| Light seems heavy Industrialisation demanded that, just as efficiently as cogs interlocked in factories, people should become part of production. Machines were expensive to buy, but there were plenty of people who could be fired at any time. Whereas the workers often wanted to forget about efficiency when they went home – most simply by getting drunk – architects tried to rationalise all aspects of life. Architects don’t have to stand in factories all day long, and neither do their wealthy customers. So strictly functional interior design became a hallmark of the rich, which poorer people later aspired to imitate. The dominant design element of functional furniture and buildings was the right angle. Granted, it was impossible for people themselves to become right-angled, but designers certainly seemed to find it easier to make their products right-angled. Since they still had to make their prototypes by hand, this was a very appealing idea. Modernism, in declaring the right angle the right answer, copied the approach of an amateur carpenter, for whom making an identical curve over and over again is a great and often unsolvable problem. In mass production, meanwhile, the angles were certainly significant when the required shape was cut from a larger piece and it was important to minimise the amount of waste, but a modern material such as plastic can be moulded just as easily into any shape imaginable. With the spread of plastic as a material many things became first regular spheres, then elliptical ones, until finally, as with trainers, there were all kinds of bizarre bulges and protrusions. The details of their shape became as random as the distance between right angles had been before. At the same time, military camouflage patterns have been turning up in urban fashion. The idea that led to their invention was originally that instead of always making nature fit to technology, this once, if only superficially, technology was to fit to disorderly nature. Artists had to design the random patterns, because the designers only knew about right-angled cities. Previously, soldiers had go to war in colourful uniforms with shining metal parts, so they would stand out and look intimidating. This plan was not very effective, since even if they had felt intimidated by the enemy’s uniforms there would not have been any way of running away. They were far too visible for that; the guns’ range was too great. Naturally, these patterns don’t camouflage at all in cities, but are rather as if someone shouted “Secret!” in the middle of a crowded room without revealing what. An imitation of nature printed on cotton shows allegiance to technology, too. It was machines that were camouflaged first, as they were more valuable than people. Instead of wearing leather, fur and cotton, the wearer of camouflage declares himself a trophy that would be worthy but is, to everyone’s relief, out of place. The camouflage pattern is so overburdened with meaning, it requires no stylistic allegiance from the people wearing this wild array of colours. The pattern has to be what it is. Even if new patterns are continually being invented, the hypothetical possibility of putting them to use makes the difference entirely redundant. At the same time most civilian wearers of camouflage are hardly ever likely to meet their military equivalent, and in an extensively tree-less world that’s been made visible through infra-red viewing devices it seems very old-fashioned to camouflage something by painting fanciful cow-spots on it. Wearing camouflage is like eating chocolate and jelly babies at once. You can no longer concentrate on one taste; it just bursts and sticks with obscene sweetness. The dreariness of a functional aesthetic commensurate with today’s technology can be seen where the shape is subject to strict specifications, for example the body of a car and aerodynamics. The waste is reduced to its basic core, just as manufacturers of washing powder devote great efforts to saving a few milligrams in the packaging. While the wind is gently re-directed, people still bump into sharp corners. If you take a seat, you are neither ergonomically enveloped nor massaged by soothing waves, but sit quite conventionally, usually not even cushioned. If ever someone had asked the world, ‘What’s too expensive? What would we buy more of if it were cheaper?’ the chances are nobody would have said: chairs with a traditionally shaped seat that should be above all durable and stackable. Now, only twenty years after they first became common, there are more white plastic chairs than people. Close to a billion have been sold in Europe alone. There is a north Italian manufacturer who produces ten million a year. In poor countries with high population growth people build churches like enormous warehouses that can seat ten thousand believers at a time on such white plastic. Nothing illustrates the limits of predictability more clearly than the demand for white plastic chairs. That even and first of all in places where almost everyone has access to all the necessaries of life people buy huge quantities of an item of furniture that nobody really likes. White plastic chairs are the real evil of globalisation, not aggressively marketed brands like Coca Cola and McDonald’s, whose products it’s possible to love, or to prefer almost identical products made by one of their rivals. The manufacturers of white plastic chairs are anonymous for the buyers, who don’t notice the differences between the various types of chair. They are too unwilling to look at them closely. And once they’re sitting on them, it’s no longer possible. There are countless objects that are considered truly ugly by more people, but there is no object either real or imaginary that more people fail to find truly beautiful than white plastic chairs. There is no beauty to be found in them, not even of a perverse kind. People become infatuated about collecting the strangest and most repellent things, but an obsession for white plastic chairs could only be motivated by the knowledge that the obsession would be unique in the world. There is nothing more absolutely ironic than love for white plastic chairs. A modern item of dress like a T-shirt or an A-line skirt has a very simple shape, but even so it looks good on the body. With a white plastic chair the opposite holds true: the chair itself, which has basically always been thought of as right-angled, suddenly manifests, when strictly functional, curves and bulges that look degenerate and awkward. It puts on the appearance of heaviness, not least because it is made to be as light and space-saving as possible. That’s why it has to be broader at the bottom and fitted with armrests. Armrests provide the necessary stability while using as little material as possible, linking together the front legs and the backrest. The minimal thickness of the plastic means that the chair is more stable, insofar as it can support the weight, because the flexibility distributes the weight over all four legs, regardless of the sitter’s position. Slits let wind and rain pass through. The chairs are hard to tip over. Most of them are white, because they were initially marketed exclusively as garden furniture. Now that the vast majority are being put to different uses, their white hardly reminds one of gardens. It would be too sad if a piece of plastic that’s worth under five dollars did. It’s better, if you’ve really decided to buy such an abomination, not to pick a different colour to that of innocence. The white plastic chair is functional fate. From “Da” by Ingo Niermann. Translation by Alexander Scrimgeour |