Clay, Robert. "Conclusion." Beautiful Thing: An Introduction to Design. Oxford: Berg, 2009.

179–
184. Bloomsbury Design Library~Bloomsbury Design Library 2019 Collection~. Web. 16 Apr.
2020. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350036093.0006>.

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Conclusion
DOI: 10.5040/9781350036093.0006
Page Range: 179–184
Hopefully these chapters will have encouraged you to think more deeply about the relationships
between design and beauty. The first and most important attribute in learning more about
beauty and its creation, is your own sensual joy in experiencing beauty itself. Without this no
amount of education and training will make up for it.

Santayana spoke of the sense of beauty, suggesting a sixth sense in addition to our existing five
– each of us can detect beauty even though we might have difficulty in explaining it. We must
all develop our own attitudes and skills towards appreciating and successfully creating beautiful
pieces of work, whether in two, three or even four dimensions (the fourth dimension of time). It
is useful to study good examples. There is no one right answer to a particular design problem.
There are potentially as many bad solutions as there are good ones and notions of beauty are
not static. We must constantly reappraise our judgements in the light of cultural and
technological evolution. Figure 161 shows a twenty-first century Deconstructivist’s proposal for
the new extension the London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Such examples may seem strange
to conventional ways of thinking, but should we accept them as beautiful? The history of art and
design is full of works that were ridiculed at the time of their production, for example the Eiffel
Tower in Paris, but today many of these works are widely accepted as both beautiful and
meaningful. On a shorter time scale, changing fashions in contemporary design such as clothing
or car styling, which may at first appear strange, can soon become accepted and admired by
most of us, often in the space of weeks.

The purpose of much contemporary work in the visual arts has nothing to do with visual beauty
in any case and this is the cause of a lot of misunderstanding among the general public. For
example virtual reality, electronic and conceptual art can pursue alternative aims to beauty,
offering the observer/participant new ways of thinking and looking at the world – or even
creating ‘new worlds’. To many observers, computer, video or screen art remains soulless,
however, as there is no tangible material such as paint or other surface texture to delight our
sensual expectations of touch – the visceral beauty of traditional art. The beauty of these works,
however, lay more in the ideas behind them, analogous perhaps to the beauty or elegance of
mathematical formulae. Conceptual art, whether putting a meteorite back into orbit via the
space shuttle to continue its interrupted voyage, or recreating an exploding shed frozen in
space and time a split second after detonation, can provoke the audience into new ways of
thinking or experiencing the world.[1]
161 PROPOSED EXTENSION TO LONDON’S VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM FOR 2006 BY DANIEL LIBESKIND.
162 ‘ZOOMORPHISM’ – QUADRACI PAVILION AT THE MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM BY SANTIAGO CALATRAVA, 2001. THE
‘WINGS’ ARE A SUNSCREEN THAT CAN BE RAISED OR LOWERED, CREATING A MOVING SCULPTURE.

Ernst Gombrich tells us that conceptual art is historically much more ancient than figurative art
in any case – that the African mask, Egyptian hieroglyph or ancient cave painting are metaphors
for the supernatural, and precede the ‘revolutionary’ figurative art of Classical Greece, art that
was concerned mainly (or merely) with reproducing the physical appearance of people and
things (mimetic art).[2] Conceptual art can make us think about issues deeper and more
meaningful than simply trying to create the illusion of physical reality and appearances, whether
in the form of a sculpture, painting or photograph, however well crafted these things may be.
In the field of design, the expressive forms of much new architecture in the early twenty-first
century are becoming more organic and dynamic, such as Herzog and de Meuron’s ‘bird’s nest’
stadium for the Beijing Olympic games and Zaha Hadid’s Central Factory Building for BMW in
Leipzig. In some cases the architecture even adopts zoomorphic (animal-like) designs, as shown
in Figure 162 – an echo perhaps of Hogarth’s eighteenth-century serpentine ideals – replacing
the strictly rectilinear and geometric forms of twentieth-century modernism. These new
buildings, belonging mainly to the romantic tradition, are as much pieces of public sculpture as
they are architecture and have been dubbed ‘sculpitecture’ by Anthony Caro. Where does fine
art end and applied art begin? Today’s buildings are blurring the line. There is however a
significant difference between meaningful sculpture and mere decoration or entertainment. Are
Gehry’s, Libeskind’s and Calatrava’s buildings a serious blend of architecture and sculpture or
mere overblown ornament?
There is much debate on whether new architecture should try to blend in or at least
acknowledge their surrounding buildings, or alternatively make a statement of their own time.
Analogous to this is the choice of colour in architecture, the American architect Cesar Pelli
believes that: ‘… in a town or neighbourhood of buildings coloured only by natural materials a
brightly coloured structure … could do great harm to the total ensemble, and I believe the
whole is always more important than one of its parts even if that part happens to be one of my
buildings.’[3]
Should this argument about colour also apply to the size, form and detailing of buildings? Many
would argue that good quality buildings from any age should, within limits (for example scale),
sit happily next to each other. We often see a jumble of different buildings in old towns and
cities, which most of us now consider charming, but we should not be slaves to bygone styles
unless there is some important overriding factor.
163 THE GREAT COURT AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON. 2000. NORMAN FOSTER’S GEODESIC ROOF.
164 YAMAHA ‘DEINONYCHUS’ ELECTRIC CONCEPT MOTORCYCLE. C.2004.

Often new and complex shapes in architecture and product design owe much to the power of
the computer, whether helping to determine the compound curves in car surfaces, the inter-
locking curves of Frank Gehry’s architecture, or the shapes and sizes of individual flat triangles
used to construct complex geodesic structures, for example Norman Foster’s roof structure for
the British Museum shown in Figure 163 (these complex computer generated architectural
forms have been dubbed ‘computer baroque’). The computer’s ability to simulate physical
objects, as well as their performance, has already had a huge influence in engineering and
product design – for example the design of car engines and the analysis of forces in chassis
designs before they are even built, has led to new forms for vehicles as well as reducing
manufacturing lead times.

At the start of the twenty-first century improvements in hydrogen fuel-cell technology have led
to a reappraisal of electrically powered vehicles. This is also good news for the planet as long as
the hydrogen is produced from renewable sources at the outset. Electric motors have several
advantages over the internal combustion engine (besides being non-polluting in operation),
they do not use any motive energy when the vehicle is stood still – unlike stationary cars in
traffic with their engines idling. Electric motors have a high starting torque and low torque at
high speed – as demonstrated by rapidly accelerating underground trains – and because of
these characteristics electric vehicles do not need a gearbox or clutch – another reason why old
diesel locomotives used an electric motor for the transmission of power to the wheels (the
diesel engine was merely used to generate electricity). Developments in fuel cell and battery
technologies will mean new and unusual possibilities for vehicle design. Figure 164 shows a
picture of Yamaha’s concept electric motorcycle with a motor mounted in the hub of each
wheel, the batteries or fuel cell being located under the seat. This has implications for the
proportion of unsprung weight of the vehicle, however, but it is probable that these problems
will be overcome with developments in material science.

It is self-evident that the progress in materials science and electronics over the twentieth
century has had a profound effect on the way we live and has also effected the change in the
shapes and shrinkage of product designs. As recently as the 1990s most of us would have
considered miraculous the sorts of things we can now do every day using a desktop PC.
Advances in nano-materials science involve manipulating materials at the near atomic level
(nano = one thousand millionth of a metre) and will provide opportunities for new ways of
interacting with products and the environment. Bonding together of different materials at the
atomic level will enable you to wear your computer as an item of clothing – the circuitry,
components and active displays will become an inseparable part of your shirt, and this shirt will
be washable too. The computer as we know it will become virtually invisible. Smart clothes will
also have adjustable thermal properties. Our buildings, the home and environment will become
‘intelli-gent’ – your home will know your state of physical and mental health at any given instant,
running a hot bath and altering the mood of your lighting and sound system to welcome you
home. It could also, in an instant, change the interior colour scheme and wallpaper patterns.
Body implants could automatically release medication into your system without you even being
aware of the need. Dr Ray Oliver of the Scientific Futures Group calls this ‘the advance of the
soft machines – where materials science crashes with art and design’. These developments have
profound implications for designs of the future, but how beautiful they are will depend on you.

[1]
Cornelia Parker’s installation, Cold Dark Matter, 1991.
[2] Gombrich, Art and Illusion.
[3]
From the journal Architectural Design, 66(3/4) – an issue solely devoted to colour in
architecture, 1996.