THE ARTFULNESS OF DESIGN
The education of a designer is centered on the acquisition of skills and knowledge that supports the creation of practical objects across different scales and levels of complexity. Whether one becomes an architect or a product designer, the general perception is the design process will result in an object, to quote Bruce Archer that is ‘useful, productive, intentional, integrative, inventive and expedient’1. Design education in an art school therefore occupies an intriguing position. Many of the aforementioned values implicit in a designed object run in contradiction to a work of art, which is often perceived to be useless, unproductive, intuitive, ambiguous, at times disturbing and may not even be physical at all. In practice, the designer deals with a client while the artist has an audience. Both are taught and work in a studio environment, use resources and media of increasing convergences, and imagine a reality that may not have existed before. The presentation will draw from a rich collection of examples to advance an interdisciplinary design pedagogy and practice inspired by the arts. It will reveal new horizons and fresh opportunities for the education and practice of a designer aligned at the intersection of art and design.
1. Archer, Bruce. (2007). The Nature of Research into Design and Design Education. UK: Loughborough University. Retrieved from http://idater.lboro.ac.uk/the-nature-of-research-into-design-and-design-education/
I like to thank Principal Rebecca Chew of SOTA, Mr. Goh Yew Lin, Board Director of Temasek Education Foundation and the organizing committee for the invitation to speak in this year’s Arts Education Forum. It is an honor for me to be here today. Having been away for many years, this occasion is also a homecoming for me. I will begin by sharing with you a quotation from the late Gordon Matta Clark, an American artist who once said,
“One of my favorite definitions of the difference between architecture and sculpture is whether there is plumbing or not.”[1]
As an architect teaching architecture and interior architecture in an art school, I find his statement amusing and enlightening. It raises a fundamental issue surrounding the difference between the art and design fields, and how we tend to make distinctions by creating walls to demarcate boundaries. In this presentation, I hope to offer an interdisciplinary approach in the teaching of architecture and design in my department that draws inspiration from the arts.
By the way, although this is not plumbing in the purest sense of the word, an artist in Germany made a fascinating installation on a building that channeled rain water through a series of pipes, bowls and funnels to create a musical experience when it rained. This work by Anish Kapoor in London definitely has plumbing because a café is located at the viewing deck level. The next work by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson is a collaboration between him and the architect for a concert hall in Iceland. Elisasson’s contribution is the building façade, where he designed a series of multifaceted glass bricks that resulted in a kaleidoscopic play of color and light. Thomas Heatherwick, a British artist trained in sculpture and furniture design has become a renowned designer whose most famous work is the UK Pavilion for the 2010 Shanghai Expo.
And in Chicago, where I currently live and work, the Crown Fountain by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa is a highly successful public art and a destination for families and tourists alike in downtown Chicago during summer. It consists of 2 rectangular glass blocks that display the faces of Chicagoans set opposite each other in a shallow pool. At random moments, a sprout of water is ejected from the lips and onto the pool. In summer, you find groups of children standing below the lips in anticipation of the water. On the other hand, the working method of the 2012 Pritzker Prize winner for architecture Wang Shu as described in the New York Times was not unlike that of an artist,
Mr. Wang says he approaches design as a traditional Chinese painter would; he studies the settings — whether cities, valleys or mountains — for about a week as the design materializes in his mind.
The plan for the Ningbo Historic Museum, for example, came to him one night when he could not sleep, he said. He got out of bed and started drawing in pencil: the structure, space sizes, entrance locations and other aspects.
“Then,” he said, “I drank tea”.[2]
Similarly, American architect Steven Holl prefers to use watercolor as his media to convey the experiential aspects of architecture because:
“With the watercolor, in the quickest way, I could shape a volume, cast a shadow, indicate the direction of the sun in a very small format,” he says.”[3]
If you did not know he’s an architect, you would have thought an artist made this statement. Last but not least, the works of Dunne and Raby, who teach at the Royal College of Art in the U.K. straddle between the art and design, where design is used as a medium to
“Provoke and stimulate discussions on the social, cultural and ethical implications on existing and emerging technologies.”[4]
Here is a project, which they imagined a group of urban foragers who maximized the nutritional value of limited food supply through the process of synthetic biology and the design of hybrid objects and clothing that helped them to source and consume food. The examples I shared with you are a cross section of artists and architects who took on an expanded role- by working in a manner that crossed traditional disciplinary boundaries, practices and media. A work of art can also challenge what the public perceived as ‘good art’. In 1981, Richard’s Serra’s public sculpture was removed from the Federal Plaza in New York City after 8 years. The reasons for the removal were,
“The sculpture interferes with public use of the plaza. They also accuse it of attracting graffiti, rats, and terrorists who might use it as a blasting wall for bombs.”[5]
I’m sure many of us are also aware of the controversy that Marcel Duchamp created when he exhibited a signed urinal and called it ‘Fountain’ in 1917. And how Ai Weiwei became a target of the Chinese government because of the strong political and social messages in his art. Closer to home, an reenactment of the performance art piece titled Brother Cane by Loo Zhihan, a Singaporean artist and an alumnus of our School in 2012, re-opened the controversy that surrounded the piece when it was first performed in 1993. Given the almost unlimited spectrum of artistic expressions, from the celebratory to the controversial, how can the field be relevant and an inspiration for me as an architect and a professor of architecture? Moreover, as Gordon Matta Clark reminded us, there is also a practical side to architecture and design, which cannot be ignored. Despite the statement by him, let’s take a look at one of his works as I explore what constitutes the artfulness of design. I cannot help but feel a sense of raw beauty that is revealed from his cutting away of a disused building. He took an abandoned Hudson pier warehouse and cut several large holes in the wall and floor, which opened the interior to the changing conditions of natural light, and views of the sky and water. Gordon Matta Clark went to architecture school but rejected the education he received. He took particular issue with how our experience of the world tends to be limited to the measurable or the quantifiable, which architecture education perpetuates and buildings symbolize. By cutting up the buildings, he was liberating and opening up an expanded dimension of the architectural experience. His concern is especially relevant in our extensive use of cell phones and other digital devices, where our relationship to one another is reduced to an interface rather than face to face. Moreover, the large number of air-conditioned interior spaces in Singapore such as shopping malls to keep out the heat and humidity has created an artificial bubble that cuts us off from the outside.
We are becoming less and less engaged with one another and the environment around us.
The immediacy and power of an art experience is one that re-engages us with the world. It amplifies and elevates everyday life. Art becomes an intensification of reality. Whether it is as simple as staring into the face of artist Marina Abramovic in her recent performance at the MOMA or to witness the gradual condensation of water on the surface of a transparent cube by Hans Haccke, everyday reality is presented differently and opens up new ways of seeing the world. As a teacher, to be engaged means creating the opportunity for my architecture and design students to observe with keen attention on the built environment, to be focused and be acutely aware of their bodies, their senses and the world around them. The artfulness of design begins with being engaged.
In this class my students were asked to convey an emotional dimension of spaces through a variety of media. The assignment was to design a space that would support a dialogue between the work of a writer and an artist. Here, a first year graduate student in architecture took a series of photographs of buildings with boarded up windows. For her, the windows were akin to being silenced, a denial of the ability to speak. The windows were no longer just architectural elements but took on a metaphorical dimension through her reading of them. In this assignment, they had to create multiple interpretations of a natural phenomenon such as the ‘weight of light and shadows’. A student created several small scale installations that expressed her interpretations on this statement, such as a line of light penetrating into the dark interior that conveyed a sense of weight or an over-lit space with the same ray of light that evoked the opposite- a sense of lightness. And manipulating the scale of an opening in conjunction with appropriate wall textures in a large interior space to convey a sense of vulnerability. Doors, walls and ceilings were no longer inert architectural elements. They were given human qualities, which the students subsequently configured them into a meaningful sequence of spatial experiences in their designs.
The artfulness of design can be achieved through play.
Play is highly under valued in modern societies. As we get older, we tend to view play as a childish activity, something that is unproductive, a waste of time and sometimes a nuisance as well. Play for me, has a degree of openness that I am drawn towards. But it is not a random activity. Play has both spoken and unspoken rules. The rules can be pre-determined, invented or improvised. To play is to be creative. Anyone, regardless of whether one is rich or poor, can play. Play recovers a sense of wonder and naivety, which we lost as we become conditioned by formal education and other pre-occupations. As Picasso once said,
“All children are artists.”[6]
In this slide, you see my daughter creating graffiti art on a street marking. Not to worry, this was not in Singapore but Chicago. And you see her fascination with the rainbow effect when light passed through the windows of our apartment- simple, everyday phenomenon, which for most of us grown-ups would have overlooked or ignored. The sense of playfulness is seen in this work titled “3 standard stoppages”. Duchamp casually dropped 3 strings that were 1 m long from a height of 1 m. The resultant forms of the line became new expressions of what 1 m meant and looked like. It also questioned our conception and the meaning of 1 m. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, on the other hand transformed a ping-pong table for 4 players with a small pond in the middle. He enlarged the tiny, narrow space of the net separating 2 halves of the table, which he called the in-between space with a pond. Besides making visible what we take for granted of this in-between space, his work challenged how we play the game of ping-pong through the invention of new rules.
Play therefore is highly valued in our design curriculum.
I developed this new course called Design Matters that exposed new students to the process of shaping ideas through the play and exploration with materials, regardless of whether they chose to study architecture, interiors or object design. It is like a common foundation program for all design students. We ensured that all new design students were exposed to play as a creative process in generating new ideas, even if the design challenge, in this assignment was to create a place to sleep in the studio. Jim Termeer, a colleague asked his students to design a place to take a short nap in the studio. The students made several full size mock-ups and tested their designs in different parts of the studio. This particular student very ingeniously borrowed the table to tie a series of fabric to suspend his body. The fact that the ‘bed’ was below eye level also gave the sleeper a degree of privacy. It echoed how as a child we loved to hide from our parents in a small private and safe world to play with or whispered secrets between friends.
In another assignment from the same course, the students had their class at the beach and were asked to make sand castles using a lathe, which they designed. The project was the conceptualized by my colleague Tim Parsons. Here you see a series of projects by students, which interpreted different ways of playing with the lathe. The notion of play was also very important for one of my graduate students in the Master of Fine Arts program. Yilin was interested in what he called the play element in art and design. For him, play was the bridge between art and design. It was also the bridge between an adult and a child. In this project, called the Big Shower Fountain, he designed a piece of public art, which was the fountain but introduced a huge shower facility below that Chicagoans and visitors alike could take a bath or just lie on the floor to see the fountain above. One would question- this is art or design? I believe it is both. In another project, the folks at the Chicago Chinatown wished to install a public sculpture to commemorate the 100 anniversary of the neighborhood. Yilin’s proposal, called the Trampoline Drum was selected as the winning entry. Unlike traditional sculpture where one only looked at it and came with a ‘do not touch’ sign, his public sculpture encouraged people to participate by using the drum as a trampoline. There was also a smaller one, which one could use as an actual drum. Again, is this a designed object or a work of art since it served a practical purpose? In another public art/design project, Yilin was fascinated by how trees in China could take on multiple roles. In this design, he encouraged the residents to play and dance with the trees rather than just using them as exercise partners.
Whether it is the exquisite installations of Eliasson or Plensa, the attention to craft and the care of making are two qualities that characterize the artfulness of design. In a world where we are bombarded by cheap, disposable and poorly designed and made objects, the notion of care in how an object or a work of art is made cannot be more vital. Making something that one actually wants to keep is a challenge for many designers now. Our architecture and design students do not only visualize their ideas on paper and screen but are strongly encouraged to fabricate them and install the work in space.
Here, you see a graduate design student who fabricated a set of equipments that allowed one to recycle household garbage into biofuel. This slide shows another project, which was a collaboration between an Art and Technology student and an architecture student. They designed a set of motion sensing light fixtures attached to a truss structure that allowed you to control the fixtures by the wave of your hand. Another student from the same class wrote an IPhone app that helped you to monitor your energy usage in the home. These students took a class with 3 of my colleagues, Anders Nereim, Carl Ray Miller and John Manning that focused on developing tools and ideas for a 2000-watt energy lifestyle.
On the other hand, one of my graduate MFA design students made this elaborate installation by meticulously sewing pieces of fabric and steel wires into a web of intricate spaces, which for him marked the beginning of architecture. Whether it is an installation that imagines a poetic architectural beginning or a device to transform household wastes into fuel, the students are engaged in crafting their projects with great thoughtfulness and care. Here’s a video clip of one of our graduate student in architecture, Phil Granke describing his transformable bench with LED lighting.
As you have seen, the media that an artists uses in his or her work nowadays is not much different from that of a designer. The convergence of media is another area where the artfulness of design is evident. As shown in my earlier slides, the use of digital and advanced technologies in shaping and projecting a work of art in a public space have become more common and acceptable as we ourselves are embedded into the digital and social networks. As an architect, we use digital tools to visualize and communicate ideas. So much so that many of our students rely heavily on them during their design process. It is not uncommon to find them seating at their desks and working in front of their laptops all the time. Instead of pushing further along this direction, I took a page from my Performance Art colleagues in getting the students to communicate their ideas through their body gestures and actions. Coincidently, my most memorable encounter with the work of a Singaporean artist was in the 1990s, when I saw Le Wen performed his piece called Journey of a Yellow Man no. 3 at the Substation.
In this community-based project in Beppu, Japan led by my colleague Hennie Reynders, Japanese architect Kenta Kishi and myself, students were encouraged not to put their ideas on paper but act out the different possibilities of using recycled beer crates to support a variety of everyday activities. They tested their ideas at the actual site by performing their roles as gracious hosts in a temporary community garden. Similarly, instead of making large architectural drawings and producing endless charts that could be confusing to ordinary folks, we encouraged 2 of our students to create a comic book that highlighted the social and economic challenges of the city and their ideas for change.
The artfulness of design includes the power of empathy. This may sound a bit surprising for those of us who are familiar with the ‘art market’, where the artist is promoted to the status of a superstar while art is reduced to a commodity to be sold in art fairs. What has empathy got to do with great art or design? As artists position their works towards greater social responsibility, the role of the subversive imagination, a term used by a dear friend of mine, Dean Carol Becker from the School of the Arts at Columbia University, becomes a critical tool for the artist to deploy in making socially oriented art.
My colleague Tirtza Even’s art project to highlight the plight of youths who were incarcerated without parole in US prisons was one such form of art practice that rejected the narrow confines of the commodified art market and instead searched for a deeper and more meaningful engagement between art and society. Called Natural Lives, her video work highlighted the problems of the juvenile justice system in the US by showcasing youths who were sentenced to die in prison without any hope of being released. Tirtza is a video artist and this ‘art work’ aims to:
“Transgress and complicate the tension between fabrication and record, guilt and innocence, accident and intent, as well as the gap between 3D animation and documentary video, acting and manifesting, projected and recalled worlds.”[7]
Tirtza’s class at SAIC exposed future artists and designers to a group of individuals very different from their backgrounds and histories. Students listened, empathized and reenacted the lives of the juvenile inmates based on the documented stories. They were energized and worked with a deep sense of purpose because they were giving voices to these invisible individuals and broadcasting their stories to the world beyond. For many, this was a life-changing moment.
To quote artist Gabriel Orozco again,
The process of living and the process of thinking and perceiving the world happen in everyday life. I’ve found that sometimes the art studio is an isolated place, an artificial place like a bubble – a bubble in which the artist is by himself, thinking about himself. It becomes too grand a space. What happens when you don’t have an art studio is that you have to be confronted with reality all the time.[8]
Like architects and designers, artists such as Tirtza Evens are expanding their roles in society. You would have noticed that Tirtza did not follow the usual route of raising money for her project through an art patron or a gallery. Instead, she went to Kickstarter, a social platform for artists and designers to raise money through the process of crowd funding. She is therefore highly entrepreneurial and is a new breed of artist who sources for alternative funding for her socially oriented art practice. Architects and designers usually depend on a client for the commission of a work. However, with websites like Kickstarter, a designer can put up a proposal online and persuade the general public from around the world to help finance the project. This year, Kickstarter funded more creative projects than the National Endowment of the Arts in the US.[9] The artfulness of design calls for one to be resourceful and seek out opportunities to support one’s work.
However, empathy cannot be cultivated in a hermetic design studio located on the top floor of a building such as ours, as much as I love the architecture of Louis Sullivan. In the same community project in Beppu, Japan I mentioned earlier, we worked in an abandoned street level shop situated in an old shopping arcade. Because of our proximity to the daily lives of the residents, we became part of the community. Residents walked in, talked to my students and inquired what they were doing. My students listened to their stories of growing up in the city, since many of the elderly residents have lived in Beppu all their lives. We organized small workshops that helped the local residents to visualize and imagine what their city could become. Working more like artists and anthropologists, we posed elliptical questions to the participants- such as “What is the sound of Beppu or How do you share the stories of Beppu? In addition to our home base in the old shopping arcade, we conducted street talks with the local residents, visited their homes, a local church and several not for profit community organizations.
Here you see 4 students from Japan, Korea and Indonesia who conceptualized a project that aimed to solicit ideas from local residents for the revitalization of their city. The project was called Beppu Tane, which meant Beppu Seed in Japanese. The project was conceived in 2-parts. First, the students created a series of small seed pockets that contained a cookie and a simple message that explained the project’s objectives. They visited homes of the residents and the elderly, as well as an elementary school to get the residents of all ages curious about the project. The students took a picture of each resident they met and spoke to. Their photos were printed onto a T-Shirt and displayed in the studio. Hung from each T-shirt was also a suggestion for revitalizing their city or a quote expressing a positive aspect of Beppu. Through time, the design studio became a kind of small community center for the local residents. There was even a competition among the residents as they tried to get as many of their friends to participate in the project. On the last day, the team presented a number of design ideas drawn from the students’ understanding of the city, suggestions from local residents and results from the various workshops.
We were heartened to hear from Junko Abe, one of the team members of Beppu Project, who said,
In the beginning, we had no idea what students were doing but little by little with curiosity and dialogue, we built up the relationship and awareness. In Japanese we say DEZAIN. We do not have a Japanese word for design. Some people think design is for only young generation's latest fashion. Some people think it is only work on a computer; something you have to renew all the time and have to deny the past in order to sell something to make money. In other words, design that is based on a business or for marketing purpose. If you don't belong to any design industry, you probably will never think about design. Now we have a little movement in the design field in Japan. DEZAIN started to have its own word 「意匠」. It means "the maestro who delivers, moderate, modify and facilitate.... the consciousness, such as the consciousness of human-being, the consciousness of the society, the consciousness of nature...the consciousness of the history...the consciousness of community. I feel the 21st Century is not only about seeking an individual’s or one nation's benefit through the design, nor to compete in the vast scale of building such as super high skyscrapers...Instead, we need to seek an international, global consciousness to create a better future. [10]
In conclusion, I like to share a quote from Toronto Poet Laureate Pier Giorgo Di Cicco, who wrote in his book, Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City,
A city is not happy owing just to prosperity or economic opportunity. It is happy in the hope and business of human and meaningful things in all spheres of endeavor. Art is about highlighting every sphere of endeavor, until the ‘artistic’ is seen as a way of life, not just something formalized on the page, on the screen, on the stage. A vibrant urban art teaches the art of life.”[11]
The artfulness of design goes beyond the narrow confines of beauty and artistic expression one commonly associates with art. I hope in this presentation, I have shared with you how the artfulness of design forms a bridge between art and design, opens up new forms of art and design practices, as well as a source of inspiration for me in the shaping of a unique, interdisciplinary architecture and design pedagogy.
Thank You.
[1] Attlee, James. (2007). Towards Architecture: Gordon Matta Clark and Le Corbusier. Tate Online Research Journal. Retrieved from http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/search?page=2&f[0]=year%3A2007
[2] Pogrebin, Robin. (2012, February 27). For First Time, Architect in China Wins Top Prize. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/arts/design/pritzker-prize-awarded-to-wang-shu-chinese-architect.html
[3] Zack, Stephen. (2008, November 19). The Painted Building. Retrieved from http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20081119/the-painted-building
[4] Dunne, Anthony and Raby, Fiona. (2009). Dunne and Raby. Retrieved from http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/biography
[5] Richard Sera’s Tilted Arc. (1991). PBS: Culture Shock. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/visualarts/tiltedarct.html
[6] Pablo Picasso: Paintings, quotes and biography. (2009). Retrieved http://www.pablopicasso.org/quotes.jsp
[7] Even, Tirtza. (2012). Natural Life. Kickstarter. Retrieved from http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1031057648/natural-life
[8] Varichon, Mona. (2011, Dec 29). Gabriel Orozco. An Ocean in the City. Retrieved from
http://anoceaninthecity.tumblr.com/post/14991089204/gabrielorozco
[9] Eler, Alicia (March 28, 2012). “Why Kickstarter Outfunding the NEA Isn’t a Good Thing in ReadWriteWeb. Retrieved from http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_kickstarter_outfunding_the_nea_isnt_a_good_thi.php
[10] From an interview with Thomas Kong.
[11] Di Cicco, Pier Giorgo. (2007). Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City. Toronto: Mansfield Press.
The education of a designer is centered on the acquisition of skills and knowledge that supports the creation of practical objects across different scales and levels of complexity. Whether one becomes an architect or a product designer, the general perception is the design process will result in an object, to quote Bruce Archer that is ‘useful, productive, intentional, integrative, inventive and expedient’1. Design education in an art school therefore occupies an intriguing position. Many of the aforementioned values implicit in a designed object run in contradiction to a work of art, which is often perceived to be useless, unproductive, intuitive, ambiguous, at times disturbing and may not even be physical at all. In practice, the designer deals with a client while the artist has an audience. Both are taught and work in a studio environment, use resources and media of increasing convergences, and imagine a reality that may not have existed before. The presentation will draw from a rich collection of examples to advance an interdisciplinary design pedagogy and practice inspired by the arts. It will reveal new horizons and fresh opportunities for the education and practice of a designer aligned at the intersection of art and design.
1. Archer, Bruce. (2007). The Nature of Research into Design and Design Education. UK: Loughborough University. Retrieved from http://idater.lboro.ac.uk/the-nature-of-research-into-design-and-design-education/
I like to thank Principal Rebecca Chew of SOTA, Mr. Goh Yew Lin, Board Director of Temasek Education Foundation and the organizing committee for the invitation to speak in this year’s Arts Education Forum. It is an honor for me to be here today. Having been away for many years, this occasion is also a homecoming for me. I will begin by sharing with you a quotation from the late Gordon Matta Clark, an American artist who once said,
“One of my favorite definitions of the difference between architecture and sculpture is whether there is plumbing or not.”[1]
As an architect teaching architecture and interior architecture in an art school, I find his statement amusing and enlightening. It raises a fundamental issue surrounding the difference between the art and design fields, and how we tend to make distinctions by creating walls to demarcate boundaries. In this presentation, I hope to offer an interdisciplinary approach in the teaching of architecture and design in my department that draws inspiration from the arts.
By the way, although this is not plumbing in the purest sense of the word, an artist in Germany made a fascinating installation on a building that channeled rain water through a series of pipes, bowls and funnels to create a musical experience when it rained. This work by Anish Kapoor in London definitely has plumbing because a café is located at the viewing deck level. The next work by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson is a collaboration between him and the architect for a concert hall in Iceland. Elisasson’s contribution is the building façade, where he designed a series of multifaceted glass bricks that resulted in a kaleidoscopic play of color and light. Thomas Heatherwick, a British artist trained in sculpture and furniture design has become a renowned designer whose most famous work is the UK Pavilion for the 2010 Shanghai Expo.
And in Chicago, where I currently live and work, the Crown Fountain by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa is a highly successful public art and a destination for families and tourists alike in downtown Chicago during summer. It consists of 2 rectangular glass blocks that display the faces of Chicagoans set opposite each other in a shallow pool. At random moments, a sprout of water is ejected from the lips and onto the pool. In summer, you find groups of children standing below the lips in anticipation of the water. On the other hand, the working method of the 2012 Pritzker Prize winner for architecture Wang Shu as described in the New York Times was not unlike that of an artist,
Mr. Wang says he approaches design as a traditional Chinese painter would; he studies the settings — whether cities, valleys or mountains — for about a week as the design materializes in his mind.
The plan for the Ningbo Historic Museum, for example, came to him one night when he could not sleep, he said. He got out of bed and started drawing in pencil: the structure, space sizes, entrance locations and other aspects.
“Then,” he said, “I drank tea”.[2]
Similarly, American architect Steven Holl prefers to use watercolor as his media to convey the experiential aspects of architecture because:
“With the watercolor, in the quickest way, I could shape a volume, cast a shadow, indicate the direction of the sun in a very small format,” he says.”[3]
If you did not know he’s an architect, you would have thought an artist made this statement. Last but not least, the works of Dunne and Raby, who teach at the Royal College of Art in the U.K. straddle between the art and design, where design is used as a medium to
“Provoke and stimulate discussions on the social, cultural and ethical implications on existing and emerging technologies.”[4]
Here is a project, which they imagined a group of urban foragers who maximized the nutritional value of limited food supply through the process of synthetic biology and the design of hybrid objects and clothing that helped them to source and consume food. The examples I shared with you are a cross section of artists and architects who took on an expanded role- by working in a manner that crossed traditional disciplinary boundaries, practices and media. A work of art can also challenge what the public perceived as ‘good art’. In 1981, Richard’s Serra’s public sculpture was removed from the Federal Plaza in New York City after 8 years. The reasons for the removal were,
“The sculpture interferes with public use of the plaza. They also accuse it of attracting graffiti, rats, and terrorists who might use it as a blasting wall for bombs.”[5]
I’m sure many of us are also aware of the controversy that Marcel Duchamp created when he exhibited a signed urinal and called it ‘Fountain’ in 1917. And how Ai Weiwei became a target of the Chinese government because of the strong political and social messages in his art. Closer to home, an reenactment of the performance art piece titled Brother Cane by Loo Zhihan, a Singaporean artist and an alumnus of our School in 2012, re-opened the controversy that surrounded the piece when it was first performed in 1993. Given the almost unlimited spectrum of artistic expressions, from the celebratory to the controversial, how can the field be relevant and an inspiration for me as an architect and a professor of architecture? Moreover, as Gordon Matta Clark reminded us, there is also a practical side to architecture and design, which cannot be ignored. Despite the statement by him, let’s take a look at one of his works as I explore what constitutes the artfulness of design. I cannot help but feel a sense of raw beauty that is revealed from his cutting away of a disused building. He took an abandoned Hudson pier warehouse and cut several large holes in the wall and floor, which opened the interior to the changing conditions of natural light, and views of the sky and water. Gordon Matta Clark went to architecture school but rejected the education he received. He took particular issue with how our experience of the world tends to be limited to the measurable or the quantifiable, which architecture education perpetuates and buildings symbolize. By cutting up the buildings, he was liberating and opening up an expanded dimension of the architectural experience. His concern is especially relevant in our extensive use of cell phones and other digital devices, where our relationship to one another is reduced to an interface rather than face to face. Moreover, the large number of air-conditioned interior spaces in Singapore such as shopping malls to keep out the heat and humidity has created an artificial bubble that cuts us off from the outside.
We are becoming less and less engaged with one another and the environment around us.
The immediacy and power of an art experience is one that re-engages us with the world. It amplifies and elevates everyday life. Art becomes an intensification of reality. Whether it is as simple as staring into the face of artist Marina Abramovic in her recent performance at the MOMA or to witness the gradual condensation of water on the surface of a transparent cube by Hans Haccke, everyday reality is presented differently and opens up new ways of seeing the world. As a teacher, to be engaged means creating the opportunity for my architecture and design students to observe with keen attention on the built environment, to be focused and be acutely aware of their bodies, their senses and the world around them. The artfulness of design begins with being engaged.
In this class my students were asked to convey an emotional dimension of spaces through a variety of media. The assignment was to design a space that would support a dialogue between the work of a writer and an artist. Here, a first year graduate student in architecture took a series of photographs of buildings with boarded up windows. For her, the windows were akin to being silenced, a denial of the ability to speak. The windows were no longer just architectural elements but took on a metaphorical dimension through her reading of them. In this assignment, they had to create multiple interpretations of a natural phenomenon such as the ‘weight of light and shadows’. A student created several small scale installations that expressed her interpretations on this statement, such as a line of light penetrating into the dark interior that conveyed a sense of weight or an over-lit space with the same ray of light that evoked the opposite- a sense of lightness. And manipulating the scale of an opening in conjunction with appropriate wall textures in a large interior space to convey a sense of vulnerability. Doors, walls and ceilings were no longer inert architectural elements. They were given human qualities, which the students subsequently configured them into a meaningful sequence of spatial experiences in their designs.
The artfulness of design can be achieved through play.
Play is highly under valued in modern societies. As we get older, we tend to view play as a childish activity, something that is unproductive, a waste of time and sometimes a nuisance as well. Play for me, has a degree of openness that I am drawn towards. But it is not a random activity. Play has both spoken and unspoken rules. The rules can be pre-determined, invented or improvised. To play is to be creative. Anyone, regardless of whether one is rich or poor, can play. Play recovers a sense of wonder and naivety, which we lost as we become conditioned by formal education and other pre-occupations. As Picasso once said,
“All children are artists.”[6]
In this slide, you see my daughter creating graffiti art on a street marking. Not to worry, this was not in Singapore but Chicago. And you see her fascination with the rainbow effect when light passed through the windows of our apartment- simple, everyday phenomenon, which for most of us grown-ups would have overlooked or ignored. The sense of playfulness is seen in this work titled “3 standard stoppages”. Duchamp casually dropped 3 strings that were 1 m long from a height of 1 m. The resultant forms of the line became new expressions of what 1 m meant and looked like. It also questioned our conception and the meaning of 1 m. Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, on the other hand transformed a ping-pong table for 4 players with a small pond in the middle. He enlarged the tiny, narrow space of the net separating 2 halves of the table, which he called the in-between space with a pond. Besides making visible what we take for granted of this in-between space, his work challenged how we play the game of ping-pong through the invention of new rules.
Play therefore is highly valued in our design curriculum.
I developed this new course called Design Matters that exposed new students to the process of shaping ideas through the play and exploration with materials, regardless of whether they chose to study architecture, interiors or object design. It is like a common foundation program for all design students. We ensured that all new design students were exposed to play as a creative process in generating new ideas, even if the design challenge, in this assignment was to create a place to sleep in the studio. Jim Termeer, a colleague asked his students to design a place to take a short nap in the studio. The students made several full size mock-ups and tested their designs in different parts of the studio. This particular student very ingeniously borrowed the table to tie a series of fabric to suspend his body. The fact that the ‘bed’ was below eye level also gave the sleeper a degree of privacy. It echoed how as a child we loved to hide from our parents in a small private and safe world to play with or whispered secrets between friends.
In another assignment from the same course, the students had their class at the beach and were asked to make sand castles using a lathe, which they designed. The project was the conceptualized by my colleague Tim Parsons. Here you see a series of projects by students, which interpreted different ways of playing with the lathe. The notion of play was also very important for one of my graduate students in the Master of Fine Arts program. Yilin was interested in what he called the play element in art and design. For him, play was the bridge between art and design. It was also the bridge between an adult and a child. In this project, called the Big Shower Fountain, he designed a piece of public art, which was the fountain but introduced a huge shower facility below that Chicagoans and visitors alike could take a bath or just lie on the floor to see the fountain above. One would question- this is art or design? I believe it is both. In another project, the folks at the Chicago Chinatown wished to install a public sculpture to commemorate the 100 anniversary of the neighborhood. Yilin’s proposal, called the Trampoline Drum was selected as the winning entry. Unlike traditional sculpture where one only looked at it and came with a ‘do not touch’ sign, his public sculpture encouraged people to participate by using the drum as a trampoline. There was also a smaller one, which one could use as an actual drum. Again, is this a designed object or a work of art since it served a practical purpose? In another public art/design project, Yilin was fascinated by how trees in China could take on multiple roles. In this design, he encouraged the residents to play and dance with the trees rather than just using them as exercise partners.
Whether it is the exquisite installations of Eliasson or Plensa, the attention to craft and the care of making are two qualities that characterize the artfulness of design. In a world where we are bombarded by cheap, disposable and poorly designed and made objects, the notion of care in how an object or a work of art is made cannot be more vital. Making something that one actually wants to keep is a challenge for many designers now. Our architecture and design students do not only visualize their ideas on paper and screen but are strongly encouraged to fabricate them and install the work in space.
Here, you see a graduate design student who fabricated a set of equipments that allowed one to recycle household garbage into biofuel. This slide shows another project, which was a collaboration between an Art and Technology student and an architecture student. They designed a set of motion sensing light fixtures attached to a truss structure that allowed you to control the fixtures by the wave of your hand. Another student from the same class wrote an IPhone app that helped you to monitor your energy usage in the home. These students took a class with 3 of my colleagues, Anders Nereim, Carl Ray Miller and John Manning that focused on developing tools and ideas for a 2000-watt energy lifestyle.
On the other hand, one of my graduate MFA design students made this elaborate installation by meticulously sewing pieces of fabric and steel wires into a web of intricate spaces, which for him marked the beginning of architecture. Whether it is an installation that imagines a poetic architectural beginning or a device to transform household wastes into fuel, the students are engaged in crafting their projects with great thoughtfulness and care. Here’s a video clip of one of our graduate student in architecture, Phil Granke describing his transformable bench with LED lighting.
As you have seen, the media that an artists uses in his or her work nowadays is not much different from that of a designer. The convergence of media is another area where the artfulness of design is evident. As shown in my earlier slides, the use of digital and advanced technologies in shaping and projecting a work of art in a public space have become more common and acceptable as we ourselves are embedded into the digital and social networks. As an architect, we use digital tools to visualize and communicate ideas. So much so that many of our students rely heavily on them during their design process. It is not uncommon to find them seating at their desks and working in front of their laptops all the time. Instead of pushing further along this direction, I took a page from my Performance Art colleagues in getting the students to communicate their ideas through their body gestures and actions. Coincidently, my most memorable encounter with the work of a Singaporean artist was in the 1990s, when I saw Le Wen performed his piece called Journey of a Yellow Man no. 3 at the Substation.
In this community-based project in Beppu, Japan led by my colleague Hennie Reynders, Japanese architect Kenta Kishi and myself, students were encouraged not to put their ideas on paper but act out the different possibilities of using recycled beer crates to support a variety of everyday activities. They tested their ideas at the actual site by performing their roles as gracious hosts in a temporary community garden. Similarly, instead of making large architectural drawings and producing endless charts that could be confusing to ordinary folks, we encouraged 2 of our students to create a comic book that highlighted the social and economic challenges of the city and their ideas for change.
The artfulness of design includes the power of empathy. This may sound a bit surprising for those of us who are familiar with the ‘art market’, where the artist is promoted to the status of a superstar while art is reduced to a commodity to be sold in art fairs. What has empathy got to do with great art or design? As artists position their works towards greater social responsibility, the role of the subversive imagination, a term used by a dear friend of mine, Dean Carol Becker from the School of the Arts at Columbia University, becomes a critical tool for the artist to deploy in making socially oriented art.
My colleague Tirtza Even’s art project to highlight the plight of youths who were incarcerated without parole in US prisons was one such form of art practice that rejected the narrow confines of the commodified art market and instead searched for a deeper and more meaningful engagement between art and society. Called Natural Lives, her video work highlighted the problems of the juvenile justice system in the US by showcasing youths who were sentenced to die in prison without any hope of being released. Tirtza is a video artist and this ‘art work’ aims to:
“Transgress and complicate the tension between fabrication and record, guilt and innocence, accident and intent, as well as the gap between 3D animation and documentary video, acting and manifesting, projected and recalled worlds.”[7]
Tirtza’s class at SAIC exposed future artists and designers to a group of individuals very different from their backgrounds and histories. Students listened, empathized and reenacted the lives of the juvenile inmates based on the documented stories. They were energized and worked with a deep sense of purpose because they were giving voices to these invisible individuals and broadcasting their stories to the world beyond. For many, this was a life-changing moment.
To quote artist Gabriel Orozco again,
The process of living and the process of thinking and perceiving the world happen in everyday life. I’ve found that sometimes the art studio is an isolated place, an artificial place like a bubble – a bubble in which the artist is by himself, thinking about himself. It becomes too grand a space. What happens when you don’t have an art studio is that you have to be confronted with reality all the time.[8]
Like architects and designers, artists such as Tirtza Evens are expanding their roles in society. You would have noticed that Tirtza did not follow the usual route of raising money for her project through an art patron or a gallery. Instead, she went to Kickstarter, a social platform for artists and designers to raise money through the process of crowd funding. She is therefore highly entrepreneurial and is a new breed of artist who sources for alternative funding for her socially oriented art practice. Architects and designers usually depend on a client for the commission of a work. However, with websites like Kickstarter, a designer can put up a proposal online and persuade the general public from around the world to help finance the project. This year, Kickstarter funded more creative projects than the National Endowment of the Arts in the US.[9] The artfulness of design calls for one to be resourceful and seek out opportunities to support one’s work.
However, empathy cannot be cultivated in a hermetic design studio located on the top floor of a building such as ours, as much as I love the architecture of Louis Sullivan. In the same community project in Beppu, Japan I mentioned earlier, we worked in an abandoned street level shop situated in an old shopping arcade. Because of our proximity to the daily lives of the residents, we became part of the community. Residents walked in, talked to my students and inquired what they were doing. My students listened to their stories of growing up in the city, since many of the elderly residents have lived in Beppu all their lives. We organized small workshops that helped the local residents to visualize and imagine what their city could become. Working more like artists and anthropologists, we posed elliptical questions to the participants- such as “What is the sound of Beppu or How do you share the stories of Beppu? In addition to our home base in the old shopping arcade, we conducted street talks with the local residents, visited their homes, a local church and several not for profit community organizations.
Here you see 4 students from Japan, Korea and Indonesia who conceptualized a project that aimed to solicit ideas from local residents for the revitalization of their city. The project was called Beppu Tane, which meant Beppu Seed in Japanese. The project was conceived in 2-parts. First, the students created a series of small seed pockets that contained a cookie and a simple message that explained the project’s objectives. They visited homes of the residents and the elderly, as well as an elementary school to get the residents of all ages curious about the project. The students took a picture of each resident they met and spoke to. Their photos were printed onto a T-Shirt and displayed in the studio. Hung from each T-shirt was also a suggestion for revitalizing their city or a quote expressing a positive aspect of Beppu. Through time, the design studio became a kind of small community center for the local residents. There was even a competition among the residents as they tried to get as many of their friends to participate in the project. On the last day, the team presented a number of design ideas drawn from the students’ understanding of the city, suggestions from local residents and results from the various workshops.
We were heartened to hear from Junko Abe, one of the team members of Beppu Project, who said,
In the beginning, we had no idea what students were doing but little by little with curiosity and dialogue, we built up the relationship and awareness. In Japanese we say DEZAIN. We do not have a Japanese word for design. Some people think design is for only young generation's latest fashion. Some people think it is only work on a computer; something you have to renew all the time and have to deny the past in order to sell something to make money. In other words, design that is based on a business or for marketing purpose. If you don't belong to any design industry, you probably will never think about design. Now we have a little movement in the design field in Japan. DEZAIN started to have its own word 「意匠」. It means "the maestro who delivers, moderate, modify and facilitate.... the consciousness, such as the consciousness of human-being, the consciousness of the society, the consciousness of nature...the consciousness of the history...the consciousness of community. I feel the 21st Century is not only about seeking an individual’s or one nation's benefit through the design, nor to compete in the vast scale of building such as super high skyscrapers...Instead, we need to seek an international, global consciousness to create a better future. [10]
In conclusion, I like to share a quote from Toronto Poet Laureate Pier Giorgo Di Cicco, who wrote in his book, Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City,
A city is not happy owing just to prosperity or economic opportunity. It is happy in the hope and business of human and meaningful things in all spheres of endeavor. Art is about highlighting every sphere of endeavor, until the ‘artistic’ is seen as a way of life, not just something formalized on the page, on the screen, on the stage. A vibrant urban art teaches the art of life.”[11]
The artfulness of design goes beyond the narrow confines of beauty and artistic expression one commonly associates with art. I hope in this presentation, I have shared with you how the artfulness of design forms a bridge between art and design, opens up new forms of art and design practices, as well as a source of inspiration for me in the shaping of a unique, interdisciplinary architecture and design pedagogy.
Thank You.
[1] Attlee, James. (2007). Towards Architecture: Gordon Matta Clark and Le Corbusier. Tate Online Research Journal. Retrieved from http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/search?page=2&f[0]=year%3A2007
[2] Pogrebin, Robin. (2012, February 27). For First Time, Architect in China Wins Top Prize. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/arts/design/pritzker-prize-awarded-to-wang-shu-chinese-architect.html
[3] Zack, Stephen. (2008, November 19). The Painted Building. Retrieved from http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20081119/the-painted-building
[4] Dunne, Anthony and Raby, Fiona. (2009). Dunne and Raby. Retrieved from http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/biography
[5] Richard Sera’s Tilted Arc. (1991). PBS: Culture Shock. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/visualarts/tiltedarct.html
[6] Pablo Picasso: Paintings, quotes and biography. (2009). Retrieved http://www.pablopicasso.org/quotes.jsp
[7] Even, Tirtza. (2012). Natural Life. Kickstarter. Retrieved from http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1031057648/natural-life
[8] Varichon, Mona. (2011, Dec 29). Gabriel Orozco. An Ocean in the City. Retrieved from
http://anoceaninthecity.tumblr.com/post/14991089204/gabrielorozco
[9] Eler, Alicia (March 28, 2012). “Why Kickstarter Outfunding the NEA Isn’t a Good Thing in ReadWriteWeb. Retrieved from http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_kickstarter_outfunding_the_nea_isnt_a_good_thi.php
[10] From an interview with Thomas Kong.
[11] Di Cicco, Pier Giorgo. (2007). Municipal Mind: Manifestos for the Creative City. Toronto: Mansfield Press.