The Genius of Design: Designs for Living, BBC Two | reviews, news & interviews
The Genius of Design: Designs for Living, BBC Two
The Genius of Design: Designs for Living, BBC Two
Home is where the art is: if you want comfort don't buy a Marcel Breuer chair
Sunday, 16 May 2010
Does form always have to follow function? Is ornamentation really such a heinous crime? Or is Modernism itself the enemy of the people? The second part of this excellent five-part series – fab archive footage, great interviews with designers young enough to no longer be beholden to the Modernist creed – focused on the founding of the Bauhaus and the Modernist aesthetic. And after juggling a lot of questions, it gently guided us towards more or less the same position as Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, though in a far more respectful, design-conscious way: Modernism worked in theory but wasn’t so hot, nor so user-friendly, in practice. Furthermore, it was inevitable that it would be the consumer rather than the theoretician who would, in the end, hold sway.
Le Corbusier wanted to raze the whole of Paris so that he could build in its place a vision of his concrete year zero utopia. Up popped his plan for his ideal Parisian metropolis. Christ. Haussmann’s Paris still stands, of course, and though Le Corb didn’t get to transform the city of le romance into one big Unité d’Habitation, you could argue, as it was argued here in its subtly forceful way, that he and his fellow Modernist visionaries left a pretty unhappy legacy all the same.
Obviously, you could look at it another way, too – if you’re a mad-eyed zealot at least: that it wasn’t modernism that had failed the people, but that it was the people who had failed the Modernist ideal. If we were rational creatures, after all, we could have quite happily adapted to its entirely rational logic. Just look at how much sense Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s iconic Frankfurt Kitchen would have made if we weren’t such disappointingly idiosyncratic creatures, given to our funny, fallibly human ways.
Designed by the Austrian architect in 1926 for a social housing project in Frankfurt, and based on the dining car kitchen of a train – hence there was neither room to swing a saucepan nor for sharing a cuppa round the tiny pull-down work unit – the Frankfurt Kitchen was the forerunner of the fitted kitchen. It was based, and here’s the science bit, on time-motion studies that determined exactly how long each processing step, from preparation to the disposal of food, should take in the kitchen (lots of complicated diagrams followed). So never mind the size, this was revolution, based on the new science of ergonomics. More importantly, it was revolution on the cheap: 10,000 units were promptly built in Frankfurt alone.
It must come as no surprise that Shütte-Lihotzky herself hated cooking. I'm guessing here, but she probably didn’t see much point in having a natter round the kitchen table, either. Meanwhile, it wasn't long before ordinary users discovered for themselves that perhaps modernism wasn’t going to be much fun after all - and none of us like being bossed about in our own homes. If they’d read a summary of Schütte-Lihotzky’s puritanical credo, that “Firstly it (life) is work, and secondly it is for relaxing, company and pleasure”, they’d have been forewarned.
So what did we learn from this excellent episode? That not only did the house have to become a machine for living in, but people had to become machines. As the man from The Fine Art Society (so not an obvious fan) explained, people, on the whole - bless 'em - would still rather live in mock Tudor splendour than in modular units. Or as we’re increasingly seeing, mock Georgian Barrett Home “villages”. And talk about crossing the floor, even a notable collector of Bauhaus chairs - in fact, the industrial designer of ergonomic seating Niels Diffrient - chimed in by saying that he couldn’t sit in any one of his famous chairs (the Bauhaus ones, he's not talking about the ones designed by him, obviously). They were sculptures, or, as he elegantly put it “poetic reflections of the Modern Age”. Theoretical chairs, then, not actually designed for use, certainly not designed for comfort. To enjoy them, one must, in fact, stand back and simply critically appraise their fine curvilinear forms.
You’ll enjoy this series, too, but only if you’re sitting comfortably, preferably on a fat three-piece.
Obviously, you could look at it another way, too – if you’re a mad-eyed zealot at least: that it wasn’t modernism that had failed the people, but that it was the people who had failed the Modernist ideal. If we were rational creatures, after all, we could have quite happily adapted to its entirely rational logic. Just look at how much sense Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s iconic Frankfurt Kitchen would have made if we weren’t such disappointingly idiosyncratic creatures, given to our funny, fallibly human ways.
Designed by the Austrian architect in 1926 for a social housing project in Frankfurt, and based on the dining car kitchen of a train – hence there was neither room to swing a saucepan nor for sharing a cuppa round the tiny pull-down work unit – the Frankfurt Kitchen was the forerunner of the fitted kitchen. It was based, and here’s the science bit, on time-motion studies that determined exactly how long each processing step, from preparation to the disposal of food, should take in the kitchen (lots of complicated diagrams followed). So never mind the size, this was revolution, based on the new science of ergonomics. More importantly, it was revolution on the cheap: 10,000 units were promptly built in Frankfurt alone.
It must come as no surprise that Shütte-Lihotzky herself hated cooking. I'm guessing here, but she probably didn’t see much point in having a natter round the kitchen table, either. Meanwhile, it wasn't long before ordinary users discovered for themselves that perhaps modernism wasn’t going to be much fun after all - and none of us like being bossed about in our own homes. If they’d read a summary of Schütte-Lihotzky’s puritanical credo, that “Firstly it (life) is work, and secondly it is for relaxing, company and pleasure”, they’d have been forewarned.
So what did we learn from this excellent episode? That not only did the house have to become a machine for living in, but people had to become machines. As the man from The Fine Art Society (so not an obvious fan) explained, people, on the whole - bless 'em - would still rather live in mock Tudor splendour than in modular units. Or as we’re increasingly seeing, mock Georgian Barrett Home “villages”. And talk about crossing the floor, even a notable collector of Bauhaus chairs - in fact, the industrial designer of ergonomic seating Niels Diffrient - chimed in by saying that he couldn’t sit in any one of his famous chairs (the Bauhaus ones, he's not talking about the ones designed by him, obviously). They were sculptures, or, as he elegantly put it “poetic reflections of the Modern Age”. Theoretical chairs, then, not actually designed for use, certainly not designed for comfort. To enjoy them, one must, in fact, stand back and simply critically appraise their fine curvilinear forms.
You’ll enjoy this series, too, but only if you’re sitting comfortably, preferably on a fat three-piece.
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