Childhood as cartography; urban planner as watchmaker; design as recipe
In reverse order, three nice design metaphors just to show how design permeates everything:
Alex Evans and David Stevens’s Resilience Doctrine claims that the next 20 years will be driven by an unpredictable interplay between abundance and scarcity. As information and connections become more abundant, time becomes more scarce. Their metaphor for the crucial instructions for how to combine the once-scarce-now-abundant resources spreading widlly as a result of connections and information, is “recipes“. Their insouciant shorthand for recipes in the next sentence is “design”. Design as recipe: not bad.
Here’s a lovely one from Jason Epstein reviewing Anthony Flint’s book about the battle between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses over the Lower Manhattan Expressway in the 1950s. “…but the revitalisation of Manhattan demanded the artistry of a watchmaker. Moses’s tools were raw political power, federal money, and Radiant City ideology”. Urban planner as watchmaker: very good.
And finally Michael Chabon, in a New York Review article excerpted from his new book, Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood , makes a beautifully supported claim that “Childhood is a branch of cartography”. The literal and metaphorical “wilderness” of childhood has shrunk to mere scraps of green, “certified zones of safety”, “jolly internment centres planned by adults”. No exploring to be done, no adventure to be had, no map for a child to draw either as a paper or psychological entity. Chabon’s chilling prediction is that this contraction of wilderness and childhood freedom-to-roam will extinguish the world of stories. A perfect illustration by Maurice Sendak accompanies it. Childhood as cartography: best of three.
That’s all from me until September. For recreational self-improvement I’m taking The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century by Alex Ross, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the Associated Board Baroque Keyboard Pieces Book IV, the Beethoven sonata it’s taken me a year to learn and ongoing hexagonal patchwork. I look forward to prize livestock and rural collectivism at the Union Fair. For health I pledge to swim the lake every day and subsist as far as possible on only the local superfoods: Maine lobster and blueberries.
The design dilemma of hot beverages
In her New York Times column today Alice Rawsthorn reports thoughtfully on the dismal experience of trying to buy an electric kettle. So true, although her thesis that countertop appliances represent the low-rent end of product design doesn’t explain why most mobile phones look like crap.
But well done Alice for getting the kettle repaired – a triumph in contemporary terms – and back to the seemly boiling of water:
I resolved long ago to evade the electric kettle by going for the old-fashioned, whistling stove-top device. Partly because of the shop of horrors that Rawsthorn identifies electric kettle design to be: the stovetop kettle is inherently a simpler thing. Also because a vigorous cook naturally avoids cluttering her vital work-surface with electrical cords and cordless launchpads. When my anonymous and functional stainless steel kettle finally disintegrated I went – with some misgivings – for le Creuset, and with it a modicum of design. Not, as it happens, the ersatz “Traditional” version Rawsthorn rightly scorns but the Kone, more post-modern armaments factory than “witches’ coven”. I don’t love it, but I don’t mind it.
My own dismay in the electrical department of John Lewis came as I entered in search of a new filter coffee machine. My years in the United States accustommed me to insist on filtration. Beats me how the Cafetière became that icon of late 20th century meeting-chic when it pours forth sludge. And although one admires the natty Bialetti Moka Express, staple of all Italian high-street hardware merchants in an awesome range of sizes, and its more stylised scions, I think in England it makes foul coffee.
The Krups filter coffee machine we acquired as a wedding present disintegrated after ten years, and my, how the domestic coffee landscape had changed! Apart from one gigantic filter machine, parodically elaborate in its functions, John Lewis had nothing but countertop espresso-makers as far as the eye could see. Urbanely, I sneered at those who make their own when how much more cosmopolitan to get one at the corner and consume it shoulder-to-shoulder with other citizens. I shivered, moreover, at the apocalypse of energy is must take to push water and steam through these things, although this may be an illusion stimulated by the prevailing ersatz, age-of-chrome, industrial styling.
I left with a Krups coffee mill instead, a compact and single-functional concession to countertop appliances, trusting that somewhere – somewhere – in London you could still buy a 1 x 4 plastic or ceramic coffee filter. Curiosity led me to the Monmouth Coffee House, where, sure enough, there’s a plastic filter and a pyrex jug from an anonymous Eastern European manufacturer, winsomely boxed up as the “Continental Filter”, for about a fiver.
We simulate the warming effect of a filter machine with the small burner and a heat diffuser. I’m pleased to say that this morning ritual of grinding and hand filtering yields a good volume of coffee, richly aromatic and sludge-free.
The cinematically intractable heroes and heroines of design
I’ve written before on the mysterious scarcity of designers in cinematic fiction. Notwithstanding this underpopulation, I received notice the other day of the forthcoming British Film Institute/RIBA season of architects and architecture on film. It’s an impressively full and enticing list but it’s certainly not long on personalities. The blurb betrays this rather disembodied character: “a varied programme of documentaries, features, silent classics and European cinema gems that demonstrate how the cinema uses architects and the built environment to influence our emotional responses”. This suggests a rather indirect connection between the architect and the emotions.
Alice Rawsthorn’s been whiling away the August doldrums turning up the 20th century’s design heroes on YouTube – real gems here, and heroic, for sure; but it’s not the stuff of fiction and fantasy. It’s archivally thrilling if you’re a design afficionado to witness Paul Rand describe his imperious handing over of the IBM logo to the importunate client (an unequivocal, single proposition), but I think not universally moving.
So what of Coco Before Chanel? Well, there’s a wonderful scene in which she stands on a beach in Normandy watching fishermen haul in their nets, and the designers in the audience know she’s studying their unique elegance. Sure enough, Coco shows up in the next scene in a fishing smock, and in the following ones looking utterly chic in a stripey matelot. Quite soon after this, her boyfriend Arthur “Boy” Capel rumbles her trying to filch his polo shirt and as she hands it back she asks what it’s made of. “Jersey” he replies, and a century of Lacoste and Fruit Of The Loom and Uniqlo flashes through our minds. But generally I felt a want of design in this movie.
We examine her progress from orphanage to indifferent singing double-act in a bar with her sister to the inglorious concubinage from which Capel’s capital rescues her. Through all this Gabrielle-Coco remains enigmatic – of course she does, her armour-plated persona concealing the indignities of youth and provenance. This makes her infatuation with Capel less than convincing (if Alessandro Nivola’s rabitty teeth and nasty period moustache hadn’t already). Although she cries at the news that he’s been killed in a car crash, she’s already admitted she’s not the marrying type.
Naturally I yearn for the more full and convincing a story that could have been made of her evolution as a designer. Yes, there’s the fishermen and the polo jersey, and a couple of other scenes in which she insists on sartorial sobriety against the taste of the times. But I wanted more clues to the trajectory from the full-length, meringue-hatted Edwardian style, at once blousy and corsetted, which she resolutely rejected, to the neat, knee-length, narrow shouldered, high-armholed, three-quarter-sleeved bouclé suit we know and love. Didn’t Chanel also invent denim as a fashion fabric after admiring the indigo-overalled workers of Nîmes (de Nîmes)? I suppose that was Coco After Chanel, but cinema has license doesn’t it?
The film ends rather abruptly. One minute Coco is presiding over her celebrity hat-trimming atelier; the next she’s sitting on the now famous staircase of the Rue Cambon watching the descent of a sublime first collection. I suppose how she got from one to the other just doesn’t make good fiction. Sigh.
Craftsmen of culvert, causeway and cascade
How glad I was to have wriggled out of sailing a 24′ Mersey Mylne (for all its superior design virtues) off Rockferry on Saturday as I heard and watched Gryff Rys-Jones liken the quality of Mersey under the standard grey firmament to “the colour of dead rat”. This as he prepared to dive in and swim the river as part of his rather excellent investigation into the industrial-historic waterways of the North West; with many passing compliments to the craftsmen of culvert and causeway, aqueduct and bridge, hydro-powered cascade and indeed wholy re-engineered landscape (Chatsworth).
In fact I’d just got off the train from my home town where I finally got around to taking the official tour of St Geroge’s Hall. Awestruck, obviously, by the high Victorian classicism and proud of my city forebears for getting it up, one fact pre-occupies me in its contemporary correlative. In the first heyday of this municiple facility, we learned, the upper gallery of the massive greatl hall (that of the great Willis organ and rarely-revealed Minton floor) was accessible to the poor for a penny so they could keep warm. Keep warm and observe the gaudies below. Imagine today getting access to the upper gallery of the Guildhall or Bouji’s to bask in the warm glow of wealth and vainglory.
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