WORDS & BUILDINGS, Adrian Forty
Design

When in 1932 the English architect Howard Robertson, Principal of the Architectural Association School of Architecture, revised his book Principles of Architectural Composition (1924), he renamed it Modern Architectural Design. This simple change of title at once tells a great deal, though not quite everything, about the inflation of the word 'design' in the mid-twentieth century, a word which after 1945 was in danger of altogether subsuming 'architecture' itself. Architects came to be referred to as 'designers', the discipline taught in schools of architecture became known as 'design', and a great many books about architecture featured 'design' in their titles. The pervasiveness of the word did not go unresisted; to Alison and Peter Smithson, for example, ' "design" was a dirty word' (201), and they preferred the term 'ordering' though that too had its own connotations).

Why is 'design' a confusing word? As a verb, it describes the activity of preparing instructions for making an object or a building. As a noun, it has two distinct meanings. First of all, it is those instructions themselves, particularly in the form of drawings: the word comes. from the Italian disegno (drawing), and in English by the seventeenth century, 'design' was routinely used for the drawings of the architect - Sir Roger Pratt talks of 'drafts and designs' (34) as synonymous. Secondly, as a noun, it may also refer to the work executed from the instructions, as one may say referring to an object, 'I like the design' this sense has also been common since the seventeenth century - John Evelyn, visiting Chambord in 1644, recorded in his Diary, 'That which made me desirous of seeing this Palace, was the extravagance of the designe, especially the Stayre-case mention'd by the Architect Palladio’ (80). In both cases, whether drawing or executed work, in the neo-Platonic climate of the Italian Renaissance, 'design' was widely taken, so Vasari (1568) put it, as 'nothing but a visual expression of the concept which one has in the intellect'; this direct equivalence between the 'artistic idea' and its representation, so necessary to the understanding of the modern usage, was already in place in English by the early seventeen-century - Sir Henry Wotton explained in The Element Architecture (1624) that Vitruvius's dispositio nothing 'more than a neate and full expression of the Idea Of Designment thereof' (118). When modernism appropriated 'design' in the 1930s, it was able to capitalize upon these already existing meanings. 'Design' fulfilled modernism's need for a term that enabled one to distinguish between a work of architecture in its materiality, as an object of experience, and a work of architecture as the representation of an underlying 'form' or idea. If 'form' was to be a primary category architecture, then 'design' was its necessary accomplice, for 'design' is the activity which realizes form and bring it into the world: as Louis Kahn put it. 'Design calls in being what realization - form - tells us (288). 'Design' with its inherent confusion between 'visual expression a concept in the intellect' and a drawing, between what emanates from the architect's mind and a built work, was grist to modernism's mill. If, as Paul-Alan Johnson remarks, 'architecture is the last stronghold of Platoni (244), 'design' is the principal concept that has made possible, for it is what has allowed works of architect to appear, paradoxically, as both pure 'idea' and at the same time as solid material objects; it takes its place in the modernist triad with 'space' and 'form'.

At one level, we might regard the growth in the popularity of 'design' from the 1930s as no more than substitution for the term 'composition' - as the change the title of Howard Robertson's book suggests. These two words had coexisted throughout the nineteenth century and had been used, synonymously and interchangeably as Soane did in his lectures (559). But by 1930, objection had been raised against 'composition' by certain modernist practitioners and critics, and an alternative was needed: 'design', with its other connotations, was more than adequate replacement. Frank Lloyd Wright, example, famously declared in 1931 'Composition is dead that creation may live'; and the Czech critic Karel Teige, in 1929, indicted Le Corbusier's 'Mundaneum' project: 'Composition; with this word it is possible to summarize all the architectural faults of the Mundaneum' (90). But 'design', while undoubtedly fillings the void left by the extirpation of the suspect term 'composition', was no mere substitute.

The pervasiveness of 'design' is to do with the polarities it set up: 'design' provided a means of creating an opposition between 'building' and all that that implied on the one hand, and everything in architecture that was non-material on the other hand. This opposition was made clear by Geoffrey Scott in his The Architecture of Humanism of 1914: 'The relation of construction to design is the fundamental problem of architectural aesthetics' (100). In other words, 'design' concerns what is not construction. This polarity was not new - for example, in 1726 Leoni had translated the important distinction made by Alberti at the beginning of De Re Aedificatoria as 'the whole art of building consists in the design, and in the structure' (1). Though as Rykwert, Leach and Tavernor point out (422-23) in their recent translation, 'design' - at least with its late twentieth-century connotations - is hardly what Alberti meant, and they retain the Latin original lineamenti. Leoni's choice of words for Alberti's distinction suggests that 'design/structure' was an accepted and well-understood trope in the eighteenth century, as a way of describing two aspects of a single activity - architecture. This convention continued throughout the nineteenth century, but in the early twentieth century this distinction, hitherto belonging only in speech and thought, was to become manifested as two discrete activities.

The attraction of 'design' was that for an occupation aspiring to join the liberal arts, but actually concerned with the materiality of building and encumbered with associations of manual work and commerce, the word indicated that part of its product which was the pure work of mind. This had undoubtedly been the appeal of 'design' to sixteenth-century Italian architects, but the need to distinguish between the manual and intellectual content became all the more necessary in the early twentieth century for one reason in particular: the change in the training of architects. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, architects in all countries except France land even there, too, to a large degree) learnt the business by working, as articled pupils or apprentices, in the workplace of practising architects. In the early part of the twentieth century, training was transferred almost everywhere to the academy, to universities and to school of architecture - a change that corresponded to that taking place in the majority of other occupations. In architecture, its effect was that what architects learnt in their training ceased to be 'practice', and became 'principles', in other words a wholly dematerialized and cerebral version of the art; and what students 'produced' from their training was not 'architecture', but drawings -commonly referred to as 'designs'. The separation between architecture as a mental product - which was taught - and architecture as a practice engaged with the material world, now emerged for the first time as a visible fact of life. Hitherto, the opposition of 'design' and 'structure' had been no more than a way of thinking about two aspects of one activity - architecture - and it had been inconceivable that either could exist without the other. Now, with the separation of education from practice, 'design', rather than being a convenient way of conceptualizing a particular feature of architecture, came to be seen as a pure and self-sufficient activity within itself. Education made real a division that had existed previously only in discourse; and the appropriation within education of the term 'design' with its long and seemingly respectable pedigree, helped to make this quite arbitrary and artificial separation between training and practice seem normal and commonsensical. In short, the category 'design' allowed architecture to be taught, rather than learnt by experience.

The sense in which 'design' became perceived as a mental activity disengaged from the world is strikingly clear from the pronouncements of architectural educators: in the remarks of Richard Llewelyn Davies, the instigator of reforms in British architectural education in the 1960s, it is noticeable how 'design' is presented as an activity which is an end in itself: 'Design work in the studio is our strong point. ... In the studio, the student is continuously reminded of the one-ness of architectural design ...' (13). It is no surprise that architects, anxious to validate the intellectual component of their work, willingly embraced this separation and reification of 'design'. However, it has to be said that in the long run it has been to their disadvantage, for the development of what is called 'design and build' - in which architects are employed by building contractors to supply designs - has taken at their word architects' claim to specialization in the mental activity of 'design', and accordingly relegated them to this as their sole sphere of competence.

The turning of 'design' from being a category within architecture into an activity of its own was substantially assisted by arguments of philosophers. Just as Plato and neo-Platonism enabled Renaissance architects to distinguish between an object and its 'design', the philosophy of Kant encouraged people to think of 'design' as a pure property in its own right. In The Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant had written 'In painting, sculpture, and in fact in all the formative arts, in architecture and horticulture, so far as fine arts, the design is what is essential' (67). By 'design' Kant was referring in part to the long-standing trope of drawing (or design) versus colour, bur also to it as the manifestation of 'form', in which sense it provided the basis for all pure judgments of taste.

If philosophy tended to support the existence of 'design' as a thing in itself, this point of view did not go uncontested. A major theme of nineteenth-century political economy was the separation between mental and manual labour, a theme taken up in its implications for architecture by John Ruskin, Ruskin's argument, developed in 'The Nature of Gothic', valued Gothic architecture because of the freedom enjoyed by the medieval craftsman to direct his own work; while recognizing the need for some division of labour in architecture between those who directed and those who executed the work, what he deplored in the architecture of his own time was the degraded and dishonourable status of those who worked with their hands, relative to their medieval forebears. Ruskin did nor take issue with the distinction in architecture between those who conceived the work and those who executed it; what he objected to was regarding the one as an honourable, the other as a dishonourable occupation. As he put it, 'in each several profession, no master should be too proud to do its hardest work. The painter should grind his own colours; the architect work in the mason's yard with his men' (§21). Ruskin hardly ever used the word 'design' in relation to architecture; in fact, 'design' (by which he generally meant the specific sense of 'drawing') was an activity that Ruskin valued highly because it was the moment when human creativity demonstrated its power to transform nature into art: 'A looking-glass does not design - it receives and communicates indiscriminately all that passes before it. ... design properly so called, is human invention, consulting human capacity' (The Two Paths, 35-36). If Ruskin was silent on 'design' in architecture, his English successors, William Morris and the architects Philip Webb and W. R. Lethaby, looked to the implications of what he had said, and treated 'design' with suspicion, for in it they saw both the cause and the symptom of the social degradation of manual work.

Lethaby, in 1892, emphasized the historical change the activity had undergone, and contrasted its past with its present status: 'Design was not the abstract exercize of a faculty plus a pair of compasses ... It was insight as to the capabilities of material for expression when submitted to certain forms of handiwork. ... The crafts ... are even now being destroyed by a system in which design is divorced from work' (153). And Philip Webb, in a letter to Lethaby, made a revealing correction that sums up all the objections when he crossed out the word 'design' and substituted 'invention' (Lethaby, Webb, 136). If one asks why, despite evident resistance to the word, it should have become so widespread, it should be born in mind that Webb and Lethaby were also opposed to the model of architectural education introduced in the early twentieth century, and that their objections to 'design' ultimately carried no more weight than their objections to the institutionalization of architectural education.

We have so far considered 'design' in relation to architecture, but specifically in Britain the word also has another sense, relative to commodities and consumer goods, implied in the phrase 'good design'. When, in 1937, Nikolaus Pevsner wrote that 'to fight against the shoddy design of those goods by which most of our fellow-men are surrounded becomes a moral duty", and was 'an integral part of the social question of our time" (11), he was not (despite the tone) presenting a new argument, but simply bringing up to date a debate about 'design' that had already been going on for over two hundred years.

In Britain, from the early eighteenth century onwards, it became common to judge a nation's cultural wealth not by its monuments and architecture, but by its 'many thousands of large and rich shops ... stocked with all sorts of goods' (Souligne, 1709, 154). However, while the existence of all these goods might be a sign of an advanced civilization, as possessions owned by individuals they also signified luxury - and luxury, as Voltaire observed, is a paradox, everywhere desired, but universally condemned as a vice. The threats presented by articles of luxury were that they made people covetous, and so threatened public order; and that if they fell into the wrong hands, they devalued social distinctions. Satirizing the pursuit of luxury. Swift made Gulliver say of early eighteenth-century England, 'When I am at home and dressed as I ought to be, I carry on my body the workmanship of an hundred tradesmen; the building and furniture of my house employ as many more, and five times the number to adorn my wife' (288). If Swift thought it absurd that one woman's dress should need a thousand men's labour, others of his contemporaries were arguing exactly the opposite. In The Fable of the Bees (1714) Bernard Mandeville argued, as had others before, that the pursuit of luxury was advantageous to society as a whole because of the wealth it caused to circulate; in addition, though, he also suggested that vain lust for material goods need not be the threat to public morality it was generally assumed to be, but that, if regulated by good taste, the pursuit of such objects would divert the selfish passions into a socially acceptable and harmless form of rivalry. This important and original observation opened up the possibility that, if they were suitably contrived (or 'well designed'), consumer goods need not be vulgar and offensive luxuries that threatened public order. This argument lay at the heart of subsequent debates about 'good design', particularly as they developed in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Nikolaus Pevsner's mission against 'shoddy design' belongs within the same tradition (though Pevsner had learnt the argument in Germany through the Deutsche Werkbund, where it had been subtly inflected to become also a mild critique of capitalism)

The other sense of 'design', which also originated in the early eighteenth century, was as a means of economic competition. The success of French luxury goods was largely seen as due to their superiority in design. In 1735. Bishop Berkeley in The Querist recommended setting up a school of design in Ireland to train textile designers, asking 'Whether France and Flanders could have drawn so much money from England for figured lace, silks and tapestry, if they had not had academies for designing' (§65). And he went on, 'Whether those who may slight this affair as notional have sufficiently considered the extensive use of the art of design, and its influence in most trades and manufactures...' (§68). By the mid-eighteenth century, the sense of 'design' as a form of added value seems to have been generally understood; the architect Sir William Chambers commented that for articles of consumption, 'Design is of universal benefit, and stamps additional value on the most trifling performances, the importance of which, to a commercial people, is obvious; it requires no illustration" (75). This principle underlies the many attempts by governments -whether in Britain in the 1840s, or in Germany in the 1900s, or again in Britain in the 1980s - to improve standards of design as a way of securing economic competitiveness.

All the ambiguities surrounding the word 'design' are contained in the present-day 'designer sunglasses', or 'designer T-shirt': tinged with contempt for things so obviously luxurious, the expression at the same time concedes a socially acceptable interest in such objects, even a desire to possess them because of the opportunity they present for the exercize of taste; but the epithet also acknowledges that the attentions of a designer have justified a price far in excess of that of their humbler, 'design-free' counterparts.