In our book Design for a Living Planet, Michael Mehaffy and I talk at length about approaches to design that waste energy and resources, or that alternatively, adapt and guarantee sustainability. We try to dig deeply into the reasons for why people design things in a certain way — teasing apart various strands of accepted practice that mix up bad habits, expediencies, and overly-narrow reasoning — in order to jolt people into re-thinking the entire discipline. We also dig into the past, recalling practices from when people were forced to economize resources because those were naturally scarce. Thus, explaining the transition from a millennial tradition of frugal design to design in an era of energy glut is an important component of our message. 

Even though we have tried to avoid polemics, we were forced to meet a major contradiction head-on: histories of design present the “machine aesthetic” as an evolutionary progress towards greater efficiency, greater adaptability, and even as a conception of design closer to nature. We disagree with those assessments, and insist that it was, instead, a move away from all of them. It will be difficult to discuss a wholesale revision of the basis of design as long as this misunderstanding remains in place. 

In Chapter 3, “How Modernism Got Square”, we engaged in a little joke, meant to clarify a historical deception carried out by the Bauhaus. Instead, our attempt turned out to reveal a serious mental blockage prevalent among architects even today. We published Figure 1 as illustrating the blatantly phony official “progress” of design from ornamented to stripped-down objects, and expected readers to recognize that the ornamented box was in fact produced laterthan the minimalist teakettle. This obvious contradiction should have helped us to finally set the record straight on the evolution of artisan to industrial objects. 

But something unexpected happened: the Bauhaus agenda continues to override reality. This figure of the two silver objects was reproduced several times when reprinting our original article online, and in essays by other authors who discuss our ideas. Yet everyone insisted on putting a new accompanying caption that describes how “the old-fashioned aesthetic of the jewelry box evolved into the modern aesthetic of the tea-kettle”, which completely reverses facts and switches our original message! Well-meaning editors and authors unwittingly conformed to the modernist orthodoxy. It’s simply that the dogma is so pervasive that the mislabeling becomes automatic: a conditioned response to indoctrination. 

Please note that the “machine aesthetic” teapot on the right in Figure 1 was hand-madein 1879, and about 30 years beforethe ornamented jewelry box illustrated on the left. The Art Nouveau jewelry box, on the other hand, was mass-produced, and 30 yearsafterthe teapot. Thus, the canonical progression from artisan to industrial would absurdly seem to have gone backwards in time, and, in addition, the artisan/industrial labels are opposite from what they seem. The “official” story is nothing but sleight-of-hand. In fact, what happened historically is that a substantial and healthy industry of mass-producing ornamented artifacts and utilitarian objects was killed off by a marketing takeover, not by any necessity of industrialization. 

Most importantly, the “industrial look” represents a purely aesthetic preference, and has nothing to do with industrial production. Any reader can easily verify that the iconic but not very useful Bauhaus and De Stijl sculptural artifacts were all expensively hand-made to conjure an image of the “machine aesthetic” (while much of their furniture is sadistically uncomfortable). Those objects were not in the least industrial: they actually replaced eminently practical mass-produced objects with hand-made ones that “looked” industrial, as one aesthetic extinguished another in a totalizing manner. The commonly accepted rationalization coming from the Bauhaus is made up — not supported by truth of any kind.

After its introduction in the politically-charged climate of the early decades of the 20^thCentury, the “machine aesthetic” came to be seen as a necessary condition to technological growth and development. Many people continue to sincerely believe in the fraudulent evolution “from artisan to industrial” to this day. It is taught as matter-of-fact in architecture schools. People accept this fraudulent logic, in spite of documented events in design and industrial production. The reason is that the machine aesthetic is successfully coupled to concerns for the poor and for social justice. But are those assumptions actually true? On closer examination, no. 

This observation opens up further questioning that makes today’s designers and architectural academics extremely uncomfortable (just like sitting on a De Stijl chair). Everyone has naively assumed that several generations of architects and designers in the 20^thCentury addressed ethical and social concerns as a matter of course in conducting their profession. The situation is not at all clear, being filled with contradictions. Similarly, academics are assumed to give scrupulous priority to truth about actual events and scientific discoveries.  

The new sciences of biophilia and complex adaptive systems give us tools to reshape our built environment for the better. Design, in order to be truthful and useful to humanity, needs to accommodate both our anatomy and our neuro-physiological system. Uncomfortable utensils, furniture, and living spaces deny the former; abstract, incoherent, ornament-shorn buildings and urban spaces deny the latter. 

Apple Computer’s designer Sir Jonathan Ive explains the problem neatly: “Our competitors are interesting in doing something different, or want to appear new. I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better … it’s not about … a bizarre marketing goal to appear different. [Those] are corporate goals with scant regard for people who use the product.” (Prigg, 2012). This quote from a 2012 interview applies to the Bauhaus’ remarkably successful marketing campaign, and underlines how we have to interpret modernist design from now on. 

Actually, Ive and many designers of consumer products happen to admire the simplicity of Bauhaus design. But they invariably confuse simplicity of design (lack of unnecessary clutter) with the stubborn minimalism preached by the Bauhaus. In all good design, simplicity and minimalism act in a proper balance to satisfy the functional and aesthetic requirements of the product. The Bauhaus elevated the minimalist attribute to a marketing gimmick, however, meant to sell an “image” of utopian change. What was tragic is that radical minimalism as an aesthetic attribute was then applied dogmatically to shape and remake our cities into inhuman, totalizing environments. 

What is truth in the design discipline? Several conditions come to mind. First, there is truth to historical facts and events, second, truth about verifiable phenomena and human nature, and third, mathematical truth. However, individuals and groups have often manipulated these aspects of truth in pursuing their own agendas. If we sometimes find today’s generation of practitioners disrespecting conditions for truth in design, this regrettable state of affairs seems to be inherited from the past century. Mathematics itself was discovered and developed by our neuro-physiological system, thanks to the same cognitive mechanisms used for discovering and developing adaptive design, complex patterns, and ornament. 

Discussing this topic risks generating controversy, especially among those who have been brought up to believe unquestioningly in the liberating power of the “machine aesthetic”. People are reluctant to dispute a century-old diktat that has become established tradition. It is impossible to develop an honest foundation for design, however, as long as the profession is held back by old prejudices and practices that falsely link technological progress to a peculiar but dominant aesthetic.