Design should in the end become invisible, it should become unconscious, forgotten. A chair that constantly reminding you of its presence is a chair that has a functional disorder. A building that makes the inhabitants curse of the architect on a dialy basis (I am living in one) is like the houses in one of Ballard‘s short stories The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista. I am living with someone I was not intended to have around me at all: the annoying presence of another architect. The difficulty here is that designers, architects are trained to be highly self-conscious and more often than not, they (uhh…ok I mean we) complain about bad clients. Or better: clients who don’t seem to understand what the design is about. Jorge Louis Borges once said: “it is more difficult to find good readers than it is to find good writers.” To paraphrase Borges: most architects design the buildings they intent build with a perfect occupant in mind: ie a monk.

As Philip Johnson has made it clear to us students of architecture: beauty is subjective, what is beautiful to one is pretty ugly to someone else, de gustibus est disputandum. True words from someone who called architects high class whores. According to the ancient Greek, the world is divided into chaos or “that which has not taken form yet”, versus cosmos: “the world perceived as a beautiful well-balanced jewel”. As if god-the-architect had unrealised plans. This is what Alberti thought of this principal:

“Beauty is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse. It is a great and holy matter; all our resources of skill and ingenuity will be taxed in achieving it; and rarely is it granted, even to nature herself, to produce anything that is entirely complete and perfect in every respect.”

The Japanese architect Arata Isozaki had an original approach towards beauty in designing one of his first building’s: the Fukuoka bank building. As a young architect, he wanted to make sure that everyone perceived his building as ugly. Come to think of it, it is a rather clever approach of Isozaki using ugliness as a crutch and avoiding any misconceptions on the discussion of the building. This makes you wonder how ugly can a design become? The question obviously is as difficult as its opposite.

Here is Wikipedia’s view of Broch on Kitsch: “While art was creative, Broch held that kitsch depended solely on plundering creative art by adopting formulas that seek to imitate it, limiting itself to conventions and demanding a totalitarianism of those recognizable conventions. To him, kitsch was not the same as bad art; it formed a system of its own. He argued that kitsch involved trying to achieve “beauty” instead of “truth” and that any attempt to make something beautiful would lead to kitsch. “ The question obviously becomes who borrows what? What is original anyway? Plato said that we learn anything new, we just remember what we have forgotten. Isn’t a creative process just that: tapping into our unconscious mind, like we do at night when we dream, creating random images of which we somehow try to recreate some coherence that might work? Some of the work of many of the contemporary Dutch design such as Marcel Wanders and Moooi are trying to achieve: re-shaping the kitschy 70’s products and furniture we remember our grandmothers had (or still have) but in such a way that it fits in a temporary interior, a kind of post-post modernism. We all love kitsch now.

Sofa: Jufferbankje by Piet Hein Eek.