Disintoxication of Design

It is not just in the architectural realm that experts predict a retreat from recent "vulgarity and ambition" (Ouroussoff), designers too see the coming trends as:

Retreat to the comfort zone

Purism as Self-Therapy

Back to basics

A Return to Reason

No Jokes, No Fakes

Utility

Craftsmanship

Back to Bauhaus

The beauty of reason: Luxury is no longer sought in comfort but in formal and qualitative consistency. Only forms that are beautiful, innovative and durable can be useful as well. Bauhaus classics set the tone, quality workmanship adds authenticity. Slender, simple furniture with as few edges as possible dominates. The materials also indicate a return to the authentic: wood, leather, woven fabrics or ceramics, rounded off with the occasional plastic detail.

Design against design: with experiments, with products and furniture that are driven by artistic rather than market-oriented motives and play with our expectations, designers and their public are rebelling against the slickness of the design world

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Read more at Dezeen. In Spanish there is good article in El PAÍS.

Algorithms and Form Creation

Delanda’s lecture at Columbia clarifies the philosophical roots of algorithms in form creation. To begin with, you have to accept that there are two forms of considering the world: Rationalism (what Delanda calls European Idealism) and Empirism (what Delanda calls Materialism).

The thing is that that duality was the one Kant had to overcome and what allowed the birth of modern art more than a century later. Actually, the whole postmodern philosophy flourishes from the nostalgia of those days when pure reason ruled the world and Idea and Matter were one. In modern times (our time) that harmonious synthesis only occurs in art: no truth or desire can do so with complete legitimacy.

Manuel Delanda’s arguments are exposed in a rather attractive way, and are quite useful in order to relate form creation (generation?) to current philosophical debate.