I answered Kristina off list when she first posted her question about
timeless design. Had I realized that it would become such an
interesting thread I would have answered on list. Through the wonders
of electronic archives, I'm rectifying my mistake:
"I don't believe that there is such a thing as 'timeless' anything
and especially not timeless design. There is design that is less
faddish than most so a designed object doesn't stand out as being
quite as anachronistic as other objects of its era would. There are
styles that have remained in use for long enough periods of time that
many people don't have a specific temporal association for them.
There are objects that have strong enough associations that those
tend to override associations of time."
Klaus wrote
>if you want to make timelessness a relative concept in the sense of
>relatively longer in circulation or relatively short in circulation,
>then you contradict the customary meaning of timelessness as not
>being bound by time, as having no temporal extension, as being
>without the time dimension.
but I'm not sure that the "customary" meaning of timelessness is so
literal. Rather than assuming that "timeless" means that no reference
to time is part of a signifier, it could be productive to consider
relative timeliness where people mean by "timeless" that the level of
signification of time is so low that it doesn't register in the
context being considered. If you drop a stone into water there is a
point when you would say that the resultant waves have disappeared
even though the event is still having a measurable (although not
visible) effect. This point will come sooner in rougher water than it
would in otherwise calm water.
Lubomir wrote
>Why do we believe that there is timeless design? What we see as timeless
>might be just a coincidence of values and interpretative structures,
>reoccurring over time.
I think this may be one flavor of timelessness but perhaps not the
only one. In his book -Rubbish Theory, the creation and destruction
of value-, Michael Thompson wrote about how a depreciating commodity
(say, a used car) becomes an appreciating commodity (a "classic" or
"collectable" car.) He indicated that the commodity had to somehow
disappear from consciousness, a stage he calls "rubbish." [1979
Oxford Press]
There is also design that never trumpeted its timeliness. One of my
favorite pieces of copy writing was from a Chouinard Equipment
catalog (back before they became Patagonia.) They sold a wool sweater
patterned after the ones that mountain guides in Chamonix wore and
the catalog copy read something like "We have been selling this
sweater for six years and it is still guaranteed to have no reindeer
or llamas. You will be just about as out of style in six years as you
were six years ago."
I'm probably revealing myself as an unrepentant Modern boy but:
Although neither an Eames chair nor a Nelson sputnik clock is
literally timeless, the latter seems more strongly and narrowly of a
particular moment. A chemistry lab beaker may clearly not be from the
sixteenth century but it isn't as specifically of a time as is a deco
vase. The affectation of using the beaker as a vase may be of a
narrower time range than the beaker as a beaker but it still focuses
us less on temporal realization than the deco vase does.
Lubomir also wrote
>PS History of science recalls that in the Middle Ages, one of the favorite
>theological questions was "How many devils can sit on the top of a needle?"
I'd always heard that it was "How many angels can balance on the head
of a pin?" (although I prefer the "How many angels can swim in the
head of a beer?" variation) but an historian whose office was down
the hall from mine when I taught at a Lutheran university claims that
this is the philosophical version of an urban legend and that it was
never a hot topic of debate. Does anyone have a reference on this?
Gunnar
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