Extra National Journey

What happens when a Russian-born American professor takes a group of his Arab students to a workshop in Amsterdam to work with a designer who has a Canadian passport but lives in Berlin?

National identities clash with globalization: this is a reality of today’s world, and reverberations of this conflict are evident in contemporary design discourse. On one hand, the national is still much valued as a precious cultural resource. On this topic, in a recent issue of Domus, MoMA Design Curator Paola Antonelli  recently wrote about “digging deep into local culture in order to achieve the universal sublime”. Notes Antonelli: “Local traditions have in recent decades proved to be the most meaningful way to move beyond modernism without giving up the great qualities of modern design”. 

On the other hand, there’s no denying that our global village is getting more standardized. Developments with the internet have both facilitated and enabled a globally homogeneous way of banking, manufacturing, commerce, branding and pop-culture. The world of young people, in particular, is a unified one in which music, fashion, games and social media have become a global infrastructure that stretches far beyond national borders. These people live in the era of Google Earth, which allows them to zoom in on any country or city without leaving their computers.  One of the missions of design education today is to address this complex condition, and to uncover strategies for its creative exploitation.

Nicolas Bouriaud’s The Radicant (Lucas and Stenberg, New York, 2009), lays out a promising theoretical framework for artists’ and designers’ work in the first decades of the new century. The notion of radicant comes from botany: it is “a term designating an organism that grows its roots and adds new ones as it advances”. According to Bouriaud: “To be radicant means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats … translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing.” Instead of postmodern games with history and heritage typically expressed through use of signs and décor, this new work is characterized by formlessness and temporality: it favors process over object, the journey over the destination.

The ideas in this prescient book have been recently put into action in a joint workshop set up between VCUQatar in Doha and the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, and based on the notion of Extra National Style, a theme proposed by Jerszy Seymour (Director of the Dirty Art Department at Sandberg).  The idea of Extra National defies easy definition: it is not a fusion of cultures (such as might be favored by Postmodernism) nor does it require abandoning all cultural references in favor of a single unified language, as was the case with International style — a solution still in evidence in many airports and public spaces still today.

If anything, the notion of Extra National recalls a much older concept, that of cosmopolitanism: the belief that all humans belong to one single global community based on a shared morality. When the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes was asked where he was from, he famously replied that he was a citizen of the world, or a cosmopolite. In contemporary thinking, cosmopolitanism questions the inevitability of nation-states and advocates the world political system that promotes personal freedom and individual opportunity. An essential feature of cosmopolitanism is respect for otherness, which implies an acknowledgement of religious and cultural differences. “I hate border controls, but I love different food and cheeses,” says Jerszy Seymour.

Working in Extra National style does not mean leaving behind the idea of national belonging, but rather making a selective inventory of what is worth keeping and asking why.  As students tried to grasp and define the idea, words like “fluid”,  “intangible” and “unreachable” dominated the discussion, until the group started to focus on the moment — the here-and-now. Indeed, the essence of this project could well be defined by its unique and multinational list of participants, assembled somewhat miraculously together in one space. The large empty studio, sheathed entirely in seamless blue plastic that was itself devoid of any specific cultural references, had become the stage of Extra National action.

In this new environment, students’ national backgrounds appeared to have been suspended. Two Israeli students worked and made friends with kids from Lebanon and Qatar­ — something that just could never happen in the course of their regular lives. Qatari girls temporarily shed their black abayas; Dutch girls joined in chanting traditional Arab songs. Students were invited to transform the blue space as needed in the process of their daily work.

Initial ideas focused on students’ basic needs as human beings: establishing a ritual of one minute of breathing, or sending containers of air from country to country in exchange. From the study of air the attention turned to music — a truly Extra National phenomenon, especially for young people. A group of students proposed an interactive musical map of the world, an invisible auditory presence open for browsing and adding one’s own voice. Another team worked on the needs of their working space, offering a collection of Intangible Furniture: they were multifunctional toy-like fragments, capable of personalized configurations. The entire class happily joined in exploration of the system’s combinatory possibilities.

Intrigued by the observations of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (who famously analyzed the difference between German, American, and French toilet bowls as the key to the three nations’ ideological differences) the next group examined a quintessentially human need, setting out to create a prototype of an Extra National toilet. The project ended up as an outhouse and was constructed outside of the school building. Its pentagon shape corresponded to five dissimilar ways of use from five different continents, all unified with one common drain hole.

In the Extra National world, all ideas will belong to everyone as material for translation and re-interpretation. This was the premise of The Cloud, a performance project by three students, which marked the end of the workshop. On the last day they collected materials from all the other group presentations. The participants’ objects, fragments and leftovers were piled high in the middle of the studio, together with all unused materials.  Reciting a manifesto, performers gradually tore the blue plastic film off all walls, wrapping the debris and creating a monumental ephemeral sculpture.  This literal “wrapping up” of the workshop was suggestive of endless transformative possibilities: all the pieces and ideas remained inside, ready for further discussion and regeneration.

The following day, the students headed to the airport and returned to their home countries. The world order has been restored. So what did everyone learn from this experience?

One could question whether or not those interactions in the blue space could even be considered design at all.  After all, there were no viable products or constructive proposals put forth, as might have been required by a conventional practice of a design workshop. The action at Sandberg Institute suggests that conventional wisdom does not apply to the design professions any longer. The field has opened up for all kinds of existential queries that question the way people live, work, or communicate.  By definition, these questions cannot lead to a singular answer. Rather, the argument is brought up again and again, by every new generation. This open-ended quest for meaning ­ is likely to dominate our professional efforts for decades to come, with young designers of all nations taking part. Students of the world, unite!

Learning from the King

If there was one reason to travel to East German city of Dresden, it would be to see the unique collections of objects and art, amassed by the Elector (King) of Saxony, Augustus the Strong (1670-1733).

Of all Dresden museums the most unusual is, definitely, the King’s treasure chamber, known here as the Green Vault (Grüne Gewölbe). The display, accessible to selected visitors already in the 18^th century, was conceived as an early example of gesamtkunstwerk – a total work of art – where the objects, the setting, and the passage through rooms were carefully planned to form a complete aesthetic experience.

There is, of course, plenty of gold, silver, and ivory on display. Yet other materials that attracted my attention were unexpected:  coconuts, ostrich eggs, Nautilus shells, Seychelles nuts, rhinoceros horns, even cherry pits. The interest in these exotic materials, stimulated by the age of geographic discoveries, was common among the European royal courts at the time. This was the period when the kunstkammer (the cabinets of wonders) proliferated in Europe, where the objects from faraway lands were stored and displayed. Those “curiouse” items were kept to arouse curiosity – a concept that in the 17^th-18^th century was synonymous with quest for knowledge. Yet the Green Vault is not merely a kunstkammer. Every shell and coconut – those signifiers of the exotic, “the other”– were sent to court artisans to be re-worked, re-combined, re-interpreted into new decorative objects. As with most treasure art, the functional requirements were nil. It was all about the effect, the surprise, the complexity. Apparently, the king presented his artisans with an aesthetic carte blanche, where the only requirement was an impeccable quality of craftsmanship.

To call these strange material collages eclectic would be both an understatement and simplification. Nicolas Bourriaud in his book The Radicant talks about creolization, “a process involving acclimatization and cross-breading of heterogeneous influences”, as a major determinant of contemporary art. This concept is perhaps applicable here. The meaning of king’s precious objects lies in joyous juxtaposition of cultures, in the sense of wonder about our wide and strange world, in the belief that beauty can unite and conquer all. Three hundred years later, these sentiments still resonate.

Authentic Moss

I was 9 months pregnant with my son Bobby, and considered myself a lucky designer. In 1997, the world was my oyster, professionally and personally. Four years out of graduate school and into a professional design career, our studio, Boym Partners, was rocking the supermarkets of Europe and the aisles of Target with plastic containers produced by a revolutionary German company called Authentics. All of a sudden, I found out from a friend that the go-to NYC design retailer, MOSS, was paying attention to our work.

I finally met Murray and Franklin outside their store re-arranging the window display of our studio’s plastic containers one midnight coming out of a late movie at the Angelika Film Center across Houston Street. In a beautiful high/low moment, the former Metro Pictures Gallery window looked like a supermarket shelf (well, almost). The window display was bursting with $2.25 plastic containers. It was one of the first of many of MOSS’ gutsy signature moves, the highbrow retailer championing cheap mass-produced design objects. For the record, the set of 8 Moss-curated Boym containers in a plastic bag cost $20.00, plus tax. There is a big price gap from $20 containers to a $20,000 sofa. For Murray Moss, the design quality could lie in all things, and he was eager to prove it to incredulous New York public.

MOSS, standard bearer extraordinaire, put their money where their mouth is. Despite what critics say, the MOSS perspective on design is not an elitist view. It’s only sincere and pure expression of a better life through design. And to guild the lily, they and their handpicked and trained staff lovingly organized many memorable exhibitions and parties. You can ask anyone in the design world who was there. I have been blessed to have been one of their designer/artist collaborators and friends for 16 years. I’d love to disclose many other memorable (design) controversies we survived together, but that history is still being written. There’s a bright future ahead for these boys starting the MOSS BUREAU.

Laurene Leon Boym

The Gift

On my recent trip to the south of India, I managed to get hold of a bicycle and pedaled through villages outside of Pondicherry, to a great excitement of local population. Children and youngsters, especially, seemed to be taken by a sight of a tourist on a bike with a camera. “Picture, picture!”– this cheerful and insisting call I would hear again and again. At first, I thought the villagers wanted to get paid a little for posing for the shot. This presumption proved wrong. Far from expecting the tip, they were sincerely surprised at the offering of money. Even though normally I am hesitant to take pictures of people, here I ended up with a small portrait gallery.

These encounters, so characteristic of India, are a curious phenomenon – like a souvenir in reverse. The Westerners always try to take something from a journey, to get a possession of something local for a good memory. Those Indian teens, on the contrary, wanted to give away, prompting me to capture their images to bring them home with me. I remember one group demanding to see their digital picture, and once they were certain I had it in my camera, they seemed greatly satisfied. They got their souvenir!

Here is this image from the world’s most photogenic country, the gift from a fishermen’s village, the name of which I do not even know. I’d like to share it with everyone. 

The Expulsion from Eden

So much has been written about the African safari, so many seductive images have been created, that it is impossible to put aside all expectations and preconceptions when one prepares to travel there.  Yet once our small plane lands on a simple gravel airstrip, the actual experience is overwhelming, almost religious.

Imagine a green, gently undulating plain, stretching in all directions as far as eyes can see. On the plain, there are innumerable groups of animals, big and small, standing still or moving gracefully. The notion of Paradise comes to mind, once and again. There is violence there, but all hunting and eating of flesh happens in such dignified, purposeful way that there is nothing gruesome or troubling about it. The beauty of our old good planet Earth – an old clichéd sentiment, perhaps – suddenly acquires a new and very exact meaning.

On the way back I made a mistake to stop in Nairobi, for a brief tour. This concrete metropolis, a 1970-s modernist nightmare, is a home to Kibera, one of the Africa’s largest slums. All ills of a 3-million-large city are in evidence: traffic, pollution, crime, and above all, an overwhelming ugliness. Stuck in endless traffic on the way to the airport, I imagined the site of Nairobi only one hundred years ago (the city is barely 100-years-old). This place probably looked much like the green plains of Africa that I have just visited.

What are we doing to our Earth?

A Happy Day

Outside of Mexico, the Day of the Dead appears silly, if not outright bizarre. What else can be made out of dangling skeletons, skulls made of every imaginable material, including sugar, and macabre monsters of all kinds?

Yet, after a visit to Mexico City, which by chance happened around this Mexican holiday, I see things a bit differently.

“This is my favorite day of the year,” confessed a woman-professor at a local University.

“Why?”

“It gives us a chance to get together with the entire family, and to reminisce about our departed loved ones. We always have such a fun time.”

Fun? In the family of my in-laws on Upper West Side, such occasion would generate tearful silences, soul-searching conversations, and would be considered a generally traumatic experience. Not so in Mexico. The special bread they make for this day is sweet, and they eat it with chocolate. They also make a favorite dish of their grandmothers, lost uncles and cousins, and savor it together.  In an unusual way, the Day of Dead becomes a cause for spontaneous mass creativity. Curious altars are created in every home, like mini-museums of the passed family history.  There is nothing didactic or sad about those displays. Personal items of the remembered, the aroma of food and marigold flowers, fire of a candle, tissue paper ornaments, fluttering in the wind, period music – all this contributes to a complex multisensory experience.

It is believed that the dead consider it disrespectful to see grieving at their altar. 

An Icon

“There may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented,” stated Barak Obama in his memorial statement on passing of Steve Jobs today.

The press likes to stress the numbers of Apple devices sold around the world (and the numbers are staggering: 129 million phones sold to date) What is more remarkable, though, is the equality of distribution of Apple products. Here in Doha, it is likely that both a sheikh and his driver will own an iPhone. In my class, I have it and so do most of my students. On Occupied Wall Street, the protesters (a.k.a. The 99%) are using it to tweet their anger about the other 1%. 

Andy Warhol once wrote about Coca-Cola, an older American icon: A Coke is a Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money will buy you a better Coke that the bum on the corner is drinking.  Today, it is true that no money will buy you a better smart phone than iPhone. If Andy was alive, he would have probably painted Steve Jobs, or an iPhone. For sure, he would be using one.

Magritte's Smile

Rene Magritte is probably rarely named as one’s favorite artist. And he hasn’t been mine, either. But I should say that my opinion of him and his work went miles up after visiting Museum Magritte in Brussels.

The story of his life, even though it lacked the drama and largesse of, say, van Gogh or Picasso, was still full of inner struggle and artistic anxiety. And it was life entirely devoted to art, as hundreds of tiny strange photos, sketches and documents prove beyond any doubt.

Magritte came to fine art from the field of advertising and poster design (and he regularly retreated back whenever the money was tight). His paintings, therefore, often give impression of strange posters, created for no other reason than to announce something unsettling: a sign to stimulate one’s mind and imagination.

For me, this was the experience with a small painting from his “impressionist period” of the 1940s, entitled simply, The Smile.  It is a simple – a little kitschy – depiction of a stone plaque with the carved date: Year 192370.

In our design field we often talk about the future, about the world in 2030 or 2050. Some really far-fetching future experts can venture into the year 2100 or maybe even 2500. I think, only once I read some science fiction, which took place around the Year 7000. It was pretty weird stuff already.  But 192370?  In geological terms, the world is still likely to exist, in one way or the other. But what will become of us? Are we all going to be just one brain?  Will love, nature, culture still exist? Will there still be MoMA? New York City? The United States? It goes from there...

I am not sure if these rambling thoughts were something Magritte intended with his work. Perhaps, his title says it all. Faced with the eternity, all we can do is smile.

Reboot

Oman is a remote destination: until the 1980s the country has been off limits to any foreign visitors. To get to the south of the country, into once-rebellious Dhofar region, is difficult even today. Two crowded commuter planes per day depart from the Omani capital, or one can take a 10-hour drive on a mountainous road.  From Salalah, the center of Dhofar, there is a gravel road that leads north, over the mountains, then through the desert. After two hours one would reach the ruins of ancient city of Ubar. Beyond is nothing, the vast expanse of sandy Arabian desert, known here as the Empty Quarter.

Why do people travel to places like this?

Some scholars see a desire to experience the most remote and the least accessible places on the globe as a quest for personal authenticity. “They expect, and find, rejuvenation when they 
reach a world as far as possible away from their own, which changes them not only because of its purported primal spiritual power, but also because of the 
dangers and discomfort they have gone through to reach it. Tourists of this type 
resemble pilgrims to a holy site, practicing austerities along the way to ensure
 the validity of their religious experience.” (Charles Lindholm, Culture and Authenticity).

Exact nature of this “rejuvenation” might be hard to define.  I think it is different and personal for each participant, for each tourist. For some, it is just a welcome break, for others, a kind of immersive meditation. Getting a new sense of perspective. Clearing your head, as if restarting a computer. In times like these, we all should be doing it once in a while. 

Holy Agriculture

Recently I was lucky to spend ten days in Veneto, and to make trips to a few of Palladio’s villas presently open for visitors. The word “villa” has a strange undertone in today’s English; on hearing it one imagines a place of idle leisure and slightly questionable taste. All this was very different in the early 16^th century when Palladio had developed the typology and language of his buildings. The circumstances and background of the villas’ construction offer curious analogies with our present, early 21^st century state of affairs. History always repeats itself.

Five hundred year ago, the Republic of Venice found itself in a state of never-ending war with the Islamic world (the Ottoman Turks). Venetian ports and trade outposts were subject to frequent terrorist attacks by pirates and mercenaries. The sea trade with the East plummeted, being too dangerous, and the economy went into a protracted recession. In these dire conditions, Venetian merchants and noblemen turned their attention inward, towards their own long neglected mainland.  They saw agriculture as a novel way of generating income and producing much needed reserves of grain, food, and vine.

The villas were needed, first and foremost, as buildings for agricultural production. The living space of the owners was prominent but relatively small. The rest of the estate was taken by the barchesse (or utility structures), used as workers’ housing, stables, storage for grain and supplies. The genius of Palladio was to turn this complex and heterogeneous program into symmetrical classical compositions, perfectly set into the open landscape of the Veneto region. All this became possible because Palladio and his enlightened patrons saw agriculture as humanistic activity, something close to our present appreciation of ecological, self-sustaining way of living. For them, working with land included not only economics and politics, but also the art of observing, decorating, contemplating, and almost religious appreciation of the landscape. “Holy agriculture”, the expression used by Palladio, would perfectly summarize it all.

Recently, John Thackara has promoted his idea of a bioregion as a blueprint for development in many areas of the world. “It triggers people to seek practical ways to re-connect with the soils, trees, animals, landscapes, energy systems, water and energy sources on which all life depends. It re-imagines the urban landscape itself as an ecology with the potential to support us”, writes Thackara. In this respect, the history of Venetian villas could provide some useful insights. Who knows, maybe the bioregion movement will give us the next Palladio.

The Real Fake

In her 1999 book The Unreal America, Ada Louise Huxtable made a critical distinction between categories of the “real fake” (which she applied to Las Vegas), and the “fake fake” of nondescript shopping malls.  In many ways, she echoed Baudrillard, who described simulacra as a defining characteristic of all America, excepting Las Vegas and Disneyland, which he saw as uniquely authentic places; for him, the simulacra was “anywhere but here”. Both of these opinions seem to recognize that when qualities of pastiche and excess are presented openly, consistently, and “honestly”, without pretend shame or aesthetic hypocrisy, they create a sense of place as memorable and striking as any “real” historical environment.  Authenticity is created by exorbitant excess.

Ever since I moved to Doha, I was trying to determine whether this place is real fake, or fake fake. There is certainly an excess of borrowed imagery here, and a sheer audacity of making the impossible happen. There are also fragile fragments of history, and traces of traditional Arabic culture. What is authentic Doha – these disappearing traces of the old, or the new Villagio Mall, complete with Venetian-style canals with gondolas, frescoed ceilings, and polished marble floors?

These thoughts were triggered again this weekend, when, walking at the local trade fair, I saw an object that defied a name. It could best be described as a “coat hanger masterpiece”: a series of generic coat hooks mounted inside an ornate gilded picture frame. It was a staggering example of kitsch – but a kind of kitsch that could be easily “borrowed” by the likes of Philippe Stark or Marcel Wanders, and placed in a trendy boutique hotel. In such new setting, the object will become a “real fake”, something that might generate attention, a smile, or an ironic wink of a design buff who’d appreciate the transgression.

What are we to do with objects like this? Should we continue a Quixotic fight to eliminate them from the face of the Earth, or try to embrace and interpret them? I did see people buying these frames. They will likely go well with their home décor. Perhaps, in absence of any acceptable universal truth, the real fake is the next best thing.

The Ladder

The long quote below is from The Anthologist, the latest book by Nicholson Baker, who happens to be one of my favorite writers. The book is about poetry, about thoughts and doubts of a middle-aged, medium-successful poet. It struck me how well his bleak vision applied to us designers, to the entire life effort of so many of my friends and colleagues.

“And now it’s like I’m on some infinitely tall ladder. You know the way old aluminum ladders have that texture, and that kind of cold gray color? I am clinging to this telescoping ladder that leads up into the blinding blue. The world is somewhere very far below. I don’t know how I got here. It’s a mystery. When I look up I see people climbing, rung by rung… Tiny figures, clambering, clinging. The wind comes over, whsssew, and it’s cold, and the ladder vibrates, and I feel very exposed and high up… And I look down, and there are many people behind me. They are hurrying up to where I am. They’re twenty-three-year-old energetic climbing creatures in their anoraks and goggles, and I am trying to keep climbing. But my hands are cold and going numb. My arms are tired to tremblement. It’s freezing, and it’s lonely, and there’s nobody to talk to. And what if I just let go? What if I just loosened my grip, and fell to one side, and just – ffshhhoooow. Let go. Would that be such a bad thing?”

True East

Ever since I came to the Middle East, I have been looking for authenticity. Tourists and visitors often search out authentic food. As product designer, I wanted to find local, truly authentic products: things invented here, made here, and used here by the locals and their families.  This proved to be far from easy. The vast marketplace ­– from souks to supermarkets – offers products that inevitably fall into one of the two categories: multiple reiterations of European/American prototypes, or commercial items specifically concocted for tourist consumption.

Then I discovered something called mabkhara. The proof of these objects’ authenticity starts from the fact that the word itself does not translate well into the English language. Most often we use a descriptive expression “incense burner”; there is also little-used and confusing word “censer”. (“Distinguish from sensor, censure, and censor”, warns Wikipedia.) In all cases, both the word and the object itself come to stand in Western culture as a symbol for something alien and exotic – a component of sensorial Oriental allure, much celebrated in the European literature and the arts of the last two centuries.

To be sure, incense burner has been a familiar presence in many religious services outside the Middle East. In the Catholic Church, a censer suspended on chains is called a thurible, and is used during important masses. In Greek and Russian Orthodox Church, the use of censers is even more widespread. Every church prayer and ritual, from christening to burial, features a deacon swinging a censer (panikadilo) back and forth. It is significant that in both religions laypersons are not allowed to handle and swing the incense burner; this is a right reserved only for the ordained.

In ancient China and Japan, the use of censer was more open-ended and democratic, yet the object clearly retained its spiritual connotations. On the contrary, the Middle Eastern mabkhara is not a religious object. First and foremost it relates to the home, where it is a part of daily family traditions and some uniquely Arabic domestic rituals. There is, for instance, the habit of airing and perfuming the clothes, when a man or a woman would stand over a burning censer for a few moments to let the aromatic smoke permeate everything under the long robes. Other traditions guide the use of the object at gatherings of friends or family. During the meal and conversation it is common to have the incense burning in the majlis (special living room reserved for entertaining guests).  At the end of the evening, the hostess will walk with the burner around the room, as if to refresh the air. For the guests this serves as a clear signal that the party is over.

Daily use of incense burners is an inseparable component of sensorial culture of the East. The famous scents of the Orient: frankincense, myrrh, laudanum, sandalwood (oud), which to date remain the mainstay of all perfume manufacturing, derive from resins produced by desert trees grown only on Arabian Peninsula. Since ancient times, harvesting and trading these substances has been a source of wealth for the region, and the cause of many attempted conquests. From literature (e.g. sensual stories in The Arabian Nights) to architecture, with its elaborate secret gardens, the celebration of the sense of smell has reached a high level of sophistication.

Early on, it was discovered that burning the incense was the most efficient, and perhaps more spectacular way to generate and transmit the scent. According to Diane Ackerman’s seminal book A Natural History of the Senses, the hand-me-down model was probably applied to incense burning: first it was reserved for gods, then for rulers and their court, until eventually it reached the people, becoming a truly popular tradition. The burner itself has likely followed the same trajectory – evolving from a precious vessel to a basic object for domestic use.

Functional requirements for an incense burner are very simple. The object has to be sufficiently stable, and a good handle for taking it around is a plus. The top, where one places a burning charcoal briquette, must obviously be fire resistant. Beyond these simple needs, the object can take any imaginable shape and almost any size. And it does. Form does not follow function here. If anything, form follows the objects’ material and their traditional way of making. Every Middle Eastern country has a preferred material, special techniques, and a particular formal expression for its own version of mabkhara.  In addition, there are many contemporary kitsch versions, which simply defy description. (Presently I have started collecting and cataloguing various regional varieties of the object.)

When a designer stumbles upon a new, relatively unexplored product typology, he and she immediately start thinking about making a design contribution of their own. Does the world need a new, designer version of incense burners? What would be the nature of “design improvement” for these objects, which already serve their purpose so well?  Perhaps I need to stay in the Middle East a little longer before I am able to answer these questions. 

Art of Artificial Grass

Spring has come to town! In Doha, it means that rolls of artificial grass are being spread outdoors over large parcels of land in anticipation of summer heat and dust. Every lawn that does not have an underground irrigation does not stand a chance of survival.  This is where fake grass comes in handy. A harsh plastic look of these new lawns is somewhat mitigated with a curious design improvement. Here and there, the workers dump sand and occasional rocks onto the grass carpet, which seems to serve a double function:  to keep the carpet down, and to give it a more imperfect, natural look.

Strangely, this reminded me of an ancient Zen practice.  When Buddhist monks clean their gardens of fallen autumn leaves, they would always throw a bunch of leaves back onto a perfectly raked garden. According to traditional aesthetic principles of Zen (Wabi-Sabi), nothing should be too perfect. Not even artificial grass. 

Less Is More

On a recent trip to Amman, I indulged myself in a visit to hamam, the traditional Turkish baths. After elaborate, long treatment (a subject for another story), on my way out I was served a glass of hot Turkish tea.  A curious small glass had no handle, nor was any glass holder provided. Thirsty, I tried to pick it up, but couldn’t  – the glass was too hot. "This is not very smart," I thought, as my memory evoked the images of elaborate silver-plated glass holders, common in a Russian tea service.

I had to wait a few minutes. When I finally managed to lift the glass, I found the tea perfectly hot – and not scalding, as was often the case with the first sip from a Russian glass. It all became clear. The absence of handle was a perfect design feature to insure the optimal tea temperature. If the glass was too hot to handle, it meant that tea was too hot to drink.

From time to time, all of us designers could learn a bit of simple oriental wisdom.

Hole in the Head

An exhibition of modern Arab art in Doha can mean many things. The inaugural show at the MATHAF temporary space on the Corniche would not look out of place in New York or London – perhaps because most selected artists do live in one of the two cultural capitals. An installation of one of these Iraqi-born, New York-based artists, Wafaa Bilal, stood out in a remarkable and disturbing way.

The artist has surgically implanted a digital camera on the back of his head. Every minute, a picture is taken automatically, which is then uploaded on a special server where the images can be accessed and viewed. The first room shows the video of the entire process of making and inserting the camera, in graphic and gory detail. The film generates a sense of marvel at artistic dedication and endurance; an anticipation for the project’s creative potential is mounting up.

The second room is devoted to photos from Bilal’s server, featured on multiple monitors. I entered the room imagining a kaleidoscope of images, an infinite mosaic of textures, objects, and people – in other words, the richness of life. Instead, I saw a picture of overwhelming banality: fragments of ceilings and door jambs, corners of furniture, fluorescent lighting tubes, random wires on patches of grey sky. The material was so generic, it could belong to anywhere, to anyone. Is this because the view was from the back?  Yet I doubt that the pictures would be much different if the artist implanted the camera onto his forehead instead.

What do we really see? How do all these meaningless fragments add up to memorable images, beautiful landscapes, lovely faces that we remember? It seems that snapshots of our daily existence by themselves are not very telling. Like random letters, they need to be processed and arranged in order to become a poem or a story.

In the introduction to the project, the artist talks about his desire “to objectively capture my past as it slips behind me”.  He wanted to record life without any mediation “by the complete removal of one’s hand and eye from the photographic process”.  Instead, he has proven that without mediation there is no life.

Travel to Oz

The first group of tourists visited Oman in 1983. Prior to that year, an official government invitation was required for any entry. At the time, there were only two consulates in Oman, British and Indian, and the ruling sultan Said considered the country’s membership in the United Nations unnecessary and suspicious.

A few decades later, the capital of Oman has a full assortment of five-star hotels; the buses, rental cars, and even cruise ships full of tourists arrive daily. What do they see? A land of powerful strangeness: architecture that defies description and style; surrealistic mountains in the middle of the city; lush flowers on streets; multiple portraits of handsome Sultan Qaboos. “Like being in Oz”, said Laurene, as we stood at the gates of the Royal Palace.

Oman is a prosperous country, where much revenue is generated by oil exports. There are state-of-the-art roads, impeccable service industry, clean beaches, and yes, McDonald’s. But there are no skyscrapers in Muscat, no starchitect-designed museums, no mega-malls, and no déjà-vu feel of a generic international metropolis. Whether by happy coincidence, or by ingenious planning, Muscat did the right thing, and managed to retain its own unique and peculiar character.

Considering that decisions about virtually everything in Oman are made inside the Royal Palace, the Sultan Qaboos must have a special design sense – just like the legendary Wizard of Oz.

War Appeal

On my recent visit to Beirut, the traces of twenty-year-long civil war are still unmistakably there. They appear as small as bullet holes on a building’s façade, or as large as entire ghastly structures, bricked-up for safety.  The most notable of these is the infamous Holiday Inn, a monumental multi-story ruin, standing on a prime city site next to a brand-new swish InterContinental. (Built extra-strong to withstand an earthquake, it became a snipers’ lookout during the war, and no amount of grenades or rocket fire could bring it down.)

It is a journalistic cliché to liken these traces to scars on the city’s fabric. In the context of Lebanon, I would rather call them tattoos. Not only these jarring reminders of the not-so-distant past give the city its peculiar gritty character, they are sometimes used as a source of inspiration by contemporary Lebanese designers. There is, for example, a well-known night club B018, designed by Bernard Khoury in an underground bunker in the former war zone, complete with coffins for seats. One could say that traces of war give Beirut a feel of authenticity, something conspicuously lacking in many glittering capitals in the Middle East.

In his bizarre book What’s Wrong with Plastic Trees, Martin Krieger writes about background noise in the analogue LP records, which continue to fascinate the music buffs. “A certain level of what is conventionally defined as noise and distortion may contribute to that sense of realism and accuracy,“ he says. In other words, noise provides authenticity.

Like everything else, noise could probably be faked. But why would someone bother? Yet in design of today’s new cities, in the Gulf region and elsewhere, the imperfections and accidents are badly needed to achieve that exciting feel of an authentic, lived-in urban environment. We have to learn how to design, plan, and implement these accidents. No one wants to wait for a war.

Heaven and Hell

A few years ago I visited the Cathedral in Orvieto, known among the cognoscenti for a chapel with frescos by Luca Signorelli with their riveting depictions of Heaven and Hell.

Signorelli’s Hell, which inspired Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, was expressive, horrific, rich in gruesome and precise detail. The image of Heaven seemed less conclusive. The artist depicted groups of people, some naked, some dressed in togas, standing around, singing, or moving in slow motion under musical accompaniment of the angels above. Can one imagine doing this forever?!

I think it was Joseph Boyce who had said that the very idea of perpetual happiness should immediately turn into its opposite. In Doha, I am often reminded about this maxim. The malls, the lobbies and public areas of hotels, and – above all – the Pearl, a luxury housing development by the sea, are all designed to represent Paradise on earth. The materials are marble and bronze, the air is conditioned and perfumed, soft music emanates from speakers hidden in plants and trees. Groups of people in long flowing clothes – men in white thobes, women in black abaias – slowly stroll around.

This is supposed to be Heaven. No expense has been spared to assure people's happiness. Then why do these places begin to feel oppressive after about twenty minutes?  The early Modernists’ dreams of “total design”, albeit of the opposite kind, are realized here.  The architects try hard to create a total, seamless experience, which promptly turns into an overwhelming sensorial monotony. Unlike Signorelli’ image, this Paradise is brand-new.  Amiss here is power and beauty of the old, the human dimension of the lived-in and the worn-off.

Does this mean that the malls will look better when they age? Not a chance. Here in Doha, they will be promptly replaced with new buildings once again.

Teaching in a Time of Uncertainty

Since the beginning of professional industrial design – throughout the entire twentieth century and into the first decade of the twenty-first ­– a designer has been a figure of confidence and authority. He (rarely, she) was a person to provide answers, to solve problems, to know more than the public could possibly knew.  A notion of an unsure designer, a questioning designer, or, heaven forbid, a doubtful designer would appear almost oxymoronic, and certainly unprofessional.

Perhaps the beginning of the new decade will go down in history as the outset of Design Uncertainty. For the first time ever, designers are willing to ask themselves, openly and publicly, about the nature of their profession, and whether they are dong the right thing. People took note of the question mark in the title of the National Design Triennial, Why Design Now?  Eindhoven Design Academy’s 2010 exhibition in Milan expressed the same sentiment with an even more succinct title, a simple “?”

The reasons for self-searching and doubt are obvious, and they are not pretty. Two seemingly never-ending wars contribute to political uncertainty and fuel fears of terrorism.  The economy meltdown of 2008 continues to reverberate around the world. Unimpeded flow of oil gushes out in the Gulf of Mexico, in spite of the efforts of global powers and feats of the world’s best experts. Alice Rawsthorn, The New York Times’ design critic, captured the spirit of our time, speaking of design as “a quest for meaning in a dystopian era.” This existential quest, rather than pursuit of new shapes, is going to define the design effort for years to come.  And any search for meaning always starts with a question.

Clive Dilnot, a professor at The New School University, writes (in an essay, characteristically titled Ethics?Design? ) that the basis of any design activity derives from a fundamental query posed by Socrates: “How should one live?” According to Dilnot, this question cannot lead to a singular answer. Rather, the argument is brought up again and again, by every new generation. Thus, the ethical dimension in design “ is always in question, always in doubt”.

It is not surprising that the best design schools got to be in the forefront of design’s quest for meaning. Unencumbered by market considerations, academia is well suited for experimentation, creative research, and production of ideas. It is good to be a student in times like these. But what about the teachers? The traditional role of all-knowing professor is rapidly changing. Instead, a teacher becomes a fellow researcher, a team leader who works with the group in an interactive, collaborative way. The work inevitably becomes interdisciplinary: a design “product” could be an idea, a service, a material, a narrative, and it is viewed as a process rather than as a finished artifact.

With these thoughts I start a new chapter in my professional life. Recently, I have become a Director of Graduate Design Studies at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. All complexities and contradictions on the modern world are reflected in the microcosm of Qatar: East and West, old and new, national and global, rich and poor. This is a world in transition, full of its own uncertainties. As such, it should be a great testing ground for new ideas and new solutions. A small group of young men and women from different design backgrounds are joining our program, the first of its kind in the entire Gulf Region. Let the experiment begin. Together, we will be trying to work out our own answers to that nagging question, Why Design Now? 

My Tobi Wong

When news about Tobi Wong’s untimely death hit the Internet, many people remembered him as their collaborator. In one way or another, within community of New York designers, he indeed managed to do a project with virtually everyone around.

Here is the story of Tobi’s collaboration with our studio.

I think it was 2004. One day, Tobi Wong, whom I hardly knew at the time, called my studio and asked if we could please give him one of our old trash cans. Needless to say, a few perplexed questions followed, and once we agreed to meet the following day, he explained the gist of his idea. It turned out he had accepted an invitation in Williamsburg for an exhibition of new garbage can designs, before realizing that the project was all about recycled and renewable resources.

“They think they trapped me now”, he confided in me. “They are saying, let’s see what Tobi could possibly come up with.” Well, what he came up with was an illustration of the old adage, One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Treasure. His object was (I quote Tobi's own description) “ an orange translucent plastic waste bin previously owned and disposed by the Boym Partners which includes actual garbage from their office.” It helped his project, perhaps, that our bin happened to be a Grcic’s old design classic.

I doubt that many in the crowd spent any time or effort to uncover and appreciate Tobi’s elegant design gesture. Yet for me, this was essential Tobi Wong: always challenging, capable of being outrageous and understated at the same time, ironic in the best tradition of Seinfeld, and tasteful like Oscar Wilde.

I’ll miss you, Tobi, I’ll miss seeing your name on an invitation and thinking: Let’s see what Tobi could possibly come up with.

Chairs

By coincidence, this email message came into my mailbox during ICFF, the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York. This is the week when furniture is celebrated, by and large, in glittering showrooms around town. Chairs are always recognized as special darlings of the entire scene, as symbolic objects representing the entire furniture industry –or even the field of design in general.

I have just returned from the fairgrounds, where hundreds of manufacturers competed, trying to convince you to buy their new chairs, proving their necessity, relevance and benefits. At first, I thought the message attributed to DLCC was a spoof. The contrast was just too great:

“The chairs in [our] room are old, red ones left behind by the company that used this office space ten years ago.  They creak.  They're uncomfortable.  One of them is missing its left armrest. But in all my years as Executive Director, no one in this office has ever asked me to buy new chairs.  And we won't.” 

The message was, of course, real, and the description of the tattered furniture meant to emphasize tireless and selfless work the campaigners were doing for their cause. Yet unwittingly it underlined another reality of American life. While clothes, shoes, bags, cars, hi-tech gadgets are considered “essential” necessities, furniture and furnishings of our domestic or work environment are still relegated to status of superfluous objects.

In times of economic uncertainty, they are among the first things to be cut from any budget.

It does not seem likely that ICFF will be able to change this unfortunate belief.

Reality Check

My mother was born and raised in Moscow; she still lives there, well in her 80s.

Until recently, she used to visit me in New York once in a while. Through her spontaneous, always unpredictable reactions to realities of our American life I was able to learn a great deal about my own preconceptions and hang-ups.

I would take her to Soho, for example, and we’d walk among cast iron buildings on cobblestone streets. “What a horrible area to live”, she’d say. ”There is not one tree around, and what about all this noise and crowds.” A classy meal at Jean-Georges would be dismissed as “something strange on the plate – and not too much of it, either.” Did she see something that we were not noticing?

Needless to say, when I showed her my own designs, she was not too complimentary. Often she’d characterize my objects as superfluous, unnecessary, wasteful – well before sustainability became a buzzword among design critics. My award-winning clocks were dismissed as illegible, chairs – as too small or uncomfortable. Even when she liked a thing, such as a set of utensils, for example, there was always a nagging doubt as to what to do with the old utensils people may already have. When, exasperated, I asked her what kind of things she herself considered appropriate and legitimate, I remember the word “normal” used as an operative term. For example, she referred to an apartment building where she lived as normal. Most things she owned or wore she also called normal.

For years, I used to dismiss her every opinion as irrelevant and uninformed. It is with great surprise I now catch myself applying her-style “reality check” to much design around. Going through images and news from the recent Salone del Mobile, or from forthcoming ICFF, I keep thinking about it again.

At this time of great uncertainty and confusion, when hype rules over substance, when everything is possible and nothing is truly exciting, we may all use my mother’s reality check.

The Year When Stalin Died

This Russian-made leather wallet is in a good shape, considering its age. The embossed image is easily recognizable: it is a fragment of Moscow’s iconic Red Square with the Mausoleum, better known here as Lenin’s Tomb, in the foreground. A closer inspection of the picture (and knowledge of Cyrillic alphabet) would reveal a strange detail. Not one but two names are inscribed on the monumental building: the word LENIN is closely followed by STALIN.

In March 1953, Stalin’s death was mourned by millions of Russian people. Within weeks, his embalmed body was placed next to Lenin’s in an identical glass sarcophagus. They lied there together, like strange evil twins, for less than three years. In February 1956, Stalin’s personality cult was denounced; overnight he was removed and re-buried, and his name forever disappeared from the pristine marble façade.  Thus, I can date my wallet fairly precisely: it could only be made between 1953 and 1956.

My mother and my father met in Moscow in the fall of ‘53.  She was a popular student at a prestigious Institute of Civil Aviation. He, coming from the provinces after military service, worked at a factory and lived in a shared dorm. It was not love from a first sight. My mother was unsure about the attention of a provincial guy; probably there were other suitors as well. Little by little, my dad’s quiet persistence – and his good looks– started to win her over. On my father’s birthday, she invited him for dinner at a Moscow restaurant, and prepared a nice present – this leather wallet.

They had to share the table with another man (a common practice in those years), who was dressed in well-worn military fatigues without any shoulder straps. (I keep thinking it must have been one of the first returning Stalin’s victims, who were just starting to trickle back from the labor camps of Gulag.) At one point, when my father had to excuse himself, the man leaned to look at the gift lying on the table.  He scrutinized the embossed picture for a while. “Things are going to get better now”, he finally said to my surprised mom. “You two will be married in no time.” My parents tied the knot in September 1954; I was duly born nine months later.

I am not sure if my father ever used his present. After Stalin’s demise, the wallet became “politically incorrect”; carrying it around could result in unnecessary discussions. The empty wallet ended up on the bottom of my father’s drawer, where I discovered it by chance, almost fifty years later. Who knows if I would even be around, without the help of this awkward, barely used object.