Before embarking on this truncated account, a few caveats are in order. A history of design will necessarily overlap with social, cultural, political, and economic histories, because design is an expression of the culture in which it was commissioned, conceived, produced, distributed, and consumed. Accounts of this sort will be heavily skewed towards the tastes, appetites, and habits of the wealthy since the powerful elites were the primary subsidizers and consumers of design until well after the Industrial Revolution, and indeed, are a powerful force fueling contemporary art and design innovation at the present.
As with any history, there are a plethora of tendencies, ideas, and movements occurring simultaneously, and a certain reductionism is essential to narrative coherence. This drive toward reduction deeply conflicts with the countervailing need to evoke the diversity, contradiction, and complexity of a particular strand followed through successive periods of history. This section admittedly paints with a very broad brush.
Some of the background stylistic analysis of industrial design, according to movements such as Rococco, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Modernism, are rooted in relatively conventional art history notions, which are, at best, lenses with limited scope. However, the main thrust of this section is not to explicate clear stylistic categories, but to sketch a plausible story of how art and industry emerged from a common source and were constituted by nineteenth century consciousness into separate spheres. Furthermore, with the collapse of the nineteenth century world-view, art and industry were transformed, moving toward potential merger once again.
In the late twentieth century, industrial design is an integral part of the vast array of goods manufactured by serial or mass-production methods. Industrial design has been professionalized and has emerged in the twentieth century as part of the trend toward specialization in large-scale modern industry. Generally today, the industrial designer is either a direct employee of an organization or an independent consultant working on a commission basis for a variety of clients. Part of the task of industrial design is translating technological or scientific developments into products which will attract a mass-audience of consumers, having a major impact on a company's overall performance.
A crucial aspect of industrial design is acknowledgment of the manufacturing context for which designs are created. Industrial designers must produce a plan of a form for mass production, which involves separating the process of conception from the actual manufacturing process. Industrial design is not confined to any one material or to a particular category of artifact or environment. Indeed, the very pervasiveness of industrial products has caused them to become invisible despite the crucial role they play in shaping the material framework of our lives.
Industrial design's simultaneous ubiquity and diversity have proved to be extremely problematic in the area of intellectual property law. While industrial designs may have been conceived to serve certain useful purposes and reflect certain values, they are also undeniably works of the creative intellect, embodying and contradicting the paradigm of intellectual property. This duality of utilitarian function and aesthetic value has resulted in an internally inconsistent set of congressional, administrative, and judicial decisions, which repeatedly demonstrate the metaphysical nature of copyright law.
To understand the contemporary meaning or meanings of industrial design, it is necessary to examine the nature of the art/utility dichotomy and the historical context in which it developed. The art/utility split is part and parcel of the pervasive cleavage of the universe into mutually exclusive, dichotomous spheres of experience which occurred in Western thought during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In this account, the twentieth century can be seen as an era in which these once clear dichotomies began disintegrating at an ever increasing rate, due to internal contradictions and external historical contingencies. What we are left with in the late twentieth century is a fragmentation of earlier world-views. These fragments prove tantalizing because they promise illusory rationalization and order in the face of a world which has grown increasingly contradictory and complex. Insofar as the art/industry dichotomy is analogous to, and implicated by the public/private split, it is useful to try to analyze its rise and fall.
A. Origins
Some past civilizations have defined art as skill developed by practice. The Romans used the word ars, the root of which signified manual skills achieved in large measure by imitating the works of one's predecessors. As recently as the end of the nineteenth century, Western art in the academies was taught through intensive copying of existing contemporary and ancient two- and three-dimensional works.
During the Middle Ages, artists formed guilds similar to apothecaries, saddlemakers, and other craftsmen. These professions were considered the mechanical arts, and their practitioners were producers who worked manually for payment. During this period the separation of art from industry began. There is no precise historical point at which the idea of craft separated into expressive conceptual and labor components. Instead, this separation can be viewed as an historical tendency. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, processes of social change occurred at a slower pace, and craftsmen were not innovators, but rather made minor adaptations to forms developed by earlier craftsmen.
During the late Medieval period and early Renaissance, there was a growth of trade in cities such as Florence, Venice, and Nuremberg. This growth in trade spurred the formation of large workshops which catered to the tastes of churches, monarchs and wealthy merchants. These workshops utilized traditional techniques of hand-manufacture in which the border between artistry and craftsmanship was extremely fluid. Often, multiple objects of the same type were made. A rise in commercial competition that threatened the fifteenth century led to a demand for innovation, which threatened the artisan's emphasis on maintaining established forms.
At this point design innovation did not necessarily mean the creation of new forms, but rather the addition of fashionable decoration and ornamentation. By the early sixteenth century, following the invention and dissemination of the printing press by Gutenberg in the 1450s, the first pattern books began to appear. The appearance of pattern books signified the divorce of a designer from the application of his designs. At approximately this point in the sixteenth century, the word "design" emerged, which recognized a separation of what had previously been a unitary idea of craft into intellectual and manual work.
[Gardner stresses] the high value that Renaissance artists placed on theory. . . . [I]f any occupation or profession were to have dignity and be worthy of honor, it must have an intellectual basis. . . . [F]or somewhat similar reasons, 'fine' artists today are likely to consider their pursuits superior to those of 'commercial' artists. Renaissance artists strove to make themselves scholars and gentlemen, to associate with princes and the learned, and to rise above the long-standing ancient and medieval prejudice that saw them as mere handicraftsmen.
As "design" was splitting off from craft, so too was "high" art. However, between "art" and "design" there was still much fluidity, undoubtedly due in part to their common sources of royal or state subsidy and patronage, and their common split between theory and practice.
Threaded through this period is the theme of state censorship. The origins of copyright involve the double-edged state grant, which subsidized approved content and suppressed the disapproved.
By the seventeenth century, the trade centers of Europe shifted from the Mediterranean to such centralized nation-states as France, which border the North Atlantic. The lavish courts of these absolute monarchies provided patronage for artisans and skilled craftsmen, with the establishment of large crown-controlled manufactories. These manufactories produced for royal consumption fine tapestries, furniture, metal work, and porcelains, with designs supplied to the artisans by the court artist.
Simultaneously, a profound split between "pure" art and industry emerged, with "design" ironically falling on the "pure" art side of the division. While the "third estate," composed of the increasingly wealthy and influential middle-class, was ascending to greater power, the aristocracy still remained the patrons of the arts, and the arts reflected the decadence of the ruling class taste in decline. "The art that won aristocratic favor was luxurious, frivolous, sensual, and clever. . . . Intricate and witty artifice now became the objective in all the arts . . . ."
By the middle of the eighteenth century in France, the designer, in addition to being a discrete specialist for the royal manufactories, also worked with commercial companies. These companies desired high-quality surface pattern designs, including those produced by wallpaper and textile manufacturers. Following the French Revolution, and the collapse of the absolute monarchy these royal factories had to adapt to marketplace competition. Their designers became employees, instead of royal functionaries. Guilds were dissolved in 1791 as vestiges of medieval hierarchy, industry came to be identified with the bourgeoisie, as opposed to the church and nobility. A plutocracy of wealthy merchants replaced the fallen aristocracy in France and the market then catered to the emerging bourgeoise.
During the eighteenth century, the absence of an absolute monarchy in England in the model of Louis XIV in France, forced English designers to expand earlier and more extensively into the commercial marketplace. By the mid-eighteenth century, rapid technological growth and applied science generated new processes and products. Names like Chippendale, Wedgewood, and Boulton belonged to commercial entrepreneurs, not artists. These innovators produced "competitively priced fashionable objects" and developed new methods of manufacture to serve the newly emergent merchant class. Eclecticism and innovation were the cornerstones of design during this period. " 'Fashion hath much to do in these things,' . . . 'and that of the present age distinguishes itself by adopting the most Elegant ornaments without presuming to invent new ones.'"
B. Developments
The separation of "beauty" and "utility," rooted in Enlightenment ideas and refracted through the prism of nascent Romanticism, was very much at odds with the profoundly democratizing effects of mass production. The sharp separation between art and utility, which can be traced to the Renaissance, emphasized theory divorced from practice and art over its applications. Ironically, at the very moment of the Industrial Revolution when it was plausible for their integration, art and utility split into mutually exclusive intellectual and aesthetic realms. With Romanticism sweeping the so-called "fine" arts, the Renaissance paradigm of the artist as the "universal" man became transmogrified into the tragic Promethean individual artist apart from society, seeking to transcend and escape traditional values and conventional history.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the term "fine" art had emerged, contemporaneous with the change of the name of the French Royal Academy to the Academie Ecol des Beaux-Arts in 1795. The Academie Ecol des Beaux-Arts sanctioned painting, sculpture, and architecture as "superior to the crafts." The new academicians, with a focus on science, theory, and history, regarded themselves as being dedicated to the gratification of taste and the pursuit of "pure" beauty, apart from and above mere craftsmen who produced useful objects. This split between "high" art and industry further reproduced itself within manufacturing, where there were now "designers" and "workers."
Prior to the nineteenth century and the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, ornamentation and decoration had been the expression of a craftsman's skill in working precious materials having both aesthetic and economic value. Design had largely been integrated with craft, but now, prodded by industrialization, it shifted to imitating the "pure" arts. It attempted to legitimize its new status by aping the forms, but not the substance, of luxurious ornament. As was the case with the social sciences a century later, design was starting to become professionalized as a discrete specialty, completely separate from the manual trades. The new manufacturing technologies and materials of the Industrial Revolution, such as stamping, molding, plating, and veneering, were capable of simulating the look of traditional high quality craftwork at a much lower cost. The appearance of intricate texture and elegant design, which were once the preserve of luxury and aristocracy, became accessible to the middle class at a significantly lower cost.
The design criteria and standards of these newly emergent industries were derived from an earlier period when elaborate form, ornate decoration, and costly materials symbolized wealth and power. The lower cost and quality of these products fed the voracious appetites of the growing middle class for products signifying status, taste, prestige, standing, and culture. Unfortunately, decoration and ornament were used indiscriminately, resulting in a baroque mockery of vanished elegance, insensitive to new, industrial realities. Manufacturers hastened to ornament simple articles in order to raise the market price for their products, realizing that a useful item with ostentatious decoration would sell for more than a similar, but unadorned, item.
Generally, the nineteenth century had an intense fixation with earlier historical periods. Regarding design, this historical obsession further expanded the vernacular of available stylistic forms and sources. These expanded sources were primarily evaluated according to their decorative, rather than their structural qualities. Out of these new resources, manufacturers ransacked and pillaged history, in search of novelty which could be transformed into marketable ornamentation and decorative features for the insatiable appetite of the nouveau riche. Often the results were a grotesque pastiche of historical forms slapped onto articles with little thought of the inter-relationship between the past or present, or the nature of the articles themselves.
Writing in the 1930s, Nikolaus Pevsner described a picture of the early- to mid-nineteenth century:
[M]anufacturers were, by means of new machinery, enabled to turn out thousands of cheap articles in the same time and at the same cost as were formerly required for the production of one well-made object. Sham materials and sham technique were dominant all through industry. Skilled craftsmanship, still so admirable when Chippendale and Wedgwood were at work, was replaced by mechanical routine. Demand was increasing from year to year, but demand from an uneducated and debased population, living a slave-life in filth and penury.
During the mid-Victorian period, discourse regarding the relation of an object to its function centered around the question of the appropriateness of its decorative style, which often was a melange of various historic stylistic flourishes.
Reformers and critics who attacked "art for art's sake" as an elitist slogan, pointed to Cellini saltcellars, Raphael candelabra, and other objets d'art as proof that art was still art even when attached to useful objects. However, evoking images of Renaissance saltcellars minimized the economic aims of industrial design—which had hit its stride by the mid-nineteenth century. William Morris spearheaded the attack on industrialization in Victorian England. With the Arts and Crafts movement, he sought to bring art back in touch with life. To Morris, Victorian "fine" artists and designers "'wrap[ed] themselves up in dreams of Greece and Italy . . . which only a very few people even pretend to understand or be moved by.'" Morris sought to revive the handicraft tradition, denouncing the elitism and irrelevance of the "art for art's sake" movement. To him, art was "the expression by man of his pleasure in labour," and the Romantic emphasis on artistic inspiration as a conduit to underlying reality was mystifying nonsense. "'[T]here is no such thing; it is a mere matter of craftsmanship.'"
William Morris was a contradictory figure. While he abhorred the industrialization of the nineteenth century and its concomitant degradation of life and labor, he accepted the skewed historicism of the Victorian era. Looking backward to the time of cathedrals and craft guilds, but without considering the effect of the rigid religious and social hierarchies, Morris proclaimed, "'[I]t is not possible to dissociate art from morality, politics and religion.'" He denounced "art for art's sake" as dangerous elitism, proclaiming, "'I don't want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.'" Yet, when workers rioted in London, aroused in part by Morris' own romantic socialist polemics, he withdrew into his own private world of Pre-Raphaelite beauty and poetry. "While Morris wanted an art 'by the people for the people,'" his handcrafted pieces of applied art were exorbitantly priced. To use his own pejorative which he had hurled at advocates of "art for art's sake," his work ended up becoming art "for 'the swinish luxury of the rich.'"
Morris was appalled by Victorian industry's treatment of its workers as depersonalized adjuncts of machines, precluded from producing skillful, meaningful, and creative work. To Morris, such work was an essential element of their humanity. The Arts and Crafts movement put forward a profoundly nostalgic, sentimentalized and idealistic program of Medieval values. With these values, Morris sought to recreate a harmonious, non-industrial society - a society in which human life was dignified and given meaning by the skills and creativity of handcraftsmanship.
The importance of Morris and his followers in the Arts and Crafts movement was two-fold. Their first contribution was the complete rejection of decoration and ornamentation as a symbol of past decadence and excess. Second, they placed a new stress on the structure and function of objects as an emblem of moral, social, and aesthetic renewal. It was this strand that was absorbed and transformed during the late nineteenth century in the United States and Europe. This approach developed into a glorification and celebration of modern industry and the machine age, an approach which came to be known as "functionalism."
The Belgian architect Henri Van de Velde gathered up the strands of the Arts and Crafts movement, discarding some and emphasizing others. Van de Velde wrote, "'The seeds that fertilised our spirit, evoked our activities, and originated the complete renewal of ornamentation and form in the decorative arts, were undoubtedly the work and the influence of John Ruskin and William Morris.'" Van de Velde, one of the originators of Art Nouveau, decisively broke with Morris' anti-machine ideology. In lectures given in 1894, Van de Velde's fundamental starting point was the machine, "'Why should artists who build palaces in stone rank any higher than artists who build them in metal?' Engineers are 'the architects of the present day.' . . . What we need is 'a logical structure of the products, uncompromising logic in the use of materials, proud and frank exhibition of working processes.'"
Van de Velde continued to develop Morris' moral and social principles, arguing that objects could not be considered separate from their method of production and context of use. He felt that artists and designers should be controlling influences, guardians insuring predominance of human needs. Van de Velde stressed the importance of linking theory and practice. If designers exclusively concerned themselves with the quest for new forms, these newly discovered forms could later be exploited out of context, thereby mangling the theory by distorting its application. This is, however, what happened to Art Nouveau as it became yet another ornamental style applied to products, severed from its origins.
Van de Velde and Art Nouveau stand at the end of the nineteenth century "craftsman" tradition, drawing upon curvilinear natural forms for inspiration, while beginning a new tradition by exploiting light metal structures. This use was made possible by developments in engineering and fabrication technology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Art Nouveau, the structure itself was transformed into its own ornament. This attempt "to create a new, universal style which would harmonize all aspects of the visual environment into a total entity, a complete work of art that would be the embodiment of cultural and social unity" carried the Arts and Crafts strand of moral didacticism forward into the twentieth century.
The writings and works of John Ruskin and William Morris were important influences in the United States, particularly on the work of Henry H. Richardson. Richardson sought to revive the Romanesque style by using "heavy round arches and massive masonry walls," but with original ornament drawn from natural forms. He managed to integrate these elements, using new building technologies, without degenerating into historical pastiche.
Richardson's protégé, Louis Sullivan, who has been called "the first truly modern architect," felt that the traditional preoccupation with historical styles impeded the development of an architecture in which "form follows function." Sullivan wanted the exteriors of his buildings to reflect their inner structure, which by the late nineteenth century included a considerably expanded vocabulary of new forms and building technologies. Standardization, prefabrication, and other new technologies and materials allowed innovative designs involving vast enclosed spaces and densities. Somewhere between the works of John Roebling, designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, and Louis Sullivan, the "modern" engineering aesthetic became elevated over earlier impulses to historicist ornamentation and design.
One must consider the socialist, humanist, and moral underpinnings of William Morris in order to fully appreciate Sullivan's slogan that "form follows function." While this expression might be "misinterpreted as expressing a somewhat crude structural and aesthetic determinism," Sullivan "attempt[ed] to formulate a concept of organic unity in architecture [and design] in which function, structure and appropriate decoration could be fused." Past architecture and design had been inextricably linked to the cultural refinements and indulgences of the aristocracy. In the late nineteenth century, the emerging industrial city, the rise of the working classes, and the urgent need for housing to accommodate an ever increasing population led to an expanded concept of social responsibility. Frank Lloyd Wright, who had worked under Sullivan, understood the ideological imperatives latent in a commitment to the organic and natural in architecture and design, as opposed to the ornamental and historical. "Classic architecture was all fixation-of-the-fixture. . . . Now why not let walls, ceilings, floors become seen as component parts of each other, their surfaces flowing into each other. . . ." "You may see the appearance . . . in the surface of your hand contrasted with the articulation of the bony skeleton itself. This ideal, profound in its architectural implications . . . I called . . . continuity."
Wright's early independent work included designs for furniture, intended to be an integral part of the houses he designed. Similar to Henri Van de Velde, Wright "came to realize, however, that the clean, straight lines of his furniture could be better achieved by the precision of machines than by hand." While not denying that machines could be used to produce "butchered forms," he also saw the potential to emancipate what he felt was the true nature and beauty of materials. Wright once wrote that 'machines have undoubtedly placed within reach of the designer a technique enabling him to realize the true nature of wood in his designs harmoniously with man's sense of beauty, satisfying his material needs with such economy as to put this beauty of wood in use within the reach of everyone.'
From out of Art Nouveau, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and others the principle of structure emerged, which, when coupled with new building technologies, freed architecture from traditional concerns of stability and support. With traditional design concerns subordinated, issues of aesthetics and utility of the structure were thrust into the forefront. Le Corbusier described "functional" houses as "machines for living in" Adolph Loos equated ornament with "crime." The early European functionalists prescribed a severe and dogmatic insistence on planar rectilinearity and non-ornamentation, at odds even with the proto-functionalist designs of Wright. The European "functionalists" eschewed naturalism and the organic in favor of machined-planed severity.
In the early twentieth century, artistic and architectural movements proliferated feverishly. Prior to the Modern Movement in design, the fundamental purpose of an architectural treatise was to identify an aesthetic canon to help future practitioners avoid errors of symmetry, measure, and style. Although all architectural manifestos of the early twentieth century claimed to reflect the functional and aesthetic needs of society, their actual content was not characterized by flexibility or sensitivity to these needs. Particularly during the period from 1910 to 1940, these architectural manifesto writers took an imperious view of civilization's working and living requirements, structuring their designs with an almost fascistic dedication to system, efficiency, and order. One could hear, repeated with religious fervor, the themes that technology was a panacea for society's troubles, the house was a typological form, the building was a statement of social responsibility, formalism should be the overriding aesthetic, and that function should be the ultimate goal.
In 1919, Henry Van de Velde appointed Walter Gropius as his successor to the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts, founded by Van de Velde in 1906. Gropius promptly renamed the school Das Staatliche Bauhaus and redesigned its curriculum into one with a strong utopian bent, which stressed that "functional" design was the solution to urgent problems in the areas of housing, urban planning, and mass-production. Gropius de-emphasized the verbal disciplines, focusing on handicraft training as the natural base for models leading to industrial products. The Bauhaus aesthetic glorified the machine form as natural and took as its classic paradigm the cubic unit - a box. In 1919, Gropius proclaimed: " 'Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward the heavens from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.' "
In 1924, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of the Bauhaus' master polemicists, said, "'industrialization [is] the central problem of building in our time. If we succeed in carrying out this industrialization, the social, economic, and also the artistic problems will be readily solved.' " This explicit utopianism readily manifested itself in an exuberant optimistic scientism. In 1926, stressing technical objectivity, efficiency, and geometric form, Gropius wrote:
'The Bauhaus workshops are essentially laboratories . . . .
In these laboratories the Bauhaus wants to train a new kind of collaborator for industry and the crafts, who has an equal command of both technology and form. To reach the objective of creating a set of standard prototypes . . . requires the selection of the best . . . men . . . who are imbued with an exact knowledge of the design elements of form and mechanics and their underlying laws.'
There was a gross shortfall between the Bauhaus' grand claims of design's transformative power and the number of Bauhaus prototypes actually put into production. However, Gropius and his cadre of followers proved tremendously influential in redesigning the curriculum of architecture, art, and design education, particularly following the Bauhaus' closure by the Nazis in 1933. It was subsequently reborn in the United States with the appointment of Gropius at the Harvard Design School in 1934, and the founding of the New Bauhaus in Illinois in 1937.
The onset of the Great Depression in the United States created intense economic and competitive pressures among the firms which had survived the 1929 Wall Street crash. Against the background of Bauhaus rhetoric proclaiming the apotheosis of functionalism, the professionalization of design occurred. The grafting of Bauhaus essentialism onto commercial contexts confronted a modernist paradox of the market: Do consumer expectations create demand for designs or do designs create consumer expectations? The ideological function of design, in projecting the images of dynamism, progress, and intimations that technical progress would bring a materially improved, infinitely expanding and aesthetically brighter future, was a marketplace translation and mutation of the socialist, utopian content of the European Bauhaus into the vernacular of the United States.
During the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, in the United States, distribution of mass-consumer products became pervasive, created images of increasing material affluence and progress. Stoves, lamps, refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and electric irons were introduced under the banners of "labor saving" and "convenience," conditioning Americans to rapid style changes and growing consumerism. These streamlined refrigerators and vacuum cleaners were heralded as logical and necessary results of the application of the "form follows function" credo. Yet, it is hard to reconcile constant product changes and modifications with the attainment of a universal result, unless planned obsolescence and rapid style turnover can be considered a "function." Additionally, cost constraints influenced designers. For example, in the early refrigerators, metal stamping processes could only form large pieces of sheet metal into wide curves and corners, and sharp angles were too expensive and time-consuming to achieve. Therefore, the curved, convex outline was imposed on the designer because of the need to obtain low cost through high-speed production.
At the other end of the spectrum, technological advances freed designers by reducing functional elements. Style, from blatant stylistic fantasy to geometric "moderne," became a matter of designer choice, unconstrained by function. The development of synthetic plastics furthered this phenomenon by liberating designers from more external constraints imposed by materials. Consumer expectations, corporate identity, seasonal product style changes, advertising, and variable market forces were packed into the "form follows function" slogan, which had become stretched so thin as to become virtually meaningless. If everything was, or could be, "functional," then any or all forms could be dictated by indeterminate and general function.
By the late 1930s, Le Corbusier, Gropius, and the Bauhaus were firmly professionalized and entrenched in the consciousness of architecture and industrial design. However, during the 1940s and 1950s, it was becoming evident that only the means, and not the meanings, of the original Modernist movement remained. There was a growing disenchantment with the "promise of technology." Industrial growth was beginning to be seen more as a source of oppression rather than liberation - as a force creating numbing conformity, alienation, depersonalization, which stultified consumers.
The "glass and steel box" had not led to utopia. The Bauhaus had gone from being a socialist utopian visionary movement with a paradigmatic aspiration to design a brave new world of humanized worker's housing and work places, to a style associated with multinational mega-corporate firms. The so-called "International" style became synonymous with corporate power, culture, and values. The entire content of "form follows function" became drained, its meanings hopelessly scattered, distorted, and lost. Designers were now firmly professionalized and entrenched in corporate institutions, designing products not for a socialist utopia, but in order to maximize profits, in the name of function and modernity. This is the same irony which befell William Morris' Arts and Crafts movement a generation earlier, when his anti-industrial rhetoric was transmuted into a valorization of industry and the machine age.
By 1949, against mounting attacks, Gropius defended the dogma of the International style:
'The fear that individuality will be crushed out by the growing "tyranny" of standardization is the sort of myth which cannot sustain the briefest examination. In all great epochs of history the existence of standards - that is the conscious adoption of typeforms - has been the criterion of a polite and well-ordered society; for it is a commonplace that repetition of the same things for the same purposes exercises a settling and civilizing influence on men's minds.'
The core problem was that a "polite and well-ordered society" was growing increasingly irrelevant in a hopelessly complex, pluralistic, chaotic, and disordered world. Ironically, the pursuit of unity between theory and practice, for an indissoluble fusion between the aesthetic and the useful, produced its exact antithesis: the degeneration of "unity" into just another style, among thousands, to be applied much like kitsch Victorian floral appliqués, with little regard for social contexts of creation, use, or history.
It is also ironic that at the very moment of the Bauhaus' crisis of belief in "form follows function," the Supreme Court, in Mazer v. Stein, recognized applied art and design as protectable intellectual property. Both the Balinese figurine in Mazer and the Bauhaus geometric design shared a genesis in industrial design. The ceramic casting of the Balinese dancer, inserted with electric wiring and fixtures, captured the essence of the Bauhaus' dilemma. Technology and industry freed designers from "functional" constraints, but cast designers back into the dreaded ocean of arbitrary subjective ornamentation, denying them an objective "functional" design criterion. It is not surprising that the cases decided after Mazer have often reached confused holdings. It is on that edge of art and industry, the subjective and objective, the functional and the aesthetic, that our inherited and contingent mediators have failed to work.
The International style took a turn toward the subjective and metaphysical in the 1950s. Le Corbusier, in 1953, wrote that architecture is a condition in which " 'a fathomless depth gapes open, all walls are broken down, every other presence is put to flight, and the miracle of inexpressible space is achieved.' " The Social Engineers claimed consensus, but on closer examination, deep conflicts and controversies over fundamental values and assumptions had emerged. The realization was dawning that Modernist formalism had squeezed out the possibilities of aesthetic experience in the creation of self-voiding empty space, trimmed of all eclectic historical influences. The limits of "functionalism" were being reached in architecture and design; the constraints of "form follows function" could be seen as nothing more than a standardized, conformist, and superficial concept.
The empiricism, optimism, and false consensus that characterized much of the 1950s tragically played itself out in the Vietnam War. All the previously suppressed cultural contradictions erupted. By the mid-1960s, the former either black or white choices, had begun mutating into a philosophical system based on the acceptance of contradiction. The sciences had long dealt with the concepts of indeterminacy and relativity, and it was only a matter of time before these abstract considerations penetrated the world of architecture. Art could not be coherently separated from industry, yet it could not be coherently integrated with it either. For every theory purporting to rationalize a clear dividing line, dissonant anomalies could be found. Theories of universal harmonies, proclaiming the melding of the "aesthetic" and "useful" only sowed the seeds of their self-destruction. In 1966, Robert Venturi published Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, a chastened manifesto, wherein he stated,
Everywhere, except in architecture, complexity and contradiction have been acknowledged, from Gödel's proof of ultimate inconsistency in mathematics to T.S. Eliot's analysis of 'difficult' poetry and Joseph Albers' definition of the paradoxical quality of painting. . . .
I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning; for the implicit function as well as the explicit function. I prefer 'both-and' to 'either-or,' black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or white.
C. Ironies
This recitation of the history of design illustrates that "form follows function" is nothing more or less than an extreme historically contingent polemic whose meaning has shifted considerably over time. Insistence on the stability of meaning, over time serves to obscure the nature of judicial prejudice. There seems to be an implicit acknowledgment of an aesthetic hierarchy, with "functional" design at the top, mixed with a curious judicial self-abnegation. It is as though the judges are saying, "I know this stuff's supposed to be 'good', but I can't legally recognize it." Holmes' admonition in Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Co. regarding aesthetic judicial restraint is invoked at such a high level of generality, that it becomes pathologically indeterminate, capable of providing potentially broad protection, or complete denial of protection, to industrial design.
This account is meant as a reminder of how prone to self-delusion we are in announcing the discovery of universally valid principles. Indeed, courts and legal commentators often do so, on the eve of the very collapse of these newly announced "universals." The judges in these cases seem to speak from some historically privileged vantage point. They assume that other areas of culture, industry, and society have a similar perception of the underlying essential stability of fundamental principles that they think the law possesses or should possess.
Cases in this area present judges with complex and contingent situations which do not offer easy choices. Seeking to mediate the contradictory tensions infesting the boundary between aesthetics and utility, judges, administrators, and legislators have resorted to ever more incoherent and abstract tests to deny that they engaged in aesthetic value judgments proscribed by Bleistein. Bleistein demands aesthetic value-neutrality from the judiciary, yet simultaneously commands them to make value-laden decisions, after having stripped them of the essential tools with which to make those difficult choices.
This Article has used an historical analysis to suggest that this area of law is defined more by its basic contradictions than by any single truthful answer, and that the answers which are achieved are partial, contradictory, oscillating, contingent, and provisional. As icons, signs, symbols, and products accumulate, and infernally proliferate, courts have abdicated any responsibility for clearing a path through the morass, deferring to Congress. Congress hatches mutilated compromises that reflect little more than confused deals cut behind the scenes with the various interest groups they are supposed to be regulating. Bleistein offers no indicia or guideposts, except to remain a font of paralysis and confusion, and the decisions flowing from it are nothing but factional compromises at odds with the professed ideals of society.