names: turbos, injections, triple super pro action - a conjunction of science, sport and technology, the holy trinity of male interests.

As well as looking different female beauty products accentuate their therapuetic qualities using the full lexicon of pampering so correctly loathed by Julie Burchill. For men the products take on a different descriptive language of buffing, scrubbing and performance. Look at this recent Nivea ad for men's skin products where acceptable reasons for worrying about having bad skin include partying and working too hard, complete with generic indie-rock soundtrack.



If all these ruses are about designing (sexual) difference into essentially the same product, then perfume represents the most extreme example of trying to articulate nothing but difference itself. Perfume is perhaps the most perfect piece of design and the most perfect product of capitalism. It is Marx's commodity fetish and Freud's sexual fetish combined, an almost magical product of mythical sexual properties. It creates value out of almost nothing but thin air.

In the packaging and form of perfume design has it all to do. This is why perfume adverts are so fabulously and perfectly absurd. There is almost literally nothing to say about them beyond; "Wear this. Get laid". If all products use sex to sell, most have another stated purpose. There ar no facts, no statistics and no information when it comes to perfume. The epic levels of pretention in Chanel's recent ad starring Nicole Kidman works to counteract its literal lack of content. Similarly the genius of Jean Paul Gaultier's perfume and aftershave range is to sexualise the packaging - the bit that isn't even the product itself - making the act of holding the bottle an erotically charged (if intentionally camp) experience.



Here is a version of design far removed from the realm of pragmatic problem solving or ergonomic functionality. It is about the conjuring of value out of next to nothing, a confluence of aura, glamour, sexual desire and the black arts of marketing and branding. It happens in all products of course but in perfume it reaches its apogee. This version of design is about spectacle, a suggestion of desirability that sparkles on the surface of objects. It is about pure style.



Style in design has become a dirty word. It is now a perjorative expression implying superficiality. To discuss design in terms of style is to risk appearing shallow, interested only in surface qualities rather than depth or content. In fact the whole rhetoric of art and design criticism rests on these spatial metaphors. Value is always assumed to lie behind things, an inherent property of the object, rather than on its surface. To understand something we must somehow get behind it or delve into its depths.



Design is always anxious to justify itself in terms other than (mere) style. Designers aim for their work to be useful, innovative, functional, worthy. To say that you designed something like this or like that simply because you liked it, or because you wanted someone else to like it too, appears shockingly decadent. The theory surrounding Parametric modelling can be read this way, as an attempt to provide an intellectual justification for the sparkling and vivacious surfaces of contemporary architecture. Perhaps though it is closer to the suggestive curves of Gaultier's perfume bottle or the bulbous pseudo-ergonomics of Gillette's M3 Power razor.

Style always raises the spectre of design's guilty secret; that it is just might not be that important. Its use might be simply to catch our attention. Design is always eager to please, always out to seduce us.

Why Do Architects Design Uncomfortable Houses?

When architect’s design houses, they don’t just design houses. They ask questions about the
nature of houses. They re-evaluate the typology of house. They challenge our common understanding of what a house is. They don’t generally, for instance, think: “Let’s make it nice and comfy”.

When Robert Venturi designed a house for his mother in Philadelphia he upset a number of apple carts, not least through his use of traditional domestic imagery. Tellingly, in perhaps the most famous photograph of the house, his mother herself appears, sitting on a chair by the front door. It’s rare for architects to include people in the photographs of their buildings at all; Le Corbusier tended to include his car, most prefer to leave the interiors strangely blank. The house is normally shown as an empty sculpture, unoccupied and sparsely furnished. So, the inclusion of Venturi’s mother, perhaps the embodiment of homely domesticity, strikes an unusual note in the history of 20th century architecture.

Homely domesticity runs pretty much contrary to the pre-occupations of the architectural avant garde. The ‘project’ of the avant-garde remains an assault on the familiar, the cosy and the comfortable. The history of the Modernist house (as written by architects) is a history of experimentation: formal, technological, and programmatic. This raises an interesting question in relation to the design of domestic architecture, where, presumably, some degree of comfort might be desired. A basic antagonism exists therefore between the aspirations of a progressive architectural culture and it’s likely patrons.


(Photo: Phillippe Ruault from Adolf Loos: Works and Projects by Ralf Bock)

Adolf Loos, wrestling with this issue at the beginning of the twentieth century, came to the conclusion that only two areas of architecture belonged to the realm of art: the tomb and the monument. “The work of art is revolutionary. The house is conservative,” he wrote. Everything else was inevitably compromised and part of the everyday. His houses, therefore, explored a strange compromise. The exteriors pursued formal issues of abstraction and modernity, while the interiors contained the trappings of comfort: familiar room types, chintzy furniture luxurious materials. The ironic fissure between the two was pursued, as others have pointed out, more subtly within the interiors too, so that his houses became elegant commentaries upon, or representations of, domesticity.


(Photo: Phillippe Ruault)

Such an antagonism might be seen to reach an apogee of intentional absurdism in Peter Eisenman’s series of houses from the 1970’s. Each of these houses is numbered according to the architect’s sequence, rather than named after the owner. By doing this, Eisenman effectively takes ownership of the house away from the client so that, like a painting or sculpture, it becomes the property of the artist and his/her oeuvre.



The autonomy of the houses is further reinforced through the manner in which they disregard the social niceties of domestic arrangement. Eisenman’s House 10, for instance, is constructed according to a series of abstract formal rules which produces an object that cannot easily be occupied in a straightforward manner. Columns come down where chairs should be, stairs hang upside down and the marital bed is cut in half. Put simply, the house is probably a nightmare to live in. Despite the artifice of such a conceit, it is probably the purest attack on the relationship between architecture’s artistic autonomy and the accepted requirements of a family house. And, of course, it depends on the benevolent patronisation of owners happy to be challenged on a daily basis by the extreme impracticality of their house. As most jobbing architects know, this is not usually the case.

If architecture is not trying to challenge our preconceptions then it is trying to improve us as people. The rhetoric of early modernism and housing was one of self-improvement through design. Take the drawing below, from Le Corbusier's Towards A New Architecture. Whilst the woman cleans the sheets the man is engaged in vigorous exercise. Similarly, the sink in the entrance hall of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoire is more a provocation than a useful item. It’s surreality is arresting but it anticipates a quick splash of cold water on the face before a jog up the ramp to the sun terrace. Le Corbusier’s love of sanitary goods followed from Loos’. Both were obsessed with a notion of cleanliness, of mind as much as body.



The co-opting of this version of architecture by the welfare state meant that its more psychologically complex elements became overridden by a pragmatic sense of health, space and improved sanitation. This, undoubtedly a beneficial thing in the sense of the enormous and progressive provision of homes by the state in post war Europe, also chimed with a certain puritanical hairshirt quality to British modernism. At its most extreme it contains a barely concealed contempt for the tastes and aspirations of homeowners that don't subscribe to the architects vision. Here the antagonism is not between that of a challenging architect and their wealthy patron but between those doing the improving and those who need to be improved.

Comfort in architecture has a troubled lineage. The function of houses and housing seems either to have been ignored by the avant garde or assumed an overly mechanistic form at the expense of pschological, emotional or symbolic need.

History Today

Book review: Intelligence Made Visible, by Stephen Bayley and Terence Conran

“…Certainties about standards of taste…(have) in recent times disappeared altogether” write the authors of this updated A-Z of design. Well, it doesn’t seem to have affected them much. Stephen Bayley and Terence Conran remain certain of their own standards of taste throughout, even if they are a little baffled by society’s unwillingness to toe the line.

Throughout this book what comes across most is the authors’ fear of design without rules, of there being no accepted standards and no official canon of good design. Digital culture and the sprawling landscape of contemporary consumerism promote a deep unease about how to quantify and qualify what is going on. Not only that, but as much contemporary design no longer conforms to the authors’ ideology of mainstream modernism, they see the situation in slightly apocalyptic terms. “Ugly, inefficient, depressing chaos” starts one chapter. “Taste” they write, “is directed not by Domus or the Architectural Review…but by what comes down the broadband connection.” Indeed, a paranoid fear of bad design, or possibly bad taste, lurks in all their pronouncements.

On the one hand this is a perfectly straightforward book. It lists designs and designers in alphabetical order. There are few surprises. The notion of design here is basically high modernism and so the cover blurb of this being “an indispensable guide to the contents of the modern world” is predictably misleading. An indispensable guide to the contents of the Design Museum would be more accurate. You certainly won’t find much new in it. There is very little on popular culture, fashion, graphics, or the kind of everyday objects that slip through the net of design conneursureship. There are no entries on current design with the exceptions of Jonathon Ive and Thomas Hetherwick, although Studio Job, Tord Boontje and Droog are mentioned briefly, and negatively, in passing. So, the plot line on modern design trotted out here is a very familiar one.

But there is a more interesting and entertaining sub-text which is the author’s relationship to the evolving design world around them. Inevitably, with two such big personalities writing what is meant to be a general guide, their adopted mask of objectivity constantly slips. The Arts and Crafts for example get a terrific mauling for their presumed culpability in the UK’s obsession with the past and with what the authors call the ‘Cotswold effect’. Fair enough, you might say, except that ridiculing our desire for the county lifestyle would be more reasonable if Sir Terence’s own historic country pile were not so well published. Somewhat randomly, some designers - such as C.R. Ashbee and Philipe Starck - are ridiculed while other equally preposterous characters such as Carlo Mollino or Joe Columbo are treated reverentially. In fact the entry on Mollino is one of the best and written with unalloyed enthusiasm for an idiosyncractic character.

Ultimately, despite all their protestations to the contrary and their stated desire for objective truth in design, this book conforms entirely to the taste of its authors. It is far more about them than it is about design. So, the two appear pictured at the beginning and end of the book, somewhat gratuitously enjoying a nice glass of wine together. They even write a short biography of each other, although, oddly, while Stephen Bayley’s tribute is generous in its praise, Sir Terence’s reads like a less than glowing reference. Indeed, there is a slight underlying sense that they might not have wanted to write this book together,

The tone of the book they have written is nostalgic, slightly mournful, occasionally a little bitter. It mourns the passing of the simplicities of an earlier era, or perhaps, the simplicities of youth. Things have changed, say the authors, and definitely for the worse. Where design used (apparently) to be about simplifying the world it is now about making it more complicated. Where it was once straight it is now perverse. Where there were once solutions now there are more questions. The fact that it never was simple is not the point. Design, like nostalgia, is just not what it used to be.

All The Chickens On The Kingsland Road

Coming Soon!

Look out for: All The Chickens On The Kingsland Road - a photographic survey of take aways from Shoreditch to Stoke Newington.

Also coming up:

Kylie Minogue at the V&A, (opens on February 8th). Sadly, rather than catch Kylie's latest Showgirl comeback tour, I'm reviewing the exhibition instead.

I've Been Around The World. This is gonna be an untitled, un-captioned, photographic record of those forlorn, pompous, negligable, overblown bits of art that litter the world's public spaces.

Meanwhile, the recent death of the inventor of instant noodles has moved me to write in praise of that most maligned of snacks; the Pot Noodle. Read Modernism: A Potted History......

Modernism: A Potted History

In Memoriam: Momoluku Ando (March 5th 1910 - January 5th 2007)

Momoluku Ando - who died at the beginning of January this year - bequeathed the world one of its most incredible products: the Pot Noodle. Could there be a better icon of mass-produced, instant, transportable, lightweight, efficient, international modernity than the Pot Noodle? Forget the Futurist’s Cook Book, this is food as Modernists dreamt the world could be.

Despite its staggering success the Pot Noodle occupies a problematic place in our food culture. In fact, for most people, it is doubtful whether they would actually class it as a food at all. Pot Noodle is most definitely a PRODUCT and, these days food's cultural value lies in its claims to naturalness. Current attitudes to food mirror our mixed up attitude to modernity in general. Food consumption is currently subject to more sentimentalism, pseudo-regionalism and sheer perversity than even architecture. It is no coincidence that Prince Charles’ twin areas of industry over the last twenty years have been in these two fields. His combination of a misty eyed veneration of olde England, deep political conservatism, sentimental love of the land and anti-scientific belief systems have given us both Poundbury and Duchy Originals: his recently built village and organic food range respectively.

If Duchy Originals hail from the same source as Poundbury then where do Pot Noodles come from? Tokyo? Milton Keynes? Well, Wales actually but like Milton Keynes they are derided and denigrated by all right thinking people, symbolic of a wasteful, over packaged, over sanitised, lazy and nutritionally under-nourished culture, removed from food production, lost to the land, indifferent to the changing seasons. They are the ultimate enemy of the Slow Food movement, the Room 101 of TV chefs. Duchy Originals are self-consciously conservative, evoking images of localised cottage farming industry. Organic, authentic and original. The associations with monarchy may rankle but the Duchy bacon and biscuits on our supermarket shelves are a favourite of urban foodies. And this is another paradox of our complex culture. Recently, our retail landscape has inverted itself. Gentrified parts of East London are now full of specialist cheese emporiums, retro sweet shops and down to earth farmers markets. Urbanites, decked in Japanese denim and plugged into Californian software, amble about picking the greenfly off Bramlies and the mud off Maris Pipers. Farmer’s stalls fill up vacant plots of inner London like a cross between Archigram’s Instant City and the Archers. It’s like….well, actually it’s so complicated, so perversely tortuous in its lack of logic that it’s hard to say what it's like. Who would have thought the city would end up looking like this? Certainly not the Futurists and, probably, not the inventor of Pot Noodles either. Meanwhile, out in the sticks, everyone is off to Tesco.

In a land of Nigel and Nigella, modern convenience food appears doomed. Except it isn’t. Pot Noodle's manufacturer's Unilever sell 4 Pot Noodles every second. Their slick and funny marketing campaign plays relentlessly on the negative connotations of Pot Noodles, constantly referring to its unnaturalness and slobby lack of sophistication. They recently brought out a super hot curry version called Bombay Bad Boy and a more upmarket one called Posh Noodle. And just look at that Bombay Bad Boy packing. It’s black with flames on it. When did anyone try and sell food in packaging that looked like a hot rod? No tasteful use of tartan, no retro packaging, no “I’m home made, I must be good for you” schtick. Pot Noodle flaunts its in-authenticity, it's status as a product, something made in a factory and boxed in its millions. It's latest advertising campaign pokes yet more fun at our longing for natural products by suggesting that the noodles are mined in Wales.

A vegetarian friend of mine at University existed for some time solely on Chicken Pot Noodles. He did this because Chicken Pot Noodles were: A, amazingly cheap and; B, contained absolutely no chicken. Momoluku Ando’s product got my friend through some difficult times. Now, he probably has nothing to with it and gets his vegetables delivered by Able & Cole. This, though, is our contemporary version of modernity. This is where we went in the century of Modernism that Ando lived through. A society complex enough to embrace the giddying effects of digital technology and to also want its vegetables seasonal and with the mud still on. And, to eat 175 million Pot Noodles a year on the sly.

The Ideal Stress Free Sustainable Spotless 0 % Balance Transferred Life

Review: The Ideal Home Show 2006, Earls Court.

Since 1908 the Ideal Home show has charted mainstream British taste in houses and interiors. Not much has changed stylistically it seems, but the show has never really embraced architectural notions of progress, either formal or technological. If technology is celebrated here it is in the ability to minutely adjust your armchair or comes hidden in the pre-fabricated panels behind t+g cladding. Here, architecture – to the horror of architects – is no longer about abstract space or challenging geometry but psychological well-being and domestic comfort.

This year’s theme is sustainability and is represented by an enormous fake waterfall. Somewhere nearby lurk Channel 5’s Justin Ryan and Colin McAllister and their spectacular tree house in its “authentic rainforest setting”. Justin and Colin loom large over the show with their brand of metropolitan snobbism and shameless stylistic globe-trotting. Their Asian Influences bedroom (“Hey, even the paint used to decorate the walls is from the Breathe Easy collection by Crown”) typifies the show’s notion of sustainability as mainly to do with celebrating the earthy hues of exotic locales. So, their bedroom also uses “…fabrics woven in the far east by fairly paid workers” as if using fabrics woven in Brentwood by fairly paid workers would be utterly unsustainable.

Away from this billowy rhetoric the exciting action seems to be upstairs at the cheapo end where a furiously competitive market exists for highly toxic cleaning products and futuristic steam irons. Snake oil sellers of a never-to-be-achieved spotless domesticity demonstrate Amazing Pasta Storage Jars, weird robotic hoovers and Magic Saucepans. There’s also some sub Jack Vetriano artworks and vast armies of people selling you Spanish timeshares, botox injections, 0% balance transfers and eye massage glasses. Overall, upstairs as well as down, there is an astonishing number of products related to stress relief and relaxation. Much of the show is taken up by vast and slightly scary looking massage chairs, complete with digital consoles and heat sensors to (supposedly) locate your personal areas of pain and discomfort. Hundreds of jacuzzi’s lined like mother of pearl oysters and festooned with action packed nozzles and rubber water jets, take up much of the other half. What else is there? Well, some fairly anodyne furniture, the occasional bronze leopard or chrome nude, some celebrity chefs and a few bits of interesting new design. It’s not unlike 100% Design, 98% design maybe, but where the innovation is in cleaning products.

Ultimately, the Ideal Home show is about the home as a sanctuary from modern life: a repository for any number of labour saving devices and home spas and ergonomic dining chairs. As Adolf Loos wrote at the beginning of the 20th century, the modern house is a haven from the existentially alienating urban environment. Hence all the massage chairs and fish tanks. Outside, the world is creased, stained and stressful. Inside, all is steam pressed, deep down clean and profoundly relaxing. In its way it’s not that far either from Archigram’s 1960’s dream of the electronic cottage or the well serviced capsule home. It doesn’t look like that for sure – there are no roundy corners or space race styling – but the clapboard covered ideal homes on show are mass-produced, super insulated, custom fitted environments. Relax in your spotless Dyson hoovered Asian Influences front room, set the massage seat to 30 minute Shiatsu, sip some decaffeinated fair trade coffee from your super sized Crazy Frog mug and watch Desperate Housewives on the Plasma screen: the Ideal Life.