michael-dean-k/

I have been brewing on this Call for New Aesthetics. I’m stuck on the question of why we need a new aesthetic for the 21st century. To go one layer deeper, what role does an aesthetic actually achieve? Like let’s say you can trace the lineage from the iPhone’s design back to Bauhaus. If the Bauhaus never existed, and smartphones took on a different aesthetic, say one that is more ornate, would we not still have TikTok? I guess this all ties back to my conclusion at the end of architecture school, that probably played some role in leaving the industry: it is capital that controls everything, and as revolutionary as architecture aspires to be, it is something like frivolous dressing atop capital aspirations (picked this up from Manfredo Tafuri, a Marxist critic of architecture; IANA Marxist, but the critique is hard to forget). No matter how you design a bank, a bank is a bank. Bauhaus was not a revolutionary aesthetic movement, but a response to the economic reality of mass production (could be an oversimplification, but I think it's accurate to see it as a response, as most architecture is). There is a long history of architects trying to proactively change culture, but failing because they don't actually have leverage. And so what you really need is not just an aesthetic or formal style, but a reimagining of the programs, institutions, and rituals of society, and then a way to use form/ornament to realize those ambitious visions. Put another way, architecture can’t matter without the vision and power of a client, and I don’t think there’s a future for architecture within the OS of capitalism—but if capitalism is about to implode, maybe there’s a new opportunity.

Waiting for my wife, I am sitting in the lobby of a firm I quit 4 years ago—though I haven’t entered the building in 5, since COVID—and I see Westler slip out the elevator bay; out walks Westler into the barrel-vaulted lobby, out through those gold revolving doors that started and ended many days of my years. Westler. He’s still here! Alive! I remember him like I do an old dream. His placid demeanor and dry humor, a goatee, his subtle mischief and possible creepiness. I don’t know if I ever really knew him behind that caricature. He designed multi-story basements for megapolic airports… I think (a kind of endless machine work, the coordination of billions of lines, cognitive sterilization, a tectonic death in service of a suitcase city, a labirynth of conveyor belts). Is he doing that same thing? Did they find some new VR guy to render his city of luggage? Of course I know absolutely nothing of Westler’s life—for all I know, he has a pearl of a daughter that makes sacrificing his peak hours worth it, forever—but in my assumption, that the company we both worked for is something of a life-sucker, a hunter and skinner of the young and ambitious, a building broker that drools steel angled towers across the East, across Dubai and Korea and Singapore, an entity in Bryant Park that overworks and underpays but leaks enormous partner bonuses that enables the CEO to buy luxury pets and park penthouses while speaking at Venetian conferences on the virtues of design, I imagine Westler as a sleepwalker. I imagine every day of the last five years, as he wisps out those gold-trimmed revolving doors, he finds relief in his break, but doesn’t stop to question the sacrifice, and knows not the basic mystery, “time flies.”

Now that I’ve retrieved my wife from the grips of her Tower, we are back in Penn Station—because no more trains run out of Grand Central this late—and we see a familiar figure, a man on fentanyl hunched over at 90 degrees. “Is that the same guy from this morning?” My wife said sadly; but I said, given he spent his entire day in the same spot, same position and same trance, he looks to me a whole lot like Westler.

This is an extreme comparison—to compare the default path to a lethal addiction—but it tracks to how I feel, an anger over a design firm kidnapping my very pregnant wife.

This morning I finally visualized the whole chain of command, the reason she works until 4am, and why 1 AM is considered a “good night”: somewhere in Dubai is a very rich man, and he’s decided to cure the anxiety over his massive pile of money but funding a Tower that, most likely, no one will live in. So he hires a team of henchman, the “client reps,” and it’s their job to dangle glamorous limitless design work to very hungry architects that fear the market could evaporate at any moment. So naturally, the firm accepts the work at half the rate, and I assume half of that is just cut off the top to reward and keep the partners fat (the 80%, the staff—they don’t matter, they are burnt and churnt over, with eager beardless faces eternally sending resumes, because where else in America can you build DUBAI). And so the client, being entitled and aware of our desperation, will throw a screaming fit if my wife and her 2 juniors can’t pull off the labor of 10 people, every single night. Staffing can’t be honest because it’s trying to survive, and business development can’t be selective because it knows it’s runway, and so what emerges is a kind of caste system where office workers are expected to work 80 hour weeks without overtime or questions.

I’m at the Rose Reading Room in the New York Public Library. It’s old, almost like a church, and when someone slides their wood chair on the tile floor to get up, it lets out a horrendous screech that echoes through the whole hall. Surely, NYPL knows about this? I wonder, why do they not have felt tips on the bottom of the chairs? Have they tried this? Are they opposed? Would they stop me if, one by one, I personally installed felt tips on the bottom of each chair?

There has to be a better answer to the “why is nothing beautiful anymore?” discourse. This usually takes the form of plucking two objects, two hundred years apart, to make a point. If you take the best thing from the past and the worst thing from the present, you can make any conclusion you want, in any field. Are there not beautiful phone booths made in the 2000s? Might there actually be more of them than in the past?

Ultimately, though, I’m less interested in aesthetic studies if they don’t tie back to character. What good is beautiful architecture is everyone is ugly in spirit? I mean that. If we built beautiful, luxurious, maximalist cities, might that not reflect a kind of materialism in the soul of its people? Not saying that’s a given, but the real dilemma of architecture—the one that troubled me in my later years in school—is if the design of our world actually has any role in shaping its inhabitants. Maybe that’s an unfair thing to ask of bricks and steel. But maybe that’s why I shifted to other fields of design that are more influential in shaping virtue.

The Big Duck is a historical landmark in Long Island. A duck farm that sold eggs and produce used a 25’ plaster duck as its highway billboard. It became “world famous” from Robert Venturi’s book on architectural theory, Learning from Las Vegas, which coined the Big Duck as the microcosmic example of “roadside architecture.”

I recently spoke about said duck in a presentation to writers. The farm and the duck are useful metaphors, working in a duality. If you only build the farm, no one driving by will pull over to see what you’ve done. If you only build the highway duck, your farm is a letdown. The trick is to build both: to have the heart of a farmer, but to accept that it’s also your responsibility to appear on the highway.

If you printed every signed contract through Docusign and then stacked them, would it be taller than Seattle’s Docusign Tower? Yes, definitely, but could you match the foot print too? Like could you make the entire Docusign Tower just out of stacks of signed contracts?

1. Small bedrooms: not much bigger than the space required to get into bed. No TVs, computer, or furniture. A bedroom isn’t a place to spend time in. Instead, reallocate that space for well-designed walk-in closets and storage.
2. The core space of the house should be “the studio,” a series of spaces for making things and working together. There should be a hierarchy, many nooks for specific functions (organized with sound/sight in mind), that all revolve around a central rotunda (for discussion, relaxation, review, presentation, wall display, showing guests). Again, no TV, that could be in a separate theatre room.
3. Design art & ornament around spaces of biological rhythms. You’ll use your dining room 3x a day, and your bathroom even more. This is where you display family crests and things that will consistently remind you of your values.
4. Minimal friction to outdoor walk: ideally, most functions are on the first floor so you get get outside without thinking. A staircase will provide the slightest friction, making you go outside less than you could.
5. Be mindful of where you place clocks. If any. I would recommend not having them in bedrooms, dining rooms, or studio spaces. Maybe put one in the foyer. If you need to know the time, you go to the clock space. The time is not something you should be ambiently aware of.
6. Time capsule cube storage: as often as you can, document and throw out things that won’t have much sentimental or practical value. For things you do want to save, don’t just store them away, because you won’t be able to find them for decades. Create a system where each year gets a cube of storage, and at any point you’ll be able to find things from your past.
7. Family tree idea: I just like the idea of dedicating a wall to visualize family lineage.
8. Sunken floors: Slight level changes (1-2 foot) force an awareness that you’re changing planes.
9. No shoes in the house.
10. A silent chapel space (not necessarily religious), ideally separate from the house, accessible from the backyard, where you can go to reflect.

Futurists fear that robots and AIs will terraform and harvest the world, but it already feels eerie and unnatural to see midwestern fields carved out into perfect grids. It is as alien as crop circles, but more terrifying and less creative. Perfect 90 degree angles. It is brute order and dull patterns; a metallic fishnet over the midriff of America. I’d be surprised if there weren’t good reasons for this, but it is spooky in its orthagonality. FWIW, I am pro-grid; a grid-head FFS. But the grid to me is an invisible structure to guide the creation of complex, organic, natural forms, not the form itself, disappearing into the edges of sight.

The difference between an architect and an engineer is that an architect needs conceptual agility in an unknown problem space while an engineer needs sharp heuristics in a known problem space. They both operate in the unknown, but engineering unknowns are within equations, and architectural unknowns are the problem space itself.