with modern nerves doesn’t need ornament. Minimalistic design became an equivalent of medical anesthetics. In this context, Le Corbusier’s white, clean interiors were able to soothe nerves shattered by the horrors of war.
Similarly, the plain surface of our devices works to make us numb and prevent awareness of the global infrastructure. “A smooth surface has no gaps, no cracks. It keeps the secrets inside. Your iPhone is full of secrets. It’s super smooth, not because it tells you the truth – you don’t want to know the truth. You don’t want to know that your brain is connected via this smooth object to the vast infrastructure of communication. You prefer to think it’s just a nice object like a cat or a pet.”
Colomina and Wigley conclude that “good design is an anesthetic” that protects our senses from turbulent global forces. “There are one million students of architecture in the world, one million brains, mainly devoted to kind of pushing the menace away. Architecture is happy, solves problems, makes happy people, makes good weather. You don't see architecture projects with old, sick, unhappy people; it's never raining, the building is never cracked,” observes Wigley. “Architecture brings you happy people, all aged between 18 to 25, on skateboards, healthy, and with California weather. It’s kind of promising happiness, promising antidote to the menace.”
In their book, Wigley and Colomina argue that the modern state of design is a horrific, reactionary disaster. They invite a rethinking of architecture’s relationship with pain and encourage new perspectives. What if instead of providing numbness, design would embrace human vulnerability? Beatriz brings the example of early design schools of antiquity and Renaissance, where all students had to study medicine and attended dissection classes. “It’s not a healthy body, but a sick body, a dead body that students of design are supposed to study. The norm is never this perfect human at the center of design, but actually a quite imperfect human that is sick, that has died.”
Colomina and Wigley believe that architecture’s approach should gravitate towards the medical approach. Design as an inquiry, which is more interested in why and how something is happening, could become an alternative to “good design” which seeks to provide solutions.