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.

Our last meal as pre-child adults was at Panera—something quick and light on the way to the hospital (plus she craved it)—and as we ordered our “pick twos” on a digital menu, I was struck by the beauty of a jazzy Christmas song that would have otherwise been extremely ordinary. It was “White Christmas” by Booker T and the M.G.s. My guess is that the stakes of an extraordinary moment—in this case, one of anticipation—can totally rewire musical taste (or preference in anything, really). Works that we attribute meaning to sometimes have nothing to do with objective qualities of the art, but in the circumstance in which you experience it. 

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.