Tag Archives: design

Three Ways Good Design Makes You Happy

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I don’t know what it is about the TED talks lately, like this one from Dan Norman on three ways good design makes you happy, but somehow I find them rather soothing.

Partly I think the attraction stems from my boyfriend and I now living in a place with a TV (!). Its very tempting at the end of the day, but all those espisodes of Law & Order are starting to make me nervous when I shower. Plus, nothing is very aesthetically-inclined, unless you count America’s Next Top Model. So somehow I end up in the bedroom watching these on my computer while my boyfriend revels in X-Men, and will probably keep doing so until PBS starts doing Art:21 marathons. By the way, did you know that ART:21 had a William Kentridge movie in the works?

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Facade: Richard Wood at the Lever House

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I noticed Richard Wood’s new work being put up at the Lever House the other night. The artist is covering parts of the exterior with patterned fiberglass panels. The British artist designed William Morris-inspired natural patterns and mock Tudor styles in saturated colors to liven up the facade of the once-sleek, Modernist structure.

Prior to this installation, the Lever House had commissioned Barbara Kruger to cover the walls with her typically graphic slogans. Here we have another design-oriented, saturated, flat approach to taking over the building by covering it in the respective artist’s trademark style. It is as if different artists each have their chance to tag the building. Except of course, this is hardly illicit behavior. It is instead commissioned, no doubt for a pretty sum, authorized, and displayed like the status mark it is.

Installation by day- mostly complete

While Kruger’s installation got some flack on this blog, at least it said something. A trite, literal something–but it attempted a statement. Wood’s installation has no such purpose. It is a design–patterns I would buy an H+M skirt or IKEA tiles in quite happily. I think it is attractive. I cannot think of something more devoid of content.
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The interest is supposed to lie in playing historical styles against one another. The title of this project, Port Sunlight, is a reference to the history of the building just as his designs refer to the history of architecture. I don’t know–do you think that there is anything more to be said about it? If so, you can check out this press release with more details on it.
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The Secret of Beauty

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Math.

That’s right, math is the secret of beauty. Or a least of beautiful design as it relates to architecture, furniture and other decorative arts. Horace Brock claims to have discovered that the secret of beautiful design is “themes” (motifs such as a curve or line) and “transformations” (changes in the motif, such as size, rotations). People find only a middling amount of complexity beautiful, so if there are many themes, there should be few transformations, and vice-versa.

Brock claims his theory goes beyond Fibonacci, and other calssic models of beautiful form.

It sounds simplistic, to say the least, and even more like a vague description of how objects physically must appear. Brock, based on this Boston Globe article, seems to have an interesting personality, if only for calling aesthetic philosophers Kant, Schiller, and Hume “fuzzy wuzzy.” He gets extra credit for saying about art’s effect on him, “it’s all a variation on an orgasm, isn’t it?”

I’m not arguing that form, whether you classify it as themes or motifs, is unimportant. I would argue that it is not the secret of beauty, only a component. N’cest ce pas?