This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Summer 1998, Number 5. To order this issue or a sub- scription, visit the HDM homepage at <http://mitpress.mit.edu/HDM>.
© 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher
Whatever Happened
toTotal Design? by Mark Wigley
WHAT DOES “TOTAL DESIGN” mean to- day? What does it mean, let’s say, after postmodernism? Not so long ago, the expression was part of the basic vocab- ulary of architects, teachers, and crit- ics. Yet it is remarkably absent from contemporary debates and seems to play no role in schools today. What happened?
EXPLODING ARCHITECTURE
Total design has two meanings: first, what might be called the implosion of design, the focusing of design inward on a single intense point; second, what might be called the explosion of de- sign, the expansion of design out to touch every possible point in the world. In either case, the architect is in control, centralizing, orchestrating, dominating. Total design is a fantasy about control, about architecture as control.
Implosive design takes over a space, subjecting every detail, every surface, to an over-arching vision. The archi- tect supervises, if not designs, every- thing: structure, furniture, wallpaper, carpets, doorknobs, light fittings, din- nerware, clothes, and flower arrange-
ments. The result is a space with no gaps, no cracks, no openings onto oth- er possibilities, other worlds. The par- adigm of this approach is the domestic interior completely detached from the chaotic pluralism of the world. A whole generation of remarkable archi- tects — including Bruno Taut, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Josef Hoffmann, Josef Maria Olbrich, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Hendrik Berlage, Peter Behrens, and Henry van der Velde — produced hyper-inte- riors that enveloped their occupants in a single, seamless multimedia garment. Inspired by Richard Wagner’s mid- 19th-century concept of the “total work of art,” in which different art forms would collaborate to produce a singular experience, these designers were eager to place the architect at the center of the process: the architect would orchestrate the overall theatri- cal effect. Collaborative organizations of artists such as the Vienna Secession carried out an architectural mission; they would implode design to create environments with an extraordinary density of sensuous effect.
The idea of explosive design haunts
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the Harvard Graduate School of De- sign in the legacy of Walter Gropius and his concept of “total architecture,” in which the architect is authorized to design everything, from the teaspoon to the city. Architecture is understood to be everywhere. Indeed, it is argued that the influence of the architect has to be felt at every scale, or society would go terribly wrong. This point of view produced an extraordinary legacy.
Architects have roamed the world, leaving their mark on every tree, lamppost, and fire hydrant. They all have their city plans, furniture, wallpa- per, clothes, and coffee pots. Many have cars. Some have ships. From the train designed by Gropius and Adolf Meyer to the airplane and automatic washing machine of Rudolf Schindler, the 20th-century architect admits no limit. Following the lead of organiza- tions like the Deutscher Werkbund and the English Design and Industries Association, men and women trained as architects defined and dominated the field of industrial design as it emerged early in this century. This fantasy is still very much alive. These days, the teaspoon doesn’t seem small enough and the city doesn’t seem large enough. Students don’t hesitate to de- velop projects on the architecture of the microchip or on networks for in- terplanetary transportation.
These two concepts of total design have played a major role in the forma- tion of 20th-century architectural dis- course. Both are responses to industrialization. Implosive design is usually understood as a form of resist- ance, if not the last stand. Architecture gathers all its resources in one sacred place where architects collaborate with other artists to produce an image of such intensity that it blocks out the in-
creasingly industrialized world. In contrast, those who explode architec- ture out into every corner of the world embrace the new age of standardiza- tion.
The line between the romantic idea of resistance to industrialization through the design of hand-crafted, one-off environments, and the equally romantic idea of embracing progres- sive machine-age reproduction, is
drawn many times in the standard his- tory books. For example, it is often drawn between two schools, or rather, two directorships of the same school: between Henry van der Velde’s leader- ship of the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts, and Gropius’s program for that same school, renamed the Bauhaus when he became its head in 1919. The Bauhaus developed mass-reproducible designs, the production and licensing of which literally funded some of its day-to-day operations. Hence the fac- tory aesthetic of the school’s Dessau building, designed by Gropius and Meyer in 1925-1926.
Less obviously, however, this em- brace of industrialization begins with what might be called an explosion of the designer. Not only are objects de- signed, mass-produced, and dissemi- nated; the designer himself or herself is designed as a product, to be manu- factured and distributed. The Bauhaus produced designers and exported them around the world. The vast glass walls of the Dessau building which, in Gropius’s words, “dematerialize” the line between inside and outside, sug- gest this immanent launching outward of both students and their designs. Even the teaching within the studios was a product. Gropius said that he only felt free to resign in 1928 because the success of the Bauhaus was finally
established through the appointments of its graduates to teaching posts in foreign countries and through the adoption of its curriculum internation- ally.
Yet the line between the two atti- tudes — and this is true of most lines that are drawn insistently — is finally not so clear. It is, in fact, mythological, a reassuring fantasy invented despite the existence of a dense and nuanced archive of historical evidence. Explo- sion cannot easily be separated from implosion. For a start, the Bauhaus was itself explicitly conceived as a “to- tal work of art” in Wagner’s sense, a glorious “building” produced by a sin- gular implosion of different disci- plines, resources, and pedagogical techniques. Gropius never stopped searching for what he called the “one- ness of a common idea” around which artists of every kind could be gathered in a grand collaboration. His rhetoric is characterized by terms like “coordi- nation,” “incorporation,” “welding,” “synthesis,” “cooperation,” “unified,” “collective,” “interwoven,” “inte- grate,” and so on. Here is a typical re- mark of his, from the 1923 essay “The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus”: “A real unity can be achieved only by coherent restatement of the formal theme by repetition of its integral properties in all parts of the whole.” The institutional space of this singular idea is even a domestic interi- or. The Bauhaus factory presented it- self as a family scene, complete with snapshots of sleeping, eating, and playing; this “family” image was rein- forced by subsequent histories that de- scribe the internal squabbles. At the nexus of the explosion of architecture is an implosion in which every detail of a domestic space is supposedly gov- erned by a single idea.
If the explosive factory school was a total art work, then the implosive hy- per-interior can be equally understood as a kind of factory. Consider Olbrich’s Secession Exhibition Building of 1898. The project symbolizes the quest for the total work of art. Its design in- volved the collaboration of Gustav
Architects build up steam, as it were, in the domestic interior, break down the walls, and then explode their designs out into the landscape in small fragments — thus they move from designing everything in a single work of architecture to adding a trace of architecture to everything.
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Klimt, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoff- mann, Othmar Schimkowitz, Georg Klimpt, and Ludwig Hevesi. Olbrich, like his teachers, was very much under the spell of Richard Wagner. As a stu- dent, he often dreamed up architectur- al spaces to match scenes from Wagner’s operas. The Secession Building looks like a temple, a sacred space of art whose gleaming white sur- faces serve to detach it from the pro- fane surrounding city. It was presented and received as such. Beyond its mon- umental entrance and lobby beneath the gilded-laurel dome, however, lies a large, undifferentiated space, lit by huge industrial skylights, with only three windows, usually screened off, high up on one side wall. The world is thus blocked out, intensifying the im- plosion of artistic energy. Through the device of moveable walls, the interior space accommodated any kind of exhi- bition.
Over one hundred Secession exhi- bitions were held there, each of which was considered a total work of art composed of sculptures, fabrics, wall- papers, carpets, friezes, music, etc. Ar- chitects like Olbrich, Hoffmann, Behrens, and Joze Pleçnik designed the exhibitions in collaboration with the artists. In this way, the building works as a kind of machine for pro- ducing unique environments. Much of the art presented in the building was sold, but so too was the decoration: collectors would literally buy the walls. This absence of a firm distinction be- tween the frame and the artifacts be- ing framed is, of course, the whole point of the total work of art. The building is a factory for the production of total works of art, works that then move out into the world. Designs test- ed in the temple-factory as singular in- stallations become the prototypes for mass production in the workshops. In another sense, the building is a kind of theater, a windowless box within which an endless array of different sets can be assembled; the aesthetic plays staged therein isolate themselves from the world, but they do so precisely to exert an influence upon the world.
Implosion and explosion are there- fore bound together; in fact, the link between them is crucial. The hyper- interior has an explosive intensity. The sarcasm of the best-known critical at- tacks on such spaces, like that of Adolf Loos (which would soon be echoed by Le Corbusier), thinly masks the fear of being overwhelmed by both the deco- rative excess and the absolute unifor- mity of style. For their critics, these spaces produce a claustrophobic sense of “suffocating” pressure. It is precise- ly this intensity that produces the blast that disseminates architecture out through time and space. The modern architect’s obsession with breaking down the barriers between inside and outside can be reread in these terms; it is part of the dynamic between implo- sion and explosion. Architects build up steam, as it were, in the domestic inte- rior, break down the walls, and then explode their designs out into the landscape in small fragments — thus they move from designing everything in a single work of architecture to adding a trace of architecture to every- thing.
Consider another obvious example: Frank Lloyd Wright. Look at how he overdetermines his early domestic in- teriors, even lowering the ceilings to produce a kind of claustrophobic pres- sure in which his total environments press themselves against you. His box- es are then exploded and the relentless design work bursts out of its domestic confinement, heads across the garden to the street, then down the road to configure the neighborhood and, eventually, with Broadacre City, slides across the entire continent in a single vast project. From the absence of win- dows in the Secession Building to the vast walls of glass in the Dessau Bauhaus, this inward then outward movement is repeated in the career of architect after architect and can, like any explosion, be restaged on a small scale in a single project.
This pyrotechnic operation, which dominates 20th-century architecture, is not the destruction of the interior but rather its expansion out into the
street and across the planet. The plan- et is transformed into a single interior, which needs design. All architecture becomes interior design.
RADIOACTIVE FUSION
The explosive dissemination of archi- tecture is a form of radiation. It was understood as such, as can be seen, for example, in one of Gropius’s first speeches to the Bauhaus in July 1919. Describing the school, he announces that, “Art must finally find its crys- talline expression in a great total work of art. And this great total work of art, this cathedral of the future, will then shine with its abundance of light into the smallest objects of everyday life.” This passage draws on the expression- ist rhetoric of the manifesto for the Berlin Workers Council on Art that Gropius, along with Bruno Taut, pre- pared just before coming to the Bauhaus. Lionel Feininger’s famous expressionist etching of the Bauhaus for the school’s program, like Taut’s drawings of his Stadtkrone fantasy, shows the bright light radiating in every direction from a crystalline inte- rior. Ultimately that radiance becomes the radiation of both designers and de- signs out from an explosively intense interior.
The same radiance can be seen in the etching of the Sommerfeld House that Gropius and other Bauhaus artists assembled in 1920-21. The house’s all- enveloping interior of carved wood, hanging tapestries, etc., is usually asso- ciated with the expressionist prehisto- ry of the school, but this kind of one-off environment remained a cru- cial part of the Bauhaus mission to dis- seminate the architect and architectural design as industrial prod- ucts. A year after the house was fin- ished, Johannes Itten demanded that the school either produce unique ob- jects or fully enter the “outside world” of mass production. Gropius respond- ed that the two approaches to design should exist side by side in a “fusion.” Exactly the same kind of intensity of the Sommerfeld interior can be seen in the theater productions that paral-
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leled the most industrialized years of the institution and that were monu- mentalized in Gropius’s 1927 design for a “Total Theater.” His redefinition and expansion of the role of the archi- tect presupposes a relentless trajectory from the details of the private house to the nation and beyond; here, from The New Architecture and the Bauhaus of 1935:
My idea of the architect as a coordinator — whose business it is to unify the vari- ous formal, technical, social and econom- ic problems that arise in connection with building — inevitably led me 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 na- tional planning. I believe that the New Architecture is destined to dominate a far more comprehensive sphere than build- ing means today; and that from the inves- tigation of its details we shall advance towards an ever-wider and profounder conception of design as one great cognate whole.
To think again about the relation- ship between architecture and the de- sign arts, we have to rethink the dynamic between the isolated hyper- interior and its explosion across the wider landscape. It is precisely in this dynamic that the contemporary status of architecture and the design arts was renegotiated. This rethinking would then force us to reexamine the stan- dard accounts of our prehistory. The most obvious starting point would be Nikolaus Pevsner’s 1936 Pioneers of the Modern Movement, an initially unsuc- cessful book that became a hit only when reedited and symptomatically retitled Pioneers of Modern Design for the 1948 Museum of Modern Art edi- tion.
Pevsner draws a straight line from mid-19th-century design reform through to Gropius, insisting that modern architecture developed from the design arts. This is a strategic his- tory: it describes how architects took over the revised concept of design in
their efforts to conquer the world, lit- erally following the passage of the word “design” from the English re- form movement to the German mod- ernist debates. Yet Pevsner’s own use of the terms “architecture” and “de- sign” is ambiguous. He argues that modern architecture is design — noth- ing but design at a large scale — ex- trapolating early discussions of the details of domestic wallpaper to ideas about the overall organization of a city. At the same time, however, Pevs- ner repeatedly differentiates between architecture and design in ways that seem at odds with his larger argument. We have since become used to sepa- rating these words (e.g., the Museum of Modern Art’s infamous “Depart- ment of Architecture and Design”), as if we know what these two terms mean. Pevsner’s book, which is still something of a bible and can even be found in some airport book shops, should have made the distinction problematic.
When Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson made their respec- tive suggestions to Pevsner on how to modify the original 1936 edition, Johnson confidentially questioned Pevsner’s evaluation of Gropius’s im- portance, insisting that Gropius was incapable of designing anything. But Pevsner stood his ground, as if he un-
derstood, at some level, that what gets designed in Gropius’s hands is an insti- tutional structure. Gropius effectively turned design into a form of manage- ment, with the architect as “coordina- tor.” The supremacy of the architect in total design, whether implosive or explosive, becomes that of the manag- er. Paradoxically, this form of control was underscored by the absence, at the
Bauhaus, of an official “department of architecture” for a long time even though the school was run by an archi- tect, understood itself as a form of ar- chitecture, saw all forms of art as forms of building, and presented ar- chitecture as its endpoint — architec- ture was running the show without actually being presented as such. Even more symptomatic of all this is the fact that Gropius couldn’t draw. This was no tragedy, of course. A number of fa- mous architects do not draw. It might even be considered a virtue today in some circles. And although Gropius wrote letters to his family describing the difficulty of surviving in Peter Behrens’s office with such a liability, he soon discovered that his own strength lay in collaborations. Before he designed objects, he designed rela- tionships, partnerships with Adolf Meyer, Marcel Breuer, and so on.
None of this is so very modern. The idea of architecture as a form of management dates at least to Vitruvius and to the idea that the architect needs to know a little something about everything. The figure of the architect became established as the organizer of domains about which he or she doesn’t necessarily have expertise. Aesthetic management is obviously a part of this, but not necessarily a particularly important part. This concept of archi-
tecture as management informs the whole history of the discipline, and shows no sign of going away. On the contrary, the proliferation of different architectures through the 1960s and ’70s, in the wake of always-frustrated attempts to unify modernism, can be understood as a proliferation of differ- ent theories of management. And if you look closely at each of these theo-
The architects who talk about chaos, absence, fragmentation, and indeterminacy usually work hard to assure that you know that a design is theirs by using signature shapes and colors. Arguments about the impossibility of “the total image” are employed in fact to produce precisely such an image — a signed image that fosters brand loyalty.
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ries, you find the dream of total design very close to the surface.
Buckminster Fuller, for example, insisted that design was nothing more than resource management. He be- lieved that the architect had to be a “comprehensive designer” capable of operating at any scale. Not by chance was the first article on Fuller by his first biographer entitled “Total De- sign.” Fuller’s mission was to trans- form the planet into a single art work. Obviously the ecological movement, which Fuller did much to stimulate, equated design and management. A not-so-close reading of classic texts of the movement like Ian McHarg’s 1969 Design With Nature reveals a totalizing aesthetic ambition. Ecological archi- tecture must fit seamlessly into the grand total design. On the technologi- cal front, the engineer Ove Arup’s concept of “total architecture” called for engineers to collaborate with ar- chitects to produce works of art by op- erating at every scale on every building system in terms of the architect’s sin- gular aesthetic vision. Environmental control packages, for example, should be organized by the same vision that oversaw the composition of the door frames. Much of the megastructural tradition promoted the idea of “total planning.” Think of Superstudio’s Continuous Monument project of 1969, which they described as “a single piece of architecture to be extended over the whole world . . . an architec- tural model for total urbanization” that marches sublimely across the sur- face of the planet.
Clearly, the dream of the total work of art did not fade in modernism’s wake. On the contrary, all of the issues raised by architects and theorists of re- cent generations that seem, at first, to signal the end of the idea of the total work of art turn out to be, on closer look, a thin disguise of the traditional totalizing ambitions of the architect.
FRESH HERRINGS
Consider “flexibility,” the idea of an architecture that could assume any particular arrangement. Most flexible
projects turn out to have inflexible aesthetic agendas. Or, more precisely, flexibility is itself a singular aesthetic. Look at the 1958 “Industrialized House” project by George Nelson, an architect who became famous as an in- dustrial designer. The house is con- ceived as an industrial design product, a system of parts that can be infinitely rearranged. But Nelson never pub- lished more than one arrangement of the house, which included detailed color images of the model’s interior, complete with wall hangings, carpet, and dinnerware. At the very moment that he announces that the architect should provide only a framework for change, Nelson installs a total work of art. Likewise, Christopher Alexander’s 1977 A Pattern Language installs a sin- gular aesthetic regime in the guise of a set of innocent building blocks that seem capable of infinite rearrange- ment. The last of these 253 “patterns” is an attack on “total design.” The hypocrisy of the attack is evident in the final lines that instruct the reader to hang personal things on walls rather than follow the dictates of designers. A designer claiming a total vision dic- tates that the totalizing instincts of all other designers should be resisted. The apparent flexibility of his system actually integrates all design into a transnational and “timeless” aesthetic pattern that can only be perceived by the master architect/manager. With systems theory, cybernetics, semiotics, and fractal geometry, the number of ways of absorbing difference into a singular structure continues to grow and to act as the totalizing architect’s best friend.
Think, too, of the different dis- courses about the absence of the archi- tect. Bernard Rudofsky’s bestseller, Architecture Without Architects, based on his 1964 exhibition at MOMA, would seem to defeat the master de- signer by drawing attention to that which remains untouched by the ar- chitect. But Rudofsky’s opening para- graph describes his work as providing a “total picture” of planetary architec- ture of great value to the designer.
The architecture he shows usually bleeds off the edge of the frame of each photograph to convey the sense of a seamless environment, an endless fabric escaping the object fetishism of the architect. Images from a multitude of countries are assembled in one book to construct the total picture — a mo- saic of patterns that date back to antiq- uity and thus transcend the purview of any one designer. The use of contem- porary technology or “design” objects by non-architects is carefully excluded from the image to produce the sense of an immaculate, timeless environ- ment. And more remarkably, the semi- nal essays by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault on the “death of the author” have recently been used to au- thorize the work of a few signature de- signers. In a comic turn, rival authors have competed for the right to an- nounce the death of the author.
Similarly, the postmodernist dis- course about pluralism, multiplicity, and heterogeneity is inevitably used as an excuse for singularity. Robert Ven- turi’s call for “complexity and contra- diction” is surprisingly intolerant of alternative positions. The proponents of “critical regionalism” see the same architectural qualities everywhere rather than the unique site-specific differences they advocate. Such plural- ist arguments are used as cover for a particular aesthetic. And the architects who talk about chaos, absence, frag- mentation, and indeterminacy usually work very hard to assure that you know that a particular design is theirs by using recognizable — signature — shapes and colors. Once again, argu- ments about the impossibility of “the total image” are employed in fact to produce precisely such an image — a signed image that fosters brand loyal- ty.
Architects who say, “I don’t think I can or should control the whole envi- ronment,” are usually, in fact, claiming control. Rather than simply accepting any interference with their vision that might occur, they insist upon indeter- minacy or incompletion to regain con- trol of those zones that elude them.
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They label them as danger or pleasure zones — red light districts, in a sense. And, of course, red light districts are never all that dangerous; usually they are highly regulated and predictable. If you study the work of these architects, you will find no gaps. Every potential gap is labeled “gap” and thereby brought back into line. Incompletion is an aesthetic. It is a design choice, and a good choice for many designers. Much of the pleasure that we take in some architects’ work comes from that choice. Indeed, presenting an aesthetic of incompletion requires a lot of ex- pertise. It’s probably harder to con- struct than the effect of completion.
Obviously there is a difference be- tween providing a rough framework for individual variation and designing the client’s slippers to match the car- pets that match the chairs that match the wallpaper that matches the room that swallowed the fly. But the differ- ence is not that one is more totalizing than the other. Look at how the archi- tects of incompletion, pluralism, and
contradiction drag us all into their own homes — typically in the pages of Architectural Digest, the contemporary reference work on total design, or the equivalent pages of fashion magazines. One by one, the postmodern archi- tects walk us through their immaculate and ever-so-precisely lit and pho- tographed domestic spaces, pausing to celebrate their books, pets, furniture, clothes, and art works. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown take time out from decorating sheds to discuss the frieze on the walls of their precisely calibrated dining room. Peter Eisen- man puts chaos theory on hold while describing the view from his cottage in Princeton. The architects whose phi- losophy seems to call for an end to to- tal design present their private spaces
as temples to such design. Somehow these totalizing images legitimate the dissemination of supposedly non-to- talizing design and theory. Once again, an intense implosion of the domestic interior is used to trigger an explosive dispersal of architecture. The ever-in- creasing physical and intellectual mo- bility of the architect, the frequent flyer between countries and disci- plines, is somehow nailed down in the very public display of his or her fixed “private” interior.
TOTAL THEORY
What follows from all this is that the expression “total design” is extremely misleading. Design is either design or it is not, the way pregnancy used to be. There is no such thing as non-totaliz- ing design. All design is total design. This was already established in the 16th century when design was made the center of architectural training. Take, for example, the promotion of architecture into the academic ranks with its admission to Vasari’s 1563
Academia del Disegno, an institution that unified the arts around the con- cept of design. Design, the drawing that embodies an idea, was understood as the magic mechanism by which the practical world of architecture could aspire to the theoretical level of gen- tlemanly scholarship. Design is always a matter of theory. Design is not a thing in the world. It’s a theoretical reading of the world. Or, more pre- cisely, it is the gesture in which theory is identified in the material world. To point to design is to point to theory. The model, of course, is the supposed- ly immaculate theory embodied in the immaculate design of the cosmos by the “Divine Architect,” as Vasari puts it. The architect’s claim to fame was precisely the totalizing capacity of de-
sign. The default pretension of the ar- chitect is to capture the grandest scale of order.
This idea was faithfully adhered to at the Bauhaus with its so-called laws of design. These laws — the center of the training, the first thing to be learned after one walked through the door — were a series of totalizing claims about form. If design is the bridge between the immaterial world of ideas and the material world of ob- jects, then a theory is required to con- trol that relationship. A set of structural rules maintains the integrity of the bridge. Gropius called for “sound theoretical instruction in the laws of design,” insisting that such a “theoretic basis” is the essential pre- requisite for collective work on total architecture, the “solid foundation” for unity. The theory was taught first by Johannes Itten and then by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, whose first biography by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (with a preface by Gropius) is symptomatically subti- tled Experiment in Totality. Design pre- supposes totalizing theory. It is not by chance that Pevsner’s Pioneers of Mod- ern Design begins with a whole chapter on “Theories of Art from Morris to Gropius.” Even the interpretation of particular objects that follows begins with the analysis of wallpaper and car- pet patterns by the Journal of Design and Manufacture, which was started in 1849 by the group that gravitated around Henry Cole in London. The Journal was first and foremost a jour- nal of theory. The preface to its first issue announced that it would offer “something like a systematic attempt to establish recognized principles.” In doing so, it was attempting to improve the various schools of design that had been founded in response to an 1836 government decree that such princi- ples should be established. Strong de- sign presupposes strong theory. Design is, as it were, the appearance of theory. It is therefore no surprise that we are addressing these issues in a school. And not just any school but the Graduate School of Design, called thus since 1936 precisely because de-
While insisting on the impossibility of producing a single, totalizing image of modern architecture or even postmodern architecture, Jencks proceeds to produce such an image and even to encourage the reader to use it as a guide to the following text.
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sign was believed to be the element that unified the departments of archi- tecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism. Design was once again the totalizing agent. Gropius arrived here shortly afterward and began his cam- paign to teach “design fundamentals” that echoed the Bauhaus’s “laws of de- sign.”
If design is always totalizing and in- volves the mystique of theory, then the question of the fate of total design be- comes the question of total theory. This is especially true if we want to discuss the relationship between the professional expertise of what we have up to now called the architect and that of the designer. After all, theory is it- self an art work, something designed. Theorists such as Vitruvius and Alber- ti insist that the ordering and structure of their respective treatises match that which they prescribe for buildings. Likewise, Pevsner understood his in- vention of the idea of the “modern movement” as a construction job, the centerpiece of a total design. He fol- lowed this a year later with a book on industrial art in England and contin- ued by writing countless essays on de- sign and launching a campaign on the subject as editor of the Architectural Review. Pevsner assumes the role of in- tellectual manager, exploiting the managerial pretensions embedded within the German art historical tradi- tion to which he was closely tied. This tied him also to Gropius. The idea of history and theory as management is linked to the idea of design as manage- ment. It now seems inevitable that Gropius brought another such manag- er, Sigfried Giedion, to the GSD.
But what did postmodernism do to total theory? An answer might begin with the obvious figure, Mr. Postmod- ernism himself, Charles Jencks — an underestimated figure. Jencks’s ac- count of postmodernism evolved from a critique of Pevsner, who was his in- tellectual grandfather insofar as his dissertation adviser was Reyner Ban- ham, whose own dissertation adviser was Pevsner. Instead of killing the fa- ther, then, he attempts to kill the
grandfather — which is probably more difficult. Jencks’s dissertation was pub- lished in 1973 as Modern Movements in Architecture — the plural “movements” was a response to Pevsner’s singular account. It begins by criticizing that account, footnoting Pevsner’s final re- mark that the modern style was “total- itarian,” before going on to reject all such “unified,” “single strand,” “all- embracing” theory in favor of “a series of discontinuous movements,” a “pho- to-strip” account. Yet Jencks’s pluralist manifesto is no less managerial in tone, no less an obsessive survey of the scene that places everything within a single picture. The photo-strip is itself a single image.
Perhaps the clearest example of this is the chart with which Jencks begins the main body of his argument. It po- sitions every architect and tendency in a system of evolutionary branches. Thus, while insisting on the impossi- bility of producing a single, totalizing image of modern architecture or even postmodern architecture, Jencks pro- ceeds to produce such an image and even to encourage the reader to use it as a guide to the following text. The chart is an “evolutionary tree” in the tradition of Banister Fletcher’s famous frontispiece to A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, although Jencks rejects Fletcher’s hierarchy by having his chart lie on its side and giv- ing the different strands equal value. There are no gaps, no radical disconti- nuities. Everything eventually flows into everything else. All architects and architectures are genetically related and “cross-fertilize” promiscuously. Discontinuities exist for a while, but eventually the separate strands are re- joined. Jencks keeps on producing such charts, rearranging the positions of each element but never altering the basic kind of diagram. An interesting history emerges from a comparison of the progressive remapping of architec- ture in the different charts. What re- mains striking, though, is their overall look. The lava-lamp aesthetic of the first chart published in 1970 gives way to hard-edged diagonals in the books
on postmodernism, which in turn give way to horizontal bands. The chart is a stylish interior in which everything can be seamlessly placed. The latest fold-out version even includes a mug- shot of each architect and one of their designs. The history of architecture can be captured in a single glance. This is nothing but design, total de- sign.
Furthermore, in the grand tradition of total design, the theorist of plural- ism and the discontinuous universe re- peatedly invites us into his domestic interior, using a series of articles, spe- cial magazine issues, and books to re- veal the hyper-designed details of his own “thematic house.” Most recently, in the October 1997 Architectural Di- gest, he shows us a new total work of art: his house and garden in Scotland. Yet again, a leading disseminator of the idea of the impossibility of a singu- lar, totalizing image somehow organ- izes that claim around the image of a hyper-interior. His countless publica- tions explode, as it were, out from this space, their inconsistencies somehow stitched together by its obsessive co- herence.
Indeed, the global infrastructure of publications works hard to construct a continuous, gapless surface. The dream of total design has moved into the media. The explosive radiance of the interior bursting out of itself and leaving all those little fragments of de- sign and designers across the land- scape is first, after all, a radiance of the media. Returning to the early exam- ples of total design described above, one can see this already in the publica- tions of the Vienna Secession, which mass-produced countless immaculate photographs of one-off, hand-crafted total interiors, sending them out into the very world which those interiors seemingly reject. Likewise Moholy- Nagy’s designs for the famous series of Bauhaus publications provided an overall look, a totalizing space in which the diversity of mass-produced objects could be inserted. Exhibitions have the same totalizing effect. Het- erogeneous objects succumb to a sin-
7 HARVARD DESIGN MAGAZINE
SUMMER 1998
© 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher
Design Arts and Architecture
Whatever Happened to Total Design?
gle overarching aesthetic regime by being located within a uniformly de- signed exhibition space. Likewise, the display of architecture in museums, books, and so on. If architecture has been exploded in fragments across the planet, numerous devices exist for compacting it back into an interior.
THE JOYS OF FRUSTRATION
The most remarkable thing about this relentless drive toward total design through the pulsating rhythms of im- plosions and explosions is its constant failure. If all design is total design, then the totalizing dream is always frustrated. The architect remains a marginal figure who doesn’t enjoy the respect shown today to the design artist — whether landscape designer, interior designer, furniture designer, or industrial designer. Some kind of inverse relationship exists between the huge scale of architects’ fantasies and the smallness of the responsibility they are given. The architect’s claim on the whole world is somehow grounded in an ambivalent social status. The archi- tect is the speculator par excellence, an obsessive dreamer. In no other disci- pline are the general claims bigger, the fetishism of minute details more ob- sessive. Architecture is first and fore- most a discourse, mobilized by the concept of design that is constantly in- voked but rarely examined. In examin- ing it here, one might even want to celebrate the frustration of the archi- tect, a frustration that does not abate even when his or her dream is realized. The more one studies the totalizing images and narratives, the more one discovers parts of the architecture, the publication, or the history that have escaped or slipped the grip of those who so resolutely frame and present them. Indeed, the wonderful thing about architecture is how it so easily escapes the people who produce it. The seemingly continuous surface is always riddled with gaps, twists, and complications. Total design is every- where, yet seductively elusive.
Mark Wigley is Director of Graduate Studies at the School of Architecture, Princeton University. He is the author of Deconstructivist Architecture (Museum of Modern Art, 1988; Philip Johnson, co-author), The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (MIT Press, 1993) and White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (MIT Press, 1995). He is cur- rently working on a prehistory of virtual space. This essay is based on a talk given at the fall 1997 GSD Architecture Department colloqui- um on The Design Arts and Architecture.
8 HARVARD DESIGN MAGAZINE
SUMMER 1998
© 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher
