Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
The idea of being technologically wired runs through a lot of the houses in this exhibit. The architects Hariri & Hariri mention how in their Digital House, empty spaces are "no longer a waste of time" -- having digital screens as walls creates "opportunities for heightened awareness." What's with this ideal of 100 percent total engagement? Is there no longer a value in doing nothing, or having emptiness, or just plain relaxing?
Don't just do something. Sit there! [Laughs.] Well, people are going to have to learn how to manipulate technology to their own benefit. Every new technology offers promise -- and behind every promise there's a risk, just as behind every risk there's a promise, as the saying goes. I'm willing to believe that there's a more dignified way of living, and that technology is probably the answer, but you probably have to learn how to live with it. Take the loft in the exhibit that belongs to the couple who are traders on Wall Street -- they actually trade out of their home, around the world, so they might be working with foreign markets at 3 a.m.
When I would describe their lives, people would groan. They think this couple must be freaks, or automatons, or incredible economic animals. But the fact is, they're a good example of learning how to live with this stuff. They don't have a bunch of computers sitting around their bedroom; they've made a space for them, and you can see that space from a couple other places, but you can also close it off. You can do whatever people have done ever since radios, telephones, televisions were introduced to the house: Find some way of controlling them so they don't run your life.
But I think there's long been a popular fear, especially in the last 10 years, that technology is like this tsunami that's coming and is going to sweep over us and subjugate everybody.
Some people are concerned about being overwhelmed by technology, but at the same time, I don't think there's been another time in the 20th century when technology has had such a high degree of respect or popularity. After the world wars, there were these periods where technology was really seen as this evil force.
Also during the arts and crafts movement at the turn of the century, which was a reaction to all the new technology at that time.
That was a generation of people who were feeling the first shocks of the industrial age. And if I think our superhighways are ugly, the initial manifestations of the industrial age were indeed crude, loud, dirty -- the reason why we have zoning to keep factories away from residences. There was a huge disparity between contemporary life and another life that people knew so well, but was out of reach: the wife at home cooking meals, things being made as they had been for centuries, furniture hand-carved by specially trained people -- this whole notion of reality that was severely challenged by the Industrial Revolution. There was a crisis of authenticity when things started getting manufactured out of new materials, with stamping, casting, printing. It's hard for us to imagine how much it threw that culture into a tizzy.
You could say we're having a similar crisis of authenticity today. People choose electronic "wallpaper" for their "desktops." And then in so-called real life, you have enterprises like [furniture store] Restoration Hardware that capitalize on the crisis, building stories around mission lamps and old metal juicers. They hark back to a time that people today probably never knew themselves.
That's what Martha Stewart's all about, too. When she works with these very romantic, sentimental notions about domestic life, people know she's not referring to their parents' world -- it's clearly about how their grandparents lived, or going even further back. It's also about making things. Her deal works so well because making things has become very exotic in a Western industrialized world that is now basically all consumers. Nobody makes anything -- they don't make food, bread, fabrics.
So she embodies a more literal arts and crafts ideal for our turn of the century?
Well, the original arts and crafts people were trying to reinstitute a world that was still within memory. With Martha Stewart it's different -- she can show people how to bake bread, or make nails for that matter -- her magazine reminds us that at one time people actually did make these things for themselves.
What was once necessity has become an exotic form of leisure.
It is. It's like these people with gym bodies. They don't have muscles from hard work; they have muscles from having time off. And baking bread now is not about work, it's about leisure.
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