The Ethics of Honest Design

Most have heard the term minimalist design. Its industrial roots refer to a German school founded in the early 1900s by Walter Gropius called the Bauhaus. Its true lineage spans much of history. For example, ancient Japanese architecture’s spartan use of materials, interlocking wood joints, and paper walls are minimalist.

Alternatively, Scandinavian furniture was minimalist before the trend became fashionable. Minimalist design sprung from many roots, each of which was not isolated. Modern architecture and industrial design sprung from this deep lineage. But it just didn’t happen in a vacuum. Minimalist designs reflect a deeper integrity of material form and function.

Architectural and product designs influenced this movement from around the world. The significant Bauhaus breakthrough was treating modern materials and fabrication techniques honestly. Instead of hiding joints, for example, the Bauhaus Barcelona chair celebrates the potential of high-tensile-strength steel as an open and graceful cradle for the soft, subtle pig skin-covered cushions. Each component leg and cushion float independently yet integrate beautifully and seamlessly.

Though this school of design contributed greatly to the modern movement, it is only a branch of what can be called the reductionist tree. By the early 1900s, the Industrial Revolution had been underway for around 200 hundred years, and arguments for theories and principles of science itself had been in the Royal Society for 300 hundred years. Every field of science was exploding. Giant leaps in Chemistry, physics, astronomy, aerodynamics, and biology were being made. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, in “Growth and Form,” postulated how forces and functions for organisms would result in the shape and designs found in nature. Form follows function became part of our lexicon, as did concepts from the fields of the new soft sciences of psychology and sociology. One might say the logos of human endeavor were firing on all 24 pistons—a perfect seq-way to the Macchi M.C.72 Seaplane below.

Some minimal designs are done by choice, while aircraft, for example, are minimal because designing lightweight, high-strength, and low-drag structures leaves no room for superficiality. The Italian Seaplane Races in the 1930s, just before WWII, is a perfect example of how competition and the pursuit of speed can result in beautiful forms following function and minimalist design by necessity. Behold the Macchi M.C.72 Seaplane is considered one of the most beautiful craft ever designed.

Not all minimalist designs tug at the romantic heartstrings in the same way. The Lunar Lander is a form that follows function and minimalist design. So much so that the landing struts are so light they cannot support the Lander in Earth’s gravity. Though some find this purity of form engineered without the constraints of an atmosphere ugly, others see the beauty of human creation.

In a way, the lander represents the principles of D’Arcy Thompson’s “Growth and Form” ” almost organic in the same sense that the scanning electron microscope revealed this elegant virus years later. Today, scientists are engineering Nanobots. Someday, these molecule scale machines may be inside you, proving, excuse the pun, minimal design is more than skin deep.

In closing, this brief tribute to modern design is intended to add perspective and give one a sense of how much we owe to those who went before us. I welcome comments, corrections, or recommendations.

Chuck Saunders