Aesthetic Histories of Design Culture
Editors: Zsolt Gyenge, Olivér Horváth (Managing Editor), Szilvia Maróthy, Márton Szentpéteri, Péter Wunderlich (Project Manager). Founding Editor: Heni Fiáth
Guest Editor: Bálint Veres
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
Bálint Veres: Some Drawdowns from the Well of Design Culture
RESEARCH PAPERS
- Endre Szécsényi: “An Habitual Disposition of Mind”: On The Roots of Everyday Aesthetics in the Early Eighteenth Century
- Anders V. Munch: The Total Design of Everyday Life: Historical Ideals and Dilemmas of the Gesamtkunstwerk
- Ben Highmore: Experimental Playgrounds, Loose Parts, and The Everyday Aesthetics of Play
- Barbora Kundračíková: “Black Holes” Exploitation: A Central European City Between Monument, Document, and Mockument
ESSAYS
Anna Keszeg: Residing in Negative Space: The Art and Life Strategies of Marion Baruch
REVIEW
Martha Kicsiny: Art Hall Immersion. Corina L. Apostol and Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, eds: Immerse!
INTERVIEW
Cross Pollination. An Interview Between Jessica Hemmings and Yuriko Saito
Bálint Veres: Some Drawdowns from the Well of Design Culture
Disegno 2024/1, page range: 4–9. https://doi.org/10.21096/disegno_2024_1vb
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Endre Szécsényi: “An Habitual Disposition of Mind”: On The Roots of Everyday Aesthetics in the Early Eighteenth Century
Disegno 2024/1, page range: 10–23. https://doi.org/10.21096/disegno_2024_1esz
This paper discusses some essays from London daily journals at the time of the emergence of modern aesthetics and attempts to demonstrate that what we nowadays call “everyday aesthetics” was not simply present in the relevant texts of the early eighteenth century, but, in a sense, it was the mainstream of the rising modern aesthetic. The aesthetic basically meant paying closer attention to our everyday reality including our natural and human made environments and also various quotidian activities. Contemporary everyday aesthetics should therefore be seen not so much as an extension of the mostly “art-centred” post-Kantian philosophical aesthetics, but rather as one of the original, pre-Kantian, sources of modern aesthetics to be restored or regained.
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Anders V. Munch: The Total Design of Everyday Life: Historical Ideals and Dilemmas of the Gesamtkunstwerk
Disegno 2024/1, page range: 24–39. https://doi.org/10.21096/disegno_2024_1am
The idea of designing for everyday life on every scale, through objects, spaces, and systems, is central to modern design and architecture. The Italian architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers is often quoted for urging his fellow architects to design everything “from the spoon to the city” (Rogers 1946, 2). For designers and architects of the high modernism of the 1950s and 1960s this motto stood for the pursuit of “total design,” in which every detail should be taken care of and aligned according to an overall scheme, from small living units to grand urban plans. The ideal is still very much alive today but is accompanied by the general criticism of modernism: that totalizing schemes confine everyday life in rigid frames and conformity. The idea of total design belongs, however, to a long tradition of thinking in art, design, and architecture. I will discuss key statements from high modernism on total design and total architecture, and revisit earlier expressions of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk as a comparable concept in art nouveau and the avant-garde. This broad notion, also called the Total Work of Art, was very productive and widespread, and has been widely discussed. I will discuss some of the dilemmas of this ambition to make comprehensive designs framing the experience of everyday life. This ideal contains some of the most valuable ideas in the history of design and architecture, which we should strive to keep alive whilst remaining aware that they have also been a continuous source of troubles and fierce discussions.
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Ben Highmore: Experimental Playgrounds, Loose Parts, and The Everyday Aesthetics of Play
Disegno 2024/1, page range: 40–53. https://doi.org/10.21096/disegno_2024_1bh
This article draws together discourses around children’s playgrounds in Northern Europe and North America from the early twentieth century onwards, and the work of the British design pedagogue Simon Nicholson, whose theory of “loose parts” from the 1970s, was inf luenced by the experimental playground movement that emerged after 1945. These experimental playgrounds, often referred to as junk-playgrounds and adventure playgrounds, encouraged city children to build their own shacks and dens on areas of rough ground, just as children living in rural areas might build dens. This activity of imaginative place making should be seen as a fundamental and everyday aesthetic activity that children take part in whether within a playground or outside one. Whether play is an imitative or an intuitive activity such placemaking would constitute a basic orientation towards design. As such the experimental playground could be treated as a crucial element of design culture.
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Barbora Kundračíková: “Black Holes” Exploitation: A Central European City Between Monument, Document, and Mockument
Disegno 2024/1, page range: 54–73. https://doi.org/10.21096/disegno_2024_1bk
The article focuses on the lively urbanism of Central European historical centres in the second half of the twentieth century and, based on a private photo album, ref lects on the processes of shaping local socio-cultural customs and practices. If the common features of these centres are the careful preservation of the historic core and the more or less systematic re-construction of residential districts or industrial complexes, it is the selective blindness to the gaps and spaces “in between,” escaping any coherent or consistent urban planning, where these processes manifest themselves most “naturally” and almost without any imposed control. Indeed, these imaginary “black holes” are where everyday experience unfolds. To this end, the current approaches of Central European Studies are connected with the history of art and visual culture. A specific triadic model of monument-document-mockument and the concept of the “living monument” are used to develop a crucial link between them all and contemporary urban studies. The theoretical insights are illustrated by the case study of the city of Olomouc in the Czech Republic, using the private photographic documentation of local artist and graphic designer Oldřich Šembera.
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Anna Keszeg: Residing in Negative Space: The Art and Life Strategies of Marion Baruch
Disegno 2024/1, page range: 74–81. https://doi.org/10.21096/disegno_2024_1ak
The short essay presents the main issues surrounding the works and professional career of Marion Baruch. It investigates the concept of negative space and its significance in the artist’s creations. The central argument is that negative space serves as both a life strategy and an artistic research method in Baruch’s body of work. Baruch’s career follows a quintessentially atypical path for a woman artist from Eastern Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. Her artworks revolve around a dual exploration of negative space. On one hand, they engage with negative space as a way of perceiving the world from the perspective of the thin line that delineates the boundaries between space and bodies. On the other hand, negative space represents a conceptual negation or the definition by negation of all living phenomena. This focus provides an opportunity to ref lect on the aestheticisation of capitalist markets in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
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Martha Kicsiny: Art Hall Immersion. Corina L. Apostol and Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, eds: Immerse!
Disegno 2024/1, page range: 82–89. https://doi.org/10.21096/disegno_2024_1mk
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Cross Pollination. An Interview Between Jessica Hemmings and Yuriko Saito
Disegno 2024/1, page range: 90–95. https://doi.org/10.21096/disegno_2024_1jhys
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About the Authors
Disegno 2024/1, page range: 96–98.