Unmaking Things
The Deconstructuralist
Debating Design Education II
Creativity, Curriculum, and the Economy
//This post is the second part of a continuing series on the Deconstructuralist that explores contemporary and historic debates surrounding design education.
Last week, Visual Communication students at the RCA organised an event entitled, ‘Our Future: Education and Creativity’ as part of their Red Tape series. The event was chaired by Teal Triggs, Professor of Graphic Design and Course Director in Design Writing Criticism at London College of Communication, and the speakers were Dr Paul Thompson, the Rector at the RCA, Bianca Elzenbaumer of Brave New Alps, who founded Department 21 (an interdisciplinary, student-led working space) when she was a student at the RCA, and Richard Gerver, educational speaker who was judged best head teacher in the UK in 2005.
Red Tape poster © Royal College of Art 2012
Rather than focusing on tuition fees (which no doubt would have occurred had the event been held a year ago), the debate quickly turned to the issue of curriculum and testing; not entirely surprising given both the choice of speakers, and the context of current moves to downgrade design and technology education in schools’ curriculum. (more…)
What does “access” mean? London 2012 and capitalism
The Olympic Park. Photo © Iggi Falcon 2012
RCA History of Design and Design Products students recently undertook a design project linked to the London 2012 Olympic site, and to introduce themselves to the site they toured it from a bus, keeping outside fenced-off perimeters around the space. In response, one of the groups explored this limited access, and designed an alternative Olympics, based on the site of the fence. Using historic games such as the Cotswold Olimpick Games as inspiration, they constructed a set of activities to be undertaken through, or alongside, the fence. This article draws its inspiration from that project’s approach to London’s 2012 Olympic Games, and will use the Olympic park as a site for exploring the spatial implications of capitalism, using this economic framing to consider the architectural/ structural constructions of access within the park. (more…)
Exhibition Road – Townscape in Practice?
"Shared Space" along Exhibition Road © Helen Kearney 2012
Exhibition Road, the site along which many Design Historians – being students at two institutions separated by this road – rush along, late for class, has recently been cleared of the mechanics of construction, various holes have been filled in, and bollards taken away.
It has been reopened, not only as a rebuilt road, but as a road with a publicity campaign. The official line is that the new road design constitutes “a world class streetscape – a stunning public space that can be enjoyed by all.”[1] It is not only a newly designed road and public space, but is also promoted as a venue of “shared space” between the car, the pedestrian, the cyclist, and potentially anything else that might try.
The road may represent a new understanding of urban design for “shared space”, but it also raises questions about how successful this new design may be – and, as an historian, it speaks strongly to me about the car/ pedestrian conundrum that has existed for the best part of the last century. The problem was the evident need for a city to have infrastructure ideally suited to the technological needs of the day, to accommodate the fast moving car on efficiently designed roads – but how to do this successfully whilst retaining the city as a pleasant place for the pedestrian to walk around, to experience? (more…)
The Truman Brewery
- The Truman Brewery © 2012 Helen Kearney
The Truman Brewery: Constructing Spaces of Nostalgia
// This article follows on from Marilyn Zapf’s discussion of the nostalgic idealisation of industry in the practice, and consumption of craft. The Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, London, is a starting point for exploring various uses of nostalgia as a design technique in architectural conservation practises.
The Brewery is a large site just to the east of the City of London, containing a number of huge, largely brick, buildings ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, including the brewery and old stables, warehouses, the Director’s house, and a number of offices. Whilst the site closed as a brewery in the 1980s and was part of the industrial decline in this period, it has now reopened as a massive space for shops, food, and arts venues. (more…)
The Jigsaw: History as a Puzzle
"Dissected Puzzle" 1788. © Helen Kearney 2011
This picture shows a “dissected puzzle” – a forerunner of the jigsaw, dated 1788 – one of the earliest extant examples of the jigsaw form. It is held in stores at the V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green and many similar puzzles and games from that period can be seen on display in the Museum.
The V&A lists the puzzle as ‘Chronological Tables of English History for the Instruction of Youth’ – but what type of “instruction” is provided? and, what kind of questions can this puzzle prompt about our understanding of history?
It is kept in a custom-made box, which has a list of the kings and queens of England, in order, on the reverse of the lid. When made up, the puzzle displays the monarchs of England, in chronological order, from William the Conqueror to George II. Each individual piece contains a small portrait of the monarch as well as a summary of their reign, a list of notable persons who lived at that time, and most interestingly, a note describing the character of each monarch. The descriptions are intriguing and often amusing – for the most part the kings and queens come off very badly indeed: most descriptions contrast the good and bad qualities of the monarch, with a definite focus on the bad. So, Henry VIII ‘was a fearless statesman, a tenacious disputant, and a cruel husband; fickle, vain, tyrannical and unfeeling’ whilst Charles I was ‘deficient in judgement, bigoted, forbidding and insincere’.
For a design historian, this puzzle can prompt a variety of questions into its production, consumption, social context, use over time, and how it came to be valued to the extent that it was deemed suitable for a V&A collection. However, in this post I aim to use the puzzle to reflect on the subject matter depicted on face of the puzzle: history. (more…)
Revisiting the Peachtree Plaza
Peachtree Plaza Interior; image©Marilyn Zapf
‘The city development of the last forty years, in capitalist and socialist countries alike, has systematically attacked, and often successfully obliterated, the “moving chaos” of nineteenth-century urban life. In the new urban environment—form Lefrak City to Century City, from Atlanta’s Peachtree Plaza to Detroit’s Renaissance Center—the old modern street, with its volatile mixture of people and traffic, business and homes, rich and poor, is sorted out and split up into separate compartments, with entrances and exits strictly monitored and controlled, loading and unloading behind the scenes, parking lots and underground garages the only mediation.’ 1
Built in 1976 by John Portman, Atlanta’s Westin Peachtree Plaza still retains the ideal modernist spatial separation referred to in the above quote by Marshall Berman from his seminal text, All That is Solid Melts into Air. However, today the hotel stands on the corner of the complicated cross-section of modern and post-modern theoretical debates on the one hand, and the evolving contemporary landscape of Atlanta’s downtown, urban environment on the other. What does it mean for Portman’s oeuvre, normally exemplified as quintessentially post-modern, to be evoked in Berman’s discussion of the modernist’s agenda for the city street? And, in return, what do these theoretical musings bring to bear on the experience of the hotel in the present development of a city returning to the nineteenth-century, walking city format? How does Baudelaire’s flaneur experience post-modernism?
Debating Design Education
On the Case for Education in Design, and for Access to Education
// The director of the Design Museum, Deyan Sudjic, wrote an article in the Guardian last week that highlighted a link between economic prosperity and design, saying in his headline that “A modern economy has to be based on creativity rather than relying on generic manufacturing”. To an extent his article felt like something of a starting point – making a simple statement that is rather difficult to disagree with – but not (alas!) going much further.
However, it did prompt me to reflect a little on the issue that he didn’t quite raise: the importance of design education, and the impact that will result from the current government’s attitude to design education. It led to thoughts about what impact design education can have, what governments can do to intervene in the dynamic between design education and its impact, and, how this particular debate has been formulated in the past.
As ever, consideration of events, dialogues, and controversies from history can provide us with the tools to understand where we may have missed potential issues in our discussions. What I want to do here is look briefly at how consideration of some historic cases can inform our approach to education today; in the field of design, but also in a wider, more general sense.
In doing this, two themes will be brought out as prominent areas that I think should be concentrated on if we are to form any kind of philosophy of education: a discussion of the type of education that we should be investing in today; and secondly a discussion of who should have access to this education (and, subsequently, how this access is achieved). (more…)
Le Corbusier, the City, and the Venetian example
A highwalk in the City of London. © 2011 Helen Kearney
This is a photograph of a section of the highwalk in the City of London. For those of us who aren’t initiated, the highwalks are a system of bridge-like walkways that function as pavements, but raised above the street level. They are designed specifically to separate pedestrians from the traffic below.
Walking along them can be a welcome contrast to the busy City below – or, their emptiness can render them vaguely alienating at times. But regardless of the impact they have on their users, the fact remains that they are certainly very evocative relics of a specific moment in history.
In the late 50s and early 60s the City of London Corporation established a policy that these pedestrian decks were to almost completely cover the City, meaning that you could walk from Liverpool street station in the east, to the Barbican in the north, the river in the south, and along Fleet Street in the west, without ever touching the ground.
viagra seizure disorder
The V&A Museum. © 2011 Helen Kearney
One of the draws of the History of Design course is studying in a beautiful and wonderfully mad Victorian monument. Whilst it cannot be forgotten that this structure contains one of the most fabulous Museums in the world, it is also worth reflecting on the V&A as a building in itself – as a physical structure that has, embedded within its stones, years of social, cultural and political history.
