I have always been interested in design, but often cringe at the word because of the connotations of aesthetics it often carries with it. Visuals are important, but design to me is always linked more to function and the stories it tells rather than looks.

I just finished John Thackara’s book In the Bubble, and was pretty astonished how closely his design aesthetic matches mine. He largely avoids the sort of ridiculous “design can solve all our problems” futurism and sticks more to what’s most important to design: people and context. He encourages a “. . . shift in emphasis from what things look like to how they behave - from designing on the world to designing in the world . . .”

In a world where “design” too-often connotes fancy Voss water bottles, visually-pleasing but meaningless tubular steel chairs designed by famous architects, or modernist buildings which purposefully reject both history and the context in which they are built, Thackara’s point of view is refreshing. He writes:

Designers are needlessly constrained by the myth that everything they do has to be a unique and creative act. Rather than design everything from scratch, we should search far and wide for tried-and-tested solutions that others have already created . . . The capacity to think across boundaries, to spot opportunities at the juncture of two or more industries, and to draw relevant analogies from seemingly unrelated industries is as valuable as deep experience of a single sector . . . We need to recombine relationships - among people, ideas, and organizations and knowledge domains - and exploit scientific, natural, and cultural knowledge that is usually ignored, whether it be mimicking biology or learning from storytellers in India. Putting old knowledge into new context creates new knowledge.

I have absolutely no background for this, but apparently there’s a monkey on top of Tel Aviv’s city hall. Pretty great photo by my friend Jax.

Update:

Ah, ok, it’s actually a duck. I jumped the gun a little bit by posting it without doing further research. Artist Dudu Geva thought Tel Aviv was so ugly he created some funny animals to liven things up a little.

“My initiative stems from the fact that the city is lost,” Geva wrote in 2003 in the Tel Aviv newspaper Ha’Ir. “Tel Aviv is so ugly that you need to erase entire streets and start from scratch. At least let us decorate and celebrate in the streets. The city hall is a lost building. If a giant duck were placed on its roof, everything would change.”

There is a long and storied history of buildings being commissioned solely for the purpose of blocking views, blocking passage, or simply irritating other people. These buildings are only usually remembered as spite houses decades later if they are also obviously impaired in their design in some way, like the extremely narrow four story house in Boston pictured here.

Houses of normal size built to block views or obstruct passage are probably much less likely to be remembered as spite houses, while the obviously cramped confines of a house like the one pictured will necessitate that its story last as long as the house itself.

In one bizarre case, the builder allegedly put up a regular-sized house in a triangular lot in Freeport, New York, with the sole purpose of disrupting the street grid pattern the city was attempting to implement.

Wikipedia has much more information about Spite Houses. The New York Times also has a recent (though fluffy) article on the subject.

Here’s a bizarre practice I ran across when visiting Lithuania. In several places they had renovated notable historical buildings, but left “windows” showing the previous state. I have never seen such a bizarre way to restore buildings and yet attempt to appease conservationists. I saw this particular technique on at least a half-dozen occasions.

As a kid, my family used to take week long trips down the St. Lawrence Sea Way in our musty old cabin cruiser. I always got great pleasure from leaving the relative safety of the cabin and moving to the front deck - a maneuver that required precariously hanging off the side of the boat via a handrail and navigating a foot-wide ledge, all while the boat was in motion ad bobbing on the waves. It wasn’t terribly dangerous, but just precarious enough to put a land-lover like myself slightly on edge, and get me out of my everyday complacency. I found myself just slightly energized by doing it.

Now imagine if you had a similar experience every single day. Imagine if walking to your kitchen was enough to put you slightly on edge. That seems to be the goal of the house recently designed by architects Arakawa and Gins, featured in this article in the New York Times.

In addition to the floor, which threatens to send the un-sure-footed hurtling into the sunken kitchen at the center of the house, the design features walls painted, somewhat disorientingly, in about 40 colors; multiple levels meant to induce the sensation of being in two spaces at once; windows at varying heights; oddly angled light switches and outlets; and an open flow of traffic, unhindered by interior doors or their adjunct, privacy.

It also brings to mind Francois Roche’s Asphalt Spot, a similarly designed undulating parking lot designed to make people question their safety and complacency.