The Z-travel is a little short, on account of my jumping the gun and ordering the lead screw before the design was finished, and 2 inches too short. The plan is to use this machine to bootstrap a more elegant and precise version 2.0.

I’ve also come to respect the power of ignorance when designing – how sometimes working entirely outside one’s area of expertise can bring outstanding moments of insight simply by leaving out what most people put in automatically.  This is a tough skill to cultivate – ignorance can only take you so far (and certainly provides very little service to your client); once lost, willful naiveté must be cultivated: a constant practice of forgetting, of stepping outside the interiority of your profession.

Closely related is the accident of mis-hearing, either by mis-translation across cultures or through the generous gaps in memory.  Slight shifts in emphasis or material, amplified by human predilections towards obsession, has brought us the cargo cults, Japanese hot-rod culture, Cubism, some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s best work. Mis-hearing could be characterized as (copying + willful naiveté) – the best artists and designers derive tremendous novelty and invention from it, the worst disappear quickly from history.

My visual aid for this post comes from the blog The Selvedge Yard, an always-excellent if often somewhat testosteronic blog of 50′s, 60′s and 70′s nostalgia.  Shinya Kimura, the founder of ZERO Engineering and one of the originators of the “ZERO style” of motorcycles, founded Chabott Engineering in California in 2006.  “ZERO Style” seems to fetishize  vintage motorcycle machinery, but in a way that seems very foreign to the chrome-and-glossy paint Harley Davidsons one tends to see in the US.

The bikes on Kimura’s website are shown in various states of undress – many unselfconsciously  sport raw aluminum fittings and fuel tanks.  They seem to be pieced together or adapted from older bikes – and not always rare or glamorous ones: one is built from parts of a little 1960 Honda Hoon.  The aesthetic is what originally touched my curiousity – its too unstudied to be called “steampunk”,  though the bikes celebrate raw metal and the work of the machinist.  The metalwork is far from perfect and clearly handcrafted – you can clearly see the hammer-marks and welds.  The bikes have the patina of an object found in a machine-shop, worn but not rusted, well-polished but not mirror-finished.  They celebrate the motorcycle as an insider’s art – these bikes don’t need to impress non-enthusiasts or sell magazines.  They look like they were produced by one man in an slightly under-stocked machine-shop for his own edification – the bike is done when he likes it.

Kimura’s work feels like remix culture, but I admit that I don’t know the ingredients.  Looking through the bikes on the website, there seems to be a certain amount of variation and exposition on formal themes.  The designs also have an improvisational lightness to them, making the best of the ingredients at hand.  These are clearly one-off, not designs for production.

I admit to a fascination with television shows like American Chopper, which chronicles the design and building of custom motorcycles.  They’re using the same same tools we’ve appropriated in architecture: 3d modelling, plasma cutters, cnc mills; there’s as much emphasis on form as any of Zaha’s latest confections (within the operational confines of a vehicle), even the conflicts between the artistic will and client are familiar.  The process they portray seems at once cutting-edge and untroubled: they aren’t concerned so much with triangulating the exact location of the avant-garde so much as dipping into an energetic zeitgeist and channeling it.  It is easy to push these choppers over to “low design” – Kimura’s work exposes a different, richer register to the form.Click to view slideshow.

Mudd Library exhibits many of the familiar hallmarks of brutalism – the massive geometrical forms, the exposed concrete, the giant moat, nevertheless manages to avoid many of the behaviours that have caused the style to be villified in the last few decades.  Sitting on the Oberlin campus, which is most known for Richardsonian and Cass Gilbert sandstone (though it has two less-successful white Yamasaki classroom buildings), it sits like an incongruous monumental mothership in the central student commons.  It is roughly square in plan, with solid, windowless corners and central invaginations on each side which reveal complex compositions of windows and stepping up over your head like an inverted pyramid, so that rooms are almost always shadowed by the building above.  This, combined with the entrance bridge and concrete moat, lend an infrastructural feel to the building which is so familiar and deadly in urban brutalism.

What works in Mudd (that would never work in an urban setting) are the nooks and crannies created by the  shifting solids in the building.  One is always affirmatively in the building – it is never transparently framing a view of the outside.  As a college student, however, I found this sheltering to be quite intimate and welcoming – there were always private coves and glades deep in the stacks that you could retreat to.  The few offices I saw in Mudd seemed quite private, each having its own view  of a sheltered piece of the moat.  The moat, by the way, though it seemed to only be used by skaters and the occasional hacky-sack game, nevertheless created a grand entrance, up and into the library.

Section through entry ramp

Mudd reminds me in many ways of Breuer’s Whitney Museum in New York – a very similar moat-and-bridge sequence at the entry, a similar use of light grazing the rough concrete surfaces in the stairwells.  What Mudd lacks in refinement of detail compared to the Whitney, it makes up for with is it’s brightly-colored 1970′s finishing, complete with intense patterns, coarsely-woven fabrics in warm colors, bold graphic shapes, geometric clusters of upholstery and, of course, womb chairs.  This decor, much of which remains in its original glory, held up very well the last time I visited the campus.

Mudd was built in 1974, designed by the New York firm of Warner, Burns, Toan and Lunde.  Like many firms who span this period they seem to have had a brutalist phase, though Oberlin certainly got off better than Toronto – the John P. Robarts Research Library, designed around the same time, certainly seems to indicates that Mudd was in fact dialed down – The Robarts library featured unfortunate, heavy use of a triangular module.

I often mused when at Oberlin whether Mudd’s architects understood what sort of environment they were creating.  For a building that could have been a disaster of formal posturing, a monument to a client’s ego or (even worse) a pastiche of “friendly” educational architectural tropes, it strikes me that Mudd came out just about right – a design full of generosity and integrity.  I would love to know who the designer was – whether they designed other buildings and what their relationship to the project was.

[Images used in this post came from the library website, including a reprint of a 1975 Interiors article about the library]

We live in a world of accreted infrastructures – we are taught that the Real World is no place for idealists.  It is rare that foundations are built or  rebuilt from the ground up – revolutions, natural disasters, newly discovered territories.  The rest of our lives we negotiate the strange minotaurs, hydras and chimaeras that we must  – constantly wondering “why not” and “what if”.  Re-setting the game involves mobilizing so many people in the same gamble, in giving up a system that mostly works for the possibility of one that works a little better that it takes an extreme catalyst to make it happen.

Simon’s sentiment reminds me a bit of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies – a place to look when nothing else seems to be working.  A more scientific version of this might be the study of cognitive bias, all of the built-in cultural and psychological blind spots through which we see (or don’t see) the world every day.  One could probably cross-reference a list of known cognitive biases to the Oblique Strategies quite easily.

I believe that the most difficult and most valuable skill to cultivate  as a designer is the ability to step outside your project, outside of everything you know and believe about design, and really see what you’ve made.  It’s an impossible task, of course.  We spend so much time in the planning and design process building a scaffolding of confidence, trusting that our practice will create solid ground under our feet in the end.