Paul Goldberger » Design Lessons from the Late 20th Century

Good morning. I am delighted to be here, and to say something about the state of architecture and design at this moment in our continually surprising cultural history. What I want to talk about this morning is not, at least on the surface, about great issues, and it is not about process. It is about little things, about minor objects of the sort we see every day and often do not give a second thought to, in part because these things give us a wonderful way of measuring the temper of the moment, telling us something about the mainstream, something about where American taste is right now, and about what implications all of this will have for the future of business.

Here we are inside this design center, in the middle of one of the better American downtowns, in the middle of one of the more sophisticated American cities. What I am about to say has little to do with any of these things, and in some ways it is probably the worst possible thing to say here, since my thesis is that at the beginning of the 21st century we can take the pulse of design in our culture better outside these doors than inside them — maybe on Fifth Avenue at The Gap, or at Pottery Barn, or off at the Banana Republic. I’m not sure there is a Gap on Fifth Avenue in Seattle, but it is a safe enough assumption almost anywhere now that there is, so I’ll make it.

The stuff to be sold at these places, and at numerous others like them is nothing short of astonishing. No, it is not dazzlingly innovative, and no, it does not change the history of design, but it does show us, firmly and absolutely, how much the mainstream of American taste has shifted in the last generation, how much there has been a movement toward quality and sophistication. We are witnessing an incredible phenomenon that I call the democratization of design — the movement of design from the province of the elite, down to if not quite mass taste, then certainly to mainstream taste. Pottery Barn, as I said; its companion stores Williams-Sonoma and Hold Everything; its rival Crate & Barrel; The Gap, which is trying to move ever-so-tentatively into the purveying of objects as well as clothing — and which sets an example of its taste in its store designs — every one of these places represents a sea change in the way in which the average person in this country now encounters design, and perceives it. Suddenly, design is accessible to all. It has become a mass commodity. It is available everywhere, and at a reasonable level of quality.

Of course what you find at Crate & Barrel aren’t the finest things our age is capable of producing, but that is not the point. The point is that not so many years ago, the people who shop at Crate & Barrel had no place to go for modern design of quality at affordable prices. There were a few elite places — Design Research on 57th Street in Manhattan and in Cambridge marked a kind of beginning of the movement toward a broader audience, as did Bonniers on Madison Avenue — but they were still fairly rarified places, and by and large quality modern design was not a mass product. There was Knoll and Stendig and ICF and a few other to-the-trade manufacturers of modern furniture of high quality, but little else. If you had modern tastes and a modest pocketbook, you were pretty much out of luck. Oops, of course there was the Museum of Modern Art, which in those days sold a few lamps and Aalto stools and things along with books and postcards, giving its stamp of approval to certain objects, a kind of Good Housekeeping seal, which it then proceeded to sell. This was design as religion, design as elitist cult of uplift. But this, too, was minor in the scheme of things; in those days the objects at MOMA were tucked behind the books; it’s significant that today, and for the last decade or so, they have had their own large store across the street, overflowing with Museum-approved design objects for sale.

A quick bit of history. The movement of serious design away from the province of an expensive, exclusive elite began to change dramatically in the mid-1970’s, with the coming of Conran’s to these shores, the American offshoot of Terence Conran’s Habitat stores in England. In the 70’s we also saw the rise of many small shops in New York selling modern objects of serious design, like Sointu and D.F. Sanders, both unfortunately now gone. Their demise, like that of Design Research years before, I attribute largely to the movement of serious modern design to the realm of mass merchandising — when people like Conran’s, and later Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel, got interested, there was little hope for the small, independent seller of quality modern objects, just as there is today little hope for the small, independent bookseller who faces competition from huge superstores.

Now I’m not here to waste your time talking about merchandising, but about something much more important in its cultural implications. I think we are now at a moment when a dream that has existed since the early part of the 20th-century is actually being fulfilled. This is the dream of seeing modern design become accessible to the masses, and even sought by them. This is the dream that energized the Bauhaus, that drove the creators of that great German institution whose name is synonymous with modern design to create what they did. For even though their own work was largely labor-intensive, much more craft-dependent than truly industrial, and rarely available to or even sought by the great masses of people, they desperately wanted modern design to be a mass product, dreaming of a moment when good modern design would be available to everyone at a decent price. They fooled themselves into believing that it could be such a thing in their time. It couldn’t, and it wasn’t. But it is one now.

That moment has now come. It’s here. Bizarre as it sounds, the Bauhaus dream has been fulfilled, more than half a century later, in places like the Gap. And we have seen a remarkable shift in the level of taste in general in this period, too Ã not just what gets sold in Pottery Barn, but in the whole range of our consumer products. Think, for a moment, about the last time you saw a television for sale that had a fake-wood formica cabinet. Think about the last "Mediterranean" console "entertainment center" you saw in the same store. Think about how long it’s been since you saw dark wood "Mediterranean" kitchen cabinets, or avocado kitchen appliances. Look at the design of stoves, microwaves, stereo systems, computers. They vary in quality, but there is a floor, a level below which none of them sink, and it is higher than the average for design of consumer objects was just a generation ago. And think of the last truly badly designed, badly made car you saw.

We don’t tolerate schlock in quite the level we once did. It’s not as simple as design meeting the consumer Ã design must lead the consumer Ã just not so far ahead that he will not want to follow. Once, there was a disconnect Ã design was so far ahead that the average consumer didn’t pay any attention to it. Now, it is closer, and the consumer is following. This is helped by the incredible rise of technology, which has put a whole new generation of objects in front of all of us to a degree never imagined a generation ago; it is hard to design a new kind of object without some sense of expressing newness, even though they tried that for years with televisions, I admit. Ahh, don’t we miss the Mediterranean entertainment consoles. But it seemed harder somehow to get away with that with computers; you’ll notice that IBM never tried to pass off a rosewood Formica PC on all of us.

Some of this may be that a younger generation of designers were producing these things, and didn’t want to stand for it themselves; IBM itself, of course, has a long track record as a sophisticated patron of advanced product design, and wisely when it moved into the realm of consumer products did not retreat from its traditional high standards. But of course they have a lot to keep up with, given that Apple has consistently set high standards of design, that others are beginning to bring colored computers to market, and that in the world of new technology, even the laggards are doing decently, and designing to a more sophisticated standard than many products met a generation ago. The iMac may or may not be your favorite computer, but as a pure work of design Ã as a moment in the cultural evolution of the design of consumer products Ã it is important.

Another reason for the widespread sense of visual literacy — and that is exactly what it is, a higher sense of visual literacy in this culture now — another reason we are more visually literate now is simply generational. I think that the baby boom generation has grown up to be more visually sophisticated, by and large, than its parents were, and less comfortable with a certain kind of cheap fakery. That doesn’t mean that our generation isn’t quite happy to have expensive, serious fakery; 30-ish software zillionaries and 40-ish investment bankers have been keeping certain architects in the money designing fake Shingle Style villas and Georgian mansions for years now, and they will continue to. But we have come to associate in our culture a certain kind of design with cheapness, and the visual sophistication of this generation now in its prime is unwilling to tolerate it. Thus the design level, the visual sophistication, of household appliances goes up, as I said, and of stereo equipment and telephones and computers and excercise equipment and all of the other things that get put into that vast Georgian mansion. Younger designers designing for younger consumers; together they raise the threshhold level of product design. Once again, that’s why the distinction between reaching consumers where they are versus where you want them to be isn’t as clear as it once was.

Even among people who seek ornate designs in their architecture, the clients who build the sprawling fake Shingle-Style mansions, want sleek and sparely elegant stainless-steel appliances in their kitchens. How I wish I had bought Sub-Zero stock 20 years ago — but the real story is not the popularity of that company’s handsomely designed, status-symbol refrigerators and the way they have become a symbol of the desire for a broader market to possess clean, sleek, sophisticated design, but the way in which an even broader market is imitating it, as GE, Amana and other mass manufacturers have now brought new refrigerator designs to the market that try to compete with Sub-Zero. Sub-Zero sets the tone, it grows from being a niche product selling high design to a nearly mainstream product, and then the mass manufacturers jump on the bandwagon, producing similar designs to compete. High-end product becomes icon then becomes model for the mass market: that is the sequence of events.

Another factor is the increasing globalization of the marketplace, and the realization that things have to sell around the world. Also, the increasing visibility of design elsewhere, and a willingness to buy into its allure. Not for nothing has the current trend toward simpler, sleeker, A couple of months ago, shortly before that great odometer we called Y2K turned over, I was asked at a conference to rank the greatest architectural achievements of the twentieth century. I hardly knew where to begin. With the revolutionary developments of modernism? With the last powerful gasps of classicism? Was Penn Station in New York City greater than Fallingwater? Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, the late works of Louis Sullivan, the work of Louis Kahn. Rockefeller Center, the Hoover Dam, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building. The interstate highway system Ã not always very beautiful, and often seriously destructive of our urban fabric, but in its sheer scope and ambition, perhaps better deserving of being called a "project of the century" than any single building. While we are on the subject of non-buildings, what about the Golden Gate Bridge, more beautiful and more powerful as symbol than almost any building? Or the landfill-based Kansai Airport in Osaka, Japan, with its buildings by Renzo Piano? We could go on and on, from architect to building to urban projects to engineering projects, and this morning is not the moment to try to summarize the century. What we can say, however Ã and this is where it is relevant to us right now Ã is that it was a century of extraordinary scope, of remarkable architectural progress, both socially and esthetically: a century in which architecture and urbanism have started with a strong belief in the public realm, have appeared often to move away from it, and then seemed, at the end of the century, to be coming back to it once again.

That is where the most ambitious architecture of our time, whatever its differences, comes together. It all represents a powerful belief in the public realm, in the value of public places, both symbolically and actually. This is critically important today, in a time when we have had so many forces pushing us in the other direction. We have technology, creating an increasing pull toward the virtual rather than the real Ã and I don’t refer here to the ways in which technology is a tool for the making of architecture, but the way in which technology becomes an end in itself, a means of substituting for real buildings in real places. I am no Luddite; I believe in the power and the necessity of technology Ã but I also believe that we have to be aware at every moment of the effect of the great tools we have, and of how they change our perceptions of real space and real places. Remember, too, that we live in a time when, as I said a few minutes ago when talking about design, that the forces of homogenization are stronger than ever, which means that, so far as architecture and urbanism are concerned, places are coming to look increasingly like other places. The airports, the malls, the hotels, everything looks more and more the same from Dallas to Minneapolis, from Atlanta to Cleveland. What, other than weather, is there to create a sense of place today Ã a sense that this place is special, and not like other places?

Architecture, at its best, is one of the tools we have for doing this. But in the last quarter of the twentieth century, we were hesitant to use this tool to its utmost, the way the three projects we are looking at have done. We have built the same things, everywhere, churning them out faster and simpler, with ever more banality. And when we have made special things, they have all too often been not truly special, not the architecture that shows the highest potential of the building art, but the glib fantasies that emerge out of the theme park. We are in an age that so values fantasy environments that it has elevated the theme park to the status of urban icon. Now, I am second to none in my admiration for the original Disneyland, and in my belief that it truly did transform the way in which we looked at architecture, but I think it’s important to say that at the end of the century, the theme park has now mutated itself into almost every aspect of our architecture. We love fantasy and all of its easy, glib pleasures, so much that we often chose it over reality.

Indeed, so much do we value the fantasy architecture of the theme park that it is easy to think these days that artifice well executed is the only authenticity that matters — or at least the only authenticity our time is capable of creating. Certainly as technologies such as virtual reality continue to develop, and the entertainment impulse and the urban impulse continue to blur, it is hard not to think that authenticity in the architectural and urban environment is one of those old-fashioned values that holds no weight today. Sense of place? What an out-of-date, tired, stody idea. What does that matter when we can see the Eiffel Tower at Walt Disney World, when a new Las Vegas mega-hotel includes a reproduction of the New York skyline? Oh, and I forgot, if you can’t get to Disney World you can see another Eiffel Tower right there in Las Vegas, not to mention a St. Mark’s Square and its campanile.

Yet as we ponder the impact of technology and entertainment on the city and on community, there are some other points that have to be made. One is to raise the paradox — and it is indeed a paradox — that the more technology we have, the more "connected" in one sense we are, the more we seem to be distant from each other, the less we seem to be a community. We are all wired, we are all instantly in communication with each other, and distances are as nothing. In a flash you can talk to anyone, in even less time you can receive data, and in just a little bit more time you can physically be anywhere in the world. And yet, at the same time we seem to be more and more confirmed in our separate cultures. As we all connect, we seem to splinter, or to break off into separate groups. This may be the age of connection, but it is also the age of factionalization, the age of breaking apart.

What connotes common ground today? What value does our society even put in the notion of common ground? The physical design of our communities often reflects this. Gated communities and pseudo-theme park malls, cut off from the world, and people in their houses, sitting on their computers. The architect Rem Koolhaas says that urban space is an antiquated notion, that public space is over Ã that the real public space now, the real city, is the virtual one, the one we make through our computers.

I don’t buy this, and I think that the projects we have been looking at are proof that society doesn’t buy it, either. That is why I’ve been going on at such length about all of this, to make the point that the greatest buildings of our time, things like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, represent what I think is the beginnings of a kind of counter-trend. "Technology," Max Frisch said, is "the knack of so arranging the world so you don’t have to experience it." Exactly. Virtual reality has its pleasures, but it is not reality. Long before cyberspace, technology was pushing us away from public places and public experiences. Think back, if you will, to the great ages of urban life Ã at least we like to think of them as the great ages of urban life Ã say, Paris in the 19th century. "Street life" was a sign of the city’s health; the public life was lived in cafes and on the streets, and as you know a sophisticated person-about-town was even called a "boulevardier" Ã a presence on the boulevards. The term underscored how important the street, the public place, was in the value system of the time. Contrast it with our phrase today, "street person" Ã a euphemism for the homeless, the down-and-out at the bottom of the social ladder.

Yet I do not believe that people will stop wanting to be with each other, however enticing the technological imitations of communal experience can become. There will always be a place for a true public realm. If there were not, it would have died long ago, for the car, the telephone, the fax, the computer, the television, have already made it technologically out of date. We hold onto it anyway, because we want it, and because people want to be together, they do not always want to be apart, even if technology lets them. Even when they are lost in their own thoughts, as we so often are when, say, we look at art in a museum, or when we experience the drama of a play in a theater or a concert in a concert hall, there is something transforming about the communal nature of the experience, about the way in which we take pleasure in sharing our private experiences together, about the way in which this somehow ratifies and strengthens them. There has to be some lesson in that.

But we also know that there is no experience in the world like that of space and form brilliantly mastered Ã that there is no sight in the world like the light of afternoon bouncing off the side of a magnificent stone wall, and no sound in the world like that of the soft echo in a cathedral. Louis Kahn once said "the sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building" Ã try reproducing that idea on the internet so someone can feel it with the depth and the power that you do when you think of what Kahn meant, and connect it to your own experience.

What ties all of this together Ã the democratization of design I talked about at the outset, the homogenization of our urban environment, the triumph of a few great individual works of architecture? The key lesson of design at the end of the 20th century is simply that it is there, more conspicuous, more central, more essential and more a part of our way of life, as well as our way of doing business, than it has ever been before. I’m not sure the average person has ever been stupid, but for a long time it was fair to say that he or she was blind, or close to it. Now, at the end of the century, people see, and see more, and better, than ever before. The first revolution of design — just getting it out there — has been won. People see, and they care about what they see. Now the question is what we do with that victory, and how we can make sure that, as the mass market continues to celebrate good objects and seems ever more to value good architecture, that design is not entirely co-opted by its success — that as we raise the bar, we continue to see, and do not take architecture and design for granted, but keep thinking, again and again and again, about how they can remain a creative, potent and challenging force in our culture, and improve the quality of life.

LECTURES

Design Lessons from the Late 20th Century

Seattle Design Center, Seattle, WA

March 2nd, 2000