RELATED TERMS: Gesamtkunstwerk
To say that design defines humanity is not quite the same as saying ‘Dasein is design’. In a material culture approach, humanity is shaped by its objects. As many of those objects are designed, it might be argued that humanity is shaped by its designs. However, many of those objects-as-designs, are themselves shaped by the practices in which they serve both instrumental and symbolic roles (‘functions’). A central thesis of Colomina and Wigley (2016) is that it is ‘design’ itself that defines humanity. Whatever the precise relation, or the degree of (mutual) determination, it would seem that design and humanity are inseparable.
A question that might arise is: how does the philosophy and theory of design presented in the web pages of Incomplete … differ from the view of design presented under the rubric of ‘total design’?
To say that design pervades the world is not to say that the world is a ‘total design’, analogous to a ‘total work of art’, and that design is ‘one great cognate whole’, in the words of Walter Gropius. In other words, to acknowledge the pervasiveness of designed artefacts, services and systems is not to say that the world is a designed totality, every aspect of which is designed as a singular, cohered, unitary design.
The Fantasy of Control
For Mark Wigley (1998), the notion of total design has two main impulses: the implosive, the intensification of design onto a single point; and the explosive, dispersing design to every possible region of the world. He argues that, in both cases, the figure of the architect remains at the centre.
[Aside: Alexandra Midal’s (2019) book, Design by Accident: For a New History of Design, makes a similar point to Wigley concerning the relationship between architecture and design. The central idea of Midal’s book is that design as a discipline emerged by accident. “Initially, architects created it as a vehicle to expand their discipline, upscaling architectural methods to design cities or downscaling it to design objects. According to Midal, the first histories of design were written by Pevsner and Giedion, who were not genuinely interested in design but in architecture’s quest for expansion.” (Moura, 2023)]
The paradigm for implosive design is the domestic interior, where every detail is subjected to an over-arching vision that cuts the environment off from the pluralism of the surrounding world. Wigley cites the example of the mid-19th-century concept of the ‘total work of art’ (Gesamtkunstwerk), where the architect was placed at the centre of the creation of the singular, seamless, multimedia experience, the orchestrator of the overall theatrical effect.[1]
Explosive design can be seen in the lineages of Walter Gropius’ concept of ‘total architecture,’ which grants the architect authority to design everything, from the smallest object in everyday use to every element of the urban environment, from infrastructure to atmosphere. Gropius’ idea of the architect as coordinator led him on
“step by step from the study of the function of the house to that of the street; from the street to the town; and finally to the still vaster implications of regional and national planning. … we shall advance towards an ever-wider and profounder conception of design as one great cognate whole.”
Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus
Architecture, as the paradigm instance or master discipline of design, is simply everywhere.
Total design, Wigley concludes, is a fantasy about control, particularly about architecture as control, from micro-environments to macro-environments. The only difference between the two impulses is the scale, and the implied ambition, of the environmental enterprise.
[Aside: In a sense, this is about the coherence of the designs in an environment and of an overall environment, about whether the elements in the whole are designed according to the same ‘principles’, so to speak, with a coherent aesthetic. While this discussion is to an extent about ‘experience’, this experience is treated in aesthetic terms. The discussion is not about ‘total design’ as the design of every element of an authoritarian totalitarian entity such as a state, so that all everyday experiences are rendered under control. Another discussion is needed for the relationship between design and totalitarianism, in the context of the two domains of ‘policy design’ and ‘design for policy’ (see Mortati, Mullagh and Schmidt (2022) for an elaboration of this distinction).]
Although a distinction has been drawn in discussions of 20th century architecture between implosive design as resistance to industrialisation and explosive design as proponent of standardisation, Wigley argues that they cannot easily be separated. This is because, in some respects, the entire planet is now imagined to have become a single interiority amenable to design practices, an exploded implosion, so to speak. The planet, where the total work – of art or design? – takes place, becomes, in the words of Gropius, cited by Wigley, a “cathedral of the future” whose light transforms everything down to the smallest objects of everyday life.
[Aside: The iconography of the cathedral, as seat of power and authority, radiated symbolically by light, remains consistent in art/design all the way through to conceptual art, with its emphasis on the (everyday) ‘chair’.][The other metaphor to be pursued is that of ‘theatre’. Both cathedral and theatre define boundaried spaces in which narration (and pedagogy) can take place, whether seamlessly or episodically, linearly or nonlinearly. They define situations, as that which unfolds, and situatedness, as that which both partakes of the unfolding and that which observes and ‘escapes’ or ‘over-runs’ the unfolding. They perform or enact a double process: that of ‘subjection’ (capture, remaining within the situation, total immersion) and ‘subjectivity’ (enrapture, within but exceeding the situation, partial immersion), the latter being the ‘vehicle’ by means of which what is learnt from the situation can be carried over into other situations.]
From Control to Management [and Governance]
The conceptual slippage between architectural design and other design practices enabled by both implosive and explosive approaches to architecture, a confusion that can be found in Nikolaus Pevsner’s inconsistent use of the terms architecture and design in Pioneers of Modern Design, enabed Gropius to turn design into a form of management in which the architect is coordinator, orchestrator or manager.
[Aside: Contrast this view of the architect-designer-manager with that of Fuad-Luke (2009) who conceives the designer as facilitator-activist. How different are they in terms of having a view on ‘how things should be managed’?]
Wigley argues that the concept of architecture as management can be seen to inform the entire history of the discipline. Given this view, the different architectural styles of the 1960s and 1970s are but differently articulated theories of management in which remnants of a fantasy of total architecture as total design, as a means of exercising control, can be found.
As an example, Wigley cites Buckminster Fuller’s insistence on design being resource management, with the architect a ‘comprehensive designer’ capable of operating at any scale. Pre-empting aspects of cybernetics and the ecological movement, Fuller sought to transform the planet into a single art-design work. In this context, systems theory, cybernetics, semiotics and fractal geometry, for example, can be viewed as ways of absorbing differences into a singular structure, despite the claims in post-modernist discourse about the value of pluralism, multiplicity and heterogeneity.
[Another slippage may be that between management and governance, the former being more ‘pragmatic’ and the latter being more conceptual or semantic. Other distinctions may be relevant here: between government and governance, for example, or between politics and the political. Surely, these cannot be dealt with by referring to Heidegger’s distinction between the ontic and the ontological. Both kinds of term, the more pragmatic and the more semantic, are elements of (social and professional) practice. They both operate in concrete situations, to provide those situations with different ‘contexts’.]
Wigley argues that architects who assert that they do not think they can or should control the whole environment are, paradoxically, by doing so claiming that control. Their insistence upon their workds being indeterminate or incomplete are strategies aimed at gaining control of those system elements that elude them. While claiming that it is indeterminate or incomplete, their work nevertheless closes off any aporia, rendering the work fully determined and complete. Used in this way, ‘incompletion’ is an aesthetic, a design choice, not an opening or aperture to a questioning of the work, its premises and its relation to a contextualising world.
[Is this what we are doing here, by naming this site Incomplete…? Are we seeking to gain control of design practices, and the world: by claiming an incomplete knowledge of them, are we thereby imposing a knowledge structure upon design practices and the world?][Or is the site an articulation of a situated knowledge, incomplete and perspectival in its grasp of design practices and the world and incompletely aware of the situation that is, or situations that are, unfolding, seeking to learn from concrete situations how that situatedness is, or is not, an opportunity or a snare, leading to a questioning of the operation of designs and design practices?][Design-works – open or closed?]
Design and Theory
Wigley argues that the notion of ‘total design is misleading. Rather, it is more important to understand ‘total theory’. The notion of design, Wigley notes, already incorporates a sense of ‘totalising’ or ‘encompassing’. Thus, he polemically asserts, “All design is total design.” When architecture was admitted into into the academic institution at Cosimo I de’ Medici’s and Vasari’s Academia del Disegno, founded in 1563, architectural training and the arts in general were unified around the concept of design. Design, understood as the drawing that embodies an idea, was taken as the means by which the practical world of architecture could aspire, and be elevated to the theoretical level of gentlemanly scholarship.[2] In this way, design becomes the bridge between the immaterial world of ideas and the material world of objects. However, a theory is required to shape and determine that relationship.
Given this emphasis, on the desire to elevate practical values to scholarly values, design can be seen to be, and to have always been, a matter of theory. Design is not so much an entity in the world as it is a theoretical reading of the world’s order and its potential re-ordering. For Wigley, design is the gesture by means of which theory can be identified in the material world. Thus, he says, “To point to design is to point to theory” (Wigley, 1998: 6).
It is this (presumed) totalising capacity of design that enables the pretension of the figure of the architect, no longer as master builder but instead as master designer, to capture order even, or especially, at its grander scales. This idea was reproduced at the Bauhaus when Gropius called for, “sound theoretical instruction in the laws of design” (Wigley, 1998: 6). Such a theoretical basis, in Gropius’ view, was the essential pre-requisite for collective work on total architecture and a solid foundation for its unity or unification.
Design, in pre-supposing a unifying, totalising theory, becomes the phenomenal appearance of theory once that design is manifested materially. In this context, history (of design), theory and design itself all become management practices. Through this confluence or circulation, the question of the fate of total design, its ‘future history’, is transformed, for Wigley, into the question of total theory, since theory itself is something that is designed. Total theory, as historiography, as design, as managerial theory aimed at creating a unitary totality (or perhaps a totalitarian unity), is concerned with control, communication, government and governance. It becomes ‘cybernetic’ or parallels ‘cybernetics’ in scope.
Notes
1: Wigley names a generation of architects as exemplars of the implosive approach. They include Bruno Taut, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Josef Hoffmann, Josef Maria Olbrich, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Hendrik Berlage, Peter Behrens and Henry van der Velde
2: “Starting in antiquity, there has been a polemic between the clarity and strength of line and form (invoking reason and representation) and the messiness, unreliability, and offensiveness of color (and connotations such as emotion, conceit, and poison). In the mid-sixteenth century, at the height of the Renaissance, it famously took on the form of the artistic and conceptual struggle between Florentine disegno and Venetian colore, pitting a mimetic, narrative, and representational mode of pictorialism against an ‘insurrection of color.’ ” (Beyes, 2024: 5)
References
Beyes, T. (2024) Organizing color: Toward a chromatics of the social. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Colomina, B. and Wigley, M. (2016) Are we human?: notes on an archaeology of design. Zurich, CH: Lars Muller.
Fuad-Luke, A. (2009) Design activism: beautiful strangeness for a sustainable world. London, UK: Earthscan.
Knoblauch, J. (2017) Toward a critical ergonomics: Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley’s Are We Human?, The Avery Review, 23 (April), pp. 1–7. Available at: https://averyreview.com/content/3-issues/23-23/2-toward-a-critical-ergonomics/knoblauch-towards-a-critical-ergonomics.pdf (Accessed: 18 December 2018).
Mortati, M., Mullagh, L. and Schmidt, S. (2022) Design-led policy and governance in practice: a global perspective, Policy Design and Practice. Routledge, 5(4), pp. 399–409. doi: 10.1080/25741292.2022.2152592.
Moura, M. (2023) Alexandra Midal’s Design: from architecture’s accident to a totality of its own [Book review], Inmaterial, 8(16), pp. 110–121. doi: 10.46516/inmaterial.v8.191.
Wigley, M. (1995) The Architecture of deconstruction: Derrida’s haunt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wigley, M. (1998) Whatever happened to total design?, Harvard Design Magazine, 5, pp. 1–8.
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