forgot this

This semesters Work

There is something interesting going on here

Carl Fasano is a Mad Man. The current work that he is doing is a real Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde affair. I cant help but be amazed at the differences between the front and back of his current work. For me it begs the question, What the Hell is going on around here? How can part of his work be so well considered, so calming, and the other part be so crazy. I wish I knew the answer. Wait, I do know the answer. The answer is that people are incomprehensable. Any attempt to figure out a person is doomed. My attempt to understand Carl's paintings is doomed, better to just sit back and enjoy.

Carl

No more dumpster design please

How do we add value to products? why do we want to add value to products? I would like to add the type of value that causes people to cherish objects, to keep them and maintain them. I wonder if this type of value can be added to a mass produced product?
Maybe,
Rolex watches are mass produced and cherished as heirlooms by some. Some cars, model T's, ferraris and rare muscle cars have the same effect. Many consumer goods that fall in the catagorie of antiques qualify. I wonder what it is that ties all of these things together, what can be learned from these things that we can add to new products?
As someone who is interested in craftsmenship i tend to believe that objects need to be well made to fall into the cherished catagorie. It is true that this is not always necesary. The converse all star is a pretty crappy shoe but a lot of people are obsessed with those things. Maybe it was the initial quality of the idea that elevated it to its current status. The rubber soled shoe would be hard to live without.
There is still the question of why. Why should we want to add value to things. The majority of current design only strives to appear more valuable than its competition, both of which are probably disposable anyways so unless it was the plastic ring that your husband proposed to you with because the real one got stolen by pirates, you probably wont bother to keep most of the crap that you buy anyways.
that was a little soap boxy
but seriously, a lot of talk about sustainable goods is in the wrong direcion the way i see it. I dont care if the sweater is made from recycled plastic bottles or not, if it is not made well, made to last a lifetime, than it is still wasteful.
The reason why i think it is important to add value to products is so that people will want to keep them. The dumpster is already full, why are we designing new things destined for it?

failed attempt to be poetic

Some people think that as young men our lives should be about

the crashing of the sports cars and the
the drinking of the liquors and
the sexing of the young women and
the wasting of the college funds and
the taking of the drugs and
the wasting of our time

Too bad we are not in the movies.

Thinking about the future

Thoughts about my design process quickly become thoughts about my values. Unfortunately, I still have a lot of thinking to do about my values so this connection does not serve as an answer but as a clue. I have had a hard time using these clues to get anywhere solid but I have been dreaming. I dream of futures were I am fulfilled through designing and making, Futures were I am part of a community. Futures that are not dull.

It is easy to compromise on ones dreams, what is the material worth of a dream after all? In the face of a paycheck a dream can easily be abused and forgotten. Dreams cannot pay the rent or feed the kids. Fortunately dreams are persistent and sometimes even haunting.

In my Dream I help people to live more enjoyably. I know people’s names and I am part of a community. I repair things that are broken. I add value to people’s lives and I can make it in any color that you want.

these are a few of my favorite things

Why Do I like This and Not That.?

Yesterday I was talking to some people about how my old neighbors had an all granite top on an island in their kitchen and about how cool it was because it was like one big cutting and mixing surface. One of my friends said that that was bad for knives and I said that I didn’t think that that mattered. My friend then shrugged her shoulders in disbelief. She must have been thinking, is this the same Ryan who loves tools and despises all who abuse them and is always yelling at everyone to cover up the surface plates in the metal shop and is all obsessed with buying new cutters for the router and Bridgeport and drill press so his cuts will be wicked accurate.

Well, I have to admit; sometimes I don’t make any sense, why did I think that recklessly dulling the kitchen knives was okay? Isn’t that just like using the good Gingher scissors to cut cardboard or using a wood lathe to cut cement or any of the other stupid uses of tools that I so often rant about and despise? After a few moments of reflection I realized that the difference was that I really liked the experience of having the big granite cutting mixing board, in fact, If cutting cardboard with Gingher scissors was fun enough I might approve of it too.

This little collision was kind of like the conversation I had with Nancy about what I like and what my design process might be. After trying to get to the bottom of all my posts and then trying to boil that bottom down even farther we came to a list of things that might be what I am all about, things like Green, Local production, Small scale, Simple and efficient.

The few days between me and that talk have had me thinking about what my design process is really all about and what is it that really links all the things that I like together in some way that makes sense. Sometimes the objects that I like do not seem to fit together to make a theme and yet to me they do perfectly. If I were to list some favorite designed things from the top of my head it might go like this, Pagani Zonda supercar, Calfee Bamboo bicycle, Moulton new series commuter bike, Old Vespas, Eladio Dieste warehouse at Montevideo, most new Mac products, sandals made from chunks of car tires (homemade kind), Chartes cathedral, Festool woodworking products, most if not all Rococo artifacts (sofas, chairs, prints, etc..) Sam Maloof rocking chairs, Buckminster fuller dymaxion series (house, car world map, housing, domes), Ford T buckets with blown Keith Black big block Hemis, Starcks juice squeezer, and on and on. In this list are things that I like for the same reasons I don’t like other things, For instance, I like bicycles because they do not pollute very much and are very efficient, I also like Paggani Zondas a lot but they pollute a lot and are very inefficient. Even after writing that down I still feel fine about liking both but the reason that is possible is still a little bit of a mystery. A clue came when thinking about the granite dulling the knives. Normally people excessively dulling sharp tools for no good reason drives me crazy but I have no problem with cutting on granite because the enjoyment that I had gotten from it was more important. In the end the reason we have all of this crap around is too have a good time, right? Maybe I am a hedonistic designer?

In the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig suggests that there should be a new metaphysical construct with the term quality at its foundation. To Pirsig Quality is not an attribute but is actually a description of the process in which we see and construct values, our instant perception of good and bad, like being able to here if an orchestra is in tune or not without having musical training. Quality is the description of knowing if something fits or not, the highest quality things being those that fit in anywhere were the lowest quality things may never fit anywhere. I feel like the best way for me to understand this is through the word harmony. Something that is perfect is in harmony with the whole of existence.

I believe that my design process is based on this sense of harmony. All of the objects that I feel drawn to have this sense of harmony but do not necessarily have any other specific attributes in common. That is why I don’t usually have a good answer when people ask me about my design sense or design process. The Bamboo bicycle strives to make individual transport more enjoyable, sustainable and ecologically responsible achieving in my eyes a sense of harmony. The 1000 horsepower super dangerous ford T bucket recycles vintage auto parts and turns them into something that is so scary that it is only driven occasionally and for the delight of many, harmony again. Sometimes having a vague compass like harmony can be frustrating, sometimes it is hard to spot out of context but the objects that have these attributes can easily be spotted. They are the things that are cherished.

aRT And dESIGN = Confusing

Like most lines that we draw to delineate between categories, the line between design and art gets harder and harder to place the longer you look at it. The tools that we might use to determine if something is a product of art or design don’t always give us clear answers. A good example of this for me is the Droog Do Hit Chair. The Do Hit Chair looks like it is simple and cheap to manufacture, a cube made of sheet metal presents no immediate challenges to a modern factory and in volume this chair should be dirt cheap. This seems to point towards it being a design object. The price, however, is 3.800 Euros. This seems to point to it being art. Like a sculpture or painting which derives its value primarily from the reputation and skill of the artist who made it and not from the materials it was made with. Everything else about the chair seems to point to the design side of things, it is not one of a kind like a piece of studio furniture, it is not custom made for the buyer and it does not have the signature of the maker on the bottom. It just seems to be an over-priced product of design, it should just be something on a sale rack at Design Within Reach marked 95% percent off so that some farmer can just buy it and drill a hole in it and funnel rain water into it for the chickens to drink. What about this chair keeps it off the sale rack, why do hip people everywhere dream of buying and smashing and then finally sitting on these polished steel cubes? Why would someone ever pay 3800 hundred Euros for a sheet metal box?

The Reason is that it is a piece of Art. At least it derives its value in the same way that a piece of art does. When someone buys a painting or a sculpture or a photo they are buying the object and they are buying a piece of the artist’s viewpoint, a physical manifestation of the feelings and opinions and beliefs of one person. If this person is important enough the value they add to an object can be immense. The Do Hit Chair gets its value through this process, the viewpoint or concept of the designer is what is valuable, not the object. The object is still important because it is the factual proof that you have participated in Marijn van der Poll’s vision.

The primary difference between this type of value and the way that we value more traditional design objects can be subtle but I think that it is definable. If we use an Eames LCW plywood chair as an example of traditional values it will help. Eames chairs are comfortable, producible and affordable*. They were mostly designed as contract furniture for office buildings or other large scale projects and as such needed to be functional, affordable and durable. If someone is waiting for an appointment they do not care about the designers idea of what chair should be, at least not as much as they care about the comfort of their butt. Eames did have and use their own viewpoint to find solutions for each project they worked on, but unlike Marijn van der Poll, they had to temper their concepts with good old functionalism. If they did not their work would not be produced and we would not know who they were and we would not have the joy of relaxing on an Eames Lounge or Chaise or shell chair.

I don’t know if there is much of a point in having an opinion as to the rightness or wrongness of all this. But I can say that some art/design just seems like a stupid waste of time and resources, like glittery poop and ugly toxic foam chairs and sharp smashed metal do hit yourself box chairs and original zig zag chairs set on fire, but there are a lot of things I don’t understand so it doesn’t seem like a good basis to judge right and wrong by. I do think that we should probably keep these art/design people around because even if all they ever do is make a bunch of crap that is silly it is still more crap to think about and the more we have to think about the better.

*I thought that I was making a little bit of sense here but then I was scrolling down the Design Within Reach page and I saw the Eames Le Chaise priced at 9,500 hundred dollars. That seemed a little high to me and then I realized that the art/design system of value was working in reverse. Is it that the Eames story has become so powerful that it is now adding value into these objects that they did not originally have or is that they are just classics now. Maybe they cost that much because somewhere there has to be a huge 200 ton injection molding machine pumping those things out at a snail’s pace burning a big hole in the Knoll furniture companies bottom line.

Bamboo Bicycles Going to Blow Your Mind

Bicycles are the best way to get around. They are the most efficient and the funnest and they are pretty cheap and way better than walking. If you have a tail wind or if you are going downhill it doesn’t even take any energy to drive one. Even though bicycles are this cool they still have a few problems. The worst problem is flat tires; the second worst problem about bicycles is all the unrecyclable and energy intensive materials they take to create. However, the bamboo bicycle has come to right these wrongs, well at least the sustainability one, sadly bamboo tire technology has not been developed. It turns out that the natural strength and rigidity that allows bamboo to grow so tall also comes in handy for bicycle frame construction. By replacing the metal or composite tubes that a bicycle frame normally uses one can create a super low carbon footprint bicycle frame.

This technology is not necessarily new but in recent times it has become viable as a durable replacement for traditional metal construction. Bamboo bicycle frames have coexisted with metal bicycle frames since the bicycles inception. However their fragile nature has relegated them to the sidelines. In the past they were always assembles with rigid metal joints that would wear away at the soft bamboo tubes until the failed. Modern bicycles frames made from bamboo use a high strength fiber like hemp and a strong adhesive binder to join the tubes. These connections are very similar to the bamboo in strength and ductility thus allowing the frame to last much longer. The pioneer in this kind of construction is Calfee bicycles.

A lot of thought seems to be going into transportation lately, more specifically making it more efficient. The bicycle is already crazy efficient and can be made from green materials easily. IF we figure out that flat tire thing the car is going to go the way of the dinosaur, fossilized.

design for displaced people is just like modern day physics

Designing for a different culture presents a unique set of challenges, actually just communicating with a different culture can be a challenge. There is a lot more than just learning the language, social standards and etiquette can change subtly or drastically making effective communication difficult or impossible. Positive comments can be taken as insults and the food you like to eat might be deemed unfit for the dog. These types of challenges create a tough barrier for designers interested in creating solutions for other cultures. These barriers get even more difficult to cross when considering the international problem of refugees. Refugees can be found in every part of our globe and are in need of food, clothing, shelter, and a clean place to go #2. We would hope that providing for mans basic needs would be a walk in the park at this point but unfortunately it is far from it. 50,000 displaced people in need of immediate food, clothing, shelter and bathrooms is a monumental problem and if you are trying to find solutions for these problems that can be deployed anywhere in the world then you have at the very least a doubly monumental problem. The seemingly hopeless search for solutions to the world’s displaced people’s problems has but one light at the end of the tunnel, the solar cooker.

The solar cooker is pretty close to a truly universal design. True, you do need the sun, so displaced people in extreme longitudes may have a problem for half the year, and you do need some foil or mirrors or something reflective but these things are pretty cheap and pretty common so all in all I would say it would probably work for 90% of the other 90%, that’s 81%, not too bad. If the solar cooker is indeed the shining light of universal humanitarian design than what does it teach us that we may be able to apply to the other areas of necessity? After all we still have to figure out a way to put the right food in the cooker and how to provide shelter and clothing and bathrooms. I think that the lesson of the solar cooker is to keep it simple. If we are to provide all of the essentials for life to millions of people from different cultures in different environments we need fundamentally simple solutions.

To find these solutions we must follow the path of science. Ever since Newton provided a seemingly universal set of laws to observe the universe with science has been on the hunt for a universal and inclusive explanation of all of the universes phenomena. Unfortunately, just like scientists, we find ourselves stuck. Physics has the irreconcilable laws of relativity for massive objects and the laws of quantum theory for small and design has Ikea and Disneyland and supermarkets and Brooks Brothers and Home Depot and highways and subways and airplanes (etc.) for the 1^st world and the solar cooker and some broken tents and rice and beans and outdated cancer drugs for everyone else. To follow the way of the solar cooker we must use the scientific method to figure out what the most basic common denominators are between people and their problems. The solar cooker did this perfectly, people need concentrated heat to cook, people have the Sun, the sun is hot, use the sun. We just need to apply this formula to the rest of the problems. People need shelter, people have dirt and rocks……

Getting around New

The last minute planning for my trip to New York entailed going onto the internet and searching for various museum and store locations addresses on Google maps and then transferring these addresses and small maps of their locations into my sketchbook. While I was doing this I was thinking about how if I had an I phone I could just get the directions when I got there and that if I had a Google phone I could even get street level pictures of the places I wanted to go to so I would know when I was there. This then made me think of how one would get these directions before the internet and the advent of mapping solutions like MapQuest and Google maps. I would have had to look in the phone book when I got to New York and then ask around to find out where to go and then make sure to follow those oral directions carefully or else I might spend half the day lost. By comparison even my slightly antiquated Google maps to sketchbook conversion method started to look pretty convenient. I started to wonder how many different designed tools I was taking advantage of when planning my day’s travels, turns out it was quite a few. If I define something as being designed if it is not naturally occurring then the macro list of designed things I used to plan my trip is, sketchbook, pen, computer, internet (Google search, Google maps, Google street view, websites for the Metropolitan museum of art, Mood fabrics, GROM gelato, Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum), the system of addresses, my cell phone and the system of phone numbers. That is a pretty long list but the list of designed tools that people can use and have used to get around is probably approaches the infinite, starting with the astrolabe and probably ending with the Zebra.

If an astrolabe and a zebra were the tools that you had to get around New York then you would only be able to navigate at night when the stars were out and it would be pretty hard to find out anything more specific than your latitude and then you would never get really good gelato. On the other hand if you have a fully charged Google phone you can just get off of the bus and walk around with your phone on showing you a satellite view of where you are and a little dotted line showing you which way to go to get just about anywhere you desire as long as its address is on the web. The exaggerated example of zebra guy and super tech phone guy makes it easy to see the ways in which a designer can affect how we experience the world around us. By creating objects and systems with certain uses a designer can offer us a solution for a problem that we might have. This solution will most likely require us to act in a certain way for it to produce its intended effect and we as users can decide to participate in this way or not. When viewed like a formula it is easy to see how a designer can change or direct human behavior in the way he sees fit. For instance the astrolabe inventor demanded that we stay up at night to find our location on the globe while the cell phone designer requires that we have a source of 110v regulated electricity and a monthly communications contract to get directions. At this basic level the control the designer can have over our actions can be easy to spot, however, when we consider the effects of culture and ingenuity we can see a different picture. In the hands of a more savvy user a Google phone might be the best way to orchestrate a crime or check out porn on your coffee break or maybe cheat on a test and if you were to try to commercially navigate the seas with an astrolabe you would probably get a fine and end up selling it on eBay to pay for that fine to someone who would use it to show how sophisticated they were as a paper weight in their office. Each alternate use for a product changes the products meaning from what the designer envisioned it as to what the individual user thinks it is. Because each individual sees the world and the things in it differently the gap between the designer and the user will always be there. No object can ever have the same meaning to any two people. As designers we can try to bridge this gap through research of our target groups environments and beliefs and styles but in the end we have to realize that once an idea becomes material it will be interpreted in ways that we can never imagine.

I often interpret my own ideas in ways I have never imagined

functionalism and some problems i have with it.

The rough equivalent of functionalism in architecture was the Modern architectural movement also known as the international style of architecture.. It was rooted in the advances in material and manufacturing technologies that the industrial revolution brought just like functionalism and stressed a very similar doctrine. The similarities in these movements goes very deep through their shared ancestor, The Bauhaus. Walter Gropius originally saw the Bauhaus as a school that united craft and fine art under the roof of architecture. In the end the Bauhaus was more well known for its industrial design output but the ideas that were manufactured there went on to be a primary resource for architects as well. Unfortunately Modern architecture as a style has already reached its height and by most accounts is dead, however, Functionalism as a design ethos is still with us.

The sudden end of modern architecture came from its unpopularity with the masses. The raw, unadorned surfaces of modern architecture left people with an uncomfortable feeling, like one of those really awesome thick hand knit sweaters that is just too itchy to wear. The best example of this is the housing projects built throughout the world to solve housing shortages. At first, efficient and cheap housing stacked vertically seemed attractive but when they were tried on it was a different story. Almost all of the projects have been rejected by their occupants and have turned to slums or been donated to the thrift store. The inability for people to relate to the forms of modern architecture through vernacular or historical references became the major downfall of the Modern architectural movement. It turns out that most people have a hard time relating to forms that are reflective of machines and construction methods used to construct them. I think that as designers this is hard to swallow, for the most part we are obsessed with methods of manufacture and materials, why wouldn’t everybody want their oven to be expressive of its rivets and heating elements? Contemporary architects have had a hard time responding to this rejection of reductionism and have reluctantly incorporated abstracted decoration and adornment. Examples of this are structures by Frank Gehry and Michael Graves. Frank Gehry has abstracted his entire buildings to look like huge artichokes (Disney opera house in Los Angeles) or ships (Guggenheim in Bilbao Spain) in an effort to add interest to his otherwise Modern style of honesty through exposed beams and titanium roofing. Michael graves just added huge statues and abstracted decorations onto his Disney hotel to appease the masses.

If Mr. Graves or Mr. Gehry was a functionalist they would not be able to follow their current path. The definition of functionalism offered to us by George Marcus "the notion that objects made to be used should be simple, honest, and direct; well adapted to their purpose; bare of ornament; standardized; machine-made, and reasonably priced; and expressive of their structure and materials" (George Marcus, Functionalism, 1995, p.9.) does not offer us opportunities for decoration or narrative. According to Marcus the narrative is the process and the decoration is the material. It seems to me that strict adherence to this would lead to the same place architecture has arrived at. In fact, we may be already. Michael graves did design a world renowned tea kettle with a rooster jammed onto it for no apparent reason. Just like in buildings, people want to be able to be comfortable with their surroundings. To be comfortable with your surroundings you must be able to relate to them. This can happen through pure formal language, like an Eames molded plywood chair which can be mistaken for potato chips or flower petals or any number of organic natural forms or historical reference like a retro styled reissue of an Oysterizer blender that looks like your grandmas or through relation to a popular style like the whole boat load of hounds tooth covered fashion accessories available in the last couple of years. In the design world I often feel that these tools are looked down upon and I think that the source of this current is the modernist/functionalist talking points of honesty and standardized. The functionalist mantra simply leaves no room for the demands of stylistic reference or plain old decoration. Instead it offers the decoration of no decoration and the style of no style as a substitute. I think that the honesty in design should be in reference to an honesty of the designer and not an honesty of materials. Every decision a designer makes could have been made multiple other ways and the accumulation of these different choices becomes the voice of that artist, it is silly to offer a style of no style as a style to adhere to and an inert material as the guiding light to navigate by. I think that we may have to just admit that as humans we like ornaments and doilies and little jaguars on the hoods of our big jaguars and blown glass baby Jesus ornaments on the Christmas tree. I like to sit in the living room across from the Christmas tree to ponder the sparkly significance of each family heirloom on the tree and I think that that is a widely universal experience.

However, I’m not saying that we have to go hyper style conscious like the apparel people were the trend and style of the time is the only way one can measure the success of an object. I’m also not saying that we have to start hand engrave plumbing fixture obsessive French Rococo style. It just seems that decoration and adornment and embellishment and narrative and style are not going any place and as part of the human condition we may want to make a place for them in design because unless we train engineering geek robots to design goods for other super geek robots all on their own using only math and physics to guide their decision making process than we are never going to have truly honest design anyways.

Eladio Dieste and functionalism and Chairs

Functionalism as practiced in modern architecture failed. The honesty of materials and forms demanded by the functionalist methodology led to forms that people were not interested in living with. Much like a Reitveld chair, modernism has left much to be desired for the average person. I don't think that this is because of a problem with the functionalist mantra but more with its application as a style instead of a thought process. Mistakingly thinking that one should reduce a chair to the least that has to do to hold someone up, Some people (Reitveld), have made some pretty terrible chairs. Almost anything can hold a person up, functionalism should demand cool stuff like comfort and ergonomics and aesthetics that people feel comfortable in. Does a chair function is nobody likes the way it looks? What if it only weighs a pound and is super strong but uncomfortable? often the pursuit of efficiency and material honesty and minimalism drive design to an esoteric place that very few can appreciate. If design is a practice that involves making for the masses than the concerns, frivolous as they may seem, of those masses must be respected and not treated as trivial. Thats why Eladio Dieste was so cool, he produced "Modern" structures with amazing economy and efficiencies while still incorporating forms that regular people could live with.

Eladio

old stuff

The laws of physics have not changed, ever. We have made all sorts of crazy materials and tools and tricky plans but triangles are still stronger than squares and circles are still more aerodynamic than cubes. This continuity in the human experience means that old ideas can become new again. As new materials and methods to utilize them come into use we can improve the way principles are applied to structures. For instance, The basics of aerodynamics have been applied to bicycle design since the bicycles inception. Efforts have been made to streamline the rider and machine through the use of almost every applicable material. The adoption of carbon composites has allowed current designers to reduce the aerodynamic drag of modern cycles drastically. The methods used to do this are not new or original, just refined versions of older efforts. Realizing that we are working within a perpetual system of refinement and that very few things are actually invented demands that we draw from past as source material and not just a list of things that have already been done.

light bulbs.

As technology progresses light emitting devices are becoming more efficient and increasingly compact. Because of the size and static shape of traditional bulbs most lighting design has been primarily concerned with disguising or accesorising the light bulb in such a way as to make it more pleasing to have around. This involved improving the look of the bulb and improving the quality of light it casts. As bulb technology has allowed light to come from smaller and smaller sources, the design of light fixtures is involved more in the quality of light. This is especially true with new advances in LED technology and fiber optic technology. Both of these are allowing structural materials to emit light which totally circumvents the traditional concerns of lighting design. It seems that the coarse we are currently on will soon lead to the possibility of having uniform light on any intensity and any wavelength evenly distributed through any environment. This kind of control over our environment has some pretty crazy implications. What kind of light is "best", questions like these are difficult to answer when technology no longer limits us to specific vehicles for output. I would like the paint on my ceiling to replicate the dappled light of a shady willow tree on a breezy sunny day.

Eladio Dieste, Wharehouse at Montevideo

Eladio Dieste, Church of christ the worker

Eladio Dieste: connecting modern forms to modern life.

The forms and spaces created by modern architecture were a way to concretely display the efforts of modernity. Proponents of the modern architectural style were in pursuit of a basic purity in structure that could be universally applied in any location and for any purpose. The pursuit of this basic purity led to an austere formal vernacular that often felt disconnected from the world around it. This disintegration with the environment became one of the major shortcomings of the Modern Architectural movement (Scully 1980, pg.158). Eladio Dieste’s church of Christ the worker is a powerful critique of these Modern architectural forms and practices. By using a process which emphasizes efficiency in material selection and application, Dieste was able to create a purely Modern structure which still relates to its environment and its users. Dieste called this approach to design “cosmic economy, a way to use materials that profoundly respects their properties and responsibility” (Carbonell 1987, pg.162). This type of approach stands in clear opposition to the works of Dieste’s contemporaries like Oscar Niemeyer. Niemeyer’s National Cathedral in Brazilia is a good example of a distinctively different approach to forms and there relations to the environment, an approach that focuses more on the singular vision of the architect and not on the realities of the construction site and material capabilities. Dieste was not alone in his dedication to using materials to their highest potential. Robert Maillart was a Swiss engineer who was dedicated to the same kind of economy that Dieste pursued. He worked with reinforced concrete to create bridge spans that pushed the material to its limits. This drive for efficiency imbues a structure with a universal value that only takes an understanding of the physical world we share to appreciate.

All of the attributes that make Dieste’s works successful are directly related to Dieste’s principle of cosmic economy. For Dieste, Cosmic Economy meant a great and comprehensive concern for the efficient use of resources. The all encompassing nature of Diestes cosmic economy meant that an efficient and concise use of material and nonmaterial resources had to be pursued. One of the major effects that this thinking had on Dieste was to more directly link the form of buildings to the construction techniques that would be used to build them. For Dieste, “construction will always be indiscernible from architecture because it is its flesh and bones” (Dieste, 1992, pg.194). Dieste’s background as an engineer is clearly evident in this way, however, the result of this thought process was more than just a technical exercise. The relationship between how a structure would eventually look and how it would be constructed is a key difference between Dieste’s work as an architect and many of his contemporaries. Many of the materials that allowed Modern Architecture to take form asked much less of the designer in the way of concessions for strength. Reinforced concretes plasticity let architects to be more free in their formal language, allowing them to design the way in which a building might look before even considering how it would be made. In contrast, Diestes cosmic economy requires that each resource must be used efficiently and concisely, something that cannot be accomplished without constant attention to how a structure will take form. This kind of attention to economy is a powerful guide for design. By embracing the physical rules and constraints of the world and working with them to develop a structure, Dieste’s work become visibly tied to the environment it was placed in with a language that everyone can understand.

Eladio Dieste’s first architectural work was the church of Christ the Worker, in the small village of Atlantida. The church of Christ the worker shares the same thin shell continuously curved reinforced masonry vaults that characterize much of Dieste’s work. This type of construction has specific advantages over the typical reinforced concrete and steel structures that are typically thought of as modern. The most important being its relation to the region in which the church was built. Dieste’s philosophy of cosmic economy led him away from the normal path of reinforced concrete and steel construction because both of these materials were prohibitively expensive to import to Uruguay and were also foreign to the labor force that would be doing the actual construction. To address the specific material and social concerns of the village of Atlantida, Dieste chose to build with reinforced masonry. Construction using masonry was very common in Uruguay, making it attractive because it was economical to purchase and install. The available work force was already well trained in this type of construction so brick and mortar was the most obvious choice. By simply committing to a material that was familiar to the people in the surrounding village, Dieste starts the process of forming an architecture that is both modern and local. If Dieste were to have simply tried to mimic the forms of more modern materials with his bricks than the connection to the local people may have felt contrived or might have felt like it was an imitation. However, Dieste did not see this material as a substitute for something better but as a valid material with its own positive and negative attributes. His background as an engineer allowed him to fully exploit the humble bricks positive qualities. By creating spans and forms that would be daring and sometimes impossible with other more modern materials, Dieste works with the materials to build a sense of wonder into the church of Christ the worker. This sense of wonder did not come from some abstract metaphor or play on historical archetypes but from our basic understanding of materials and the mystique that comes with challenging the limits of the constraints that they provide.

The challenge of constructing of Brazils new capitol was a major undertaking. One of the many buildings that needed to be constructed was a national cathedral. The task of building this new cathedral was Oscar Niemeyer’s. Niemeyer’s design called for a set of reinforced concrete ribs arranged radially to form a large cone like structure with a circular floor plan. Niemeyer’s design solution also integrates a mote that people have to walk under to get inside. The choices of materials for this project were primarily reinforced concrete and glass. These materials have no relation to the region of Brazil in which they were placed, which was a semi arid desert and mostly uninhabited. They were chosen because they were the accepted norm for modern architecture worldwide and because they were probably the only materials that could fulfill the structural requirements of the design. The resulting structure speaks to the observer through multiple extended metaphors that must be detected and decoded by the observer. The most obvious of which is probably the allusion to baptism experienced by having to pass under water to gain access to the Nave and if one is extra imaginative they can see how the overall form of the structure looks like a set of praying hands. By relying on the poetics of the formal language of structure for its sense of meaning, Niemeyer fully invests the value of the cathedral in his own personal vision. If a person visiting the cathedral simply misunderstands what the forms of the structure mean than much of the value of the design is lost. There are still the unique qualities of the light and circular floor plan to dwell on and those by themselves are interesting but are clearly not what Niemeyer wanted the cathedral to be about. By using forms, materials and construction methods that do not relate to the experience of the geographic region of Brazilia or the people who live there, Niemeyer counts on the value of his own vision and interpretation of meanings to give the experience of the National Cathedral value.

The type of demand for economy and efficiency that Dieste’s approach to design demands is not wholly unique and the relations to the environment that it creates are not limited to the retro appeal of traditional materials. Robert Maillart was a Swiss engineer and bridge builder who worked in the modern material of reinforced concrete. When Maillart started to build with reinforced concrete in the early 1900s it was already becoming a common material in Switzerland, having been in use for 30-40 years and also having been invented in neighboring France. Maillart used some of the same principles of Dieste’s cosmic economy to stretch the abilities of this material to its limits. At the time most engineers and architects were accustomed to using wood, stone and steel to create structures. The qualities of these materials became part of the language that designers drew on when creating. When reinforced concrete came into use its first applications were a direct replacement for the materials that had preceded it. The unique qualities and opportunities that reinforce concrete presented were not being fully exploited or respected in its use. Maillart saw reinforced concrete as a unique material with traits that could be exploited to reach an economy in construction, form and material. An economy that all previous materials could not attain. The best examples of this are his large span bridges like the Salginatobel Bridge in Switzerland. In this design Maillart employed a monolithic structure comprised of a shallow, curved reinforced concrete slab for the arch, with the horizontal slab of the platform and a series of stiffening vertical slabs used to tie and articulate them (Giedion, 1941, pg. 459). This type of bridge construction was entirely foreign to the swiss mountains. It struck a contrast with people’s perceptions of what a bridge should look like and with how people thought structures could work. If Maillart’s bridges were based solely on his own external vision of how they should look, their value would be up for interpretation based on how well that vision was understood by the critic. However, because Maillart’s forms were based in a search for engineering efficiencies they appeal to the basic senses that we have accumulated through our lives.

Elaudio Dieste built truly modern structures. The Church of Christ the worker is a testament to that fact. It is also easy to see that the Church of Christ the Worker is a departure from some of what is thought to be some of the essential parts of Modern Architecture, like reinforced concrete. By using a process that strives to consider the effects of every decision in the process of designing and building a structure, Dieste found a way to successfully blend the striking forms of the modern with the daily needs and tastes of the average. This blend did not come from a desire to compromise the ideals of modernity to suit the masses but from tempering the pursuits of modernity with the reality always present in each Architectural pursuit. This kind of mindset was in opposition to the Modern architectural movement which disconnected itself and its stark forms from the people and environment around it by imagining that modern man could conquer, or at least ignore, the rules of nature. By treating the disconnect this attitude formed as a problem of style, postmodernism reintroduced elements of the historical to better relate to the public’s need for something familiar and warm. Dieste shows us a way to relate the forms of modernism to something even more universal than history, our experience of the world around us. By striving to build in response to the circumstances and limitations that are faced by everyone, Dieste relates his structures to the human experience directly by challenging what our perceptions of what is possible with common materials, inspiring a sense of wonder.

Bibliography

1. Scully, Vincent. Modern Architecture and Other Essays, Princeton university press, 2003

2. Carbonell, Galaor. Eladio Dieste, Universidad de los Andes, 1987

3. Dieste, Eladio. Reflection on Architecture and construction , MIT press, 1992

4. Giedion, S, Space, Time and Architecture , Harvard University Press. 1941

Timelines

here are some thoughts on history in time line form, stay tuned, theres more coming soon.