online: 10 april 2011 modified: 18 march, 4, 5, 7, 10 april 2011 18 march 2011 modernism for all
in a furniture supermarket
...after a bewildering journey through unfamiliar suburbia i am guided by kindly people (already adapted to the diminished but popular version of the residential garden suburb of Henrietta Barnett and others) to the entrance-area-with-playground of ikea the international furniture supermarket... a profitable mixture of consumer-factory (for self-assembled furniture)... school of design-culture... and commodity supermarket...
...is this what became of German modernism and the Bauhaus*, Russian Modernism at the Vuhutemas design school, and even of the semi-fictional craft utopias of John Ruskin and William Morris?...
...having been advised to begin with a meal i found myself in the restaurant (a noise-filled but spacious sea of plain whitewood tables, chairs and white sofas beneath a sky of Scandinavian snowflake-like lights... surrounded on two sides by Miesian (or even Eames-like) floor-to-ceiling fenestration or curtain wall (new names for what became of the pre-modernist tradition of hole-in-wall windows)...
...yes (says my first thought) this is what came of the whole modern movement, in design and architecture, that well-intentioned cultural effort... for the many by a few... and the subsequent flow of new life freed of 19th century slum living and paternalistic restriction... this could be IT, the tame but popular future of modernist design... and a step towards decentralised everything...
[as i write this i am aware of what could be my own transformation from no-longer-needed finder of new design methods for professionals to a new me who looks for ways to reorganise designing as 'creative democracy'... or some such?]
...in the bus back... having learnt that the actual bus routes are simpler than i was told by the (automated and centralised) public-route-planner... and even by the person at the (centralised) call centre...
...from which i conclude that the new way is to base everything on local knowledge and responsibility... supported by (but not controlled by) intelligent software... and perhaps other necessities as yet unforeseen...
...my local adviser (in finding the right bus from ikea) was a well-informed man who set me confidently on this bus... which goes all the way to where i live in one hop... and he said a kindly good-bye when he got off before i did...
...an empty plastic water bottle is rolling about the bus... but none of us rescues it... is that public reticence one of the things that keeps us from seeing 'responsible anarchy' as reasonable, or even as a social joy or pleasure?...
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