Stephen Bayley is one of the best known commentators on modern culture.
As well as being The Observer’s architecture and design correspondent, he is a consultant and author.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
Christine Joos In your article in the Observer few months ago you compared pre- and post credit crunch design choices and I was wondering in what other ways you expect consumerism and lifestyle might change now?
Stephen Bayley Personally speaking I have always disliked excess, but I think the current economic circumstances force everybody to understand that excess is not just vulgar, it’s also stupid and wasteful. I think all the old arguments about design are not so relevant any more, I think the current economic circumstances probably will force people back into realising the value of making things and almost like the values of John Ruskin and William Morris.
I don’t mean antiquarianism but I mean it is going to be economically, socially and culturally necessary just to make things, that are no longer abstractions, no longer luxury goods.
CJ It’s more about quality than quantity then?
SB Absolutely.
CJ But I think William Morris, wasn’t it so at that time that only rich people could afford actually what they made?
SB Yes, there is a terrible paradox in William Morris. He was a great idealist, an almost wholly admirable person. The paradox is that the things he made turned out to be very expensive, not very democratic. The achievements of modern design in the 20th century were remarkable. Democratising luxury and giving everyday objects aesthetic value, that’s marvellous, but I think, all the old assumptions have gone. It always seems to me design was one of the great organising principles of the 20th century, you know when skilled individuals applied their arts and intelligence and taste and ingenuity to great industries. I think that’s sort of gone now. Design is now everywhere. I am always meditating about the Design Museum, which you perhaps know I was responsible for making. We started thinking about this 30 years ago, long before e-mail and the internet and in those days design represented a specialist expertise and we needed to make a museum about design, because it was not properly understood. Now it’s everywhere and you don’t know what you need a design museum for.
CJ You joined Sidhu & Simons a PR agency promoting luxury brands, automotive, Formula1. How are these brand strategies going to change now?
SB I don’t know how brand strategies are going to change, that is up to the individual company. These are very big questions. I mean once competitive advantage came from having expertise in manufacturing or having technology, which your competitors didn’t have. But now, everybody has got access to the same technology. It has become flat; there is no competition in technology in the developed world. So compared the advantage comes from, I don’t like the word brand, but it comes from those mystical attributes. For instance, Volkswagen Group is merging now with Porsche. Porsche is taking over Volkswagen. And what’s going to happen is instead of having ten different manufacturing units -they’ve got Volkswagen, they’ve got Audi, Seat in Italy. There will be now one factory but they will keep the brands. The designers just have to think about, what is the essence, what is the essential thing. All these machines will have the same components. The whole Volkswagen Group is going to be just a brand operation and eventually they will probably shift the manufacturing to China or India, so it won’t say ‘Made in Germany’, it will say something like ‘Designed by Volkswagen’.
CJ And then, the quality, is it going to be losing?
SB The problem is that what made Volkswagen great in the first place was the fact that it was made by Germans, it was made methodical, it was very reliable and it represented Dr. Porsche’s design theory. But when you separate brand from manufacturing I think you get into all sorts of philosophical difficulties. I mean you can do it for a few years, but in twenty years time when Volkswagen has lost touch with the original Porsche philosophy.
CJ It’s all going to be air then.
SB Exactly. Karl Marx said that all that was solid melts into air.
CJ And how about corporate brands like Coca Cola and Sony… is there going to be a change or is it going to go on as before?
SB I think this is a very strange moment in history. I am not anti-progress but I think the idea of progress, novelty and newness it’s not so relevant as it used to be. People are more concerned with quality. They want to have better stuff and less of it. No one is anticipating any radical innovations in technology or materials. Do you know about the theory by Nikolai Kondratiev, a Soviet economist. He had a theory that all business, social, cultural, artistic activity is on long sinusoidal waves of about fifty years. And the creativity and activity are on a fifty years cycle and it is always stimulated by new energy sources to you have coal, electricity, nuclear. It’s mysticism rather than science but it’s probably true. I think Kondratiev is generally speaking correct. We are now entering a completely new phase. The old phase which began at the end of the Second World War and lead to globalized products, the global design phenomenon, global fashion. That phase is now coming to an end. The problem with the finance and the banks, that’s not the cause, that’s the effect of the great changes; we are just going to reinvent…
CJ And how can we reinvent us, redesign us? What shall we do now?
SB Design is not going to help at all. That is the truth. I don’t say, there is no work for designers to do, but I think the idea that design is going to change the world is one of the great, I don’t want to say it’s a fiction, but it was a very persuasive theory of the 20th century.
Of course I believe we need more beautiful, useful objects, of course I do. But I think the idea that designers move into the manufacturing industry and change the destiny of corporations, I think that was a valid and true idea for a large part of the 20th century, but it’s no longer plausible. You know, designers are not going to walk into Volkswagen Group and change a thing any more.
CJ But design can visualize changes, because if you look at –it’s maybe hard, but– for example in the third reich the graphic design identity of Hitler was kind of a really strong identity.
SB I am writing about that this afternoon. I am writing an article for Ferrari magazine about the importance of branding.
…
I disliked the idea of branding. I am not saying it does not exist, it is obviously a real phenomenon, but the interesting thing is that my own motivation has always been to try to teach people to appreciate quality which goes beyond the superficial. I mean, branding issues are very badly misunderstood; people often say that BMW is a great brand, well, it is a great, it has become a great brand, but it’s only become a great brand, because they have made great products, consistently, with absolute consistency. And they had great advertising, super graphics and everything. They weren’t sitting around in München in 1990 and saying: ‘Hey guys, let’s create a brand’. They sat there and said: ‘We are going to make a certain kind of motor bike, a certain sort of car and we won’t make trucks, we won’t make busses, we just do…and they did it with absolute … you know that’s how great brands evolve. What I am trying to say is that Tom Ford is a really clever guy and deserves his success, but I don’t think in a hundred year’s time anybody will be talking about Tom Ford, but they will probably still be talking about BMW. The whole thing about branding is like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, that as soon as you investigate atomic particles, they change their behaviour, so you could never understand how atomic particles actually behave, because even looking at them changes their way…I think it is the same with branding: as soon as you get self conscious about it, it changes.
CJ Some of them are positive brands, but some are aggressive, brands like Starbucks can be kind of annoying because they are everywhere and make a city look like the other.
SB Absolutely. Well, I think we come to the end of that now, I hope so. It’s what’s going to happen next in architecture. You know, I am not an antiquarian, far from it, I am passionate about the future, but I think the idea of celebrity architects like Rem Koolhaas, we will have generic cities, please, God, no! You know I want Hamburg to be different to Seville. The big challenge for architects now is to make buildings which are contemporary but also respond to local character…
CJ …to the context?
SB Yes. They have to respond to the context but without copying the past. That’s the big challenge. That’s why the big debate today between the Prince of Wales and Richard Rogers, which I wrote about in Sunday’s Observer. I think it’s fascinating, because I think Prince Charles it wrong, but I also think Richard Rogers is wrong. I am not talking about compromise. Richard Rogers is a great man. He is a major figure and very admirable, but who wrote the rule, that modern buildings have to be hard edged, aggressive and constantly challenging? Sometimes they can be and that is fine. Why can’t modern building also be gentle and friendly? The current architecture debate is so annoying because it just forces people to extremes. You have Prince Charles at one end, who just wants everything to look as if it was made three hundred years ago and you have Richard Rogers who just wants everything to look like a factory. They are both wrong, but Rogers is less wrong than Prince Charles, because the thing with Richard Rogers is that he has got huge talent. But there is good optimism in what Richard Rogers says and does even when the execution is wrong, but with Prince Charles, there is no optimism at all, it’s very defeatist, very negative and therefore bad.
CJ Maybe these times can stimulate design?
SB Well, constraint is always stimulating for creativity. I wasn’t going to talk down design, I spent my living being involved in design. I think, if you like, the business model is going to change, as I said in the 20th century we just had an idea that you were big corporate designer or you were a big design consultant, like Raymond Loewy was the model for the that. It does not happen like that any more. Everybody now understands that things should be well designed, you know there is more and more work for designers, but I don’t think it’s going to happen through big consultancies, you know, again, it could be individuals doing precious work on a smaller scale.
I am pro-technology, I am pro-industry, but I think the idea of global products is a very, very dated one. I think major things are going to change in the future like travel: people will travel much, much less.
CJ Why?
SB Travelling is horrible.
CJ Maybe it’s going to be made more convenient?
SB I think it’s going to get even worse. It used to be that travel was a romantic privilege, an adventure.
CJ Flying especially…
SB Yes –it used to be. I remember when flying somewhere was fabulous. They treated you as if you were a princess and they were pleased to see you and there was never any delay and now it’s horrible. No matter what end of the airplane you go on, it’s horrible, utterly horrible. And what is the point? I used to go to Sweden quite a lot and I went to Stockholm again for the first time in years and years and years recently, it’s a lovely city. When I first went to Stockholm thirty year ago there were real Swedish shops, there were real furniture makers making stuff in the center of Stockholm –wonderful. No you go to Stockholm and you see Calvin Klein, you see Prada, Louis Vuitton. What’s the point? Everywhere it becomes the same. What’s the point of going somewhere? Particularly if you live in London, which has got everything apart from the sunshine and mountains? Everything in the world is available in London. So why would I go to Stockholm where the food is worse, the shops are the same.
London has got the best food in the world now. When I was in Paris last week, I visited my daughter and I love Paris, but it is terribly difficult to eat well in Paris. Food is one of my real passions. Everybody interested in architecture an design is always interested in food. The ideas occupy the same parts of the brain. Function, nutrition, it’s about style and taste, deliciousness, has to look good and work well. It’s the same thing.
CJ Do you know about the Slow Down London Festival? It is connected with the Slow Movement?
SB I know Carlo Petrini who founded the Slow Food Movement. Petrini is great. He says there are only two things necessary for the progress of humanity: that is food and sex and each is best done slowly. You know, I love machines, cars and airplanes, but we don’t need to travel any more, we don’t need to be so quickly.
CJ Now you can purchase those little houses you can place in you garden and work there (http://www.officepod.co.uk/) and I think that is kind of solution to many things, because you could just do home office very often.
SB Yes, absolutely. I think that is the way of the future. You know when I was a child, my father bought a nice car and in those days you would get a car and actually use it, use the dar to drive somewhere and it was a rational way of making a journey and often a very pleasant one, but now? Not just in London, anywhere, in New York, Paris, wherever, you can’t use it. Why would you choose to drive anywhere? Again, check on Kondratiev’s waves: so much of the last super cycle was based on ideas of travel, speed, change, novelty, demand. I think the American thing of the middle of the 20th century is marvelous. I love mid-century America, but that idea that you can improve life by continuously consuming more goods is wrong. It is a very beautiful idea, the idea that your life could be made perfect if you bought a new fridge.
CJ We now know it’s not true.
SB It was a beautiful idea, but it’s over.
CJ I mean definitely people need some things and it’s nice to consume.
SB Of course it is. I am not a puritan. But pleasure is more intense when it’s disciplined. Yes, everybody want’s a fridge, but what we don’t want is a new fridge every year. We want a really seriously well made, well designed fridge which will last for thirty years.
CJ Products are conceptualized so that they are not repairable. it is expected that you throw things away if they are broken and buy new things. But that’s maybe something that could change, because how annoying is it, if you constantly have to research on new products, buy them and then read the manual and things like that.
SB You are absolutely right on the manuals: it’s not a pleasure any more. Pleasure is very important. Design is partly about what Freud called the pleasure principle.
I am glad to say my beautiful pen and my beautiful watch will last forever and I don’t need a manual.
CJ Thank you very much for this interview.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/contemporary/past_exhns/beauty/bayley/index.html
