Design Observer :: Join the Discussion http://places.designobserver.com/feature/steve-jobs-versus-rem-koolhaas/37722/ en-us Design Observer Group 2013-04-11T12:54:27-05:00 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0
Interesting new piece here:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-04/apples-campus-2-shapes-up-as-an-investor-relations-nightmare

"... in Silicon Valley, nothing says you’ve peaked quite like a lavish new HQ" ]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/steve-jobs-versus-rem-koolhaas/37722/#comments 2013-04-11T12:54:27-05:00
Another question for your students, then: Is Apple's new headquarters an example of industrial design, or architecture, or both?

Daniel Gregory

]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/steve-jobs-versus-rem-koolhaas/37722/#comments 2013-03-26T18:53:45-05:00
The Light & Space connection is a good one and is also made by Alex Kitnick ("Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface," Artforum, February 1, 2012). It's remiss of me not to have included it since it came up in conversation at a seminar convened by Sylvia Lavin in preparation for the MAK Center show "Everything Loose Will Land" (http://www.mak.at/en/program/event?article_id=1350932582333&event_id=1350932582350) -- which I mention here since the show is likely to be of interest to any readers drawn to things Californian.

I'm not sure that my arguments in this piece would have been changed by a more detailed comparison with Koolhaas, though I regret that readers might be left feeling short-changed in that respect. Maybe I'll return to it some time.

Finally, the question of questions, raised by dgregory and taken up by Aaron Betsky -- "what would a modernist carrier with criticality or catalytic function be?" I truly fear depressing my students as we circle this issue. Yet students can perceive an aesthetic or intellectual or social "surplus" even in the most sober analyses of design history. It's as producers of those surpluses that Koolhaas and Jobs are so helpful to me in the classroom, other reservations aside.]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/steve-jobs-versus-rem-koolhaas/37722/#comments 2013-03-22T20:33:26-05:00 http://places.designobserver.com/feature/steve-jobs-versus-rem-koolhaas/37722/#comments 2013-03-21T14:49:29-05:00 Koolhaas on the otherhand is more in the architectural tradition of creating one-of-a-kind spaces. They are as far from a "brand" as you could say---i see little similarlity between Koolhaas projects. I've heard them described as Hyperrational, which means they are rational to their particular site and context--though there are stylistic similarities, whereas Apple makes modernist Starbucks meant to be familiar across countries. ]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/steve-jobs-versus-rem-koolhaas/37722/#comments 2013-03-21T00:23:50-05:00
Thank you. We've made this correction. — Eds.]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/steve-jobs-versus-rem-koolhaas/37722/#comments 2013-03-20T11:30:56-05:00 http://places.designobserver.com/feature/steve-jobs-versus-rem-koolhaas/37722/#comments 2013-03-19T16:29:59-05:00 http://places.designobserver.com/feature/steve-jobs-versus-rem-koolhaas/37722/#comments 2013-03-19T16:24:13-05:00 http://places.designobserver.com/feature/steve-jobs-versus-rem-koolhaas/37722/#comments 2013-03-19T15:53:34-05:00
I also think it is important to embed that aesthetic in California culture, though I do think you, if I may say so, got it a bit wrong: it is not the Bay Area School of woodsy modernism, but the Light & Space movement that is the real percursor. If there are roots in Eichler, it is in the blanding-down of high modernism, again the notion of default modernism withut criticality. I also think the analysis of OMA is very, very superficial; the title promises a much more thorough analysis of both Jobs' and Koolhaas' conceptual turn away from singular products and towards catalytic interventions and the desire for mass consumption. The one point of intersection is the notion of whether there is an absolutism about this kind of large-scale capitalism and how you become complicit with it, no matter how either Zen or critical you are.]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/steve-jobs-versus-rem-koolhaas/37722/#comments 2013-03-19T14:35:53-05:00
I can see a relationship to the Jobs esthetic as a kind of reversal of that approach -- making the highly designed object -- Mac, iphone etc., etc. -- ordinary. And also to a Miesian esthetic where the material is the ornament, itself a comment on Adolf Loos.

But what about the new Apple headquarters as architecture? A beautiful object to be sure -- to me it is the apotheosis of the gadget -- but perhaps a very old-fashioned and wasteful approach to land-use, building, and urban design. And that would seem to contradict the very notion of esthetic efficiency lying at the heart of so many wonderful Apple products.]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/steve-jobs-versus-rem-koolhaas/37722/#comments 2013-03-19T12:47:48-05:00