To call the 20th century an era of change is to understate the obvious. The past century has seen the world swept along by an extraordinary tide. We have been exposed to instances of invention, discovery, growth and rupture that have transformed our lives in ways that we cannot yet fully comprehend. The effects of global modernization continue to shape and connect us.
To better understand the work we produce, and the work we ought to produce, I have attempted a preliminary inventory of the “background” conditions that increasingly constitute the substance of our work. The inventory touches on a range of phenomena currently shaping and constituting our global image context and includes surveillance, celebrity, violence and communication. Explored here are circulation, infrastructure, tourism and freeway condition.
What becomes apparent in studying the inventory is that things are now more connected than ever. The attempt to find the boundary of any practice—where one ends and another begins—is increasingly artificial. We live in a 24-hour-market world where there is less and less “unregulated” terrain. Events, cultural styles, technologies, memes, comments, rumors, scares and insults pass through the international economy, distorting one another and reverberating.
Circulation
What goes around, goes around. Circulation is the lingua franca of the new context. All objects, even apparently stable and singular ones like buildings, now exist in many places simultaneously. Statues of Liberty proliferate all over the world. So do signature architects: Frank Gehry is Frank at work in his Los Angeles studio, but he is also 40o,ooo Web site entries, an ad for Apple computers, Bilbao and a line of furniture.
Within our reprographic culture, value is directly linked to circulation. Tiger Woods functions as currency. His value is pegged to his performance on the links, but it also lies in his ability to circulate fluidly as a brand image, in his capacity to be compressed and packaged to suit various communication formats.
Infrastructure
We all know about the “old” infrastructure. It involves large-scale, capital projects that are often visually prominent, politically sensitive and typically the pinnacle of their chief architect’s career-railway terminals, hydroelectric projects and museums on hilltops.
The “new” infrastructure, by contrast, is distributed, decentralized and evolutionary. Built or grown by users, or in response to users, it consists of agreements, alliances, standards and systems. It includes software, which produces a range of mini infrastructures: the global typographic system—digital fonts are accessible the world over; the world car—Ford is launching a design studio connecting designers in Europe, Asia and North America to produce one automobile; and, of course, the Internet-the greatest distributed evolutionary infrastructure, still in its infancy. Conceived as a defensive posture to protect the old-fashioned kind of infrastructure, the Internet is still linked to an American system of command and control.
Tourism
Every city is now in the business not only of making itself but also of marketing itself. Decisions that affect tourist “optics,” like whether a city has a professional sports franchise or a crime problem or a police problem, take on added significance. Thanks to Milton Glaser, who brought us the I Y New York logo, cities everywhere compete for tourism dollars with their own logos and slogans. Celebrities—some long gone—are pressed into promotional service. The destinations themselves are increasingly design driven: nighttime golf courses carved from the Asian jungle, cinematically engineered theme parks, the latest massive- scale cruise liners. The latter, too big to actually dock anywhere, are no longer a form of transportation but are themselves a floating destination.
Abetted by transnational designers and architects, the forces of globalism are working their way into every pocket of the world. As a result, the places we arrive at are increasingly similar to the places we depart from. The most successful “attractions,” like Jon Jerde’s CityWalk at Universal Studios, are franchised and reproduced around the world with subtle local inflection, increasing attendance and decreasing travel time.
The question becomes: Where to from here?
As the middle class expands exponentially and infrastructure transports vast hordes to increasingly distant and exotic destinations, every local “difference” becomes fodder for touristic exploitation. But as franchise operations continue to extend their global presence, wiping out uniqueness in food, culture, custom and product, the practices that remain distinctive have become increasingly extreme and eccentric—bull fights, sex industries, violence, risk, fundamentalism, primitivism, isolation, disaster… architecture. In our age of tourism, the natural environment represents the only significant and unmanufacturable difference, but even that is not holding on very well.
As thrill-seeking tourists look further and further afield to experience the ideal trip, one can imagine the niche market offerings: South Central L. A. Survival Adventures; Ethiopian Famine Tours; Antarctic Isolation Tours (you may simply never come back); Disease Tours (complete with guaranteed cure).
Freeway condition
To drive the Pasadena no—the first freeway in America, famous for its treacherous 20-meter onramps—is to understand the cultural significance of the freeway condition. It is the profoundly modem idea that we can enter a flow, be carried along with it, and exit again effortlessly, unscathed.
As actual places decline in significance and particularity, the space between them increases in prominence and “quality.” As Tracy Metz notes in the book Snelweg—Highways in the Netherlands, “Roads no longer merely lead to places: they are places.”
The metaphor of the freeway condition, of constant movement and velocity, has become so ingrained in our collective psyche that it is now applied to politics, to (assembly-line, just-in-time) manufacturing, to the information industry. We are now a “streamlined” culture. We “go with the flow” and look for the best on-ramps. It is only when we try to decelerate that we realize there’s a problem. In a freeway condition only robust entities survive. Only brand franchise signals can be apprehended. With culture set at cruise control, clarity trumps complexity. The known quantity “Toys-R-Us” wins out every time over enterprising but ambiguous “mom and pop.”
Uniqueness is a traffic hazard when you’re traveling at breakneck speed. Difference, no matter how subtle, is an unnecessary detour. Both are impossible with life lived “on the fly.”
Time and Attention
What I propose in response to these accelerated, frenzied, torrential conditions is an engaged design methodology. Engagement means enlisting to our advantage all of the restrictions, conditions and limitations of the context in which we work.
Unless we come to terms with our global image context and the way it permeates the things we make and see, we are doomed to spend our lives decorating and redecorating.
If freedom can be defined as the ability to apply one’s energy to objects of one’s own choosing, then our attention (our time and energy) is our most precious resource and ought to be guarded jealously. By understanding our working context we open avenues of liberty not yet established or explored.
Author Bruce Mau. principal of Bruce Mau Design in Toronto. is design director of Zone Books and the associate Cullinan Professor at Rice University. This essay is reprinted from Anytime, by permission of the MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Photos by Luis Delgado.
Originally published in early 2000, in arcCA 00.1, “Zoning Time.”
