The Design Line: 2 - 8 July
It’s been a big week for news, but if you still want more then the Design Line has it covered. In this edition, Kanye West branches out into the world of automobile design, Google promises to protect the geolocation data of people visiting abortion clinics in America, and we reflect on the legacy of Marcus Fairs, the founder of Dezeen.
The Dezeen founder has died at the age of 54 (image: via Dezeen).
Marcus Fairs 1967 - 2022
The design world was shocked on Monday when news broke of the sudden passing of Dezeen founder Marcus Fairs, who died unexpectedly last week at the age of 54. Fairs founded the digital platform as a blog in 2006 after leaving traditional print magazine Icon under something of a cloud. It was Fairs who had the last laugh, however; Dezeen surfed the wave of the digital boom while legacy titles floundered in the shallows of the financial crisis and Web 1.0. A consummate networker and a notorious stickler for detail, Fairs moulded Dezeen into “the world's most influential architecture, interiors and design magazine”, whose embrace of digital established him as the leading figure within design media of the past decade and a half: while Dezeen was very much a product of its time, feeding into the internet’s burgeoning emphasis on immediacy and churn, even today it remains the design title that has done most to embrace digital media. Under Fairs’ leadership, the website built a reputation for breaking industry news and generous curation of imagery – a winning combination for the current era of breakneck news cycles and aesthetic accelerationism. Having celebrated 15 years since its founding in 2021, the platform was acquired by JP/Politiken Media Group, with Fairs remaining at the helm. Disegno’s thoughts are with Fairs’s family and Dezeen staff at this difficult time.
The data trail
Ever since last week’s decision by the US Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs. Wade, and its resultant assault upon bodily autonomy, attention has focused on how the tech giants will be handling personal data moving forward: in states that seek to criminalise abortion, a person’s search or location data could quickly become of interest to law enforcement seeking to prosecute terminations. Notable, then, was Google’s decision to move swiftly this week in announcing that it would automatically delete abortion clinic visits (alongside location data surrounding counselling centres, domestic violence shelters, fertility centres, and a number of other spaces) from the location history of its users. Good news, then? Well, kind of. While Google was quick to act on location data, it was less forthcoming around search data, with the company refusing to commit to automatically deleting search records about abortions and instead reiterating that users must individually opt to delete their search history. Now, personally we’re alarmed (albeit not surprised) that Google stores that data anyway, but given the current climate in the US the decision to retain such data by default feels especially reckless. In the US’s ongoing war against reproductive rights, the battlefield appears to be open on the digital, as well as physical, front.
A Roman return
Twenty-five years on from its dissolution, the British School at Rome’s Faculty of Architecture is to return for the 2022/23 academic year. Billed as a centre for interdisciplinary research that will oversee and support two fellowships for architects, the faculty is to be chaired by Allies and Morrison’s Bob Allies, who will be supported by practitioners including Denise Bennetts and Níall McLaughlin. First founded in 1912, the Architecture faculty eventually lost its funding in the 1990s before being absorbed into the school’s Fine Arts faculty. “Over time, I think that’s proved to be a problem for architecture because it means it’s underrepresented,” said Allies. “‘Putting architecture under fine arts was a bit of a misnomer. Yes, of course, art is important to architecture, but architecture is now really central to huge global questions of sustainability, climate change, urban growth and urban development, so to see the Rome scholarship as an arty thing is completely wrong in a sense.” While architecture has not been entirely absent from the British School at Rome in recent years, it is nevertheless exciting to hear that it is returning in a more full-throated manner. For those interested, its initial two scholarships (one focused on “exceptional, early-career architects throughout the Commonwealth”, the other to architectural historians) are now open for applications.
Could a computer do this?
Shakespeare may be long gone, and Austen may be doomed to Sisyphean adaptations (the reaction to the very Bridgerton-meets-Fleabag reboot of Persuasion was one of muted horror), but could Artificial Intelligence bring back their wit and sparkling prose? The Sunday Times provided the authors of Story Machines, a new book about how computers have allegedly mastered creative writing, with a list of writers from the canon, so the AI they have developed could take a stab at imitating each distinctive prose. The results were superficially convincing, but there was a lot of style over substance. “These machines have been trained on the internet and the internet is made up of small chunks and short paragraphs,” said co-author Mike Sharples. “It is not reflective, not analytic, not scholarly. On the surface, it is grammatically, stylistically OK.” Could AI write the Design Line? Maybe a convincing facsimile, if we fed it enough previous material, but it might get a little meandering and repetitive – unlike this snappy and very much human-made section, we might add. While AI can furnish us with previously unimaginable computing power, it’s unclear why we would want to delegate the intimately human process of creativity to machines.
The album to trainers to car design pipeline (image: Donda).
Yeezy does it
Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West) has made some good music; we’ve also quite liked some of his Yeezy trainers. All the other stuff… well, let’s say that we’re less keen on it (although his McDonald’c collaboration with Naoto Fukasawa definitely had something). But the design world can expect a lot more to come from Ye, with news this week that he has appointed sneaker designer Steven Smith as the head of his newly formed Donda Industrial Design studio. Smith is an industry veteran who has worked with West since 2016 on footwear, so it’s a fair bet that Donda will be working in that field (potentially signalling the end of Ye’s partnership with Adidas, particularly given that he has accused the German giant of plagiarism). But with Donda, Smith’s remit is expected to be wider than mere footwear, with the announcement of his appointment teasing concept art from something called the “Donda foam vehicle”, a car design that resembles a chubby, squat Batmobile. Now, Ye is not, perhaps, the most obvious person to design vehicles, but Smith seems convinced of his plan, explaining that “Mr. West is the single most inspiring creative I have ever worked with.” High praise, you might think, but by the standards of Ye it was positively lukewarm. This, after all, is the man whose 2008 Glow in the Dark tour featured a talking computer he had scripted to declare: “We need the brightest star in the universe. We need you Kanye.”
The midcentury modernist hotdog stand that looks good enough to eat (image: Tail o’ the Pup).
Bad taste tastes good
In their seminal text Learning From Las Vegas, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown meticulously documented and critiqued the architecture of Las Vegas and famously divvied up its buildings into two categories of modernist design: the Duck and the Decorated Shed. Ducks, named after a 1931 duck-shaped building on Long Island, are those gloriously kitsch structures that semaphore their purpose with their form. But as time and the grasping bulldozers of developers come for many mid-century buildings, Ducks of a certain vintage are becoming an endangered species. So it was a great joy to hear that Tail o’ the Pup, a hotdog-shaped hotdog stand first erected in 1946, is returning to grace West Hollywood, Los Angeles, after 15 years languishing in storage. Complete with a fresh coat of paint along its signature mustard stripe, the sausage-and-bun-shaped eatery will serve its namesakes alongside an updated menu of milkshakes and merchandise. It’s probably a savvy decision on the part of its new owners, as one imagines mimetic architecture like this snack-shaped snack shack is Instagram catnip for meme-obsessed millennials.