48 Thinking the Future III Walking inside an enormous artifi cial cloud on Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland. Scientists from MIT now make use of the insights revealed by the design team Diller Scofi dio + Renfro. PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY OF DILLER SCOFIDIO + RENFRO
Every object tells a story, and so does every building — a story that can move people or irritate them. Objects and buildings are shaped and constructed to give form to ideas that designers and architects don’t need to relate because they can “build” them instead. In the world of literature, each story has its own context and is tied to a particular era with all its special skills and cultural specifi city. Homer and the Odyssey, Cervantes and Don Quixote, James Joyce and Ulysses — each one is a landmark of world literature. But how do you build a story? What is design as storytelling? How do you turn “Once upon a time…” into a lamp? What once inspired our imagination in printed form has in the past 10 or 20 years begun to inhabit the world of things. An armchair that alights in the living room like a drop of water travelling in slow motion would have been technically impossible at one time. The spectacular technical creations of architects such as Rem Koolhaas are on the one side; the desire of designers to abstract and tell a story is the other. “Form follows function”, the now legendary credo of Bauhaus pioneer Mies van der Rohe, has become passé. Today, aesthetics can be totally free of ideology. This means in turn that austere Bauhausinspired design can coexist alongside fl amboyant, exuberant creations, including those of Fernando and Huberto Campana, for example. Today, the beautiful is what pleases the senses, and functionality is a prerequisite, but by no means the only criterion. Yet beauty is more than merely pleasing. At stake here, once again, is the readability of design and of architecture — Visitors to the Blur Building stand in awe in front of or within a cloud floating above the lake. They are captivated by the sheer poetry of the moment. as exemplifi ed by the Campana brothers from Brazil, who turn stuffed toys into unconventional armchairs. But is this mere playfulness? “Our aim is to get a hold on the present,” says Fernando Campana. For the hippies of the 1970s, reality had already moved far beyond the functionality venerated by the Bauhaus movement. The stories that designers tell always have something to do with their own life histories. The Campana brothers, for example, have never given up their playroom in Rio de Janeiro, where they wallow in stuffed toys and rearrange them into a fairytale context. 49 And thus everyday life is transformed into illusion. The world of MTV, iPhones and Avatars is a global reality that leaves its mark and provokes a response from the world of design and architecture — whether as an armchair made of stuffed toys or in Santiago Calatrava’s Turning Torso, a building that twists its way into the Malmö sky over 54 fl oors, complete with warped windows like something out of a Salvador Dali painting, which provide residents with a totally <strong>new</strong> and even surreal perspective. For Calatrava, the design process usually starts with sketches and studies of people and animals. This produces drawings of immense artistic power. An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art charted the birth of Calatrava’s design stories, from the original idea in draft form to the fi nished hightech structure. For the tower in Malmö, 820 tonnes of steel were worked into the framework of the façade, and <strong>new</strong> processes had to be developed to produce the 2,250 slanted windows. Is this just aesthetic playfulness? By no means. Every <strong>new</strong> advance in architecture and design generates ideas that benefi t sectors ranging from the automotive industry to recycling. Rarely do the creations of the design pioneers have only a visual dimension. For example, it was Diller Scofi dio + Renfro’s “Blur Building” — a spectacular cloud-creating structure built on Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland — that fi rst pushed scientists at MIT toward a realisation of how certain wind conditions and landscape features shift smog. But that doesn’t concern the visitors who are savouring the amazing experience of standing before or within a cloud fl oating above the lake. They are simply transfi xed by the sheer poetry of the moment and share an experience of architecture that is beyond the conceptual. In its simple beauty, the Blur Building commands an aesthetic consensus — and in its own context the Campana armchair made of stuffed toys does so as well. The top designer Philippe Starck has shown that design stories can also be disturbing. His 18-carat gold-plated guns fashioned into fl oor and bedside lamps have an obvious story to tell. Yet freed from their usual context of war and violence, they become works of art for the home. Is this merely provocation
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