I wonder how often people choose what should be beautiful and what should be ignored. What motivates us to make things beautiful?
I hated the drafting class I attended at Fashion Institute of Technology’s School of Art and Design in New York City. It used the most unforgiving medium I ever worked with. If I started a blueprint off the mark a sixteenth of an inch, I had to rip up the drafting paper and start all over. Working in ink was worse. Pencil lines could be erased, but the ink taunted and glared at me and screamed: “You have to start ALL OVERRRR.”
Watching the other students in the classroom fascinated me, though. Next to me, a young woman effortlessly drafted the most exquisite plan and elevation for a classical style living room. A student behind me worked on the design of a modern office suite. Others created beautiful rooms with the same ease and diligence. I continued the best I could.
Taking a Break from Ink
One day, the instructor remarked on the paradox of his school and students dedicated to beautiful interiors. The room was downright ugly. Chipped laminated furniture, glaring fluorescent lights, and gray walls bereft of posters and ornament set the tone. Abandoned soda cans, coffee cups, and scraps of drafting paper everywhere added to the dinginess. On the walls were some graffiti.
Beauty energizes us. Why else would anyone spend top dollar on an interior design?
Why else? Because ugliness depletes us. As the students created beautiful, soulful interior plans, their environment wore them down. “When the soul is neglected,” as Thomas Moore said in Care of The Soul, “it doesn’t just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence and loss of meaning.”
Why Do We Allow It?
Part of the problem was that nobody “owned” the room. Day after day, morning until night, at least five teachers and more than 300 students used it. The school was also a bureaucracy, a State University of New York college that divided responsibility for the room’s upkeep to various departments. Instructors may feel responsible to teach students to create beautiful interior, fashion, graphic, or advertising design, yet no one felt responsible for the beauty of the room itself. SUNY’s head offices were in Albany nearly three hours away.
The Problem’s Depths
I think the problem goes deeper. When I am befuddled, I first consider our culture’s long history.
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Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane describes mankind’s need to create sacred places to dispel an unknown universe’s sense of chaos. Churches, temples, and Druid rock formations like Stonehenge brought us order and calm. The tendency to design such structures continues even among the nonreligious of us. They still perceive spaces as profane or, like a garden, gravesite, or nostalgic vacation hideaway, sacred. Still, humanity keeps forgetting its need for sacred places. I blame my classroom’s ugliness on our millennia of forgetting that need.
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I am reminded how the spirit-matter divide has harmed Western culture. Two thousand years dominated by organized religion focusing on the soul has kept us from focusing on the equally important sanctity of our physical being. Conversely, the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment, based on the empiricism of our five senses, has pushed aside mind-body spirit sensibility. It left our bodies and other matter sterilized, Energy-less.
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I think of the belief systems of the indigenous people who embrace animism. To the animist, all matter, including everything that we create with our hands, is alive and due soulful respect and care. It is our intent, especially our love, that enables a thing to emit Energy. The Lakota people calls such Energy skan.
The Lakotas say we absorb the feelings of the people who fashion the items we use. On that basis, it is hard for me to forget the worn, chipped desks in my drafting class. My desk was probably made by New York State prisoners, unlikely from love. Moreover, the school laminated the chips in my desk with plastic. Plastic is made from fossil fuel, a substance ruinous to our environment. Imagine the Energy loss from my desk alone!
What Should Be Beautiful
So, I think and I think and I think. My gut says there is no escaping the room’s ugliness from everything going on in the world, whether ecological or psychological. We cannot bring beauty to that room unless we deal with the Energy associated with these issues. Such a strange connect!
Perhaps we cannot change the design of the room until we address climate change or prison reform.
We are being called today to change our divided worldview to one that recognizes the world as one. The planet’s survival demands it as we address our ecological challenges, the effects of prejudice or tribal skirmishes.
One way to start embracing a holistic worldview is by bringing beauty into the most mundane areas of life. Beauty, like the sacred, begs us to pull it into our profane world; and once we do, it gives meaning to our ordinary experiences.
And, yes, as I work with ink trying to create the beautiful on paper, I continue to think, to ask and to wonder….
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Solutions for the Bureaucratic Community – How to Make Things Beautiful
- I think it is the responsibility of the educational facility to teach interior design students a philosophy of aesthetics, especially in conjunction with bureaucracies (un-owned space). The concept probably could not be taught in a course, though many a designer has cried for the need. Perhaps a lecture or a pamphlet would do.
- One way to get interior design students to take ownership of the classroom would be by sponsoring a contest in which they would come up with simple means to enliven the space. Because all students using the room would be required to participate, all would begin to become aware of their public environment. The winners could get extra course credit or a notation for their resume. The designs could include a painted graphic for the wall or a poster and some framed prints. Everything would cost the school no more than a few hundred dollars.
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