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From: "Architexturez." <interface.services@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 00:49:03 +0530
Chair wars
There's nothing like a superstar designer to make Stephen Bayley reach
for his power tools. Here, the co-founder of the Design Museum and the
Observer's new architecture critic cuts the 'conspirators' down to size
Sunday September 10, 2006
The Observer
When I hear the word 'designer', I reach for my chainsaw. There used to
be an old health and safety warning on these ferocious power tools that
read 'Caution: accidents with chainsaws are rarely trivial'. But I have
never been more serious.
Adapting Goering's dismissal of culture (which made him dangerously
trigger-happy) is not to dismiss design, only to threaten with sickening
violence its annoying false prophets, an ever-enlarging band of snake
oil merchants defined not by their relevance, but their lack of it. I
mean the 'designer' in inverted commas. Voltaire said it is the secret
of art to improve on nature. It is the purpose of design to improve on
industry. Or was. The problem is that in usage the word 'design' has
recently deteriorated from signifying the meritorious to demonstrating
the meretricious: a rapid descent from saint to sinner, from ennobling
industrial art to the silly designer chair.
The architect Le Corbusier rightly said design was 'intelligence made
visible'. For a while that was true, and magnificently so,
cont'd....
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1868607,00.html