In Defense of Detail

I have made a labor-day resolution (do those exist?) to reactivate the blog and keep up with it more regularly, and I couldn’t think of a better topic for this revival post than detail.  Detail & nuance are disappearing ideas in today’s western world; what better illustrates that than my failure to keep up with this blog and with many of the other “little” aspects of my life that get looked over as I pursue wider and grander goals.  As this blog’s focus is material culture, I’d like to focus on the loss of detail in the design world, but in so doing I hope that I can elucidate some of the merits of detail-oriented living, too.

As any menswear sage can tell you, the details make the man.  Anyone can go out and buy a nice suit, have it tailored, and wear it with confidence; he will look sharp, but generically so – rather like a faceless model in a magazine ad, easily passed over.  A truly well dressed man pays attention to the details, because the details make him an interesting human being, not just formally, but semiotically.  Everything from the way he folds his pocket square to the plaquet of his shirt to the pattern of his socks says something about a man because each one is a choice.  The more choices he illustrates with his appearance, the more he "speaks" about himself*; detail adds meaning to form, semantics to syntax.

            Since I began architecture school in June, I have heard no end of the importance of form.  In a post-Corbusian world, architects are taught that their goal is to create meaningful space by the formal interaction of opposites – solid & void, large & small, orthogonal & curvaceous, graded & flat.  For this reason, most contemporary architecture paints in broad strokes, manifesting itself in uninterrupted planes, great walls of translucent glass, solid colors, & bold, computer-calculated curves.  Lately, after decades of what I call "concrete fetishism", some architects have become interested in an array of materials again, but this interest is still formally driven: the concern has moved beyond the mid-century interest in circle-square-triangle geometry, but now finds itself hung up on texture, color, hardness, warmth.  None of this becomes personal; none of it bears the stamp of it’s unique designer or user.

Before

    I came across this article the other day, and I was utterly baffled as to why the designer, Mr. Yang, was receiving such praise for his work.  He has taken a classic Chinese urban cruiser bike and stripped it of all of its detail in an attempt to create a “modern urban” bike.  The end result is a bare frame painted in a single color with the same saddle and grips as every modern fixed-speed bike in every major city in the first world.  His typically contemporary obsession with simplistic formalism has stripped the bike of all of the detail the original designer painstakingly added – the decorated chainguard, the leather mudflaps, the rear box-fender, the drop stand.  In so doing he has also lessened the opportunities that the owner has to make the bike his or her own.  Worse still, he has thrown out both the designed & incidental elements that tell the bike’s life story.  Now, what was a distinctive bike with a distinctive past has become a generic color swatch with wheels; the two are mechanically identical but the original functionally & aesthetically outclasses the new bike.       

After

            Perhaps the eclectic historicism that has been sweeping the vernacular design world for the last five years or so stems from these very concerns.  Even as we are forced to move into dull, modern formalist houses & made to buy clean detail-less products for lack of an alternative, many westerners, in direct opposition to Corbusier’s universalism, formalism, and a-historicism are flocking to flea-markets, garage sales & grandma’s attic in search of little elements to make their space personal.  As our homes and cubicles take up meaning with little personalizing touches, our public spaces are becoming further & further divorced from specificity to their communities.  

My current design studio project asks me to develop an extension of Oakland, a park and cemetery that was begun at the same time as, and grew right alongside young Atlanta.  I have been spending a great deal of time there & researching its history.  It, like most Victorian park-cemeteries, is full of little details, each with their own cultural & personal meanings.  This public space, which served as the city’s major picnic and stroll spot for 100 years, is formally planned, and hence has the unity that our flea-market homes lack, but it also incorporates layer upon layer of meaning into its formal framework by the inclusion of little details.  Oakland is not a place that can be glossed over like a modern park, but rather a place of deep meditation, slow walks & long memories; a place specific to Atlanta and to the Grant Park/Cabbagetown neighborhood.  Just as our knick-knacks and the folds in our pocket squares make our internal lives speak, the Architects of Oakland have carved every stone and every bench with the details of a community’s inner life.  
I’d love to think about and hear readers' thoughts on the ways we can bring that depth of meaning into today’s spaces.  I also hope that each of us will take steps to bring a little more detail into our lives each day, and with it re-manifest meaning in our designed world.




*This comes with a caveat: don't be a loud mouth.  Highlight a few details in each outfit or project.

The Big Idea

For a long time now, I have been thinking about the line between design and production.  It seems to me that today's buyers are primarily concerned with design, and not in the least concerned with craft.  It is a rare thing that one hears a consumer ask how, where, or by whom a product is made.  If it looks right on the shelf, in the catalogue, or on the website, they'll buy it.  This way of shopping ignores everything about the product after it leaves the drawing board, all of the important pieces of a product's creation that dictate its quality, longevity, and social impact.  Design is only part of the equation; American consumers need to tune back into craft.

Let me illustrate this need -- I have always loved the styling of J.Crew, but I’ve had some serious quality and fit issues with their clothes in the last year.  As a consequence, I began to read up on real clothiers: the kind that talk to you, size you up, help you pick out materials and stitch the whole thing together for you.  I ordered a custom dress shirt from Proper Cloth for the same price as a J.Crew shirt, and the results were astounding.  The material is much nicer, and I was able to choose it myself from a wide selection (after some background research); the shirt fits better than any I’ve ever worn before; the stitching is clearly of better quality than a stock J.Crew shirt, all of this because it was made (not manufactured) just for me (not all “medium” men in America).  Since then, I have been to a real brick-and-mortar tailor with results that impressed me even more.

I should have known this all along.  I was raised on the idea of craftsmanship.  I have always made things; my parents are both creative and skilled with their hands, so I would help them out as a child and pick little skills up along the way.  I was also raised to do things correctly and to the best of my ability, so I ought to expect the same from the people who make the things I buy.  The bottom line is, if something doesn't totally accomplish its function and do so for a reasonably long time, then it was not made correctly.  My experience with J.Crew and other high-design/low production-value companies have thoroughly convinced me that we as consumers must expect a higher level of craftsmanship in our purchases.  We can no longer live in a culture that produces ill-fitting clothes, boilerplate flatpack furniture, and prepared foods and then  expects us to throw them in landfills and buy more of the same.  If each of us takes our business to our local craftsmen instead of major manufacturers, we will be pouring money back into our own neighborhoods, establishing real relationships with the people who make things for us, and getting products that fit right, work right, last longer and cost less money in the long run that the low-quality, ill-fitting products we rely on today.

To go one step further, each of us can and should choose a skill or two and master it.  There aren't many true craftsmen left today, so we must become craftsmen ourselves.  We can make things for ourselves and our neighbors – our ancestors did with far more primitive technology.  That is the message of Matt Pierce at Wood and Faulk.  He has inspired me to begin to master my own crafts, and to support other craftsmen as they do the same.

With this blog, I hope to discuss and collect information on the objects of craft and their makers, and thereby develop and spread an ethic of craftsmanship.  Check back regularly for related links and stories, information about my work, and opportunities to engage in and support craft near you.