POP-ARCH Cynically Playful Design for Emotional Beings
Anna Mary Murnane advised by Molly Hunker Undergraduate Thesis Preparation Syracuse University School of Architecture
POP-ARCH Cynically Playful Design for Emotional Beings
Anna Mary Murnane advised by Molly Hunker Undergraduate Thesis Preparation Syracuse University School of Architecture
Dedicated to:
Barbara, Iggy and Brendan Murnane.
CONTENTS
1-4 CONTEXT CLAIM 5-8
CH 1 RECONNECTING CARRIE 1 Out of the Furnace
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CH 2 THE MINOR AESTHETICS 1 Mass Taste 39 2 Camp Sensibilities 49 CH 3 UNITED, WE CONSUME 1 Pop-Art 57 2 Pop-Architecture 65 CH 4 BUILT TO SHOCK 1 Productive Anxiety 2 Exposure Therapy SPECULATIVE ARTIFACTS OUTTAKES
77 81 89-100 103-106
Fabrice le Nezet, Fashion for Concrete, 2013.
CONTEXT
During the age of progressionism and futurism, in this era called modernism, the central themes were technology, function, and ‘public space’. This notion of public space, although highly Eurocentric, was accompanied by the words ‘universal’ and ‘international.’ In those days, all an architectural theorist had to do to predict the future cities was to look at the works of leading architects, such as Mies van der Rohe. That is, until Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown started to say, “Less is bore” and went learning in Las Vegas. And so began the phenomenon of post-modernism, a time in which architects started to copy from Disneyland, and theorists now had to study theme parks. Similar to “international style,” this notion of postmodernism was a disguising title, adopted by architects to become practitioners of kitsch and popular culture; but what it truly was, was a style of capitalism and consumerism.
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Playtime. Dir. Jaques Tati. 1967. Film.
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After the collapse of Modernist ideals and the loss of our post-Enlightenment optimism, we are a postmodern culture of disenchantment. We have already achieved in many regards the long awaited images or notions of the future in a practical way. As Americans, we no longer know what the term “future” means, because it appears as if we’ve achieved it. We enter here into a kind of “post-futuristic” world construct, in which we have the machines and mechanisms of the “old future” behind us. We’ve found ourselves at a time structure of an extended “now”, where our concepts of the future merge with the experience of the past and perhaps offer us the possibility not to repeat the mistakes of the past, or at least to look upon them differently or more objectively. Our industrialized culture produces the type of person with a disposition to perpetual critique, defined by an ensemble of traits, such as skepticism, cynicism, and suspicion. Today’s instant variations in rhythm have made us elastic: the by-product of adaptability and acceleration. As a collective, we have developed a deeply ironic sensibility, with a natural impulse to demystify, deconstruct, and delegitimize.
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CLAIM
Architecture, as a discourse, is losing relevance in the twenty-first century because architects tend to be unfailingly optimistic about the future. Still blinded by the deeply embedded ideologies of Modernism, they devise master plans for imaginary people: for the perfect, happy, and obedient citizens of tomorrow. In order for architects to participate in shaping the reality people desire, they must say goodbye to the 20th century and ask themselves, “Whom really are we designing for and what will their values be?� Design is no longer about making a nice object that will become a solution for our problems; Design is about the complexity of contemporary living. Using memory as a design strategy to engage with the history of Braddock, populararchitecture can take on the force of the uncanny and re-design the present condition of the Carrie Furnace site as more cynical, yet playful.
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Dewitz, Travis. Carrie Furnace. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 2012. Photograph.
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“What is interesting about people is that when you put forward some apocalyptic or negative scenerio, people always see the positive side of things.� -Fiona Raby
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Building of the Atomium for the World’s Fair. 1958. Belgium
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RECONNECTING CARRIE
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Homestead
Carrie Furnace Edgar Thomson Steel Works
fig. 1: Hot Metal Bridge + Carrie Furnace
It is in this limbo, this in-between of the before and after, that makes this a crucial time in considering the fate of the America’s post-industrial cities. Industrial relics that have survived into the age of globalization have an aesthetic value, because they symbolize our previous relationship with “the future.” The marriage of technology and progress, alone, can no longer advance our society. We desire a world in which the new and the old, in many layers, co-exist simultaneously.1 By the use of certain methodologies in art and photography, such as those deployed by Andy Warhol and the Bechers, architecture can establish an alternative reality for Braddock, Pennsylvania, and transform the “place the mills left behind” into a “place the mills helped design.”
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Kovats, Stephen. “What Does Future Mean Here?” Interview by Nadin Heinich. DigitaL Utopia 2013: 63-67. Print.
fig. 2: Braddock + Edgar Thomson Steel Works
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
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fig. 1: Parking Lot
fig. 2: Talbot Ave
fig. 3: Rankin Bridge
Carrie Furnace
Fig. 3
1 2
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On the edge of the Monongahela River, just outside the city of Pittsburgh, is the riverfront community of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Once center stage during the steel revolution, Braddock would become home to Andrew Carnegie’s first library, as well as Edgar Thomson Steel Works. Following the collapse of the United States Steel Industry in the 1970’s and 80’s, Braddock alone has lost nearly 90% of its population, and an even higher percentage of local businesses. These waterfront communities became victims of globalization and suburbanization, plagued with systemic joblessness, financial hardship, and a general sense of hopelessness are near permanent fixtures.1 A word close to ‘ruin’ is ‘derelict’, yet these two terms prompt opposite reactions- the former inspires poetry as a symbol for our previous notion of “future,” while the latter calls for demolition.2 Braddock, Pennsylvania, is a host to a thriving sub-city of derelict architectures- abandoned pubs, vacated shops, and boarded-up houses. The nearby Carrie Furnace is one of Pittsburgh’s most impressive and last remaining industrial ruins on the verge of reclamation.
1 Streitfeld, David. “Rock Bottom for Decades, but Showing Signs
of Life.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 31 Jan. 2009. Web. 05 Dec. 2014. 2 Williams, Gilda. “It Was What It Was: Modern Ruins” Art Monthly
No. 336. London, May 2010.
Dewitz, Travis. Looking towards Edgar Thomson Steel Works in Braddock, Pennsylvania. 2009. Photograph.
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Dewitz, Travis. Businesses in Braddock, Pennsylvania. 2009. Photograph.
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“As a fragment, a ruin is more loaded with meaning than when it was a whole.� -Gilda Williams
In 1999, the Homestead Steel Works, once the world’s most advanced steel plant, was redeveloped into a suburban-type open-air shopping mall, with parking lots making up the majority of the master plan. The goal for this expansive development was to revive the business district of Homestead to the south, yet this goal was not met. Two decades have passed, and a generation of Pittsburghers has grown up without any idea of what once existed on this land before the shopping center. 12 power-washed smokestacks flank the parking lot to the west, representing the fate of many industrial objects as amputated and cosmetically-modified ornaments: victims of deindustrialization and suburbanization.
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J&R Steel Works. 1940s. Homestead, PA.
Parking Lot. 2012. Homestead, PA.
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The Carrie Blast Furnaces nos. 6 and 7 were once a part of the U.S. Steel Homestead Works, which produced iron from 1907 to 1978. They were sold to the Park Corporation in 1988, then to the county in 2005. In 2006, the Carrie Furnace became a National Historic Landmark, yet not much effort was put into giving this historical relic any kind public accessibility, except for seasonal tours and events organized by a local organization called Rivers of Steel.1 Recent interest in future redevelopment of this site was spurred by the emergence of the “Carrie Deer”, a sculpture made of wire and constructed by a group of artists who trespassed every Sunday over the course of a year to build it. Currently, a large overpass is under construction, and within the next couple of years, a suburbanstyle shopping center will be established, similar to the one across the river in Homestead.
1
Christopher, Matthew. “Carrie Furnaces.” Abandoned America. N.p., Apr. 2013. Web. 05 Dec. 2014.
“History is a means to re-imagine the past as much as it is to comprehend the past.� -Jonathan Hill
View of Carrie Furnace from North. 2014. Braddock, PA.
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“Building the Carrie Deer.” The Carrie Deer. Web. 05 Dec. 2014. Photograph.
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“The Carrie Deer.” The Carrie Deer. Web. 05 Dec. 2014. Photograph.
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“Flyover Ramp to Open Development of Carrie Furnace Site.” TribLIVE.com.
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OUT OF THE FURNACE
Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace once described Pittsburgh as “Hell with the Lid Taken off.” Since then, small mill towns along Western Pennsylvania’s Monongahela and Allegheny River Valleys, such as Braddock, have become a kind-of readymade backdrop for American decline, chosen by directors in attempt to channel a certain type of somber, blue collar authenticity in their films.1
1 Newton, Matthew. “Hell With the Lid Taken Off.” Matthew New-
ton. N.p., 25 Mar. 2014. Web. 14 Dec. 2014.
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Steel Mill Workers. 1940s.
J&R Strike. 1946.
Mill Worker. 1940s. Archives Service Center, U. of Pittsburgh.
Courthouse. 1950s.
Carnegie Library. 1950s.
Before smoke control ordinances in the 1940’s, Pittsburgh was filled with a density of low-level clouds emitted by nearby coal plants. At this time, the city’s heavy output of smoke was not yet understood to be a sign of airborne contamination. In order to keep people in the city, ideas were formulated and perpetuated by a powerful lobby spreading misinformation, leading residents to believe that smoke could improve their lungs and help crops grow. Smoke was understood to be a visible indication of Pittsburgh’s advanced technology, high productivity and power.1
1
“Historic Pittsburgh.” http://digital.library.pitt.edu/. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Jan. 2015.
Corner of Liberty and Fifth. 1930s. Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
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Under the Bridge. 1930s. Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.
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Historically, one of the primary functions of photography has been to document sites where significant, often traumatic events have taken place. Photographs depicting happy people during the industrial revolution in Pittsburgh are rare, especially at such an early stage in the medium. Whether these images were taken in earnest or to be ironic, they put us in a critical position and challenge our previous notions of reality, as well as the possible motives of the photographer behind the camera who created these powerful images.
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Steel Mill Children. 1930.
Girls in Ethnic Outfits. 1936. U. of Pittsburgh.
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THE MINOR AESTHETICS
MASS TASTE During the 16th-Century, Claude Perrault, in his Ordinance, would produce influential theory, setting the stage for the legitimacy of minor aesthetics in architecture. Perrault, based on his analysis of Vitruvius’ proportional orders, recognized the emerging elements of minor aesthetics as self-evident phenomena with intrinsic properties of material, symmetry, relation between parts, and opulence.1 He understood that beauty was not absolute, but rather, progressive.
1 Claude Perrault, A Treatise on the Five Orders of Columns, trans.,
John James (London: Benk. Mott, 1708), Plate I, p. 43.
Vitruvius, The orders, controlled by easily remembered ratios. 16th c.
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Dielman, Frederick. The Widow, 1861-97, oil on canvas
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“The middle-class wanted to buy art, but they didn’t want to understand its cultural value.” -Matei Calinescu
Perrault insisted upon the existence of arbitrary beauty, and that the proportions of Vitruvius’ orders were based on a certain society’s cultural prejudice, habits, and associations; a product of mass taste. Perrault would become the most influential precursor of 18th-century theory.1 His definition was modern in the sense that he seemed to be eluding to the aesthetics of consumerism. After the printing press revolutionized the world and sparked the age of the Enlightenment, aesthetics became a philosophical debate for the first time. Street artists in Munich began to borrow techniques from romantic art and create cheap reproductions for the middle class. Avant-garde artists fought back, attempting to preserve their integrity by categorizing this type of art as kitschen- a German verb meaning, “to collect rubbish off the street”.2
1 Pollak, Martha. "Book Review:The First Moderns: The Architects
of the Eighteenth Century Joseph Rykwert." The Journal of Modern History 58.1 (1986): 249. JSTOR. Web. 1 Jan. 2015. 2 Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity - Modernism, Avant-
Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1987.
In 1917, Duchamp’s urinal, re-titled Fountain, was rejected on the grounds that it defied good taste.1 In response to his rejection, Duchamp would criticize the superstructure of aesthetic value, writing in an anonymous essay that the importance of the object was that ‘he chose it’. Susan Hapgood in her book Neo-Dada Redefining Art tells us that ‘Duchamp himself claimed that with the ready-mades he wanted to lower the status of the artist in society, to de-deify the artist, even to eliminate art entirely, however the public perception was somehow different.’
“Suddenly, everything could be art and everyone could be an artist.” -Gerrard O’Carroll
1 Hapgood, Susan. Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62, Universe,
New York, 1994, p. 137.
Duchamp, Marcel. Fountain, 1917, photograph.
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Magritte, RenĂŠ. Not to be Reproduced, 1937, oil on canvas.
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“If the avant-garde imitates the processes of art, kitsch, we now see, imitates its effects.” -Clement Greenburg
Kitsch was not an art movement, but rather, a philosophical movement. It replaced our previous idea that beauty is socially distributed with the modern idea that beauty may be bought and sold.1 Suddenly, everything could be art and everyone could be an artist.2 According to Odd Nerdrum, who was the first artist to accept the kitsch label and wear it with pride, ‘Kitsch is about the eternal human questions, whatever its form, about what we call the human.’ It became the unified concept for all that wasn’t intellectual or new, standing by even the most uneducated audiences.3
1 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Mass Culture:
The Popular Arts in America, London: The Free Press of Glencoe/Collier-Macmillan, 1964), 102. 2 Gerrard O’ Carroll, Towards Autopia, Babylon:Don, Architecture
Annual, RCA, London, 2006. 3 Odd Nerdrum, The Kitsch Movement, 1998. Web.
“Kitsch is about the eternal human questions, whatever its form, about what we call the human.� -Odd Nerdrum
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Nerdrum, Odd. The Singers, 1988, oil on canvas.
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CAMP SENSIBILITIES After the Enlightenment, our world has transformed into a hyper-commodified, information-saturated, and performance-driven aesthetic experience. The emergence of the minor aesthetics reveals our collective desire for more simple relations with our commodities and modes of consumption. Designers adhere to this sensibility and popular culture in order to convert the serious into the frivolous. Cute objects, such as a child’s toy or a squishy blob, are simple, infantile, feminine, injured, and disabled. Cute is capable of making an active demand on the subject, who is culturally and biologically able to fulfill.1
1 Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2012. Print.
Erwin Wurm, Fat House, 2003.
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SĂŠbastien Boullier, Colorful Holy Spirit. 2011. Photograph.
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According to Susan Sontag in her essay, Notes on Camp, ‘Camp’ comes from the French reflexive verb, ‘se camper’, which means ‘to present oneself in an expansive but flimsy manner, with overtones of theatricality, vanity, dressiness, and provocation.1 Andrew Ross argues that the ‘camp effect’ is generated when ‘the products…of a much earlier mode of production, which has lost its power to dominate cultural meanings, become available, in the present, for redefinition according to contemporary codes of taste.’ The whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious. ‘Camp, whether naive or deliberate, is an established sensibility on the verge of institutionalization,’ says Sontag, ‘a mode of address that allows one to experience the sinewy paintings of Gustav Klimt, the lavalike architecture of Antonio Gaudi, and the flamboyant films staring Gina Lollobrigida or directed by Ed Wood from an ironically detached point of view.’ Camp is an affectionate attitude, rather than kitsch’s ironic sensibility.
1 Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966. Print.
Thomas Kinkade, Disney Dreams, 1996.
According to Paul Maltby in his essay, Kinkade, Koons, Kitsch, ‘Any judgment of art by Kinkade or Koons is a symptom of someone who grew up in a disenchanted culture; someone who is more comfortable with parody than spiritual narratives composed in earnest; someone who is insecure and arrogant at the same time.’ Thomas Kinkade was born in Placerville, California in 1958. A devout Christian, he describes his cozy cottage landscapes as “faith-inspired.” Kinkade produces nostalgia and sentimentality by means of hallowed landscapes and religiously infused utopias. His work is most popular amongst a largely evangelical market that admires his art as a source of the divine. Koons was born in York, PA in 1955. Koons is a secular artist whose work finds inspiration in the icons of commodity culture. His art is aimed more towards an exclusive market of wealthy metropolitan collectors, who understand his work as a source of ironic enjoy-
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Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1998.
ment. His admirers willingly enter a state of “aesthetic absorption”, seduced by his saccharin campiness by means of haloed objects. Koons’ art challenges the relationship between our material world and human understanding. Kinkade retreats to the postmodern world, Koons embraces the postmodern world of consumerism for its enchanting potential; Kinkade purges his art of irony, Koons’ art absorbs it; Kinkade communicates the sacred through programmatically religious vision, Koons communicates it through a para-relgious iconography.1 Both Kinkade and Koons assert that all of their work is composed in earnest, and whether or not these two are being honest about being honest, the fact is that they’re the two wealthiest living American Artists. They profit in our disenchanted culture because their art is personal, visually arresting, and consumable: an easy target for our criticism.
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Maltby, Paul. Kinkade, Koons, Kitsch. Jrct.org. West Chester University, Apr. 2012. Web. 1 Jan. 2015.
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UNITED, WE CONSUME
POP-ART As a species and historical force, we are equipped with an attention span and for a finite physical capacity to see the same or similar objects over time. We have personalities and opinions, as well as the ability to make decisions based on cultural prejudice, habit, and association. In the 1960s, using the mechanical process of screen-printing to manipulate his photography, Andy Warhol would establish a new mode of visual production and become the pioneer of serial representation in art.1 Warhol was fascinated in the emotional power of images, which have the power to change our behavior and the way we think.
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Andy Warhol: Shadows. Dia Art Foundation. 2014.
Andy Warhol, Atomic Bomb, 1965. Silkscreen on canvas, 264 x 204.5 cm
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Andy Warhol, Race Riot and Pink Race Riot, 1963, Silkscreen on canvas.
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Warhol understood the psychological effects of serial viewing as a form of therapy for mass culture. Frequent, repetitive viewing, which numbs our perceptual apparatuses, helps us to cope with traumatic events. The Pop-art movement was an attempt to debase America’s fascination with lowbrow aesthetics and critique mass culture by representing found objects and images from movies, television, and magazines as art in a gallery setting. Beyond cultural icons and commodity forms that most often populated his art, Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series (1962-63), which featured serial images of electric chairs, suicides, and disasters, revealed his fascination with the darker side of media culture. In this particular series, Warhol used serial images to challenge our notion of art as the expression of a singular, heroic author, recasting each subject as a repository for autobiographical, cultural, and historical information. His archival impulse revolutionized art production over the ensuing decades, paving the way for a conceptually driven use of photography as a means of absorbing the world at large into a new aesthetic realm.1
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Ganis, William. Andy Warhol’s Serial Photography. Cambridge, NY: New York Institute of Technology, 2004. Print.
“The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel.” -Andy Warhol, 1975
From the 1960s to the 1990s, German conceptual artists Bernd and Hilla Becher would gather an expansive collection of industrial photography. Expanding on Warhol’s serial methodology, the Bechers would elevate the status of industrial architecture to that of an icon, using photography in a way a botanist might approach the cataloging of flora and fauna. Each blast furnace, water tower, grain elevator, coke oven, and warehouse was photographed from a similar angle, and organized in a grid according to type, which highlighted the formal similarities of each structure.1
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‘The Serial Portrait: Photography and Identity in the Last One Hundred Years’ National Gallery of Art, Washington. 2012.
Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gas Holders, Wales, England, 1960s-90s.
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Bernd and Hilla Becher, Water Towers, 1960s-90s.
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POP-ARCHITECTURE In Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown would, indeed, begin to question what could possibly be ‘learnt’ from Las Vegas, a city of neon, clutter, and excess. Written in late 1960’s America, this book analyzes the commercial strip, which deploys the minor aesthetic categories of the ordinary, ugly, and the social into architecture.1 Las Vegas may be a spectacle, but as a spectacle tailored to the vehicle and deployed in the name of commerce, it does not establish a normative status for irrational form in architecture to communicate anything beyond advertisements.
1 Venturi, Robert, and Denise Scott Brown, Architecture as Signs
and Systems for a Mannerist Time . (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 74-101.
Venturi, R., and D. S. Brown. The Commercial Strip. 1968. Las Vegas.
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FAT Architects, Heerlijkheid Hoogvliet, Netherlands, 2008.
Landscape port and refinery structures as city’s former industrial identity
Typography city’s name as ornament blending into timber freize
Pop-Art psychadelic aesthetics draw attention to convention
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More recently, Sam Jacob and his former firm FAT would produce a recreational center for the inhabitants of Hoogvliet. The facades of this building combine landscape, typography and pop art to establish “the Villa” as a unique image for this postwar community, making it a tourist destination for other Rotterdammers to visit. The Villa uses cultural references to abstract Hoogvliet’s identity and establish iconicity, using symbolism as a story-telling device to re-imagine the frieze, a traditional archetype, as a collage. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who coined the terms “decorated shed” and “duck”, understand the role of symbolism in architecture as a device, which provokes consumer activity. FAT architects go a step further, using abstraction in order to critique the role of irrational form in architecture, and promote its ability to communicate something beyond advertisements.
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Architecture is, among other realms of design, a bearer of meaning. With the ability to create narratives in order to convince users and other designers, architects are good storytellers- but as long as capitalist modernization exists within our consumer culture, rationalist form in architectural design will remain paramount, because it ensures an integrity that we commonly associate with “high-design.” With this ability to bear meaning, architecture is also able to convey a status and advertise itself, instilling within us the ability to recognize the architect as a human being. We all know a Gehry or a Zaha when we see one. According to Denys Lasdun, each architect must devise his or her ‘own creative myth,’ which should be ‘sufficiently objective’ and also have ‘an element of subjectivity; the myth must be partly an expression of the architect’s personality and partly of his or her time, partly a distillation of permanent truths and partly of the ephemerae of the particular moment. It cannot
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ignore the point which history has reached nor the point which architecture has reached, but it must be more than a simple reflection of or reaction to contemporary social, political, and aesthetic values, important as they may be.1 Architecture has the ability to express the individual through form. And deconstructive architecture, as demonstrated by Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum and Zaha’s MAXXI Museum, has the power to revitalize post-industrial city centers and elevate their status in a competitive global market; that is, if it is built in the right place at the right time. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao has generated an extra three million visitors to the city each year (Ever heard of the “Bilbao Effect?”) In addition to designing an iconographic structure as a ‘shock factor’ in order to promote the city’s identity, Gehry’s urban strategy involved cleaning up the brown fields along the waterfront and providing green space for events and attractions.
1 Denys Lasdun, Architecture in an Age of Scepticism: A
Practitioner’s Anthology, Heinemann, London, 1984.
Heald, David. Guggenheim Museum. 1997. Bilbao.
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, 2010.
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MAXXI Museum, Rome, Italy, 2008.
MAXXI Museum, Rome, Italy, 2012.
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U.S.A.
Flint, MI
Pittsburgh, PA
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Los Angeles, CA
Asia Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Tokyo, Japan
Kyoto, Japan
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BUILT TO SHOCK
PRODUCTIVE ANXIETY
Ever since the phrase “the age of anxiety” entered the lexicon, each generation has claimed that they have more worry than the previous one.1 We perceive anxiety as accumulative- a side effect of time and knowing too much. But the fact is that anxiety is part of the human condition. It’s the price we pay for having a brain that makes predictions- for the ability to see a future that is not necessarily foretold by the past.
1 LeDoux, Joseph. Putting Our Anxieties to Work. What Sould We
Be Worried About, HarperCollins, NYC, 2014. pg. 285.
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Human ancestors and other animals with foresight may have worried only about genuine and pressing problems, such as not finding food, or being eaten. Over the past 40,000 years (possibly much longer) we have become much more imaginative. We began to worry about improving our lot individually and collectively, which is sensible. However, as our imagination is fueled by cultural input and religion, we began to have misplaced worries, i.e. the evil eye, the displeasure of dead ancestors, the purity of their blood, etc. More recently, as scientific discoveries move from the laboratory into everyday life through the marketplace, we are confronted by a new breed of misplaced worries. The result is a flow of problems and opportunities that present us with an exponential amount of cognitive and decisional challenges. Our ability to anticipate these problems and opportunities is swamped by their number, novelty, speed of arrival, and complexity.1
1 LeDoux, Joseph. Putting Our Anxieties to Work. What Sould We
Be Worried About, HarperCollins, NYC, 2014. pg. 285.
Humans are an anxious species, but we aren’t all equally anxious. We each have our own set point of anxiety: a point toward which we gravitate. The calm that results from eliminating a source of worry is always short-lived. Get rid of one and pretty soon something else takes its place, keeping each of us hovering around our special level of worry. The fact that we are able to choose where to direct our anxiety says a lot about the human psyche. Whether we are in denial or in a state of cozy complacency in regards to air pollution, genetic engineering, new arms of destruction, or intelligent robots, the decision to remain optimistic is also an option. But we don’t necessarily want to get rid of anxiety altogether, because it serves a purpose. What we should worry about is finding some way to use, rather than be used by, our anxiety. Perhaps if we weren’t criticizing ourselves, our anxiety could be redirected somewhere more productive, and design can provide the answer. Overthinking. Digital image. Tumblr.
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EXPOSURE THERAPY
As humans, we are born the instinctual ability to adapt, however, revolutions are not so easy on us, especially when they’ve occurred as rapidly and frequently as they have in the past one-hundred and fifty years.1 Critical design is an expression or manifestation of our skeptical fascinations with technology, science, and politics that we share as a collective, and exposure therapy is a methodology designers use to make innovation less disruptive.
1 Paola Antonelli, Design and the Elastic Mind, Exhibition Cata-
logue, MoMA, New York, 2008.
Julius Fritzsche, Pollen from ‘Ueber den Pollen.’ 1837.
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Our relationship with the invisible is a recent phenomenon. Advances in technology and science have given us the electron microscope, which in turn has provided us with a window into the world of microbial creatures.
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Oliver, Drew. “GIANTmicrobes.” 2002. Stamford , CT.
chlamydia
syphilis
penicillin
the clap
herpes
HPV
kissing disease
the flu
the common cold
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Mushroom Cloud. Digital image. Tumblr. 9 Nov. 2013. Web. 11 Nov. 2014.
Dunne & Raby use design as a medium to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the social, cultural and ethical implications of existing and emerging technologies. Available in white or red reflective fabric with polyester stuffing, and achieving a level of quality one would expect from a well-designed object, these huggable atomic mushrooms are plush versions of an atomic bomb explosion. They were inspired by treatments for phobias in which patients are exposed to the source of their fear in increasing doses, as such, they are available in three scales: small, medium, and large.1
1
Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2013. Print.
Dunne, A., and F. Raby. Huggable Atomic Mushroom. 2004-05. Sculpture. MoMA, NYC.
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SPECULATIVE ARTIFACTS
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OUTTAKES
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