waste
Ending is better than mending
Less, but better
Flying a kiwi
The mirror-image economy
Wasting light
- Poured
A timeless quality
Of all Rams’s products, the 606 Universal Shelving System is perhaps his most successful in fulfilling his own principles of good design. It is still in production today, some fifty years after its conception. The system is distinctive yet unobtrusive, and when the shelves and cabinets are filled, its slim profile allows it to fade quietly into the background.
Its ‘plainness’ lends it a timeless quality that has transcended the vagaries of fashion like no other of Rams’s designs. It was conceived in such a way as to optimize its function as simply and in as many different situations as possible, while still permitting upgrades and alterations without falling into obsolescence: all later adaptations and additions could still be integrated into the original structure and sizes.
"Fashion objects are not capable of being long-lived," said Rams in 2007. "We simply cannot afford this throw-away mentality anymore. Good design has to have built-in longevity. I believe that the secret of the longevity of my furniture lies in its simplicity and restraint. Furniture should not dominate, it should be quiet, pleasant, understandable and durable."
Consumption
The proponents of technology in the 1840s were very enthusiastic about replacing workers with machines. But somehow I find no indication that they realized that while production could be carried out with few workers and still run to high outputs, buyers would be needed for those outputs. The realization that though the need for workers decreased, the need for purchasers could increase, did not seem to be part of the discourse on the machinery question. Since then, however, technology and its promoters have had to create a social institution – the consumer – in order to deal with the increasingly tricky problem that machines can produce but it is usually people who consume.
The Factory Photographs
A Book by David LynchI love industry. Pipes. I love fluid and smoke. I love man-made things. I like to see people hard at work, and I like to see sludge and man-made waste.
Bowellism
A DefinitionLloyd’s Building, London.
Bowellism is a modern architectural style heavily associated with Richard Rogers. The premise is that the services for the building, such as ducts, sewage pipes and lifts, are located on the exterior to maximise space in the interior.
Muda, Muri, Mura
An ArticleEliminating waste is the key to efficiency – in the Toyota Production System, this is termed as:
Muda (waste),
Muri (overburden),
and Mura (irregularity).Working with Brian Eno on design principles for streets
- Think like a gardener, not an architect: design beginnings, not endings
- Unfinished = fertile
- Artists are to cities what worms are to soil.
- A city’s waste should be on public display.
- Make places that are easy for people to change and adapt (wood and plaster, as opposed to steel and concrete.)
- Places which accommodate the very young and the very old are loved by everybody else too.
- Low rent = high life
- Make places for people to look at each other, to show off to each other.
- Shared public space is the crucible of community.
- A really smart city is the one that harnesses the intelligence and creativity of its inhabitants.
Towards a New Architecture
The house is a machine for living in
But men live in old houses
It is not right that we should produce bad things because of a bad tool; nor is it right that we should waste our energy, our health and our courage because of a bad tool; it must be thrown away and replaced.
But men live in old houses and they have not yet thought of building houses adapted to themselves.
Primitive resources
There is no such thing as primitive man; there are primitive resources.
Employs nothing at all
The man of today planes to perfection a board with a planing machine in a few seconds. The man of yesterday planed a board reasonably well with a plane. Very primitive man squared a board very badly with a flint or a knife. Very primitive man employed a unit of measurement and regulating lines in order to make his task easier. The Greek, the Egyptian, Michaelangelo or Blondel employed regulating lines in order to correct their work and for the satisfaction of their artist’s sense and of their mathematical thought. The man of today employs nothing at all and the result is the boulevard Raspail.
All the work of an epoch
Style is a unity of principle animating all the work of an epoch, the result of a state of mind which has its own special character.
Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style.
Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it.A taste for fresh and clear daylight
Tail pieces and garlands, exquisite ovals where triangular doves preen themselves or one another, boudoirs embellished with “poufs” in gold and black velvet, are now no more than the intolerable witnesses to a dead spirit. These sanctuaries stifling with elegance, or on the other hand with the follies of “Peasant Art,” are an offense.
We have acquired a taste for fresh and and clear daylight.
Eyes which do not see
Our epoch is fixing its own style day by day. It is there under our eyes—Eyes which do not see.
The problem of the house has not yet been stated
The lesson of the airplane is not primarily in the forms it has created, and above all we must learn to see in an airplane not a bird or a dragon-fly, but a machine for flying; the lesson of the airplane lies in the logic which governed the enunciation of the problem and which led to its successful realization. When a problem is properly stated, in our epoch, it inevitably finds its solution.
The problem of the house has not yet been stated.
At the Green Mosque
In Broussa in Asia Minor, at the Green Mosque, you enter by a little doorway of normal human height; a quite small vestibule produces in you the necessary change of scale so that you may appreciate, as against the dimensions of the street and the spot you come from, the dimensions with which is is intended to impress you. Then you can feel the noble size of the mosque and your eyes can take its measure. You are in a great white marble space filled with light. Beyond you can see a second similar space of the same dimensions, but in half-light and raised on several steps (repetition in a minor key); on each side still a smaller space in subdued light; turning round, you have two very small spaces in shade.
From full light to shade, a rhythm. Tiny doors and enormous bays. You are captured, you have lost the sense of the common scale. You are enthralled by a sensorial rhythm (light and volume) and by an able use of scale and measure, into a world of its own which tells you what it set out to tell you.
Poems of an Indian summer
To build one's house is very much like making one’s will. When the time does arrive for building this house, it is not the mason’s nor the craftsman’s moment, but that moment in which every man makes one poem, at any rate, in his life. And so, in our towns and their outskirts, we have had during the last forty years not so much houses as poems, poems of an Indian summer, for a house is the crowning of a career.
A grave and noble beauty
An architecture of our own age is slowly but surely shaping itself; its main lines become more and more evident. The use of steel and reinforced concrete construction; of large areas of plate glass; of standardized units (as, for example, in metal windows); of the flat roof; of new synthetic materials and new surface treatments of metals that machinery made possible; of hints taken from the airplane, the motor-car or the steamship where it was never possible, from the beginning, to attack the problem from an academic standpoint—all these things are helping, at any rate, to produce a twentieth-century architecture whose lineaments are already clearly traceable. A certain squareness of mass and outline, a criss-cross or “grid-iron” treatment with an emphasis on the horizontals, an extreme bareness of wall surface, a pervading austerity and economy and a minimum of ornament; these are among its characteristics. There is evolving, we may begin to suppose, a grave and classical architecture whose fully developed expression should be of a noble beauty.