Why am I here?

Some caveats to start:

First I am an American. I know this can be seen as a problem at the moment for my European friends. (But, even though I am an American, I take no responsibility for him.

I didn’t vote for him, and neither did a majority of my compatriots. We’ll do our best to take care of the problem next November. Sorry again.)

Second Linguist Roman Jakobson remarked famously that asking a writer to talk about literature was like asking an elephant to talk about zoology. As I am a designer, that makes me inherently unqualified to talk about design. Please also note I am not a theorist and I have tried to keep this talk as jargon-free as possible, there are a few times I fall into it. I can’t help it; it’s a kind of affliction in itself.

Third, I am not an expert on Holland by any means. Over the past 15 years I have spent countless days in Dutch Hotels,

perhaps I could be an expert on them. But as to Dutch design, I am strictly an amateur, an interested observer for sure, but no expert. So many of the ideas I put forth tonight will be naïve and over-simplified. I am sure my examples will seem painfully obvious, even canonical or clichéd. And they will necessarily represent the oddities not the norms of Dutch design. I don’t have access to enough work to speak with real nuance. But then again, that’s part of the point, to hear what we understand from the outside.

I come from a big, messy country. Unlike you, we have plenty of land so we are happy to waste it. When we get sick of something, we simple move onto something else.

Our government doesn’t like to waste money on infrastructure, cities, education and things like that. When it comes to the public realm, we have very dubious design credentials. In your country this is public infrastructure.

In my country we settle for more modest solutions.

When our government had to come up with a design solution for a possible chemical or biological attack, their advice was duct tape and plastic sheeting.

(Come to think about it, this could be a proposal from Droog Design.)

So what right do I have to criticize? In fact this lecture is not really criticism. It more like a kind of critical love song, the kind you sing to the person you want to like you AND think you’re smart.

It’s a lecture as much about America as it is about Holland – and perhaps as Holland becomes increasingly Americanized – read that privatized – it is a kind of cautionary tale as well.

0. Introduction

Maybe we just got bored somewhere along the way. Maybe we just started to believe in our own irrelevance. Or maybe, after years of trying to get people to like what we do, we just gave up our attempts to win friends and influence people and retreated into our little private club where we know everyone and everyone knows us. But, whatever the reason, somewhere along the line we just stopped trying to really change anything and we settled for simply changing DESIGN itself.

The convoluted, challenging, intelligent, difficult, self-reflexive, coy, clever, often staggeringly beautiful work that results from this exhaustion I call Dutch Design. I don’t consider Dutch Design to be design generated in the Netherlands. I consider Dutch Design a kind of work, or an attitude about work, or even a brand of work, that could theoretically occur anywhere at anytime.

Because of special conditions here in the Netherlands, Dutch Design seems to flourish: primarily due to the fact that that there exists a culture that understands design, that so many study design and so much money is injected into the system to support “design experiments.” (In America the period during the high-tech bubble created a brief moment conducive to such work.) But any work that demonstrates the peculiar combination of irony, self-deprecation and thinly-veiled egoism can earn the title of Dutch design.

There are several key themes – the rise of branding, the decline of nationalism and the public realm, and an emerging form of overt authorship -- and some broad shifts – from public to private, from large scale to small, from optimism to irony. But the form of this essay will be somewhat blurry. I have structured my lecture as follows: I will present a number of potential lectures on my own misreading of contemporary Dutch Design. Each lecture is a brief waiting to be developed by someone more adept and knowledgeable than me. So please take these as highly-personal speculations from an enthusiastic outsider.

Lecture 1: The Greenhouse Effect

My first visit to Holland, as an adult, was in 1984. I distinctly remember thinking that this is what my design professors were talking about. Good, modern design was everywhere. Signs had real typography. Bright yellow, orange and green where actually used by serious companies. Public buildings were “interesting.” Holland seemed like a designer’s dream. I think we American designers are fascinated by Holland because real design actually seems to get built here. You don’t know how novel this is for us, (especially when the work is for the Government.)

To plan and build a country using design as a key instrument is unfathomable for us. When we see a picture like this,

the condition and the opportunity is completely foreign.

(Wait, scratch that. We are now dealing with our first Dutch project, Ground Zero, and the process is a fiasco.) For whatever reason – maybe our country is just too big or our culture too eclectic -- we have never believed in the notion of a “makeable society.” In America individualism and raw power always pummels consensus. We have no polder model. “Action is typical of American style,” wrote Daniel Bell, “thought and planning are not.” (I realize you may see this consensus culture as problematic, but in America it is cited, continuously, as an unattainable utopia.)

Our commitment to the private over public represents a vast difference between the ways we view the issue of “design.” To understand that difference, you must realize that in America, design is always considered suspect: effete, luxurious, intellectual. America tends to be a deeply anti-intellectual, anti-aesthetic place. So if our government builds something, it must look as awful and as cheap as possible, thus signifying 1.) That precious tax dollars weren’t wasted on it, and 2.) That no high flatulent “concepts” were passed off on an unwitting public. We have no tradition of aesthetic functionalism. We are suspicious of modernity. Modern smells expensive.

From the outside, the situation in Holland since my first visit seems to be the opposite. While its almost impossible to get a real number, by my crude estimate various Dutch governmental agencies dole out tens of millions of euros a year on art, architecture and design foundations. That’s for a country with roughly the population of the New York metroplex. Some precentage of that money supports contemporary, “challenging” new design work. Last year in America, the government granted a whopping $400,000 in design grants for a country of about 280,000,000 people. In contrast the 2003 defense budget was about $360,000,000,000. Of course some of that could be seen as a kind of design subsidy, it’s just that the designers tend to be Boeing and Lockheed Martin and the

experimental projects tend to be jet propelled. The point is Holland uses subsidy to support projects overlooked by the market; America subsidizes the market.

That official sanction of Design, as a valid, vital cultural activity seems to create an atmosphere here where designers actually consider themselves valid, vital contributors to culture. This is not always the case in America where our designers tend to be much more insecure about their professional value. A fully privatized market simply will not support the kind of design culture that exists in Holland. (The dissolution of the PTT’s art and design department may prove that is increasingly the case here as well.) Maybe the designer is less valued as a business asset than as a cultural asset.

And all that subsidy and support has had an effect, maybe not a direct financial effect as a majority of the projects are private, but a psychological effect. When I scan a Dutch cityscape, or a poster kiosk or magazine rack, the array of “designed” infrastructure is staggering: stations, government buildings, museums, urban planning, conferences, institutes, festivals, etc. But, I wonder, what is the function of all these elaborate or exotic designs to the state that promotes them? I suppose when something is so obviously “designed” it suggests a social democratic commitment to culture, to the life of the nation. A challenging building or an unconventional book or a loco logo says: We’re a good government! We invest in culture! We’re daring and creative! We care about our people!

In Holland it seems that an object – be it a building, a bus or a bottle – must be clearly designed -- which recently means: colorful, oddly shaped, or unexpectedly material – to signify the government and the major corporations are progressive and looking out for cultural improvement. In America if something is designed it says: “Your government wasted YOUR hard earned money on something as frivolous as this.” In America colorful always means wasteful and expensive.

So now after twenty years of frequent visits, the Dutch landscape seems littered with fragments of contemporary, international design, indexical signs of an engaged, thoughtful, benevolent state and corporate governance. (To paraphrase an adage: designers have crazy ideas everywhere; in Holland they actually build them.) This fragmentation may be exacerbated by the current tendency to break up big projects into small commissions, encouraging young designers to make a name for them through some especially innovative design. Strange buildings

either crash land in empty fields or get crammed together in conglomerations of urban renewal

So much Design in one place creates an aggregation of exacerbated difference. I wonder now after a twenty year ejaculation of making, if individual design doesn’t need to signify anything anymore; it simply needs to look different from other designs. In that way design shifts from ideology to a kind of branding strategy and enters its fully linguistic state. The Dutch City becomes a Vegas version of a Dutch City with its myriad contemporary “attractions.” It’s Holland as international design theme park.

Lecture 2. Poor little rich country

So all that government incentive, corporate investment and cheap design education has paid off. Over the past two decades, Dutch Design has become simultaneously hot and cool. (Hot in that its popular, cool in that it doesn’t seem to try very hard or care too much.) What was once a local take on modernism has grown into a global brand.

But how did design become so central to the image of Holland? The cliché is that Holland is manufactured territory; that the construction of dykes and polders and the reclamation of land suggest a kind of artificiality underlying the Dutch psyche; that the landscape itself is the great design project of Holland. I’ll spare you that well-worn story. I am sure you have all heard it a million times before. My question is not nearly so profound. I simply am curious about the idea of identity and the way designers construct it.

I love this picture

here’s a group of earnest, hardworking young men planning the overthrow of the Dutch aesthetic landscape. There generation would take on all the major efforts of visual reconstruction: the airport, the telephone and postal systems, the rail and highway system, etc. With that much money, time, effort and talent thrown into the design of the nation, is it any wonder so much was done. Their chosen name speaks volumes: Total Design. It could be a philosophy for the nation.

That first wave of Dutch corporate identity in the 50s and 60s may have been simply a knock off of the work being developed in Germany and Switzerland at that time. Total Design loved Gerslter and Mueller-Brockman’s hyper Swiss German rationalism. But an increasingly Dutch form of identity found its way into all sorts of designed objects: stamps, posters, trains, money, buildings, ships, highways, airports, etc. And in Holland, more than anywhere else, much to our envy, corporate and government commissioners would actually choose good design over bad.

It seemed like everything in the post-war Netherlands was being rethought and the process of identity design, with its emphasis on analysis, was one more type of rethinking. If there was any question that Holland was a progressive, modern state, pull out some money, lick a stamp, pick up a phone. The proof was everywhere. The Dutch remade modernism in their own, more eclectic, more tolerant, version. Dutch design was Swiss-lite.

The branding of Holland seemed to be overlaid with other, unassailable values: efficiency, legibility, economy, beauty, etc. At least in the 60s these values were still discussed seriously, there appeared to exist an honest belief that the injection of design into the built environment would make it a better place. So like the Social Democratic politician demanding that the building be a “good” building, public information work demanded good design -- which was usually interpreted to mean more or less Total Design modernism. And this form of rational functionalism became the standard of design education as well.

Somehow the heads of Dutch corporations and Dutch government agencies embraced the notion of not only the value of modern design but also promotion of Dutch talent through commissions. Certain things are possible in a state where the money looks like this

or this

If the most staid organization of any state, the central bank, is sponsoring design like that, what is there left to rebel against. In America we still feel its out duty to try to inject good design into the fabric of the culture that is generally resistant to it. In Holland that cultural fabric is saturated and it’s a small country. But are all big projects done? Is Holland a country where EVERYTHING is already designed?

Lecture 3. Clash of the Titans

The answer of course is yes and no, and, at least in the late 60s, the thing to rebel against was Total Design’s totalizing effect. In trying to understand the work Dutch work I find interesting now, I keep going back to the oft-cited debate between Wim Crouwel and Jan Van Toorn in November 1972.

I realize this debate has been mythologized to the point of canonical sheen but, on the surface at least, the opponents seem to represent the extremes of an irreducible contradiction that still undergrids Dutch design.. Perhaps the flow of history, however, has slowly reunited them.

The much-touted contrast between van Toorn’s design for the van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and Crouwel’s work for the Stedelijk Museum seems not nearly so pronounced in the branding era. Crouwel seemed to argue for a seamless, rational rendering of information, the designer as information channel, the perfect expression of the “new objectivity.” (His position in America was mirrored by the likes of Rand and Vignelli.) Van Toorn on the other hand argued the position of the designer as editorial shaper, the one who adds content to content. Van Toorn sees the designer’s role as political commentator, even preaching “hindrance” rather than clarity. In van Toorn’s view the designer accepts his distorting role and uses it to forward a specific social agenda.

But what we have learned in the meantime is that 1) Neutrality is a myth or at least neutrality is a brand message in itself. 2.) Hindrance and dissent as a method can also become a brand device. So JVT’s claim of the elimination of house style working with Jean Leering at the van Abbemuseum is as much a housestyle (No style as house style) as Crouwel’s work for the Stedelijk (which relied on one master grid for every piece of communication.) Each institution used the figure of the designer, or his purported absence, as an aesthetic expression in itself. By injecting JVT and all his well-known political agenda into the message of the work, the designer himself becomes a kind of authorial presence, an emblem for the client.

But despite the aesthetic, methodological and political differences, both Crouwel and van Toorn end up coming off as humanists. Both are working at the “makeable society”, one from the position of efficiency, modernization and objectification; the other from the position of agitation, dialectic and the enlightenment of the masses. So Jan and Wim end up not in opposition but as two sides of the same Dutch coin. Both assume a patriarchal belief in their role as guardians of culture. (You rarely miss an underlying rhetoric of social value, no matter where you scratch the surface of Dutch design.)

Gramsci argued that the ideology of a dominant culture consumes all discourse contained within in it, including the discourse of resistance. So their difference now, in the age of what Max Kisman has dubbed the “style of styles,” seems to be primarily formal. This disintegration of distinction does not in any way lessen the real ideological differences between the two men in 1972 but instead demonstrates the way in which the visual expressions of ideology have been absorbed into one master system that strips the meaning of all aesthetic gestures and reduces them to easily exchanged visual clichés. (See for instance, Experimental Jet Set’s ideology free regurgitation of Crouwel’s work. It’s not accidental that the political power of the original work has been replaced by a history of conflicted dramatic “personalities.”

Lecture 4: Dumbar for Dummies

Speaking of personalities… for Americans the ideological debates of the sixties and seventies were more of less invisible. We had our own conflicted relationship with Switzerland to work out. True Dutchification crept into our consciousness much later and this “tagging” of official agencies was profoundly affected by one figure: Gert Dumbar.

While we were following Jan van Toorn, Karel Martens, Anton Beeke and later studios like Wild Plaka and Hard Werken, throughout the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s it was this one designer – through his burgeoning studio stocked with legions of stagaires – who seemed to impress his subjectivity on every aspect of Dutch culture. For most of the rest of the world, Dutch graphic design in the 80s became synonymous with Dumbar Design.

For us, Dumbar seemed to impose a kind of irrational exuberance on the staid institutions of Dutch culture: the post office, the railway, the police, etc. Dunbar neatly synthesized the two competing strains of Dutchness: the systematic and the wonky. And he seemed to be able to sell his institutionalized wonkiness to even the most conservative commissioners. (As outsiders, we secretly couldn’t believe any self-respecting country would allow their government officials to wear such outlandish outfits.)

By 1995 Chris Vermaas, capturing the sensibility, warned that the continued application of Dumbarism to the organs of the state threatened to turn Holland into a LegoLand:

“the Dutch policeman seems attached to his motorbike sitting on one big plastic peg and has a head that can spin around 360 degrees and come off in one piece.”

Working from a palette of tried and true elements -- brightness, off-kilteredness, geometric abstraction, angularity -- Dumbarism became a kind of brand in itself that could be applied to anything, anywhere. Rather than an expression of a client’s values, Dumbarism became a value in itself. (Critics complained he supplied visuals for companies without their own story to tell.) To associate with Studio Dunbar meant adopting certain value suggested by Dunbar’s own mythmaking apparatus, basically a systematic modernist approach to corporate identity peppered with a sprinkling of playful design elements. This approach allowed conservative, often privatizing clients to have it both ways: it promised efficiency and seeming individuality or freedom.

(As an aside, that double-sided rhetoric also served his ends. The studio’s ubiquitously published “wild” 80’s design – that captured the attention of the world, was underwritten by conventional corporate identity work, this much to the chagrin of the legions of Cranbrook and RCA interns, drawn by the studio’s public image, only to find themselves composing corporate identity manuals for a bank or an insurance company.)

The effect of Dunbarism and the frenzy of identity designing over the 80s and 90s seemed to be that Holland became one continuous sea of logos. Everything was done. Everything was styled. The country took on a quality of a “Gesamtkunstwerk”: a total work of art and design. Like some Art Nouveau dream, every surface of the country was fondled. It recalls Loos’ description of the bourgeois gentleman subjected to the all consuming design of his art nouveau environment:

“The happy man suddenly felt deeply, deeply unhappy… He was precluded from all future living and striving, developing and desiring. His thought: this is what it means to learn to go about life with one’s own corpse. Yes indeed, he is finished. He is complete.” (quoted from Hal Foster, Design + Crime.)

Are the young graphic designers living with the corpse of their parents’ Dutch design? Did Dumbar finish it off with terminal, nationwide over-design? If not what is left? Is there any room left for the Dutch design imagination?

Lecture 5. Dude, where’s my country?

At the moment of the ascendancy of Dunbarism and Dutch Design as an international brand, the country itself was getting harder to find. Branding is a late cycle phenomena, the next step once the thing itself is no longer enough. When the consumer needs added impetus to choose one more or less equivalent product over another, the package becomes almost as critcal as the product. Does a thinning Holland need an ever more robust package? Is there a relationship between the rise of brand and the disappearance of nation?

Like everywhere, Holland is under intense pressure. The contemporary nation is stretched: “The domination of information, media, and signs; the disaggregation of social structure into lifestyle; the general priority of consumption over production in everyday life and the constitution of identity and interests.”

What is Dutch anymore anyway? Clearly what it means is changing. (The conservatives resort to the sly phrase “Dutch-values” to disguise an overt nationalist/racist appeal.) The demographics are brutal. The time-honored story of the battle between Catholic and Protestant is dissolving fast. What percentage of the country is Muslim? Who can speak Dutch? Who is even literate? While no one was looking Holland became a porous concept.

The famous emblems of Dutchness dissolve through merger and hostile takeover. The money first, then the post, then what? As production fades, Holland transforms into BeNeLux or MainPort: Europe’s airport, seaport and warehouse land (with its own special logo).

It’s the country as conduit. All that Delta Project territory to create land to store and move someone else’s things headed somewhere else. There is a shift from commodity to experience. Everything time, space, service as well as goods, become branded.

Some products so are inextricably linked to their nation

they take on a quasi-public role. But there is a subtle but profound shift that happens when major cultural figures privatize. Air France swallows KLM, although the deal is couched in a way to make it seem like an equal marriage.

PTT becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of TNT based in Australia of all places. These great public institutions, flagships of the nation, become profit-driven corporations, subsidiaries of international conglomerates. What once was an expression of Dutch pride -- PTT showcasing the best of Holland in the design of the stamps and phone cards for instance, or KLM with their slow motion swans and painfully matter-of-fact blue-suited fight attendants – either simply disappears or flips to clichés of Dutchness, turned back on the nation as marketing tools. The public institution represents the state; the private one attempts to represent the taste and lifestyle of its own market.

It’s the McKroket strategy.

Multinational McDonald’s customizes its internationally consistent commodity to appeal to vernacular tastes. The McKroket is McDonalds going Dutch. The privatized standard-bearers of the Dutch culture repackage the emblems of Dutchness as a branding strategy to maintain the loyalty of their consumers (the contemporary word for citizens.) So Dutchness, and Dutch Design, become tools for globalized, capitalist corporations to market to the Dutch audience. Dutch design as branding tool and constructed signifier of Dutch values, becomes as quaint and charming as windmills and tulips.

At the moment of this deep internal insecurity, the nation is embarking on a major initiative, building signature embassies in world capitals. Once content with low-profile generic office space, Holland now uses embassy design to make an international show of strength; to shore up the Dutch Brand. (Remember, branding is the last attempt of the desperate.) Whatever is happening at home, Holland keeps up appearances. The embassy project is pure ego-booster, reassuring yourselves and the rest of the world you are still here, and you still matter.

Lecture 6. Two Big Books

In the first five lectures I wanted to suggest an optimistic design culture ready and willing to engage the major challenges of rebuilding Holland leading to a hyper-design state with increasingly less room for maneuvering. The next five look for closely at contemporary reactions to the that state and the concomitant rise in the desire for self-expression.

To explore that shift from public to private a little further, I turn now to two big Dutch books: Wim Crouwel and Jolijn van de Wouw’s PTT telephone book of 1977

and Irma Boom’s commemorative book for the SHV corporation of 1999

I am curious specifically about the relationship between the designer and the work in two settings: utterly public, the other obsessively private.

The telephone book maybe the ultimate utilitarian object that is both open to, and includes, everybody. Its function is clearly stated and simply tested. The social contract between the designer and the public is clear and simple: I need to find a name; the number needs to be legible, etc. The designer has a responsibility, clearly, to clarity, legibility, efficient production, etc. You don’t want personality or parody in the phonebook. So far, so good. This fits comfortably into the definition of Graphic Designer. Problem solver. A scientist of information.

But despite claims to the contrary, the phonebook is an expression of a kind of ideology: A belief that it was good for the public to read a certain way, a typographic aestheticism disguised as altruism. Under the cover of neutrality, the designer asserts his subjectivity, for instance, Crouwel uses the limited character set of phototypesetting to justify an all lowercase alphabet: a long-time dream of modernist designers who saw different upper and lowercase letterforms as an untenable illogic.

Then do we make sense of Irma Boom’s role with SHV corporation (for whom Crouwel’s Total Design had created the original housestyle in 1965). The Director of SHV commissioned arguably Holland’s most celebrated book designer to create a special volume commemorating the 100-year anniversary of the company. Working in conjunction with an archivist for over five years, Boom shaped a narrative out of an undifferentiated lump of raw data. The meaning and narrative of the book is not a product of the words but almost exclusively the function of the sequence of the pages and the cropping of the images, the basic devices of design.

Boom’s big book is fundamentally a different genre than Crouwel’s big book and the role defined for the designer is so antithetical as to almost demand a different title. The SHV book is a project for one man, representing all the power of his corporation, produced in a hyper-limited edition. (In typical Dutch pseudo modesty, the extravagant display of conspicuous consumption is hidden from view by limited distribution.) The book makes the signature of the designer part of its branding strategy. The book says: we are an enlightened company, we are rich, we are cultured, and we know the value someone like Irma Boom. The corporation uses its association with her unassailable brilliance to advance its own image.

The difference between the two books, I think, is the difference between a hyper-Dutch and a hyper-American project. And it represents the move from the public to the private. But in both cases, the association with the designer has meaning. While Crouwel disappears in the phonebook, the PTT makes an overt commitment to Modernity, through a connection to Total Design. SHV licenses Boom’s aura and Boom grafts her identity onto the content of the SHV book. (Crouwel opined in an interview that a recent Boom book on Otto Treumann was “in fact a book about her, not Otto Treumann.”) A book that large and complex, with every page shaped by one person, becomes a kind of autobiography and Boom is a constant, ghostly presence. It’s not JUST a big book. It’s an Irma Boom book. The designer, as author, supplies brand value or celebrity endorsement.

Lecture 7. The Organization Men (and women)

I’ll get back to that trend, where the designer makes a guest appearance in the work. But I actually think those cases of the overt reference of author/designer are anomalies. Holland poses a special condition and the Dutch designer has a conflicted relationship with the idea of authorship (in the same way the Dutch seem to have a issues with ambition and authority.) There’s the divided lust for expression on one side, and moral rectitude and modesty on the other, which seems to generate a range of singular behaviors.

To assuage, or at least to mask, the ambition and ego necessary to build the figure of the author, the Dutch designer positions him/herself, not as originator, but as one who marshals undeniable economic, legal, textual, demographic and civic forces and follows them to their irrefutable conclusion. By this technique, the designer eschews celebrity, feigns anonymity, and assumes the role of systems manager.

This bifurcated relationship – dividing the desire to express and the drive for reason -- is already present in Crouwel’s description of a rational design process. “The content determines the form, the typeface, the format, the cover, the binding. Every assignment can be divided into several factors, which are all interrelated. With each commission, as it were, you have to plot those factors along a horizontal and a vertical axis, stretch out a string and then see where it takes you.” (Wim Crouwel, 1961) The image of the matrix is brutal: its findings, absolute. Notice the passivity, the submission to the data. You wait and see where the data takes you. His experiments in type design test the same formula. He sets up the system but then slavishly follows it to some logical conclusion.

This matter-of-factism, hyper-pragmatism, this surrender to the omnipotent effect of the diagram is present in all manner of Dutch work. Perhaps the strategy derives from a natural reaction to a country in which every centimeter is regulated by preordained rules. But the buildings of architects like MVDRV

and their attendant documentation and reliance on so-called “Datascape,” take that Dutch rationalism and stretch to produce absurd, even parodic results. Research and analysis form a diagram and diagram derives a building. The designers are represented as bystanders or objective scientists watching with grim satisfaction as their bizarre theories give rise to even more bizarre forms.

See also Koolhaas’s plan for New York’s MoMA that simply uses the given zoning envelope as form generator – coupled with the title: “Architecture without Architects.”

Or also OMA’s soon to be completed Seattle Public Library in which the Dewey Decimal organization of the library books drives a diagram that drives a building.

Critic Thomas Daniell put it nicely comparing the method of the Japanese architect and the Dutch: paraphrasing: The Japanese architect begins with a poetic concept and refines it into plausibility, the Dutch architect begins with analysis and extrapolates it into poetry. These Dutch buildings have a kind of brutal, self-evident ugliness to them. Of course they’re ugly, current conditions, objectively measured, don’t necessarily render beauty. Beauty would imply a subjectivity. Facts are facts. You take the building the facts give you.

Perhaps much of the strange shapes of recent Dutch buildings can be attributed to this devotion to the diagram, and the authorial absolution it grants. By taking traditional Dutch pragmatism to absurd, deadpan extremes, the designer generates new, wholly unexpected forms. Some of Droog Design – which has been so publicized it doesn’t need anymore from me – embodies this absurdist-hyper-rationalism. The designer simply continues to apply the system until the form appears in all its strangeness.

This authorial avoidance strategy seems to have spawned the enthusiasm for the generic, the recycled, the already done, the undersigned, the preexisting that dominate contemporary design debates. Much of recent Dutch design seems intent on erasing the sense that any designer imposed any subjectivity. Take Pascale Gatzen reworking of photographed clothing. By copying an existing item, not from the original but from the ad, remaking it, and then re-photographing it and re-advertising it, she calls the origination of the object into question. Is it her work? Klavers & Engelen make a simple change in orientation a defamiliarization strategy. (Repeat) Or Hella Jorgenus’s textile “Repeat” uses pre-existing traditional textile designs reorganized by curious juxtaposition and unifying overlays. Or Experimental Jet Set’s project that samples the work of a previous generation, its style stripped clean of any political associations. Or

Archis magazine’s use of found typographic style, absolving the need for any subjectivity, that is eliminating the designers presumed responsibility to create distinct, unique identity (More on that shortly.)

Lecture 8. Author as Value-Added

But if it is a Dutch Design trait to disappear into data or system, and at least feign a lack of real ambition or subjectivity, there is an emerging tendency in which the designer assumes a central role as character in their own work. This tests the way in which the treatment of given material – what JVT might call the critical perspective – amounts to a kind of authorship.

Many designers have enthusiastically embraced the idea of authorship in hope of dipping into the authority traditionally granted to authors. But designers have generally misconstrued the idea of the author as a power strategy: a way to wrest control over their projects from the various forces intent on limiting power. Most design use of the phrase links authorship to a kind of artistic or self-expression. But I am much more interested not so much in trying to recuperate the prominence of the designer through the application of authorial principles but in trying to pick out the way the figure of the author (which is always fictionalized) meshes with branding strategy.

(In all cases its important to remember that when I use the term author, I am never referring to the writer but a fictional figure that serves to unify a whole variety of diverse texts. The author is a function, a term of exchange.)

Dumbar could be seen to embody one model of the designer as auteur, managing an army of underlings to impress his stamp on the broadest possible canvas. Dumbar – actually NOT Dumbar but Dumbar’s studio – creates Dumbar signature work. Dumbar as flamboyant stands for the work gives it a public face and a branded “personality.” Irma Boom working with SHV seems to represent another model in which the designer uses the tools of design to construct meaning. But more recent work engages the subject in more complex and nuanced ways.

I want to turn back then for a moment to look closely at one project: Archis Magazine and its transformation from somewhat straight, analytical professional journal to an international style magazine whose subject happens to be architecture. (As the magazine was recently celebrated again in the Rotterdam Design Prize, I think it is safe to assume that it is an example of what is somehow considered by some as the “best of the contemporary Dutch design.)

While the core of the magazine is still articles, reviews, critiques and editorials, (Archis I offer) Archis adopts another voice that appears spectrally among the articles, offering choices, garnering information, asking questions, making jokes. But whose voice? The editor? The designers? A phantom that haunts its pages? Who is the “I” of Archis?

Since that voice has nothing ostensibly to do with the delivery of the content -- that is the articles and items that make up the body of the magazine -- at first it would seem to be a van Toornian hindrance strategy. The designers editorialize through shaping the material. But the Archis authorial presence has none of van Toorn’s desire for social reformation or political agitation. The Archis voice is that of the court jester; it’s about richness, pleasure, irony, humor, i.e. value-added content and shading.

Archis furthers that relationship between author and reader through a series of specific shifts and moves. The voice directly asks questions, leaves blank spaces to be filled, supplies forms to fax back, overwrites other texts and generally interferes. (And it can be maddening, like an annoying friend reading over your shoulder making comments.) Some pages are perforated suggesting reader-driven mutability; that the presented form is merely one incarnation, not the finished state. It invites is own disfiguration.

The voice of Archis moves it from the writerly to the readerly text. By goading readers to literally fill in the blanks, the Archis author implicates them in the design itself. This gesture culminates in the recent move toward organized public events that suggest a completely user-centric forum where content is specifically formatted in direct response to an audience gathered in a specific spot at a specific time with the Archis author assuming the role of maestro, conducting.

One well-publicized example of the fictionalized author can be discerned in Jop von Bennekom’s self-motivated “Re” magazine. JVB links his magazine -- which started as a school project at the Jan Van Eyck Academie – to “a typical Dutch approach ... A conceptual position of self-irony and self-questioning.” Through this overt form, a magazine dedicated to his interests, proclivities, possessions, friends, life events, etc. JVB positions himself as both the originator and subject of the magazine. The magazine generates a fictional presence – the designer JVB – who permeates every aspect of the project. Even as JVB moves from sole proprietor to executive editor or when the subject of a specific issue shifts to focus on a single individual, JVB serves as both author and subject in an intensely autobiographical project.

And then this. Visiting the recent AMO/OMA exhibition at the National Gallery in Berlin, I was greeted by this figure. Artist Tony Orsler created a special Rem Koolhaas doll for the exhibition. Koolhaas can be read on several levels, as literal author and as coalescing figure – the ringmaster -- marshalling the forces of a broad, decentralized, international cast of collaborators whose work is unified under his name. Orsler’s figure of Koolhaas floats spectrally over a smashed and decayed pile of garbage and broken design elements and reads, over and over again in continuous loop, his article entitled “Junk Space.” The Rem doll makes a perpetual celebrity appearance endlessly spouting his famous, branded, rhetoric.

Lecture 9. Dressing down.

In typical Dutch fashion, no one dresses up to make an appearance. The Dutch author comes in unshaven and informal. His or her presence is almost always padded in irony and self-deprecation. There seems to be is a close connection between the rise of the author and of subjectivity and the un-designing of design.

But what drove that shift to the un-designed design in the 90’s and the attendant Dutch Design explosion internationally. While certainly part is clearly a reaction to the slickness of the 80s and early 90s, I nominate one man: Joop van den Ende (JVDE) as the real source of inspiration. JVDE is of course the father of the worldwide global phenomenon known as Big Brother

and bubble gum television. The basic tenant of Big Brother is that compelling television may result from simply sticking a bunch of unlikable characters in a house and videoing the ensuing friction.

Reality TV has exploded in US and around the world. Television producers love it because its cheap, easy to make, easy to serialize and most importantly easy to localize, hence the success of Big Brother around the globe. BB satisfies a grim desire to inspect the dirty laundry of your neighbor. But in Holland it seems to have a special resonance, perhaps because the whole country is a kind of artificial reality of closely packed neighbors, or perhaps due to the brutal efficiency of the concept. Its seems to embody the “not one penny more” credo.

Recent work focuses on the banal: the areas untouched by Dunbarism and the sweeping over-design gestures the years before. Van Lishout’s AVLville is a kind of artificial reality TV. The work seems to reference the standard, accidental items of an in-between space, but always with some ironic twist. But actually it’s a romanticized banality. This work ignores the corporate, globalized reality of Phillips and PTT or Rabobank. The romanticized reality focuses on the generic apartment, the refugee camp, the abandoned embankment and the vernacular language of the amateur do-it-your-self’er.

That same aesthetic is repackaged by agencies like KasselKramer in campaigns for the likes of Diesel and Ben. In fact their own sly, funny website perfectly embodies the the methodology. It adopts all the familiar clichés of the web, injects into them and produces and new form of writing that is part reference, part narrative, part playacting. Of course this casualness is so enormously cultivated and styled that it is immediately recognizable as design with a capital D. No one would miss the joke.

But the question is: does banality have an agenda? Is anything advanced except the blasé, detached bemusement of the designer? Has Holland become so comfortable, so completely designed that the only thing left is ironic commentary on the act of designing itself? Does anyone think about a kind of makeable society or have we just given up? Is design simply a free-floating reaction, all verb without direct object.

Just against…but against what? Note this remark from EJS:

“What we have…drawn from postmodernism is the realization that there are no objective, neutral or universal values. But that does not discourage us from pursuing those values; that is our modernist inheritance. In the end, we've actually arrived at something of a synthesis of modernism and postmodernism; working with a utopia in mind, while being fully aware that we will never achieve that utopia.”

Yikes. Has it really come to this: A pure, sweet, innocent cynicism?

We have all gotten used to accepting whatever comes along, whomever is in the house. One will get voted off each week but don’t worry; the whole thing will start again next season. It’s just a game. It’s as if after 20 years of absolutely relentless shifts in style, and years of being berated for their lack of political commitment by their May 68 professors, young Dutch designers simply turned inward. The kind of Dutch design that captures our attention now almost always has a layer of humor and reference that seems to say, like EJS, we don’t really believe this but lets pretend anyway. But more strikingly, for a country once known for big, bold, broad public initiative Dutch design seems to have taken to tackling small issues. The designer cast his/her gaze on something so low; so insignificant it imbues the object with almost mythic power.

I turn briefly to a contemporary identity project: Daniel van der Velendan’s project -- government subsidized of course -- developing an brand for Sealand; a single abandoned North Sea defense platform cum principality. Whatever the merit of the design experiment -- to create an identity for an entity without substance, a pure data space – it may point to a fatal fact: Dutch designers may have metaphorically turned their attention off-shore, given up on the mainland, given up believing their work can affect the “real” world. Maybe there is no running room left in Holland. Maybe the “makeable society” is simply the basis for a cruel parody.

Lecture 10. We are what we eat.

The production and consumption of style has accelerated so quickly, been broadcast so widely, that trends and countertrends develop simultaneously. Action and reaction are linked inextricably. This is due in part at least to the fact that you really do have a culture of design here, a culture of experiment, discourse, and discovery.

I originally titled this talk “Mad Dutch Disease” and obvious allusion to Mad Cow Disease or more officially: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy. The scourge of Europe, Mad Cow is theorized to appear when cows eat feed that contains the remains of other cows. When our diet starts to be restricted to the point of devouring and regurgitating the trends of last week, we are in serious jeopardy of succumbing to a similar fate.

But as I mentioned at the beginning, I don’t see Dutch design as confined to the Netherlands. This is happening everywhere. It’s just that due to advantageous conditions, it seems more pronounced here. Our flights of fancy are constantly quelled by the market. Because of that we use Holland as a kind of quarantined breeding ground, carefully observing what is sure happen everywhere sooner or later.

Perhaps this is a better metaphor. I wonder if we have all worked ourselves into a trap of our own making. We have been tirelessly chasing this thing called design theory or criticism for 20 years. We have been building this elaborate contraption of a self-reflective meta-design culture only to realize that we may be its ultimate victims. When it comes time to hit the switch, who knows what the result will be?

Lastly a few thanks: To Dingeman for inviting me.

To Irma Boom for suggesting me to Dingeman. And to Rem Koolhaas, Petra Blaise, Jan van Toorn, Karel Martens, Armand Mevis, Peter Bilak, Daan van der Velden, Ole Bouman, Linda van Deursen, Chris Vermaas, and many other’s for their assistance in the preparation. And especially to my partners Susan Sellers and Georgie Stout for bearing with me while I wrote it.

© Michael Rock