wigley total design

WHAT DOES “TOTAL DESIGN” mean to-day? What does it mean, let’s say, afterpostmodernism? Not so long ago, theexpression was part of the basic vocab-ulary of architects, teachers, and crit-ics. Yet it is remarkably absent fromcontemporary debates and seems toplay no role in schools today. Whathappened?

EXPLODING ARCHITECTURE

Total design has two meanings: first,what might be called the implosion ofdesign, the focusing of design inwardon a single intense point; second, whatmight be called the explosion of de-sign, the expansion of design out totouch every possible point in theworld. In either case, the architect is incontrol, centralizing, orchestrating,dominating. Total design is a fantasyabout control, about architecture ascontrol.

Implosive design takes over a space,subjecting every detail, every surface,to an over-arching vision. The archi-tect supervises, if not designs, every-thing: structure, furniture, wallpaper,carpets, doorknobs, light fittings, din-nerware, clothes, and flower arrange-

ments. The result is a space with nogaps, no cracks, no openings onto oth-er possibilities, other worlds. The par-adigm of this approach is the domesticinterior completely detached from thechaotic pluralism of the world. Awhole generation of remarkable archi-tects — including Bruno Taut, LouisSullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, JosefHoffmann, Josef Maria Olbrich,Charles Rennie Mackintosh, HendrikBerlage, Peter Behrens, and Henryvan der Velde — produced hyper-inte-riors that enveloped their occupants ina single, seamless multimedia garment.Inspired by Richard Wagner’s mid-19th-century concept of the “totalwork of art,” in which different artforms would collaborate to produce asingular experience, these designerswere eager to place the architect at thecenter of the process: the architectwould orchestrate the overall theatri-cal effect. Collaborative organizationsof artists such as the Vienna Secessioncarried out an architectural mission;they would implode design to createenvironments with an extraordinarydensity of sensuous effect.

The idea of explosive design haunts

H A R VA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E 1

This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Summer 1998, Number 5. To order this issue or a sub-scription, visit the HDM homepage at <http://mitpress.mit.edu/HDM>.

© 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced withoutthe permission of the publisher

Whatever Happened to Total Design?by Mark Wigley

the Harvard Graduate School of De-sign in the legacy of Walter Gropiusand his concept of “total architecture,”in which the architect is authorized todesign everything, from the teaspoonto the city. Architecture is understoodto be everywhere. Indeed, it is arguedthat the influence of the architect hasto be felt at every scale, or societywould go terribly wrong. This point ofview produced an extraordinary legacy.

Architects have roamed the world,leaving their mark on every tree,lamppost, and fire hydrant. They allhave their city plans, furniture, wallpa-per, clothes, and coffee pots. Manyhave cars. Some have ships. From thetrain designed by Gropius and AdolfMeyer to the airplane and automaticwashing machine of Rudolf Schindler,the 20th-century architect admits nolimit. Following the lead of organiza-tions like the Deutscher Werkbundand the English Design and IndustriesAssociation, men and women trainedas architects defined and dominatedthe field of industrial design as itemerged early in this century. Thisfantasy is still very much alive. Thesedays, the teaspoon doesn’t seem smallenough and the city doesn’t seem largeenough. Students don’t hesitate to de-velop projects on the architecture ofthe microchip or on networks for in-terplanetary transportation.

These two concepts of total designhave played a major role in the forma-tion of 20th-century architectural dis-course. Both are responses toindustrialization. Implosive design isusually understood as a form of resist-ance, if not the last stand. Architecturegathers all its resources in one sacredplace where architects collaborate withother artists to produce an image ofsuch intensity that it blocks out the in-

creasingly industrialized world. Incontrast, those who explode architec-ture out into every corner of the worldembrace the new age of standardiza-tion.

The line between the romantic ideaof resistance to industrializationthrough the design of hand-crafted,one-off environments, and the equallyromantic idea of embracing progres-sive machine-age reproduction, is

drawn many times in the standard his-tory books. For example, it is oftendrawn between two schools, or rather,two directorships of the same school:between Henry van der Velde’s leader-ship of the Weimar School of Arts andCrafts, and Gropius’s program for thatsame school, renamed the Bauhauswhen he became its head in 1919. TheBauhaus developed mass-reproducibledesigns, the production and licensingof which literally funded some of itsday-to-day operations. Hence the fac-tory aesthetic of the school’s Dessaubuilding, designed by Gropius andMeyer in 1925-1926.

Less obviously, however, this em-brace of industrialization begins withwhat might be called an explosion ofthe designer. Not only are objects de-signed, mass-produced, and dissemi-nated; the designer himself or herselfis designed as a product, to be manu-factured and distributed. The Bauhausproduced designers and exported themaround the world. The vast glass wallsof the Dessau building which, inGropius’s words, “dematerialize” theline between inside and outside, sug-gest this immanent launching outwardof both students and their designs.Even the teaching within the studioswas a product. Gropius said that heonly felt free to resign in 1928 becausethe success of the Bauhaus was finally

established through the appointmentsof its graduates to teaching posts inforeign countries and through theadoption of its curriculum internation-ally.

Yet the line between the two atti-tudes — and this is true of most linesthat are drawn insistently — is finallynot so clear. It is, in fact, mythological,a reassuring fantasy invented despitethe existence of a dense and nuancedarchive of historical evidence. Explo-sion cannot easily be separated fromimplosion. For a start, the Bauhauswas itself explicitly conceived as a “to-tal work of art” in Wagner’s sense, aglorious “building” produced by a sin-gular implosion of different disci-plines, resources, and pedagogicaltechniques. Gropius never stoppedsearching for what he called the “one-ness of a common idea” around whichartists of every kind could be gatheredin a grand collaboration. His rhetoricis characterized by terms like “coordi-nation,” “incorporation,” “welding,”“synthesis,” “cooperation,” “unified,”“collective,” “interwoven,” “inte-grate,” and so on. Here is a typical re-mark of his, from the 1923 essay “TheTheory and Organization of theBauhaus”: “A real unity can beachieved only by coherent restatementof the formal theme by repetition ofits integral properties in all parts of thewhole.” The institutional space of thissingular idea is even a domestic interi-or. The Bauhaus factory presented it-self as a family scene, complete withsnapshots of sleeping, eating, andplaying; this “family” image was rein-forced by subsequent histories that de-scribe the internal squabbles. At thenexus of the explosion of architectureis an implosion in which every detailof a domestic space is supposedly gov-erned by a single idea.

If the explosive factory school was atotal art work, then the implosive hy-per-interior can be equally understoodas a kind of factory. Consider Olbrich’sSecession Exhibition Building of 1898.The project symbolizes the quest forthe total work of art. Its design in-volved the collaboration of Gustav

Design Arts and Architecture Whatever Happened to Total Design?

2 H A R VA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E S U M M E R 1 9 9 8

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Architects build up steam, as it were, in the domestic interior,break down the walls, and then explode their designs out intothe landscape in small fragments — thus they move fromdesigning everything in a single work of architecture toadding a trace of architecture to everything.

Klimt, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoff-mann, Othmar Schimkowitz, GeorgKlimpt, and Ludwig Hevesi. Olbrich,like his teachers, was very much underthe spell of Richard Wagner. As a stu-dent, he often dreamed up architectur-al spaces to match scenes fromWagner’s operas. The SecessionBuilding looks like a temple, a sacredspace of art whose gleaming white sur-faces serve to detach it from the pro-fane surrounding city. It was presentedand received as such. Beyond its mon-umental entrance and lobby beneaththe gilded-laurel dome, however, lies alarge, undifferentiated space, lit byhuge industrial skylights, with onlythree windows, usually screened off,high up on one side wall. The world isthus blocked out, intensifying the im-plosion of artistic energy. Through thedevice of moveable walls, the interiorspace accommodated any kind of exhi-bition.

Over one hundred Secession exhi-bitions were held there, each of whichwas considered a total work of artcomposed of sculptures, fabrics, wall-papers, carpets, friezes, music, etc. Ar-chitects like Olbrich, Hoffmann,Behrens, and Joze Pleçnik designedthe exhibitions in collaboration withthe artists. In this way, the buildingworks as a kind of machine for pro-ducing unique environments. Much ofthe art presented in the building wassold, but so too was the decoration:collectors would literally buy the walls.This absence of a firm distinction be-tween the frame and the artifacts be-ing framed is, of course, the wholepoint of the total work of art. Thebuilding is a factory for the productionof total works of art, works that thenmove out into the world. Designs test-ed in the temple-factory as singular in-stallations become the prototypes formass production in the workshops. Inanother sense, the building is a kind oftheater, a windowless box withinwhich an endless array of different setscan be assembled; the aesthetic playsstaged therein isolate themselves fromthe world, but they do so precisely toexert an influence upon the world.

Implosion and explosion are there-fore bound together; in fact, the linkbetween them is crucial. The hyper-interior has an explosive intensity. Thesarcasm of the best-known critical at-tacks on such spaces, like that of AdolfLoos (which would soon be echoed byLe Corbusier), thinly masks the fear ofbeing overwhelmed by both the deco-rative excess and the absolute unifor-mity of style. For their critics, thesespaces produce a claustrophobic senseof “suffocating” pressure. It is precise-ly this intensity that produces the blastthat disseminates architecture outthrough time and space. The modernarchitect’s obsession with breakingdown the barriers between inside andoutside can be reread in these terms; itis part of the dynamic between implo-sion and explosion. Architects build upsteam, as it were, in the domestic inte-rior, break down the walls, and thenexplode their designs out into thelandscape in small fragments — thusthey move from designing everythingin a single work of architecture toadding a trace of architecture to every-thing.

Consider another obvious example:Frank Lloyd Wright. Look at how heoverdetermines his early domestic in-teriors, even lowering the ceilings toproduce a kind of claustrophobic pres-sure in which his total environmentspress themselves against you. His box-es are then exploded and the relentlessdesign work bursts out of its domesticconfinement, heads across the gardento the street, then down the road toconfigure the neighborhood and,eventually, with Broadacre City, slidesacross the entire continent in a singlevast project. From the absence of win-dows in the Secession Building to thevast walls of glass in the DessauBauhaus, this inward then outwardmovement is repeated in the career ofarchitect after architect and can, likeany explosion, be restaged on a smallscale in a single project.

This pyrotechnic operation, whichdominates 20th-century architecture,is not the destruction of the interiorbut rather its expansion out into the

street and across the planet. The plan-et is transformed into a single interior,which needs design. All architecturebecomes interior design.

RADIOACTIVE FUSION

The explosive dissemination of archi-tecture is a form of radiation. It wasunderstood as such, as can be seen, forexample, in one of Gropius’s firstspeeches to the Bauhaus in July 1919.Describing the school, he announcesthat, “Art must finally find its crys-talline expression in a great total workof art. And this great total work of art,this cathedral of the future, will thenshine with its abundance of light intothe smallest objects of everyday life.”This passage draws on the expression-ist rhetoric of the manifesto for theBerlin Workers Council on Art thatGropius, along with Bruno Taut, pre-pared just before coming to theBauhaus. Lionel Feininger’s famousexpressionist etching of the Bauhausfor the school’s program, like Taut’sdrawings of his Stadtkrone fantasy,shows the bright light radiating inevery direction from a crystalline inte-rior. Ultimately that radiance becomesthe radiation of both designers and de-signs out from an explosively intenseinterior.

The same radiance can be seen inthe etching of the Sommerfeld Housethat Gropius and other Bauhaus artistsassembled in 1920-21. The house’s all-enveloping interior of carved wood,hanging tapestries, etc., is usually asso-ciated with the expressionist prehisto-ry of the school, but this kind ofone-off environment remained a cru-cial part of the Bauhaus mission to dis-seminate the architect andarchitectural design as industrial prod-ucts. A year after the house was fin-ished, Johannes Itten demanded thatthe school either produce unique ob-jects or fully enter the “outside world”of mass production. Gropius respond-ed that the two approaches to designshould exist side by side in a “fusion.”Exactly the same kind of intensity ofthe Sommerfeld interior can be seenin the theater productions that paral-



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leled the most industrialized years ofthe institution and that were monu-mentalized in Gropius’s 1927 designfor a “Total Theater.” His redefinitionand expansion of the role of the archi-tect presupposes a relentless trajectoryfrom the details of the private house tothe nation and beyond; here, from TheNew Architecture and the Bauhaus of1935:

My idea of the architect as a coordinator— whose business it is to unify the vari-ous formal, technical, social and econom-ic problems that arise in connection withbuilding — inevitably led me on step bystep from the study of the function of thehouse to that of the street; from thestreet to the town; and finally to the stillvaster implications of regional and na-tional planning. I believe that the NewArchitecture is destined to dominate a farmore comprehensive sphere than build-ing means today; and that from the inves-tigation of its details we shall advancetowards an ever-wider and profounderconception of design as one great cognatewhole.

To think again about the relation-ship between architecture and the de-sign arts, we have to rethink thedynamic between the isolated hyper-interior and its explosion across thewider landscape. It is precisely in thisdynamic that the contemporary statusof architecture and the design arts wasrenegotiated. This rethinking wouldthen force us to reexamine the stan-dard accounts of our prehistory. Themost obvious starting point would beNikolaus Pevsner’s 1936 Pioneers of theModern Movement, an initially unsuc-cessful book that became a hit onlywhen reedited and symptomaticallyretitled Pioneers of Modern Design forthe 1948 Museum of Modern Art edi-tion.

Pevsner draws a straight line frommid-19th-century design reformthrough to Gropius, insisting thatmodern architecture developed fromthe design arts. This is a strategic his-tory: it describes how architects tookover the revised concept of design in

their efforts to conquer the world, lit-erally following the passage of theword “design” from the English re-form movement to the German mod-ernist debates. Yet Pevsner’s own useof the terms “architecture” and “de-sign” is ambiguous. He argues thatmodern architecture is design — noth-ing but design at a large scale — ex-trapolating early discussions of thedetails of domestic wallpaper to ideasabout the overall organization of acity. At the same time, however, Pevs-ner repeatedly differentiates betweenarchitecture and design in ways thatseem at odds with his larger argument.We have since become used to sepa-rating these words (e.g., the Museumof Modern Art’s infamous “Depart-ment of Architecture and Design”), asif we know what these two termsmean. Pevsner’s book, which is stillsomething of a bible and can even befound in some airport book shops,should have made the distinctionproblematic.

When Henry-Russell Hitchcockand Philip Johnson made their respec-tive suggestions to Pevsner on how tomodify the original 1936 edition,Johnson confidentially questionedPevsner’s evaluation of Gropius’s im-portance, insisting that Gropius wasincapable of designing anything. ButPevsner stood his ground, as if he un-

derstood, at some level, that what getsdesigned in Gropius’s hands is an insti-tutional structure. Gropius effectivelyturned design into a form of manage-ment, with the architect as “coordina-tor.” The supremacy of the architectin total design, whether implosive orexplosive, becomes that of the manag-er. Paradoxically, this form of controlwas underscored by the absence, at the

Bauhaus, of an official “department ofarchitecture” for a long time eventhough the school was run by an archi-tect, understood itself as a form of ar-chitecture, saw all forms of art asforms of building, and presented ar-chitecture as its endpoint — architec-ture was running the show withoutactually being presented as such. Evenmore symptomatic of all this is the factthat Gropius couldn’t draw. This wasno tragedy, of course. A number of fa-mous architects do not draw. It mighteven be considered a virtue today insome circles. And although Gropiuswrote letters to his family describingthe difficulty of surviving in PeterBehrens’s office with such a liability,he soon discovered that his ownstrength lay in collaborations. Beforehe designed objects, he designed rela-tionships, partnerships with AdolfMeyer, Marcel Breuer, and so on.

None of this is so very modern.The idea of architecture as a form ofmanagement dates at least to Vitruviusand to the idea that the architect needsto know a little something abouteverything. The figure of the architectbecame established as the organizer ofdomains about which he or she doesn’tnecessarily have expertise. Aestheticmanagement is obviously a part ofthis, but not necessarily a particularlyimportant part. This concept of archi-

tecture as management informs thewhole history of the discipline, andshows no sign of going away. On thecontrary, the proliferation of differentarchitectures through the 1960s and’70s, in the wake of always-frustratedattempts to unify modernism, can beunderstood as a proliferation of differ-ent theories of management. And ifyou look closely at each of these theo-



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The architects who talk about chaos, absence, fragmentation,and indeterminacy usually work hard to assure that you knowthat a design is theirs by using signature shapes and colors.Arguments about the impossibility of “the total image” areemployed in fact to produce precisely such an image — asigned image that fosters brand loyalty.

ries, you find the dream of total designvery close to the surface.

Buckminster Fuller, for example,insisted that design was nothing morethan resource management. He be-lieved that the architect had to be a“comprehensive designer” capable ofoperating at any scale. Not by chancewas the first article on Fuller by hisfirst biographer entitled “Total De-sign.” Fuller’s mission was to trans-form the planet into a single art work.Obviously the ecological movement,which Fuller did much to stimulate,equated design and management. Anot-so-close reading of classic texts ofthe movement like Ian McHarg’s 1969Design With Nature reveals a totalizingaesthetic ambition. Ecological archi-tecture must fit seamlessly into thegrand total design. On the technologi-cal front, the engineer Ove Arup’sconcept of “total architecture” calledfor engineers to collaborate with ar-chitects to produce works of art by op-erating at every scale on every buildingsystem in terms of the architect’s sin-gular aesthetic vision. Environmentalcontrol packages, for example, shouldbe organized by the same vision thatoversaw the composition of the doorframes. Much of the megastructuraltradition promoted the idea of “totalplanning.” Think of Superstudio’sContinuous Monument project of1969, which they described as “a singlepiece of architecture to be extendedover the whole world . . . an architec-tural model for total urbanization”that marches sublimely across the sur-face of the planet.

Clearly, the dream of the total workof art did not fade in modernism’swake. On the contrary, all of the issuesraised by architects and theorists of re-cent generations that seem, at first, tosignal the end of the idea of the totalwork of art turn out to be, on closerlook, a thin disguise of the traditionaltotalizing ambitions of the architect.

FRESH HERRINGS

Consider “flexibility,” the idea of anarchitecture that could assume anyparticular arrangement. Most flexible

projects turn out to have inflexibleaesthetic agendas. Or, more precisely,flexibility is itself a singular aesthetic.Look at the 1958 “IndustrializedHouse” project by George Nelson, anarchitect who became famous as an in-dustrial designer. The house is con-ceived as an industrial design product,a system of parts that can be infinitelyrearranged. But Nelson never pub-lished more than one arrangement ofthe house, which included detailedcolor images of the model’s interior,complete with wall hangings, carpet,and dinnerware. At the very momentthat he announces that the architectshould provide only a framework forchange, Nelson installs a total work ofart. Likewise, Christopher Alexander’s1977 A Pattern Language installs a sin-gular aesthetic regime in the guise of aset of innocent building blocks thatseem capable of infinite rearrange-ment. The last of these 253 “patterns”is an attack on “total design.” Thehypocrisy of the attack is evident inthe final lines that instruct the readerto hang personal things on walls ratherthan follow the dictates of designers. Adesigner claiming a total vision dic-tates that the totalizing instincts of allother designers should be resisted.The apparent flexibility of his systemactually integrates all design into atransnational and “timeless” aestheticpattern that can only be perceived bythe master architect/manager. Withsystems theory, cybernetics, semiotics,and fractal geometry, the number ofways of absorbing difference into asingular structure continues to growand to act as the totalizing architect’sbest friend.

Think, too, of the different dis-courses about the absence of the archi-tect. Bernard Rudofsky’s bestseller,Architecture Without Architects, basedon his 1964 exhibition at MOMA,would seem to defeat the master de-signer by drawing attention to thatwhich remains untouched by the ar-chitect. But Rudofsky’s opening para-graph describes his work as providinga “total picture” of planetary architec-ture of great value to the designer.

The architecture he shows usuallybleeds off the edge of the frame ofeach photograph to convey the senseof a seamless environment, an endlessfabric escaping the object fetishism ofthe architect. Images from a multitudeof countries are assembled in one bookto construct the total picture — a mo-saic of patterns that date back to antiq-uity and thus transcend the purview ofany one designer. The use of contem-porary technology or “design” objectsby non-architects is carefully excludedfrom the image to produce the senseof an immaculate, timeless environ-ment. And more remarkably, the semi-nal essays by Roland Barthes andMichel Foucault on the “death of theauthor” have recently been used to au-thorize the work of a few signature de-signers. In a comic turn, rival authorshave competed for the right to an-nounce the death of the author.

Similarly, the postmodernist dis-course about pluralism, multiplicity,and heterogeneity is inevitably used asan excuse for singularity. Robert Ven-turi’s call for “complexity and contra-diction” is surprisingly intolerant ofalternative positions. The proponentsof “critical regionalism” see the samearchitectural qualities everywhererather than the unique site-specificdifferences they advocate. Such plural-ist arguments are used as cover for aparticular aesthetic. And the architectswho talk about chaos, absence, frag-mentation, and indeterminacy usuallywork very hard to assure that youknow that a particular design is theirsby using recognizable — signature —shapes and colors. Once again, argu-ments about the impossibility of “thetotal image” are employed in fact toproduce precisely such an image — asigned image that fosters brand loyal-ty.

Architects who say, “I don’t think Ican or should control the whole envi-ronment,” are usually, in fact, claimingcontrol. Rather than simply acceptingany interference with their vision thatmight occur, they insist upon indeter-minacy or incompletion to regain con-trol of those zones that elude them.



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They label them as danger or pleasurezones — red light districts, in a sense.And, of course, red light districts arenever all that dangerous; usually theyare highly regulated and predictable. Ifyou study the work of these architects,you will find no gaps. Every potentialgap is labeled “gap” and therebybrought back into line. Incompletionis an aesthetic. It is a design choice,and a good choice for many designers.Much of the pleasure that we take insome architects’ work comes from thatchoice. Indeed, presenting an aestheticof incompletion requires a lot of ex-pertise. It’s probably harder to con-struct than the effect of completion.

Obviously there is a difference be-tween providing a rough frameworkfor individual variation and designingthe client’s slippers to match the car-pets that match the chairs that matchthe wallpaper that matches the roomthat swallowed the fly. But the differ-ence is not that one is more totalizingthan the other. Look at how the archi-tects of incompletion, pluralism, and

contradiction drag us all into theirown homes — typically in the pages ofArchitectural Digest, the contemporaryreference work on total design, or theequivalent pages of fashion magazines.One by one, the postmodern archi-tects walk us through their immaculateand ever-so-precisely lit and pho-tographed domestic spaces, pausing tocelebrate their books, pets, furniture,clothes, and art works. Robert Venturiand Denise Scott Brown take time outfrom decorating sheds to discuss thefrieze on the walls of their preciselycalibrated dining room. Peter Eisen-man puts chaos theory on hold whiledescribing the view from his cottage inPrinceton. The architects whose phi-losophy seems to call for an end to to-tal design present their private spaces

as temples to such design. Somehowthese totalizing images legitimate thedissemination of supposedly non-to-talizing design and theory. Once again,an intense implosion of the domesticinterior is used to trigger an explosivedispersal of architecture. The ever-in-creasing physical and intellectual mo-bility of the architect, the frequentflyer between countries and disci-plines, is somehow nailed down in thevery public display of his or her fixed“private” interior.

TOTAL THEORY

What follows from all this is that theexpression “total design” is extremelymisleading. Design is either design orit is not, the way pregnancy used to be.There is no such thing as non-totaliz-ing design. All design is total design.This was already established in the16th century when design was madethe center of architectural training.Take, for example, the promotion ofarchitecture into the academic rankswith its admission to Vasari’s 1563

Academia del Disegno, an institutionthat unified the arts around the con-cept of design. Design, the drawingthat embodies an idea, was understoodas the magic mechanism by which thepractical world of architecture couldaspire to the theoretical level of gen-tlemanly scholarship. Design is alwaysa matter of theory. Design is not athing in the world. It’s a theoreticalreading of the world. Or, more pre-cisely, it is the gesture in which theoryis identified in the material world. Topoint to design is to point to theory.The model, of course, is the supposed-ly immaculate theory embodied in theimmaculate design of the cosmos bythe “Divine Architect,” as Vasari putsit. The architect’s claim to fame wasprecisely the totalizing capacity of de-

sign. The default pretension of the ar-chitect is to capture the grandest scaleof order.

This idea was faithfully adhered toat the Bauhaus with its so-called lawsof design. These laws — the center ofthe training, the first thing to belearned after one walked through thedoor — were a series of totalizingclaims about form. If design is thebridge between the immaterial worldof ideas and the material world of ob-jects, then a theory is required to con-trol that relationship. A set ofstructural rules maintains the integrityof the bridge. Gropius called for“sound theoretical instruction in thelaws of design,” insisting that such a“theoretic basis” is the essential pre-requisite for collective work on totalarchitecture, the “solid foundation”for unity. The theory was taught firstby Johannes Itten and then by LaszloMoholy-Nagy, whose first biographyby Sibyl Moholy-Nagy (with a prefaceby Gropius) is symptomatically subti-tled Experiment in Totality. Design pre-supposes totalizing theory. It is not bychance that Pevsner’s Pioneers of Mod-ern Design begins with a whole chapteron “Theories of Art from Morris toGropius.” Even the interpretation ofparticular objects that follows beginswith the analysis of wallpaper and car-pet patterns by the Journal of Designand Manufacture, which was started in1849 by the group that gravitatedaround Henry Cole in London. TheJournal was first and foremost a jour-nal of theory. The preface to its firstissue announced that it would offer“something like a systematic attemptto establish recognized principles.” Indoing so, it was attempting to improvethe various schools of design that hadbeen founded in response to an 1836government decree that such princi-ples should be established. Strong de-sign presupposes strong theory.Design is, as it were, the appearance oftheory. It is therefore no surprise thatwe are addressing these issues in aschool. And not just any school but theGraduate School of Design, calledthus since 1936 precisely because de-



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While insisting on the impossibility of producing a single,totalizing image of modern architecture or even postmodernarchitecture, Jencks proceeds to produce such an image and even to encourage the reader to use it as a guide to the following text.

sign was believed to be the elementthat unified the departments of archi-tecture, landscape architecture, andurbanism. Design was once again thetotalizing agent. Gropius arrived hereshortly afterward and began his cam-paign to teach “design fundamentals”that echoed the Bauhaus’s “laws of de-sign.”

If design is always totalizing and in-volves the mystique of theory, then thequestion of the fate of total design be-comes the question of total theory.This is especially true if we want todiscuss the relationship between theprofessional expertise of what we haveup to now called the architect and thatof the designer. After all, theory is it-self an art work, something designed.Theorists such as Vitruvius and Alber-ti insist that the ordering and structureof their respective treatises match thatwhich they prescribe for buildings.Likewise, Pevsner understood his in-vention of the idea of the “modernmovement” as a construction job, thecenterpiece of a total design. He fol-lowed this a year later with a book onindustrial art in England and contin-ued by writing countless essays on de-sign and launching a campaign on thesubject as editor of the ArchitecturalReview. Pevsner assumes the role of in-tellectual manager, exploiting themanagerial pretensions embeddedwithin the German art historical tradi-tion to which he was closely tied. Thistied him also to Gropius. The idea ofhistory and theory as management islinked to the idea of design as manage-ment. It now seems inevitable thatGropius brought another such manag-er, Sigfried Giedion, to the GSD.

But what did postmodernism do tototal theory? An answer might beginwith the obvious figure, Mr. Postmod-ernism himself, Charles Jencks — anunderestimated figure. Jencks’s ac-count of postmodernism evolved froma critique of Pevsner, who was his in-tellectual grandfather insofar as hisdissertation adviser was Reyner Ban-ham, whose own dissertation adviserwas Pevsner. Instead of killing the fa-ther, then, he attempts to kill the

grandfather — which is probably moredifficult. Jencks’s dissertation was pub-lished in 1973 as Modern Movements inArchitecture — the plural “movements”was a response to Pevsner’s singularaccount. It begins by criticizing thataccount, footnoting Pevsner’s final re-mark that the modern style was “total-itarian,” before going on to reject allsuch “unified,” “single strand,” “all-embracing” theory in favor of “a seriesof discontinuous movements,” a “pho-to-strip” account. Yet Jencks’s pluralistmanifesto is no less managerial intone, no less an obsessive survey of thescene that places everything within asingle picture. The photo-strip is itselfa single image.

Perhaps the clearest example of thisis the chart with which Jencks beginsthe main body of his argument. It po-sitions every architect and tendency ina system of evolutionary branches.Thus, while insisting on the impossi-bility of producing a single, totalizingimage of modern architecture or evenpostmodern architecture, Jencks pro-ceeds to produce such an image andeven to encourage the reader to use itas a guide to the following text. Thechart is an “evolutionary tree” in thetradition of Banister Fletcher’s famousfrontispiece to A History of Architectureon the Comparative Method, althoughJencks rejects Fletcher’s hierarchy byhaving his chart lie on its side and giv-ing the different strands equal value.There are no gaps, no radical disconti-nuities. Everything eventually flowsinto everything else. All architects andarchitectures are genetically relatedand “cross-fertilize” promiscuously.Discontinuities exist for a while, buteventually the separate strands are re-joined. Jencks keeps on producingsuch charts, rearranging the positionsof each element but never altering thebasic kind of diagram. An interestinghistory emerges from a comparison ofthe progressive remapping of architec-ture in the different charts. What re-mains striking, though, is their overalllook. The lava-lamp aesthetic of thefirst chart published in 1970 gives wayto hard-edged diagonals in the books

on postmodernism, which in turn giveway to horizontal bands. The chart is astylish interior in which everythingcan be seamlessly placed. The latestfold-out version even includes a mug-shot of each architect and one of theirdesigns. The history of architecturecan be captured in a single glance.This is nothing but design, total de-sign.

Furthermore, in the grand traditionof total design, the theorist of plural-ism and the discontinuous universe re-peatedly invites us into his domesticinterior, using a series of articles, spe-cial magazine issues, and books to re-veal the hyper-designed details of hisown “thematic house.” Most recently,in the October 1997 Architectural Di-gest, he shows us a new total work ofart: his house and garden in Scotland.Yet again, a leading disseminator ofthe idea of the impossibility of a singu-lar, totalizing image somehow organ-izes that claim around the image of ahyper-interior. His countless publica-tions explode, as it were, out from thisspace, their inconsistencies somehowstitched together by its obsessive co-herence.

Indeed, the global infrastructure ofpublications works hard to construct acontinuous, gapless surface. Thedream of total design has moved intothe media. The explosive radiance ofthe interior bursting out of itself andleaving all those little fragments of de-sign and designers across the land-scape is first, after all, a radiance of themedia. Returning to the early exam-ples of total design described above,one can see this already in the publica-tions of the Vienna Secession, whichmass-produced countless immaculatephotographs of one-off, hand-craftedtotal interiors, sending them out intothe very world which those interiorsseemingly reject. Likewise Moholy-Nagy’s designs for the famous series ofBauhaus publications provided anoverall look, a totalizing space inwhich the diversity of mass-producedobjects could be inserted. Exhibitionshave the same totalizing effect. Het-erogeneous objects succumb to a sin-



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gle overarching aesthetic regime bybeing located within a uniformly de-signed exhibition space. Likewise, thedisplay of architecture in museums,books, and so on. If architecture hasbeen exploded in fragments across theplanet, numerous devices exist forcompacting it back into an interior.

THE JOYS OF FRUSTRATION

The most remarkable thing about thisrelentless drive toward total designthrough the pulsating rhythms of im-plosions and explosions is its constantfailure. If all design is total design,then the totalizing dream is alwaysfrustrated. The architect remains amarginal figure who doesn’t enjoy therespect shown today to the designartist — whether landscape designer,interior designer, furniture designer,or industrial designer. Some kind ofinverse relationship exists between thehuge scale of architects’ fantasies andthe smallness of the responsibility theyare given. The architect’s claim on thewhole world is somehow grounded inan ambivalent social status. The archi-tect is the speculator par excellence, anobsessive dreamer. In no other disci-pline are the general claims bigger, thefetishism of minute details more ob-sessive. Architecture is first and fore-most a discourse, mobilized by theconcept of design that is constantly in-voked but rarely examined. In examin-ing it here, one might even want tocelebrate the frustration of the archi-tect, a frustration that does not abateeven when his or her dream is realized.The more one studies the totalizingimages and narratives, the more onediscovers parts of the architecture, thepublication, or the history that haveescaped or slipped the grip of thosewho so resolutely frame and presentthem. Indeed, the wonderful thingabout architecture is how it so easilyescapes the people who produce it.The seemingly continuous surface isalways riddled with gaps, twists, andcomplications. Total design is every-where, yet seductively elusive.

Mark Wigley is Director of GraduateStudies at the School of Architecture,Princeton University. He is the author ofDeconstructivist Architecture (Museum of Modern Art, 1988; Philip Johnson, co-author), The Architecture ofDeconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (MITPress, 1993) and White Walls, DesignerDresses: The Fashioning of ModernArchitecture (MIT Press, 1995). He is cur-rently working on a prehistory of virtual space.This essay is based on a talk given at the fall1997 GSD Architecture Department colloqui-um on The Design Arts and Architecture.



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