The Design Line: 23 - 29 July
As Morag Myerscough restores Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England, Saudi Arabia announces its own take on the wall typology with new plans for a 100-mile-long glass city in the desert – welcome to this week’s edition of Design Line!
Hadrian for all!
Hadrian’s Wall can be a tough sell for those not already well versed in Roman history. Erected from 122CE onwards, the wall was a 73-mile-long defensive fortification that marked the frontier of the Roman Empire in northern England – no doubt spectacular in its day, but it now exists as a series of partial ruins that do not, perhaps, do justice to the scale of the original undertaking (Disegno’s editor is, to this day, still recovering from learning that a childhood holiday would be spent looking at an old wall near Newcastle). Congratulations to Morag Myerscough, then, for restoring some of the wall’s former pomp this week. Commissioned by English Heritage to create a contemporary installation that could mark the wall’s 1,900th anniversary, Myerscough has responded in style. Titled The Future Belongs To What Was As Much As What Is, Myercough’s installation occupies the site of the original northern gatehouse at the Wall’s Housesteads Roman Fort and replicates this structure’s impressive size, all while recasting the fort as a scaffolding structure bearing technicolour signs that explore the wall and its history (with the wording on these signs chosen in collaboration with poet Ellen Moran and members of the local community). Myerscough’s work pulls double duty: it not only offers a glimpse back into history, making tangible what has been lost, but also seems to provide a thoughtful reflection on borders and migration today, with signs bearing messagings such as “warning or welcome”, “open door” and “longing and belonging”. “We hope that placing such a bold contemporary art installation in this ancient landscape will not only capture people’s imagination but maybe also challenge their ideas of what the wall was for,” Kate Mavor, chief executive of English Heritage, said. “Not just a means to keep people out, but a frontier that people could – and did – cross.” Well said.
Skirting the issue
A well-dressed protest broke out in Paris this week at the Dior shop on the Champs-Elysees over the design of a $3,800 skirt. Protesting students dressed in Hanfu, traditional robes worn by Han Chinese, brought placards and livestreamed their actions before police shut them down. The activists were protesting the fashion brand’s claim that a pleated skirt it sells is a “hallmark Dior silhouette”, when it looks remarkably similar to a historic Ming dynasty mǎmiànqún (马面裙) skirt. Also known as Horse Face Skirts, these practical garments’ pleats were originally designed for convenient horseback riding. While historical fashion is often a source of inspiration for designers, there’s a fine line between appreciation and appropriation, with Dior the latest badly behaved maison to cross the line. Instead of acknowledging the inspiration or, if we want to be generous, accidental similarity (after all, in the intervening 4,000 years a lot of skirt styles will have been “discovered” by pleat-happy designers), Dior's claim that the silhouette is proprietary is clearly ahistorical. Dior has now removed the skirt from its online stores, but protesters have vowed to take their Hanfu and placards to boutiques in London and New York. While luxury European fashion brands are desperate to court Chinese customers, they regularly run afoul by treading roughshod over cultural differences or playing into racial stereotypes. Dolce and Gabbana’s infamous chopstick advert caused deep offence, while Gucci has come under fire for using stereotypical makeup looks for Asian models to market the brand's clothes to a Western audience (while presenting simple product shots to its Chinese market). After this latest snafu, perhaps designers and copywriters will be a little less hasty to try and colonise the pleated skirt.
We miss Harriss
When architect Harriet Harriss was appointed dean of Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture in 2019, the New York institution heralded its appointment of a figure who had “pursued a trailblazing career displaying innovation and leadership in architecture”, with Harriss joining from her role leading the post-graduate research programme in architecture and interior design at the Royal College of Art in London. Just three years later, however, Harriss is to leave her position at Pratt, with the school announcing that she would instead “transition into a leave to pursue research” surrounding “climate justice pedagogy, practice and policy”. Harriss’s decision to step back from management and into research is understandable given that her tenure at Pratt coincided with a tumultuous period for the school. Under Harriss’s leadership, the institution has tried to respond to the challenges of the pandemic, widespread political unrest, and the vital issues of social justice raised by the Black Lives Matter Movement. A challenging brief, then, but one that Harriss seemed to meet with some success: under her leadership, Pratt launched its first Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Council, a graduate incubator, and a new master’s degree in landscape, while also becoming the first American school of architecture to hold international accreditations from both NAAB and RIBA. Three years is a short time in such a role, but Harriss leaves behind a worthwhile legacy.
Game with impunity
Video games have, historically, faced a bad rap. They’ve variously been accused of encouraging violence (false), linked to addiction (probably true), and even subject to government-issued restrictions around use. The discipline may have breathed a sigh of relief this week, then, when a University of Oxford study found evidence to suggest that gaming has no intrinsic impact on wellbeing, seemingly refuting longstanding claims that the field is pernicious to mental health. Tracking the gameplay habits of 40,000 gamers (whereas previous studies have relied upon self-reported estimates), the study found no evidence that gaming had an impact on life satisfaction. Rather than an intrinsic link between games and wellbeing, it instead found that wellbeing around gaming is more likely liked to the “mindset that people have as they approach games”: play for positive reasons – such as having fun or socialising with friends – tends to be associated with positive wellbeing; play for negative reasons – such as feeling a compulsion to meet certain goals within a game – is linked with worse satisfaction. Fairly commonsensical, then, but in a field as frequently demonised as video games, it’s nice to have some scientific evidence to set things straight.
Hashtag unhappiness
Redesigns of popular social media platforms rarely go down well, but recent changes made by Instagram, the photo-posting app owned by Meta, have caused so much upset that even the Kardashians are up in arms. The wildly unpopular redesign has seen its Reels video feed centred in its layout. Even Adam Mosseri, the platform’s head, has admitted that the new system is “not yet good” in a statement trying to placate unhappy users, both celebrity and plebeian. Meta has been accused of trying to turn Instagram into video-based app TikTok, which has been “eating Facebook’s lunch” with its impressive ad performance. Owned by Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok is one endless scroll of user-created videos, selected by an algorithm that’s spookily good at discerning your tastes and interests. While TikTok has snaffled up advertising money, Meta lost an estimated $10bn in ad revenue after Apple introduced a simple checkbox-based change to its privacy policy. But it is hard to feel sorry for Meta for the backlash. After all, the lies it told to news publications about the success of video content on Facebook caused the “pivot to video” that decimated newsrooms around the world, only for their video content to fall flat while Facebook became the dominant distributer of (often completely fake) news. Having chewed through the publishing industry, Meta has announced that it is over news distribution and is pivoting to the creator economy instead – promptly pissing off the homegrown creator economy it already had on Instagram. Meanwhile reports leaked from Meta HQ paint a picture of a frustrated Mark Zuckerberg fretting over the onrushing economic downturn and, in response, taking away extra holiday days from employees. Recovering from the Great Instagram Redesign Fiasco may take more than a judiciously applied Valencia filter to fix.
Make no mistake, this is not a good idea (image: via Neom).
Scraping the barrel
First we had skyscrapers, those buildings that stretch up so high they scrape the clouds (duh). Then we hand landscapers, buildings so long that they were like skyscrapers having a wee lie down, providing all of the space with less of the vertigo. Now we have a design for a cityscraper, accompanied by the sounds of the bottom of the creative barrel being, well, scraped. Designs released this week for Line, a futuristic city in the desert of Saudi Arabia, show a 100-mile-long building that is clad in mirrors. Right. One hundred miles of mirrors in the middle of a desert, what could go wrong? At 500m-tall, Line would be a mega tall skyscraper, and at 200m wide, a very skinny city. The scheme, which is the brainchild of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, paints a picture of an AI-run future city that stretches credulity thinner than a piece of tissue stretched 100 miles. High speed rail will, allegedly, make the journey down Line a mere 20 minutes, and facilities will include outdoor skiing (in, and again we stress, a desert). Line is part of Neom, the Saudi royal family’s plans to build a desert megacity that will move the kingdom away from its oil-based economy and encourage young people to move there. For all the talk of flying taxis and robot maids, the reality is that this multi-billion-dollar plan has, so far, mainly involved violently displacing the Huwaitat tribespeople to make way for a megalopolis scale. Credit to the designers at least – a vast expanse of mirrors is a fitting symbol of a vanity project of supervillain proportions.