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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 -- Gunnar Swanson Design Office 536 South Catalina Street Ventura CA 93001-3625 USA +1 805 667 2200 [log in to unmask] http://www.gunnarswanson.com