Share Joy with a Starbucks Holiday Coffee

The gradual move away from Christmas is subtle and clever.

Starbucks has a new "holiday" logo out, which seems to be celebrating Christmas. But it doesn't quite do that.

The main, written message of the logo, instead of saying "share the joy" of Christ's birth, simply tells us to "share joy." What could this joy mean? One million things. Something different for each person. The unified joy that we are to feel around the Christmas season has splintered into the joy each of us feels for whatever reason.

That is one way Starbucks is shifting us away from Christams.

Another way it is relaying its message of a Christmas Holiday without Christmas is through the design of its products, which either distort Christmas symbols, or leave them out all together.

Here is the Starbucks paper cup for this "holiday season":



1. What looks like a star on the left cup could just be a sparkly tree decoration shaped in a flower design.

2. The triangular star shapes in the octagons (dispersed around the cup) are too uniform, and there are two of each star ray, making a total of eight. The rays are all the same length.

The star that shines in many renditions of Christmas paintings and illustrations has four rays. And the top and bottom rays are longer, with the bottom the longest. This elongated bottom ray connects the star to the earth, to show the spot where Jesus' manger lay. This star is often called "The Star of Bethlehem."




Elihu Vedder (American, 1836–1923)
Star of Bethlehem, 1879–80
Oil on canvas: 36 3/16 x 44 3/4 in
Milwaukee Art Museum

The frantic holiday scene I’ve described is starkly in contrast to the peaceful one we find in Star of Bethlehem created by American painter Elihu Vedder in 1879-80. This painting, currently housed in Milwaukee Art Museum storage, depicts a serene moment in the muted, golden desert. Three figures on camels overlook the path before them, while three shepherd/guides ahead and three behind also survey what lies ahead. Color can be seen in the distance in the green of trees. Above them the sky contrasts what is seen below with a bright light that illuminates the sky. There is a sense of anticipation created by figures that can be seen in the clouds, standing there, backs slightly hunched as they look down upon the earth. [Source: The Milwaukee Art Museum]

Here's Rembrandt's (or what is attributed to be a pupil of his) Adoration of the Shepherds, where Jesus is bathed in what is most likely the light from the Star of Bethlehem.


Pupil of Rembrandt, 1606–1669
‘The Adoration of the Shepherds’, 1646
Oil on canvas

Painters and art of various centuries and cultures show the importance of the star as a guiding light, and especially its pointed direction toward the earth to indicate where the infant Jesus lay.

Even popular illustrations, often for cards and hanging pictures, depict the bottom ray of the star pointing downwards. In the image below, the star shows the three kings where the manger lies.



3. Back to the Starbucks cup. The illustrations on the cup are sloppy. They look like they're preliminary sketches, rather than decorations ready for display. Especially irritating is the cone-shaped decoration, which is drawn as an amorphous blob.





4. The leaf at the bottom of the smaller cup is not that of a pine tree, nor does it look like a holly, the traditional leaf for most Christmas decorations.



It is a coffee plant leaf, and the nut-like shape, a coffee bean. Starbucks' marketing strategy, is to commemorate this "holiday" season through coffee rather than through Christmas.

The Starbucks Christmas cup is all about the coffee and very little about Christmas.

5. Shapes are scattered around the cups, as though to fill in gaps. What are the spikey triangular shapes - rays from a star? And the white dots - snow flakes? Why not have sketch of snow flakes, with some of the beautiful shapes?





6. The homes we see on the package illustration could be homes on any product cover. They have no Christmas distinction: there is no Christmas tree near the homes; there are no decorations around the houses; there is no angel or star above.



Below is a promotional image from the Starbucks website, showing the homes and their surroundings. There is no Christmas tree. The odd, leafless trees are dotted with what could be lights, but it could just be any kind of graphic embellishment. The homes have what look like lights framing the roofs, but it isn't enough to indicate Christmas lights. And the diamond-shaped objects in the sky could be stars, but there is no unique, distinct Star of Bethlehem to show that this is a Christmas scene, and not just any winter scene.

And we are invited to "create wonder," as though we have supernatural powers. What kind of wonder do we create? Again, whatever strikes our fancy, creators that we are. Like the message "Share Joy," what we create, and the joy that we share, are not related to the Christmas story, but rather, our very own individual fancies.



And finally, here is the description of the Christmas Blend mixture, from the Starbucks website:

A time to create wonder. An invitation to share joy.

Three decades ago, we created something wonderful - a coffee special enough for your celebrations big and small. Christmas Blend brings bright, lively Latin American coffees together with smooth, mellow Indonesian coffees, including rare aged beans from Sumatra. The aged coffee dramatically balances the overall flavor to create luscious, sweet, spice notes. Crafting this coffee embodies the best of everything we do - sourcing, roasting, blending, exploring, perfecting and sharing. It’s one of our most cherished traditions - made for you to savor season after season.

Of course, coffee is a Third World export. But, the description above tells us that it is part of Starbucks' "sourcing" strategy.

Dictionary.com defines "sourcing" as:

...the buying of components of a product from an outside supplier, often one located abroad

And Starbucks tells us how it does this "ethically":

Ethical Sourcing
We've always believed in buying and serving the best coffee possible.

And it's our goal for all of our coffee to be grown under the highest standards of quality, using ethical trading and responsible growing practices. We think it's a better cup of coffee that also helps create a better future for farmers and a more stable climate for the planet.
With the help of Conservation International, we’ve developed ethical sourcing guidelines that help us purchase coffee that is responsibly grown and ethically traded.

We’re working directly with farmers to develop responsible growing methods and investing in their communities to ensure a sustainable supply of quality coffee.

This sounds too much like the "Banana Republics" that developed through vast farmlands being allocated for big business plantations, while local farmers had to do with inferior land.

In this Starbucks produced video, Carlos Mario (no last name), who is clearly an intermediary between Starbucks (the corporation) and the local Costa Rican farmer, talks about the farmer and coffee production. This Third World company man says:

We are helping farmers, teaching them how to improve production, improve the quality, and reduce the use of pesticides. We are taking care of the environment and the pretty country that we have. Helping farmers is really good, and I feel really proud of that. I think Starbucks is working with agronomists because they know that if they don't care about the environment, they will not have good quality coffee in the future."

All Hail King Coffee!

Below is Toik Wolf, the cup's designer saying "All Hail King Coffee."

I found his quotes after I wrote my design break-down above. Wolf is saying almost to the word what I've written about the cup design. Of course, he thinks it is a Good Thing, while my analysis is a lament. This shows further that the deconstruction of Christmas is systematic and deliberate by the likes of Wolf and Starbucks, and not some random aesthetic project:

On The Design Process

Toki Wolf, Creative Director, In-store Promotions:
One of our early idea explorations was treating our core product, coffee, in its agricultural form and seeing if we could apply that in a beautiful way for the holidays. See if it can be meaningful in the holiday timeframe. So, there’s this image, a quick sketch of a coffee plant with coffee cherries coming out of the red cup. We were literally thinking, “If coffee is at the heart of what we do, can that be the foundation where the exploration comes from?” Even in that little sketch form, we thought we might be onto something. We kept going back to it, even after moving on from it and exploring different illustration style. We always went back to the drawing with the red cup below it. It was the basis of the elements that ended up on the red cups and the coffee bags for this year.

So, the idea was to take these coffee cherries and use them as a holiday element – like holly berries. The coffee flower that you see on the cups comes across, as maybe a snowflake, maybe a poinsettia. We start to see these interpretations. Even in the origin patterns, they kind of look like snow in an abstract form. They start to have a holiday feel to them. Once we realized that we could make this work visually in a way that was both authentically Starbucks and authentically holiday, we went for it, and extracted it all the way across all of our holiday elements. We started with the way it can be interpreted, creating the story around it. Going back to that original sketch, it feels like this beautiful holiday moment is coming out of the red cup, literally coming from the coffee. We ended up keeping the element in the swoop. We call it a “story swoop” or “story arch” that kind of flow around the packaging. So, you’ll see that across all of our holiday design elements, including the cups and the coffee packaging.

[...]

This holiday is the next step of the visual journey we’ve been on with the brand. Beginning with the new coffee packaging. We wanted the coffee to be at the center. We wanted it to look like the leader and to elevate above the noise in the coffee category. We wanted to create something that felt right for coffee but was unique and own-able to Starbucks. By doing so, we created this new visual vocabulary around coffee that looks traditional, and looks like it’s rooted in heritage, but yet it’s fresh and new. We haven’t done anything exactly like it - nor has there been anything like it in the category. You’re right. This holiday feels like a natural extension of that [the coffee packaging redesign]. It keeps that momentum going.

I like coffee, and I especially like Starbucks' blends. There is no doubt that its the "King of Coffee." I wish its leader would just say that they're in the business of making great coffee, and that they work in Third World countries. Let those countries make the necessary steps to help the farmers, while Starbucks provides the coffee for us through a true market and competitive manner.

And, I wish Starbucks wouldn't tell us to "Share Joy," or to "Create Wonder" if it cannot come right out with "Share the Joy of Christmas." I would rather just have a warm cup of coffee without being pulled into a false sense of the Christmas holiday. It is just coffee, after all.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Share Joy with a Starbucks Holiday Coffee

The gradual move away from Christmas is subtle and clever.

Starbucks has a new "holiday" logo out, which seems to be celebrating Christmas. But it doesn't quite do that.

The main, written message of the logo, instead of saying "share the joy" of Christ's birth, simply tells us to "share joy." What could this joy mean? One million things. Something different for each person. The unified joy that we are to feel around the Christmas season has splintered into the joy each of us feels for whatever reason.

That is one way Starbucks is shifting us away from Christams.

Another way it is relaying its message of a Christmas Holiday without Christmas is through the design of its products, which either distort Christmas symbols, or leave them out all together.

Here is the Starbucks paper cup for this "holiday season":



1. What looks like a star on the left cup could just be a sparkly tree decoration shaped in a flower design.

2. The triangular star shapes in the octagons (dispersed around the cup) are too uniform, and there are two of each star ray, making a total of eight. The rays are all the same length.

The star that shines in many renditions of Christmas paintings and illustrations has four rays. And the top and bottom rays are longer, with the bottom the longest. This elongated ray is to show a star that is connecting with the earth below, to show the spot where Jesus' manger lay. It is often called "The Star of Bethlehem."




Elihu Vedder (American, 1836–1923)
Star of Bethlehem, 1879–80
Oil on canvas: 36 3/16 x 44 3/4 in
Milwaukee Art Museum

The frantic holiday scene I’ve described is starkly in contrast to the peaceful one we find in Star of Bethlehem created by American painter Elihu Vedder in 1879-80. This painting, currently housed in Milwaukee Art Museum storage, depicts a serene moment in the muted, golden desert. Three figures on camels overlook the path before them, while three shepherd/guides ahead and three behind also survey what lies ahead. Color can be seen in the distance in the green of trees. Above them the sky contrasts what is seen below with a bright light that illuminates the sky. There is a sense of anticipation created by figures that can be seen in the clouds, standing there, backs slightly hunched as they look down upon the earth. [Source: The Milwaukee Art Museum]

Here's Rembrandt's (or what is attributed to be a pupil of his) Adoration of the Shepherds, where Jesus is bathed in what is most likely the light from the Star of Bethlehem.


Pupil of Rembrandt, 1606–1669
‘The Adoration of the Shepherds’, 1646
Oil on canvas

Painters and art of various centuries and cultures show the importance of the star as a guiding light, and especially its pointed direction toward the earth to indicate where the infant Jesus lay.

Even popular illustrations, often for cards and hanging pictures, depict the bottom ray of the star pointing downwards. In the image below, the star shows the Three Kings where the manger lies.



3. Back to the Starbucks cup. The illustrations on the cup are sloppy. They look like they're preliminary sketches, rather than decorations ready for display. Especially irritating is the cone-shaped decoration, which is drawn as an amorphous blob.





4. The leaf at the bottom of the smaller cup is not that of a pine tree, nor does it look like a holly, the traditional leaf for most Christmas decorations.



It is a coffee plant leaf, and the nut-like shape, a coffee bean. Starbucks' marketing strategy, is to commemorate this "holiday" season through coffee rather than through Christmas.

The Starbucks Christmas cup is all about the coffee and very little about Christmas.

5. Shapes are scattered around the cups, as though to fill in gaps. What are the spikey triangular shapes - rays from a star? And the white dots - snow flakes? Why not have sketch of snow flakes, with some of the beautiful shapes?





6. The homes we see on the package illustration could be homes on any product cover. They have no Christmas distinction: there is no Christmas tree near the homes; there are no decorations around the houses; there is no angel or star above.



Below is a promotional image from the Starbucks website, showing the homes and their surroundings. There is no Christmas tree. The odd, leafless trees are dotted with what could be lights, but it could just be any kind of graphic embellishment. The homes have what look like lights framing the roofs, but it isn't enough to indicate Christmas lights. And the diamond-shaped objects in the sky could be stars, but there is no unique, distinct Star of Bethlehem to show that this is a Christmas scene, and not just any winter scene.

And we are invited to "create wonder," as though we have supernatural powers. What kind of wonder do we create? Again, whatever strikes our fancy, creators that we are. Like the message "Share Joy," what we create, and the joy that we share, are not related to the Christmas story, but rather, our very own individual fancies.



And finally, here is the description of the Christmas Blend mixture, from the Starbucks website:

A time to create wonder. An invitation to share joy.

Three decades ago, we created something wonderful - a coffee special enough for your celebrations big and small. Christmas Blend brings bright, lively Latin American coffees together with smooth, mellow Indonesian coffees, including rare aged beans from Sumatra. The aged coffee dramatically balances the overall flavor to create luscious, sweet, spice notes. Crafting this coffee embodies the best of everything we do - sourcing, roasting, blending, exploring, perfecting and sharing. It’s one of our most cherished traditions - made for you to savor season after season.

Of course, coffee is a Third World export. But, the description above tells us that it is part of Starbucks' "sourcing" strategy.

Dictionary.com defines "sourcing" as:

...the buying of components of a product from an outside supplier, often one located abroad

And Starbucks tells us how it does this "ethically":

Ethical Sourcing
We've always believed in buying and serving the best coffee possible.

And it's our goal for all of our coffee to be grown under the highest standards of quality, using ethical trading and responsible growing practices. We think it's a better cup of coffee that also helps create a better future for farmers and a more stable climate for the planet.
With the help of Conservation International, we’ve developed ethical sourcing guidelines that help us purchase coffee that is responsibly grown and ethically traded.

We’re working directly with farmers to develop responsible growing methods and investing in their communities to ensure a sustainable supply of quality coffee.

This sounds too much like the "Banana Republics" that developed through vast farmlands being allocated for big business plantations, while local farmers had to do with inferior land.

In this Starbucks produced video, Carlos Mario (no last name), who is clearly an intermediary between Starbucks (the corporation) and the local Costa Rican farmer, talks about the farmer and coffee production. This Third World company man says:

We are helping farmers, teaching them how to improve production, improve the quality, and reduce the use of pesticides. We are taking care of the environment and the pretty country that we have. Helping farmers is really good, and I feel really proud of that. I think Starbucks is working with agronomists because they know that if they don't care about the environment, they will not have good quality coffee in the future."

All Hail King Coffee

I like coffee, and I especially like Starbucks' blends. There is no doubt that its the "King of Coffee." I wish its leader would just say that they're in the business of making great coffee, and that they work in Third World countries. Let those countries make the necessary steps to help the farmers, while Starbucks provides the coffee for us through a true market and competitive manner.

And, I wish Starbucks wouldn't tell us to "Share Joy," or to "Create Wonder" if it cannot come right out with "Share the Joy of Christmas." I would rather just have a warm cup of coffee without being pulled into a false sense of the Christmas holiday. It is just coffee, after all.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Toward Resilient Architectures: How Modernism Got Square

Toward Resilient Architectures 3: How Modernism Got Square
Michael W. Mehaffy and Nikos A. Salingaros.
MetropolisMag.com
Blog Point Of View
March 22, 2013

As we enter a transition era that demands far greater resilience and sustainability in our technological systems, we must ask tough new questions about existing approaches to architecture and settlement. Post-occupancy evaluations show that many new buildings, as well as retrofits of some older buildings, are performing substantially below minimal expectations. In some notable cases, the research results are frankly dismal [see "Toward Resilient Architectures 2: Why Green Often Isn’t"].

The trouble is that the existing system of settlement, developed in the oil-fueled industrial age, is beginning to appear fundamentally limited. And we’re recognizing that it’s not possible to solve our problems using the same typologies that created them in the first place. In a "far-from-equilibrium" world, as resilience theory suggests, we cannot rely on engineered, “bolt-on” approaches to these typologies, which are only likely to produce a cascade of unintended consequences. What we need is an inherent ability to handle "shocks to the system", of the kind we see routinely in biological systems.

In "Toward Resilient Architectures 1: Biology Lessons", we described several elements of such resilient structures, including redundant ("web-network") connectivity, approaches incorporating diversity, work distributed across many scales, and fine-grained adaptivity of design elements. We noted that many older structures also had exactly these qualities of resilient structures to a remarkable degree, and in evaluations they often perform surprisingly well today. Nevertheless during the last century, in the dawning age of industrial design, the desirable qualities resilient buildings offered were lost. What happened?


Figure 1. The fractal mathematics of nature bears a striking resemblance
to human ornament, as in this fractal generated by a finite subdivision rule.
This is not a coincidence: ornament may be what humans use as a kind of “glue”
to help weave our spaces together. It now appears that the removal of
ornament and pattern has far-reaching consequences for the capacity
of environmental structures to form coherent, resilient wholes.
Image: Brirush/Wikimedia.
A common narrative asserts that the world moved on to more practical and efficient ways of doing things, and older methods were quaint and un-modern. According to this narrative, the new architecture was the inevitable product of inexorable forces, the undeniable expression of an exciting industrial "spirit of the age". The new buildings would be streamlined, beautiful, and above all, "stylistically appropriate".

This was the thinking that gave birth to the modernist style and form language, still popular with architects today and part of a design movement that in various forms has dominated the world for a century. But such choices of style and type are not independent of how well our buildings perform on criteria of sustainability and resilience — a growing body of evidence is damning. So what does recent science tell us about the soundness of this approach to architecture?

Science forces us to conclude that the modernist view of environmental structure itself appears un-modern — and unsustainable. It rests upon now largely discredited theories of culture, technology, environmental geometry, and building form; theories that have never been properly re-assessed by their proponents.

Far from being an inevitable product of inexorable historical forces, the evidence reveals 20th century design to be developed as a series of rather peculiar (historically highly contingent) choices by a few influential individuals. The story goes back to a small group of German, Swiss, and Austrian architect-theorists, and at its seminal moment, the particular ideas of one of them regarding ornament — which turns out to have far-reaching implications.

Adolf Loos’ idea takes hold

In his famous essay of 1908, "Ornament and Crime", the Austrian writer/architect Adolf Loos presented an argument for the minimalist industrial aesthetic that has shaped modernism and neo-modernism ever since. Surprisingly, he built this argument upon a foundation that is accepted today by almost no one: the cultural superiority of "modern man" [sic], by which he meant Northern European males.

Loos proclaimed that, in this new era of streamlined modern production, we had apparently become unable to produce "authentic ornamental detail". But are we alone, he asked, unable to have our own style do what "any Negro" [sic], or any other race and period before us, could do? Of course not, he argued. We are more advanced, more "modern". Our style must be the very aesthetic paucity that comes with the streamlined goods of industrial production — a hallmark of advancement and superiority. In effect, our "ornament" would be the simple minimalist buildings and other artifacts themselves, celebrating the spirit of a great new age.

Indeed, the continued use of ornament was, for Loos, a "crime". The "Papuan", he argued, had not evolved to the moral and civilized circumstances of modern man [sic]. As part of his primitive practices, the Papuan tattooed himself. Likewise, Loos went on, "the modern man who tattoos himself is either a criminal or a degenerate". Therefore, he reasoned, those who still used ornament were on the same low level as criminals, and Papuans.


Figure 2. Ethiopian silver ceremonial cross, carried in liturgical processions,
represents a mathematically sophisticated fractal. Was Loos implying that
observers of such millennial religious practices the world over — dependent
as they are upon ornamented ritual, artifacts, chant, music, and dance —
are no better than "criminals"?
Drawing by Nikos Salingaros.
Built on an essentially racist worldview, Loos’ seminal essay codified a fateful series of four tenets that have seeped into design culture and remain largely unquestioned, even today:

1. Geometrical fundamentalism. The march of technological progress inevitably compels the elimination of detailed or ornamental features, and focuses on features that nakedly display (and celebrate) technological expediency and geometrical reduction.

2. Tectonic determinism. The geometric character of any addition to the built environment can only be a unique expression of its own specific technological moment in history (defined in stylistic terms, of course).

3. Typological prejudice. It follows that all previous architectural geometries of older eras are wholly inconsistent with modernity, and must be marked for elimination. Revival — a constant evolutionary fugue throughout the greatest civilizations — is now rejected, for the first time in history.

4. Modernist exceptionalism. Civilization has arrived at a fundamentally different and superior cultural status, elevated beyond previous historical constraints by its powerful technology. Architecture will serve this technology most appropriately by drawing from a limited form language derived from early 20th century production technology. No other form language is valid or "authentic".

What was this limited form language? It employed the repetitive production of standardized machine components, conceived in the most limited sense (eliminating complex artifacts, tools and utensils, and complex architectural components). It was an extreme strategy to exploit economies of scale and quantity to achieve efficiencies. Those industrial parts — blank flat sheets, razor-straight line cuts, simple unadorned squares, cubes, and cylinders — were standardized to allow for easy and low-cost assembly.


Figure 3. Some holes were evident in Adolf Loos’ theories,
even at the time they were written. On the left, mass-produced Art Nouveau
silver jewelry box by P. A. Coon, 1908. On the right, hand-made Machine Aesthetic
silver teapot by C. Dresser, 1879. The machine aesthetic was an artistic
metaphor of "modernity" chosen by Loos — not a true functional requirement.
Drawing by Nikos Salingaros.
Precisely because of its limitations, this form language made for dramatic, somewhat disquieting new shapes, readily suited to metaphoric use as the attention-getting expressions of a great new age. The raw, simple forms were well suited psychologically to the streamlined shapes of the breathtakingly fast-moving new vehicles like locomotives, aircraft, and ships. In turn, these reinforced the idea of streamlined buildings as a metaphoric style — although, of course, buildings do not actually move.

In an age enthralled with the promise of the future, this radically novel form language became unexpectedly popular and entirely displaced its contemporary competitors, many of which are largely forgotten today. Innovative architectural form languages that emerged included Jugendstil, Sezessionstil (Vienna Secession), Art Nouveau, Stile Liberty, Edwardian, and Art-and-Crafts as well as the early F. L. Wright. In fact, Loos was specifically attacking the relatively innovative forms of Art Nouveau — not the over-the-top rococo work of late Victorian designers, as some assume today.


Figure 4. "The cube ate the flower": how the machine aesthetic
devoured all other form languages, from "Architecture for Beginners"
by Louis Hellman, 1994.
Adapted and redrawn by Nikos Salingaros.
Corporate branding with science fiction

The clever use of machine parts production, through the early application of industrial technology, as a romantic new form language was not lost on Loos’ German contemporary Peter Behrens. Known now as "the father of corporate branding", Behrens recruited industrial minimalism as an aesthetic tool to create a streamlined marketing image to help his client AEG (Germany’s version of General Electric) sell its products. He created striking logos, stationery, advertisements — and buildings, which, in effect, were converted into giant billboards to help to sell the companies and their products.

In taking this momentous step, Behrens was masterfully solving a critical problem for environmental designers offering their services in a new age of standardization and mass production. If we were no longer going to generate the form of buildings in place, through localized craft-like processes, but must rely instead upon (supposedly superior, and certainly cheaper) combinations of standardized parts, then how were we, as designers, going to create aesthetically distinctive works? By "theming" them with an exciting stylized vision of the future to be created by industry (and specifically, by the client company, and by the currently-employed design firm).

So we would turn buildings and objects into canvases to "brand" our companies and our own talents as visionary designers, leading civilization into a thrilling new age. More than that, these packaged designs would have the special allure, in the skilled hands of Behrens and his artistically minded protégés, of a great new fine art. At its heart were industrial manufacturing and the commodification of products.

Working from the self-imposed limitations of this new aesthetic minimalism, the image that Behrens created was of power, industrial might, order, and cleanliness. Above all, it was the promise of a wonderful new technological future. His brilliant recognition paved the way for a dominant theme of modern marketing — one that can sell almost anything if it’s successfully linked to romantic imagery of the future. The allure of such a product is, by definition, beyond any claim that can be evaluated in the present. It is the selling of hope, dream, and desire — even if it is one that’s destined to quickly tarnish and be discarded. Indeed all the better, for planned obsolescence means another "new, improved" product can be sold in its place.

The seductive power of this futuristic message was not lost on Behrens’ young protégés, each going on to have a profound effect on 20th century design. Their names, Walter Gropius; Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris (later known as Le Corbusier); and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, are familiar to architects. In fact, architectural students are required to study and copy them in school. In the next decades they would announce their "total architecture" (Gropius) that signaled a "great epoch of industrial production" (Le Corbusier) and "the will of an epoch" that "less is more" (Mies). In the words of their most important theorist and propagandist, Sigfried Giedion, "mechanization takes command". Our buildings must reflect the unavoidable reality of our modern world.

This was not merely a stylistic prescription that one might (or might not) find visually pleasing. It was a complete blueprint for remaking the world according to specific concepts of scale, standardization, replication, and segregation; all codified within a form of visual culture. It became (especially through CIAM, the modernists’ profoundly influential international group) the template for the urbanization and suburbanization that took place rapidly in the U.S. and globally after World War II, and that still continues at an astonishing pace in China, India, Brazil, and elsewhere. The structure of this urbanization has profound consequences, for better or worse, for the use of resources and other critical issues of our age.

From today’s scientific perspective that structure has attributes that ought to provoke deep concern, if not outright alarm. As the urbanist Jane Jacobs famously pointed out a half-century later, the modernist approach did not reflect an understanding of the "organized complexity" of natural and biological systems that underlies human biology, human life, and cities inhabited by human beings. It reflected instead an outmoded and unfounded but totalizing theory of the nature of cities, of technology, and of geometry itself.


Figure 5. The form language of nature is not mechanical
in the "modern" sense. The only known exception:
Donald Duck discovers square eggs,
from "Lost in the Andes" by Carl Barks, 1948.
Redrawn by Nikos Salingaros.
More recent scientific investigations reveal the richly complex geometry of living environments — including human ones. The geometries of those natural structures "evolve in context" as complex adaptive forms, through a process known as "adaptive morphogenesis". As a result of that process, living geometries have particular characteristics. They differentiate into a range of subtly unique structures, and they adapt to local conditions, giving such environments stability and resilience. They achieve great complexity and efficiency through their evolution — and great beauty, in the form of a perceivable deeper order.

A new view of the nature of environmental structure, aesthetics, and ornament

Key to resilience is the way different parts of geometry lock together into larger functional (but not rigid) wholes. In the most ecologically resilient structures, they do this by forming symmetries across inter-linked scales. The resulting structure has the hallmarks of adaptive, evolutionary self-organization: redundant ("web-network") relationships, diversity of mechanisms and components, innate ability to transfer information among many different scales, and fine-grained adaptivity of design elements.

There is also evidence from neuroscience and other fields that the aesthetic experience of such structures is not a superficial "psychological" aspect, but rather, a kind of cognitive "gateway" allowing us to experience and react to this deeper order of our environment. The artistic dimension lies in the way this gateway is shaped, and in its resonance with other emotional experiences in life. Creative abstractions are added to — but do not replace — the natural complexity of our world. As conscientious artists working to improve the human environment, our role is to enhance, express, and clarify that complex adaptive order. Certainly, it’s not merely to apply a veneer of visually dramatic gimmicks.

In this picture of things, ornament is far from mere decoration. It is a precise category of articulation of the connections between regions of space by the human beings that design them. It can be thought of as an essential kind of "glue" that allows different parts of the environment to echo and connect to one another, in a cognitive sense and even in a deeper functional sense. Ornament, then, is an important tool to form a complex fabric of coherent symmetrical relationships within the human environment.


Figure 6. Is this ornamental embroidery?
Actually, a fractal antenna which, when miniaturized,
makes cell phone reception possible. There is an important
role here for functionalism, understood in a much deeper sense.
Drawing by Nikos Salingaros.
We are beginning to understand that the industrial form language represented a catastrophic loss of this adaptive structural capacity, bringing with it enormous negative consequences for the environment we inhabit. It deprived us of the thought processes necessary to conceptualize the characteristics of resilient environmental structure — web-network relationships, diversity, linking of scales, and fine-grained adaptivity. As one functional example, a certain kind of cell-phone antenna incorporating ornament-like fractal patterns (see above) offers the best performance for its tiny size but cannot be conceptualized within a minimalist form language.

The big re-think

We are now beginning to see a pattern in the momentous changes to industrial civilization of the last century. The excessive reliance on standardization and commodification, the birth of a consumer society dominated by branding and theming, the rapacious and unsustainable consumption of resources as an addictive economic fuel are intimately related to the non-resilience of the form languages that were handed down to us. The products of that related group of form languages are a failing industrial civilization’s "art supply".

True resilience does not result from artistic metaphors, or by sticking veneers over the same failing industrial model.

Biological resilience and sustainability require the capacity to endure, to adapt, and to maintain a dynamic stability in the face of sometimes-chaotic environments. They require the cognitive flexibility that enables the genesis of technological innovations. We will have to think outside the modernist box to find new forms — and new uses for very old forms, just as natural evolution does. It seems clearer than ever that the survival of our planet depends upon it.

Yet we are the heirs of Loos’ erroneous and limiting ideas about geometrical fundamentalism, tectonic determinism, the exceptionalism of modernism, and the typological prejudice rooted in an illusory aesthetic functionalism. All of these dogmas are enforced by self-perpetuating elite privileges, and the proprietary commodification of design as a fashion and brand. Even now, a reactionary old guard, wearing frayed progressive trappings, condemns virtually any use of ornament, pattern, or precedent as reactionary, uncreative, and lacking in imagination.

But in an age that demands new thinking, perhaps it is that attitude itself that betrays the ultimate lack of imagination.

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Michael Mehaffy is an urbanist and critical thinker in complexity and the built environment. He is a practicing planner and builder, and is known for his many projects as well as his writings. He has been a close associate of the architect and software pioneer Christopher Alexander. He is a Research Associate with the Center for Environmental Structure, Alexander’s research center founded in 1967, and Executive Director of the Sustasis Foundation, a Portland, OR-based NGO dedicated to developing and applying neighborhood-scale tools for resilient and sustainable development.

Nikos A. Salingaros is a mathematician and polymath known for his work on urban theory, architectural theory, complexity theory, and design philosophy. He has been a close collaborator of the architect and computer software pioneer Christopher Alexander. Salingaros published substantive research on Algebras, Mathematical Physics, Electromagnetic Fields, and Thermonuclear Fusion before turning his attention to Architecture and Urbanism. He still is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio and is also on the Architecture faculties of universities in Italy, Mexico, and The Netherlands.

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat

Throwing Out Ornament

Right: The new Ryerson University Image Arts glass box all lit up
Left: The cloister windows of Notre Dame of Paris

The posting below is from Camera Lucida, which I wrote last year:

Throwing Out Ornament
November 19, 2011
Camera Lucida

I walk by Ryerson University almost daily to get to and from the downtown amenities (stores, bank, subways, etc.). Yesterday, I saw a young man taking photos of the new Image Arts building. I asked him what attracted him to the building. He said he liked the simple square. The building in the evening is impressively lit, and glows in dark shades of blue and yellow. Other times, it lights up in fluorescent pinks and purples. I'm not sure if this lighting extravaganza is to honor the new building, or if it will continue regularly. In any case, for a building that calls itself image arts, it is a cheesy decoration. But, it accentuates the box-like structure of the building.

I asked this young man if he's a film or photography student. He said neither, but was studying to be a counselor for LGBT youth. "Lesbian---Gay---Bisexual---Transgender---Youth" I said. Yes, he answered.

I asked him if architecture hadn't regressed. "Think about the medieval cathedrals, or the renaissance palaces. All we do now is glass boxes. Lego for grown ups. We're back to simple squares and circle, just a little above the line in the sand drawn with a piece of stick."

He informed me of the level modern technology has reached in order to build an almost exclusively glass building, since the glass is now essentially as strong as concrete.

Yes, but we have lost art in the process. Also, the medieval stained glass windows were no less of a technical feat. Their designers had to work with coloring the glass, designing the shapes, figures and forms within the glass, and making it function as a window. Think of the beauty of the glass in Notre Dame Cathedral. And the strength of those windows which held up arches.

"I'm not into ornamentation," he replied nonchalantly, referencing (I think, although I may be giving him too much credit) the early twentieth century anti-ornament movement.

I don't think he's been to Paris, or even bothered with the history of glass and glass structures, when he gave me his quick, empty response.

"So what do you do" he asked me. I said I'm a former image arts (Ryerson) student of film and photography and that I tell people like him, one person at a time, that modern art, for all its supposed sophistication, has done us a great disservice, and is slowly dismantling our art and culture. And that my task as an image maker is to revive the tradition of the arts (of the image arts), and pick it up where modernism has thrown it aside, scornfully rejecting thousands of years of wisdom and erudition.

"Good bye, I have to be off now!" I said. Less than a minute later, I heard him shout from the (now empty) skating rink in front of the building: "I'm off too!" I hope he meant that he was done with those photos. Perhaps he just needed someone to jolt his intellect a little. I waved back, and walked on. But someone who has embraced this contrary life, this anti-life, is hardly going to be influenced by a five minute conversation. What he wants is the ultimate destruction of the traditional and religious society that condemns his "lifestyle." The less powerful this tradition, and its concrete reminders, the better for him and his ilk. Juvenile, even infantile art of basic shapes and design will certainly help with that regression, and ultimate destruction. One step at a time towards the gotterdammerung.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat