this is a nice anecdote and very appropriate. it doesn't illustrate though
that design is rhetorical. to do so would require a recognizable quality,
called "rhetorical," that design has and other things don't.
to me it suggests that design is always part of a language game, that
context-free forms are mostly ambiguous, both emotionally as well as
informationally. design cannot escape the language being used to describe
it, the conversations in which it occurs, the dialogues in which it plays
particular roles vis-a-vis the participants. in the example the meaning of
mies' work is created collaboratively, in interaction between the designer
and the client. this process is part of the concern of product semantics.
klaus krippendorff
At 01:45 PM 10/3/00 +0100, Nigel Cross wrote:
>Here's the example I use to suggest that 'design is rhetorical' (with
>apologies to those who really know what rhetoric is!):
>
>A famous example of early Modern Architecture was the 1930 'Tugendhat
>House' in Brno, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Apparently,
>according to Mies, the client had approached the architect after seeing
>some of the rather more conventional houses that he had designed before.
>Then, Mies said, in an anecdote reported by Herbert Simon in 'The Sciences
>of the Artificial', when he showed the surprising new design to the
>client, Herr Tugenhadt,
>'He wasn't very happy at first. But then we smoked some good cigars, ...
>and we drank some glasses of a good Rhein wine, ... and then he began to
>like it very much.'
>
>This doesn't tell us whether it was the articulacy of Mies van der Rohe,
>or the persuasivness of the design, or the effects of the cigars and wine,
>that won the client over. But it does reinforce what we all know - designs
>ARE persuasive: we buy products because we like them. And that is
>something that Phillipe Starck understands!
>
>Nigel
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