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Then there are situations when just a tweak, a twist or a re-framing of something that’s already there does a better job than starting from scratch.

A project brief might call for pounds of plastic, paper, ink, metal and fuel, but does the larger situation suggest a more efficient response?

DesignInquiry 2009: ‘Design-Less’ explored a variety of works and approaches to design that share a kind of productive nihilism. Things organized or assembled to create a particular attitude; variations on ‘nothing’ or ‘next to nothing’; the subtraction, obstruction or interference of a language we take for granted.

See more DesignLess content here.

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Only at neap tide (when the gravity of the Sun and Moon act perpendicular to each other) is it possible to wade to this little house, named ‘The Low Tide Gallery’ during a DesignInquiry-led expedition.

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At Vinalhaven, my own norms for staying connected–emailtextsvoicemailblogsnewsthephonethescreenthecar–were dropped. To my surprise, the theme ‘design-less,’ resulted in genuine connection, experimentation, and possibility.

The letterforms presented here are constructed based on points of cell phone reception that the group discovered across the island, and includes the shared landline at the Poor Farm. Strokes are drawn across the air based on these points, as if a phone call were mapped. Peter stands in front of David’s vacation rental, and phones the Ferry Terminal where Ann is waiting for her phone to be dropped off. Sunniya stands in front of the Charming House, and calls Ben at the Low Tide Gallery; the tide has come in, the call is dropped. These calls form the letter T.

T was my assigned Love Letter from Lucy. The project also responds to Steve’s challenge to construct letterforms in space. It thinks about tools, at Denise’s suggestion. It plays with Peter’s posted cell phone reception map. The title of the project is (207) 863-2256, the phone number at the Poor Farm.

Download (207) 863-2256 by Emily Luce (PDF)

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Above: Poor Farm Indenture: November 15, 1844.

Leonard Norton [aged 5] to be “instructed and employed in the trade or mystery of Farming” by Samuel Brown until November 10, 1860, “at which time the said apprentice if he shall be living will be twenty one years of age.” In addition to training in farming, Mr. Brown is accountable “also to teach and instruct the Said apprentice or cause him to be taught and instructed to Read and Write…as far as the Rule of three and Shall also find and allow unto his said apprentice meat, drink, washing, lodging, and apparel and other necessaries meet and convenient for such an apprentice during the term aforesaid and at the expiration of the said term shall give to his said apprentice three new suits of wearing apparel one suitable for the Lord’s day and the other two suitable for working days.”

Below: Poor Farm Plat

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by Peter Hall, Brooke Chornyak, Steve Bowden, Ben Van Dyke, Sean Wilkinson

Perhaps it was the combination of rolling mist, the lack of gallery walls, and the jagged Maine coastline that created the sublime atmosphere of the Low Tide Gallery? Or perhaps it was something else all together. On Thursday June 25th, the attendants of 2009 DesignInquiry gathered at the rocky shore of Vinalhaven to acknowledge a week of challenging conversations, renewed creative curiosity, friendship, and the creative outcome of a weeklong journey. The body of work represented a sampling of several workshops worth of prints and drawings. Black and white on varied paper substrates was the dominant palette, yet sharp blues and oranges stood out amidst the grey-green surroundings, supporting the beauty of the landscape and melding it with the incorporated found materials.

Returning to our point of beginning, the curators of the gallery merely created the conditions for something to happen, ‘designed less,’ and experienced a moment far greater than expected. As a group we hope to establish the gallery as an annual event, and we wish to thank all the participants and visitors.

Paper boats, salt water and fog. It’s impossible to write down honest thoughts, accurate thoughts. Loving the rain. Not slowing things down; I want to speed things up. There’s always just enough time. The boats sink, the shells are crushed, the mosquitoes squished. Proximity.

Sleeping early, sleeping late.

Run left instead of right. Explorers, recycling posters in new landscapes. Perspective and letter-loving. An island sighted. Navigated to only at low tide. A shack in the mist, a gallery is born. Drinking, printing and island-shack-mythmaking ensues. People are curious, the show is on. Tide against us. Alternate sites abound and one is found. Fragments of now, enjoyed in the moment. Work fluttered.

Designers frolicked. Poetry, wine and song. A toast and a journey home. Closure brought to projects, lectures, and the week. What time is your ferry?

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Here’s a Version of How it Went, in order of appearance:

Nancy Skolos: Encyclopedia of design knowledge, A to Z. Many pretty pictures of many amazing designed things. And how can we know as much as we need to know? Ben Van Dyck: The big questions. Which door to choose from. Also: does design thinking and making include adventurous forms of making and thinking? Aside # 1 (I think we should do something with that hallway upstairs and all those doors.) Lucinda Hitchcock (see essay after this Digestif): Defining Design-less a few different ways; Letters/words/spaces: “reading” a place actually and figuratively. Dimensional typography, and memorial design that isn’t monolithic or conventional. Teaching narrative thinking. Szu Han and Jesse Vogler: Surveying the land, measuring the (im)measurable. How the traverse meets the story. Szu Han lying on the ground on her belly observing closely. Finding the lay of the land literally and figuratively. Laurie Churchman: Better now? Better now? And is DIY a thing to contend with? Or not? Do we care about logos? Or who makes them or how much they cost? Aside # 2 (you can’t see from above if you have no wings). Denise Gonzales Crisp: Gorgeous wire Letterform jigs. And jags. And a SCREAM box! (a clip of the amazing Kelly Dobson video) and flamboyance, decoration, pretty things that work. Make a simple tool. (so I did: a measuring device that makes poetry). Julia Child: peg boards. Tools that delight. Peter Hall: A beautifully eloquent talk on design history, the designed object as a cultural signifier. “Why do we talk about the vase but not about the flowers.” The cars but not the roads. The THEY. Melle Hammer: Potatoes and curating. Rearrange the items on the table. Discuss. Rearrange again. And again. aside # 3 (my daughter, age five: “Mom, if there were no corners, things would go on and on.) aside # 4 (Dutch poet Bert Schierbeek’s version of the Paul Valéry quote: even a pound of feathers cannot fly without a bird. Thanks Melle.) Brook Chornyak: Re-purposing. A nice blend with Denise’s workshop request. My poetry yardstick was a tool from repurposed materials. Sunniya Saleem Hamid: Too many kinds of soap to choose from, too many designs for useless things. Re-use and refuse. Jenny Tsai: Exploratorium: How can people be encouraged to participate in online forums such as flickr? Is it a viable locus for research and reaction? Esp for non-profit and cultural institutions? We download and consume rather than upload. aside # 4 (where is this all going. Wondering about the threads that tie things together. Moderation might help make discussion more fruitful.) Jessica Fleischmann: Weeds. A lovely and astute metaphor for our inquiry: Designing as editing, selecting, transplanting, identifying, researching, controlling, arranging. Gate crashers lurking in the mulch. The uninvited. And the behavior of weeds: a parallel to the way people behave in groups (or when living intimately on a small island plucked from their natural environments). aside # 5 (when is a metaphor useful?) Anita Cooney and Gabrielle Esperdy: l.e.a.n. meets John Deer museum. An articulate discussion (or two) about buildings, spaces, greed, construction and design, and road tripping. My notes get fuzzy here. I was paying close attention but not writing down. I remember thinking how much I wish architects and graphic designers and those of us in-between folks who are interested or involved in environmental graphic design could use more opportunities like D.I. to have useful and authentic exchanges around ideas and processes and knowledge about our respective interests and methods. Steve Bowden A most refreshing and necessary directive: Make an object which leaves a mark, preferably a letter form. Many people enjoyed this workshop and many of the memorable results found their way to the low tide gallery. Nancy Skolos’s typeface rendered from a complex system that repurposed an empty toilet paper role is worth a mention here. David Shields A remarkable tale about the remarkable Rob Roy Kelly type collection. Such beautiful wooden letter forms. And such an enviously organized mind (David’s) organizing the system, uncovering the research and history, and making these types accessible to the public. Thank you David! Mark Jamra: A funny, acerbic, and genuinely impressive explanation of how a font really gets made, massaged, programmed, and attended to with the utmost detail, respect, knowledge and skill. Melle Hammer Designing with what you have, with your brain on fire. Designing in a way that is subversive and smart and principled. Designing an arabic font with tagliatelli. Help from Sunniya on how the various diacritical marks and variations from letter to letter affect meaning and pronunciation. Emily Luce A fascinating talk about her work on the disappearing Nuu Chah Nulth language. This is so good I have to quote it: “the experience of deprecating the design process, of holding back on my area of contribution, of listening, and being forced to participate in the big picture, of sticking with it, has unequivocally made me a better designer. It has clarified how design is important, and how it is not.”
Nici von Alvensleben Many beautiful books and the beginning of a timely and important discussion about the value of the “design competition” and the role of judges in such competitions. When does less become more or more become less. How do we work in this climate when the need to simplify is so evident. Thanks for bringing so many books with you. And for such a lovely and articulate presentation. Charles Melcher and Margo Halverson Client case studies: the perfect client, the nightmare client, the unusual client. I loved these stories and it was good to be reminded of how much the design process is about our relationships with others. Scott Townsend Fascinating work involving international clients, complex amount of information presented in dimensional and installationist environments. Loved the work. Wish we had more time to talk about this challenging and compelling area of design. I am still wondering where “designlessness” comes in to play. Lucille Tenazas The back of the needlepoint as a starting point for the visual and contextual narrative. The story of migration, family, place, change and stability, and the flux of time and place. Lucille: beautiful, poised, elegant, talking about the beauty of the unseen side. And of course, my paella partner! And closing remarks by Satoru Nihei: The sun came out (it was a misty soggy week) as we prepare to say goodbye. Satoru had a goodbye to express. It mattered to him and it worked for us.
L. Hitchcock, Design Inquiry, 2009

__________

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Lucinda Hitchcock
Vinal Haven, Maine, June 2009

I began my presentation with words on the screen, (shown here, separated by semicolons), one phrase faded out as the next phrase faded in:

design less; design more?; design more; de-sign; un-sign; stop-sign; stop signing; design less! (as an imperative?); design-less (as an adjective?); design-less culture; things made design-lessly; design less (fill-in-the-blank); design less junk; design-less junk; design less stuff; design less nonsense; design less obliquely; design less habitually; design less egotistically; design less subversively; design less overtly; design less myopically; design less soulless, meaningless, vacuous, self-referential stuff.;

and

design more; design more work that: challenges; pleases; connects; beautifies; broadens; speculates; articulates; argues; directs; defines; narrates; shows; frames; posits; tells; teaches!

My current design practice is mostly concerned with making opulent books for museums and galleries. It is fun, certainly, but it is decidedly not a “designless” practice. But the praxis that interests me most deeply and genuinely these days, is developing projects and curricula for my students at Rhode Island School of Design, where I teach full time. Where I can, I incorporate narrative as a lens through which students can approach design work during their art school experience. I find that this opens conversation, deepens thinking, and encourages risk-taking. We all know what a story is, and when you approach graphic communication as a branch of story telling, a connection with student imaginations can usually be made.

I studied literature both as an undergraduate and again as a graduate student, and my first jobs after graduate school were in the editorial departments at various publishing houses, and it was there that I began looking over the shoulders of the in-house graphic designers. I noticed that they were grappling with something that I found fascinating: the visual representation of the written word. Making the shift from the mostly verbal to the mostly visual realm (through some miracle I was accepted into an MFA program for graphic design), I became involved not only with learning to design verbal and textual expressions in two-dimensions (typography, layout, composition), but also with how the verbal and poetic could be conjured in the three-dimensional realm: how are messages framed/derived/formed in spatial settings and environments? I began to read: Kevin Lynch, Dolores Hayden, Lucy Lippard, Gaston Bachelard, among numerous others. I also read poetry, including Ranier Maria Rilke, and became intrigued by his notion that we “read” spaces, and that subconscious memory is deeply linked to locus, frame, and environs. This natural pathway from reading texts to reading spaces, led me from the consideration of setting type to setting sites. Later, when I was teaching, I continued to find ways to link these areas of interest.

When I prepared to join the ranks at Design Inquiry in June 2009, I decided that my connection to the topic “DesignLESS” could be through a discussion about teaching students to produce narratives rather than artifacts. Narrative, place, memory, setting; rather than thing, artifact, object, result. I encourage students to talk about the relationships and connections between things in situ, and to observe how meaning is made through the juxtapositions of environments and objects, texts and places, spaces and use, etc.

I opened my talk at D.I. with a sort of manifesto which performed the simple act of taking apart the term “Design Less” (see above). I enjoy how the phrase can be used as an adjective to describe a noun (as in motherless) or as an imperative (design less _____ [fill in the blank]); or as a suggestion of a condition (we might consider designlessness for the week on Vinal Haven). This manifesto/inquiry suggested that we might turn the question on its head and answer it from a position of strength. YES we must design less _____ and instead design more _____.

I shared some of the work I show my students in my classes at RISD (Making Meaning; Graduate Typography Studio; Sophomore Typography; Visual Narrative; Setting The Site: Type and Message in the Environment), along with some of the work produced in my classes. I was (I hope) able to draw the discussion forward to ask the question, what is our role in design education? Can we teach more while designing less? Does it make sense to do so? And as educators, what is our role in the design field? The participants at D.I., over the course of the following days, each shared with us, in his or her way, how they are “designing less” (or designing more, better). I find that for me, I am designing less (fewer) things, but I’m teaching, thinking, talking, reading, inspiring, showing, finding, connecting, imagining, seeking, seeing, more.

Setting the Site is an advanced class for graduate students and seniors at RISD. My course begins with an overview of work produced by various artists, architects, and designers who rely heavily on narrative and meaning as they work to express visual messages in unconventional ways. Examples of this kind of work can be seen in the beautiful memorial design by Micha Ullman. His astonishingly poignant piece at Bebelplatz in Berlin, designed to commemorate the burning of condemned books in the plaza by university students in 1933, is embedded deep in the ground, and viewed from the plaza above. One looks down through thick glass to a small square room whose white walls are entirely lined with book shelves all of which are empty.

by Micha Ullman

Another example might be Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial which used the most pared down and simple forms to visualize an extraordinary thing: a deep gash, a black wound in the earth. But the over-arching narrative in her tale has equally as much to do with the story of how a young Asian American female student got the memorial made and approved and eventually built, working against many political and military forces throughout the process.

I also showed the work of Renata Stih + Frieder Schnock who do amazing work around cultural memory, specifically in Germany. Their proposal for a Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe was rejected (along with numerous other applications) in favor of Peter Eisenmann’s enormous, physical, and monumental grid of rectangular concrete blocks. Stih + Schnock proposed a piece entitled “Bus Stop” which would have been a memorial-in-motion: an actual route inviting people to ride on bright red busses which would traverse the countryside, emblazoned with the names of the various possible destinations: Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and so on. But importantly, their proposal would have required that the site dedicated to the proposed Memorial, in the middle of the city’s most expensive real estate section, remain entirely empty. With nothing but a bus-stop sign.

M+Co/Scott Stowell’s simple “Everybody” billboard simply and succinctly became an inclusive community-building gesture during a time when New York’s 42nd street, which in those days was largely comprised of pornography and strip joints, was under construction. Developers were attempting to “clean up” the area,and in doing so excluded and eventually ousted those businesses that had been occupying the stores and theaters for so many years.

These are just a few examples of the many kinds of work I introduce to my students. We discuss how this work communicates, narrates, tells and teaches, gestures and frames, advocates and invites without necessarily adding to the world’s overabundance of unnecessary items, stuff, ephemera and printed collateral. This work tells stories, creates place, creates community, evokes emotions, shapes opinion, invites and incites interaction, memorializes horrific events without relying on visual clichés, or overused and ubiquitous imagery, billboards or logo campaigns, posters or brochures. And the benefit of my class and this sort of work, is that to truly engage in a class such as this, students must immerse themselves deeply and genuinely into their chosen subject area.

After observing and analyzing some of these artists and designers, students are then given projects in which they too are asked, in incremental steps, to arrive at a piece of work that memorializes an event (personal or public, monumental or banal) or tells a story in visual, structural, and physical ways. In one project the students are directed to only use what they find at a site. A lovely solution came from a student, Kai Salmela, who took a walk in the woods on a sunny day when there was still snow on the ground. Using only his (freezing cold) hands, he scraped away a large square in the middle of a slightly open space in the woods. A striking brown square in the white field resulted: a beautiful statement of form, meditation, portent of springtime coming. There was something moving & somber in the square earth, a burial ground, a place of endings as well as beginnings.

In a different project, where the students are asked to introduce a word into the environment, my student Vasily Davidov, made massive white letters that spelled in beautiful Universe capitals: OUCH and placed them in a site between two buildings which were just about to be renovated/replaced. The space was tight and the poetry of the piece came through it’s context: students loved that space, they delighted in the weird alleyway between these nearly-touching buildings. And the alleyway was about to disappear.

These examples (among others) were part of my contribution to the discussion at D.I. I hoped that by sharing what I do in my teaching, I might prompt a discussion about how students and designers might consider ways to pull us out of our computers, out of our self-referential focus, and into a place of opinion, heart, poetics, geography, context, cultural relevance, community, caring, responsibility, imagination, reverence, research, innovation, and grace.

Lucinda Hitchcock, D.I. 2009

Designless

The post Designing Narratives in Place appeared first on DesignInquiry.

So there we have it – another DesignInquiry has come and gone. And now we look forward to that long interim period between now and next year’s event when the ideas and theories espoused at DI are pondered, gestated and perhaps even acted upon. It is also a period of new postings on the DesignInquiry website, set in the redoubtable Courier, a.k.a. the DI Type.

I have never cared for Courier as the DI Type and could never understand why it was chosen in the first place. It seems too brutal, too austere and bureaucratic, too authoritarian in a dried-up, encrusted, politburo kind of way. Perhaps it was chosen because it was felt to have a “neutral” personality and would allow anything to happen around it. But to me, it doesn’t allow creativity at DI – it preemptively forbids it.

The problem is that there is no DesignInquiry in Courier. It contains none of the left-brain activity, none of the wild tangents, the camaraderie or the spontaneity. Moreover, it lacks the thing which is the heart and soul of DesignInquiry; the thing that is present every day at DesignInquiry and keeps people coming back again and again:

Bacon.

So in today’s workshop we shall add bacon to the DI Type. In the age of OpenType, when you can have high performance fonts on your computer, adding bacon to Courier is a fairly simple task and, frankly, I don’t know why Adobe or Microsoft didn’t think of this a long time ago. Think of the marketing value. Think of the sales. Do you wish for the passionate, loyal following and cult status of a company like Apple Computers? Is this what you desire?

Add bacon, you fools.

Step 1: Drawing the Bacon

Pretty simple, really. Fry up some bacon, lots of it, find the model bacon strip in the batch, lay it on the scanner, scan it. Then eat the model. Drink some coffee. Then eat the rest. Raise the contrast and convert to a bitmap in Photoshop, save as a TIFF.

Now let’s open up Courier in Font Lab. There it is! We’ll add a new glyph cell and go to work there.

In Font Lab, we import the TIFF and draw the bacon around it using the Bézier cubic splines that we know and love from applications like Illustrator, except that, contrary to Illustrator, we can draw it in Font Lab without screaming at the computer and pulling our hair out.

Draw the bacon as carefully as you can, keeping in mind the decay in image quality when it is set in low-res environments like LCD monitors and iPhones. This is the toughest part of the task. Bacon has a more complex flavor and form than Courier and will likely be used only in display settings – and mostly at breakfast.

Step 2: Bacon Metrics

Look at this video image.

Just look at this beautiful picture. Do you see how Charles is spacing the bacon on the left? That’s how you should do it too. It’s no use having bacon in the DI Type if it’s going to be crashing into everything around it. So give it a left-side bearing and a right-side bearing. Well done, Charles!

If you were smart enough to use a primarily straight strip of bacon as your model, you’ll find that your bacon will require relatively few kerning pairs in the font. In fact, it may not require any at all. A crooked or curled bacon strip will undoubtedly cause some spacing problems with certain letters and require a set of kerning values.

Step 3: Writing the Bacon Feature

Here comes the part that all the computer geeks have been waiting for. How do you write a bacon feature in the OpenType Feature Language? It’s really easy.

First, your bacon has to have a name. Since there is no other glyph in Courier called “bacon,” you are free to use that name for your new glyph.

Now we are ready to write the bacon feature in the OpenType panel of Font Lab. Our bacon feature will involve basic Substitution – nothing more. A more complex routine like Conditional Substitution is not necessary for our bacon feature, because at DesignInquiry, bacon is usually eaten unconditionally.

Here it is:

Now we compile the code and check it out in the Preview panel.

It looks swell! I can hear the DI Type sizzling! Generate the font (via the File menu) and load it into your Fonts folder. You’re ready to go!

Now let’s start up InDesign. While we’re waiting for the application to load, I can tell you that I’m currently using a secret beta of CS6 which Adobe sent me last week and – oh look! – Adobe seems to have anticipated our new feature – there’s a Bacon Button!

OMG! It’s right here!

Of course, as you have probably guessed, I have been writing this whole article in the new DI Type. Now comes the part that all of the theoreticians and academics have been waiting for. The following is a critical analysis of the conceptual and cultural significance of putting bacon into Courier. At the same time, we’ll get to see how that new feature works out.

The post A Post DI Workshop appeared first on DesignInquiry.

[Gabrielle Esperdy in collaboration with Anita Cooney]

Seven Strategies for Normative Architecture

It is conventional wisdom in architecture circles that only 10% of buildings are designed by architects, implying that the other 90% of buildings are not designed by architects.[1] This suggests an apparent lack of design intention, making that other 90%, in effect, designless.

These percentages are usually trotted out as a way of quantifying the degraded state of the built environment and qualifying the role architects might play in improving it.From a critical perspective, this interpretation of 90% of buildings is highly suspect, but it is not necessary here to refute either the implication of the pejorative or the impossibility of real designlessness, both of which I’ve done elsewhere.[2]

Rather, let’s consider that first 10%.While these are buildings in full possession of design intention, they are also engaged in a generally overlooked project of deliberate designlessness.This is not meant to equivocate, but these intentionally designed buildings do, in fact, participate in an architecture culture of the designless, one that emerged from a, heretofore, unexamined architecture practice of designing less.

Though this practice became most pronounced in the 20th century, notably in the modernist pedagogy of the Bauhaus, it reaches forward to the 21st, in the protocols of Building Information Modeling.It also reaches backwards very nearly to the beginning of recorded history.

Retroactively identifying and analyzing the practice of designing less in architecture offers a means of reconsidering the evolution and continued relevance of normative architecture.In an essay from the late 1990s, Joan Ockman proposed “normative architecture” as a way of theorizing the hegemony of mid-century modernism and explaining how it was transformed by the dominant culture from socially radical ideology into socially palatable form making.[3] In other words, form making acceptable for conservative patronage, middling practice, and mainstream consumption—designing the 10% but influencing the 90%.

What follows extends the normative from theory to strategic practice and expands its chronological boundaries beyond modernism, from the ancient world to the information age, from Bau to BIM and beyond.

Strategy 1 Traditional Normative

The traditional normative designs less by rebuilding the same building.Intentions can range from the ritualistic and symbolic to the merely practical.

The Shinto Shrine at Ise in Japan is rebuilt every 20 years according to precise design specifications that were established at the end of the 7th century.The current shrine buildings, erected in 1993, are the 61st iteration of the tradition, which is intended to symbolize both impermanence and endurance. Gottfried Semper’s Opera House in Dresden was completed in 1841 and destroyed by fire in 1869; Semper rebuilt it with only minor modifications. The opera house was destroyed by fire again in 1945, the result of Allied bombing; the city rebuilt it as a stone-by-stone replica that paid homage to the glory of pre-war Dresden.A similar traditional normative impulse motivated those who called for rebuilding the Twin Towers after 9-11.

Strategy 2 Historical Normative

The historical normative designs less by designing the same thing over and over and over.From Paestum to the Parthenon, from Vitruvius to Vignola, from Palladio to Perrault, from Albert Speer to Leon Krier, classicism has been the most persistent form of the historical normative.For over twenty-five hundred years its canons and orders have defined the fine arts of architectural theory and practice, despite refinements of form, translations of material, and transformations of meaning.

In buildings across the millennia and across the planet, architects have deployed classical forms like the temple front, the triumphal arch, and the stoa with such regularity that is difficult to imagine a greater way to design less.

Strategy 3 Rational Normative

The rational normative designs less by claiming that all design decisions are based on function and utility rather than aesthetic preference.Subjectivity, individualization, and the artist architect give way to objectivity, standardization, and the technocrat architect.If the rational normative’s moment of triumph is the famous debate between Hermann Muthesius and Henri van de Velde at the 1914 Werkbund exhibition in Cologne, its vindication and possible denouement is the forms and ideas of the Bauhaus and its post-war progeny.Walter Gropius was perhaps its most ardent advocate, if not always its most faithful adherent.

From his celebration of American industrial buildings, emulated in the Fagus Factory at Elfeld, to his Baukasten kit-of-parts system for mass-produced housing, to his heralded workshop block at the Dessau Bauhaus, Gropius championed what he called rationalization, arguing that “the vagaries of mere architectural caprice” had been replaced by “the dictates of structural logic.”Recognizing the architectural endgame this suggested, Gropius also promoted a Loosian belief in society’s aesthetic progress: “we have learned to seek concrete expression of the life of our epoch in clear and crisply simplified forms.”[4]  Thus, the rational normative finds a social rationale.

Strategy 4 Generic Normative

The generic normative designs less by fetishizing industrial and quotidian stuff while claiming it is merely specifying, not designing. Le Corbusier pioneered this strategy in the 1920s when he cast the objet-type, a universal and standardized object, as both an element and goal of architecture.

Whether specifying a Thonet bentwood chair in the Pavilion L’Esprit Nouveau or selling the Maison Citrohan as mass-produced machine for living, i.e. an objet-type at building scale, Corbusier idealized the generic as an appropriate norm for a century that saw the maturation of industrialization.

Progressive architects working in the U.S. before and after WWII were of a similar mind, believing that modern architecture must accommodate itself to advanced technology by willfully exploiting standardized products and processes.

Richard Neutra and Charles and Ray Eames viewed the industrially produced building materials with almost talismanic regard:“Sweets Catalogue was the Holy Bible and Henry Ford the holy virgin.”[5]  To this end, both the Lovell Health House and Case Study House #8 were full of generic, off-the-shelf components from steel frames and aluminum casements to fiberboard panels and automobile headlights.

In the 21st century, Muji represents the apotheosis of the generic normative.The company’s no brand brand wittily updates the objet type through a process of design distillation.From plastic pushpins to prefab houses Muji products are, as the company claims, simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary.[6]

Strategy 5 Artistic Normative

The artistic normative designs less by aestheticizing industrial and quotidian stuff while refusing to admit that it is customizing, not specifying.A key moment in the emergence of this strategy was the 1934 Machine Art show at the Museum of Modern Art.

Though at first glance curator Phillip Johnson’s placement of factory made objects on MoMA pedestals appears to validate the generic normative, by elevating ball-bearings, propellers, and springs, as well as bathroom sinks, coffee urns, and desk lamps, into platonic ideals of abstract beauty Johnson was privileging appearance over function and aesthetics over use.Here, Johnson learned from his master, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Mies’ work from the 1920s through the 1960s, from the cruciform chrome plated steel columns of the Barcelona Pavilion to the bronzed I-beam mullions of the Seagram Building, epitomized industrially-derived elegance.

The artistic normative does not require such refinements of materials or methods.

Frank Gehry used cheap materials to great aesthetic effect in his early projects.In his own house in Santa Monica he transformed a modest mail-order type 1940s bungalow into a glorious one-off architectural pile, wrapping it with chain link fence, corrugated steel and plywood.Robert Venturi’s Fire House No. 4 in Columbus, Indiana is as precise in its details as the Seagram Building but the mannerism of its brickwork and massing is derived from the “ugly and ordinary” commercial strip.It is a dumb box, artistically considered.[7]

Strategy 6 Autonomous Normative

The autonomous normative designs less by claiming that all design decisions are based on an internal, hermetic discipline.Here, architecture suppresses such mundane concerns as program and function in order to prioritize generative and regulatory practices.The autonomous normative operates in both analogue and digital architectural realms, from Peter Eisenman’s paper houses of the 1970s to Greg Lynn’s blob houses of the late 90s and early oughts.

For Eisenman architectural autonomy, an exit strategy from the failed social project of modernism, produced a series of methodical, if not megalomaniacal, manipulations of a formalized grid.Intended as nothing more and nothing less than a visible record the design process, Houses I-X are architecturally dense in their layered and intersecting planes and humanistically empty in their begrudging accommodation to occupation.In Lynn’s work computational scripts and codes offer an even more rigorous application of the autonomous normative because parametric and algorithmic design has its own internal limits and controls.With its continuous surfaces and voluptuous forms, the computer-generated Embryological House has considerable sensual attractions. Whether it has social attractions of equal magnitude remains to be seen.

Strategy 7 Info-Normative

The info-normative designs less by claiming that data processing has replaced heroic design.

The preferred strategy of our supposedly post-industrial moment transforms the technocrat architect of the machine age into a data manager producing building information models that are integrated and life cyclical.Engineering, fabrication, construction, building systems, occupancy, and maintenance are rendered as a continuous stream of real-time data.This 3-D, born digital building information model is intended to replace the discreet and sequential development of conceptual and schematic designs, and design and as-built documentation, that characterized pre-BIM architectural practice.

At a basic level BIM is as apparently sachlich as the Bauhaus: only a handful of microchips separate the contemporary info-normative from the modernist rational-normative.The PC and the network retooled an earlier dream of factory-produced architecture, offering data exchange in place of the assembly line.Of course, data is rarely neutral and building information, like the tropes of function and utility it subsumed, is still subject to human contrivance—call it user error data corruption or user generated data mining, depending on your point of view.Either way, this is where the info-normative can create meaningful architecture, as evident in the Cooper Union Academic Building completed by Morphosis in 2009.

Here, as Thom Mayne has explained it, BIM was not a means of representation; it was a tool for thinking comprehensively and across disciplines in order to “build the thing itself.”[8]  The strategy was not to consider form or structure or program or material or assembly or performance in isolation, but to take on all of them simultaneously as equally valuable bits and bytes of building information.In building the thing itself, the info-normative is triumphant.

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The traditional, historical, rational, generic, artistic, autonomous, and info-normative: these seven strategies for normative architecture are as prescriptive as they are ubiquitous.As this retroactive exegesis has shown, these seven strategies embody the designlessness of the intentional 10% of buildings.But their application in designing less might be a salve for the unintentional 90% as well.

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