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PremselaStichting voorNederlandseVormgeving

Mad Dutch Disease

Premsela lecture 2004

by

Michael Rock

19 March 2004


Lecture Michael Rock

Prelude:

First a few thanks: To Dingeman for inviting me.

To Irma Boom for suggesting me to Dingeman. And to Rem Koolhaas, PetraBlaise, Jan van Toorn, Karel Martens, Armand Mevis, Peter Bilak, Daan vander Velden, Ole Bouman, Linda van Deursen, Chris Vermaas, and many

other’s for their assistance in the preparation. And especially to mypartners Susan Sellers and Georgie Stout for bearing with me while I wroteit.

Why am I here?Some caveats to start:

My natural tendency is to speak very quickly. Please, if I am reading toofast, let me know it.

First I am an American. I know this can be seen as a problem at themoment for my European friends. (But, even though I am an American, I

take no responsibility for him. (I didn’t vote for him, and neither did amajority of my compatriots. We’ll do our best to take care of the problemnext November. Sorry again.)

Second Linguist Roman Jakobson remarked famously that asking a writerto talk about literature was like asking an elephant to talk about zoology.

As I am a designer, that makes me inherently unqualified to talk aboutdesign. Please also note I am not a theorist and I have tried to keep thistalk as jargon-free as possible, there are a few times I fall into it. I can’t

help it; it’s a kind of affliction in itself.

Third, I am not an expert on Holland by

any means. Over the past 15 years I havespent countless days in Dutch Hotels,perhaps I could be an expert on them. But

as to Dutch design, I am strictly anamateur, an interested observer for sure,but no expert. So many of the ideas I put

forth tonight will be naïve and over-simplified. I am sure my examples will

seem painfully obvious, even canonical or clichéd. And they will

necessarily represent the oddities not the norms of Dutch design. I don’thave access to enough work to speak with real nuance. But then again,that’s part of the point, to hear what we understand from the outside.



I come from a big, messy country. Unlike you, we have plenty of land so we

are happy to waste it. When we get sick of something, we simple moveonto something else. Our government doesn’t like towaste money on infrastructure, cities, education and

things like that. When it comes to the public realm, wehave very dubious design credentials. In your countrythis is public infrastructure. In my country we settle

for more modest solutions. When our government hadto come up with a design solution for a possiblechemical or biological attack, their advice was duct

tape and plastic sheeting. (Come to think about it, thiscould be a proposal from Droog Design.)

So what right do I have to criticize? In fact this lecture is not reallycriticism. It more like a kind of critical love song, the kind you sing to theperson you want to like you AND think you’re smart. It’s a lecture as much

about America as it is about Holland and perhaps as Holland becomesincreasingly Americanized read that privatized it is a kind of cautionarytale as well.

In fact, I don’t consider what I call Dutch design, design generated in theNetherlands. I consider Dutch design a kind of work, or an attitude about

work, or even a brand of work, that could theoretically occur anywhere atanytime. Because of special conditions here in the Netherlands, Dutchdesign seems to flourish: primarily due to the fact that that there exists a

culture that understands design, that so many study design and so muchmoney is injected into the system to support “design experiments.” (InAmerica the period during the high-tech bubble created a brief moment

conducive to such work.) But any work that demonstrates the peculiarcombination of irony, self-deprecation and thinly-veiled egoism can earnthe title of Dutch design.

Finally there are several key themes I hope to develop here the rise ofbranding, the decline of nationalism and the public realm, and an

emerging form of overt authorship -- and some broad shifts I want toexplore from public to private, from large scale to small, from optimism toirony. But the form will be somewhat blurry. Because I freely admit my

ignorance and certainly acknowledge all of your superior understanding ofthis subject since some of you actually lived it. I have structured mylecture as follows: I will present 10 abstracts for potential lectures on my



own misreading of contemporary Dutch Design. Each lecture is a subjectiveproposal waiting to be developed by someone more adept and

knowledgeable than me. So please take these as highly-personalspeculations from an enthusiastic outsider.

Lecture 1: The Greenhouse Effect

My first visit to Holland, as an adult, was in 1984. I distinctly rememberthinking that this is what my design professors were talking about. Good,

modern design was everywhere. Signs had real typography. Bright yellow,orange and green where actually used by serious companies. Publicbuildings were “interesting.” Holland seemed like a designer’s dream. I

think we American designers are fascinated by Holland because real designactually seems to get built here. You don’t know how novel this is for us,(especially when the work is for the Government.)

To plan and build a country using design as a key instrument isunfathomable for us. When we see a picture like this, the condition and the

opportunity is completely foreign. (Wait, scratchthat. We are now dealing with our first Dutchproject, Ground Zero, and the process is a

fiasco.) For whatever reason maybe our countryis just too big or our culture too eclectic we havenever believed in the notion of a “makeable

society.” In America individualism and rawpower always pummels consensus. We have no

polder model. “Action is typical of Americanstyle,” wrote Daniel Bell, “thought and planningare not.” (I realize you may see this consensus

culture as problematic, but in America it iscited, continuously, as an unattainable utopia.)

Our commitment to the private over public represents a vast differencebetween the ways we view the issue of “design.” To understand thatdifference, you must realize that in America, design is always considered

suspect: effete, luxurious, intellectual. America tends to be a deeply anti-intellectual, anti-aesthetic place. So if our government builds something, itmust look as awful and as cheap as possible, thus signifying 1.) That

precious tax dollars weren’t wasted on it, and 2.) That no high flatulent“concepts” were passed off on an unwitting public. We have no tradition ofaesthetic functionalism. We are suspicious of modernity. Modern smells

expensive.



From the outside, the situation in Holland since my first visit seems to be

the opposite. While its almost impossible to get a real number, by my crudeestimate various Dutch governmental agencies dole out tens of millions ofeuros a year on art, architecture and design foundations. That’s for a

country with roughly the population of the New York metroplex. Someprecentage of that money supports contemporary, “challenging” newdesign work. Last year in America, the government granted a whopping

$400,000 in design grants for a country of about 280,000,000 people. Incontrast the 2003 defense budget was about $360,000,000,000. Of coursesome of that could be seen as a kind of design subsidy, it’s just that the

designers tend to be Boeing and Lockheed Martin and the experimentalprojects tend to be jet propelled. The point is Holland uses subsidy tosupport projects overlooked by the market; America subsidizes the market.

That official sanction of Design, as a valid, vital cultural activity seems tocreate an atmosphere here where designers actually consider themselves

valid, vital contributors to culture. This is not always the case in Americawhere our designers tend to be much more insecure about theirprofessional value. A fully privatized market simply will not support the

kind of design culture that exists in Holland. (The dissolution of the PTT’sart and design department may prove that is increasingly the case here aswell.) Maybe the designer is less valued as a business asset than as a

cultural asset.

And all that subsidy and support has had an effect, maybe not a direct

financial effect as a majority of the projects are private, but a psychologicaleffect. When I scan a Dutch cityscape, or a poster kiosk or magazine rack,the array of “designed” infrastructure is staggering: stations, government

buildings, museums, urban planning, conferences, institutes, festivals, etc.But, I wonder, what is the function of all these elaborate or exotic designsto the state that promotes them? I suppose when something is so obviously

“designed” it suggests a social democratic commitment to culture, to thelife of the nation. A challenging building or an unconventional book or aloco logo says: We’re a good government! We invest in culture! We’re

daring and creative! We care about our people!

In Holland it seems that an object - be it a building, a bus or a bottle must

be clearly designed which recently means: colorful, oddly shaped, orunexpectedly material to signify the government and the majorcorporations are progressive and looking out for cultural improvement. In



America if something is designed it says: “Your government wasted YOURhard earned money on something as frivolous as this.” In America colorful

always means wasteful and expensive.

So now after twenty years of frequent visits, the Dutch landscape seems

littered with fragments of contemporary, international design, indexicalsigns of an engaged, thoughtful, benevolent state and corporategovernance. (To paraphrase an adage: designers have crazy ideas

everywhere; in Holland they actually build them.) This fragmentation maybe exacerbated by the current tendency to breakup big projects into small commissions,

encouraging young designers to make a name forthem through some especially innovative design.Strange buildings either crash land in empty fields

or get crammed together in conglomerations ofurban renewal

Standing in the center of the Hague I think about F.T. Marienetti’s famousdiatribe against the museum. Just substitute insert “City”:

[Cities], cemeteries!...Identical truly in the sinisterpromiscuousness of so many objects unknown to each other.Public dormitories, where one is forever slumbering besides

hated and unknown beings. Reciprocal ferocity of [architects]and [designers] murdering each other with blows of form andcolor in the same [street].

F.T. Marienetti

So much Design in one place creates an aggregation of exacerbated

difference. I wonder now after a twenty year ejaculation of making, ifindividual design doesn’t need to signify anything anymore; it simplyneeds to look different from other designs. In that way design shifts from

ideology to a kind of branding strategy and enters its fully linguistic state.The Dutch City becomes a Vegas version of a Dutch City with its myriadcontemporary “attractions.” It’s Holland as international design theme

park.



Lecture 2. Poor little rich country.

So all that government incentive, corporate

investment and cheap design education haspaid off. Over the past two decades, DutchDesign has become simultaneously hot and

cool. (Hot in that its popular, cool in that itdoesn’t seem to try very hard or care toomuch.) What was once a local take on

modernism has grown into a global brand.

But how did design become so central to the image of Holland? The cliché

is that Holland is manufactured territory; that the construction of dykesand polders and the reclamation of land suggest a kind of artificialityunderlying the Dutch psyche; that the landscape itself is the great design

project of Holland. I’ll spare you that well-worn story. I am sure you haveall heard it a million times before. My question is not nearly so profound. Isimply am curious about the idea of identity and the way designers

construct it.

I love this picture: here’s a group of earnest,

hardworking young men planning the overthrow ofthe Dutch aesthetic landscape. There generationwould take on all the major efforts of visual

reconstruction: the airport, the telephone and postalsystems, the rail and highway system, etc. With thatmuch money, time, effort and talent thrown into the

design of the nation, is it any wonder so much wasdone. Their chosen name speaks volumes: TotalDesign. It could be a philosophy for the nation.

That first wave of Dutch corporate identity in the 50s and 60s may havebeen simply a knock off of the work being developed in Germany and

Switzerland at that time. Total Design loved Gerslter and Mueller-Brockman’s hyper Swiss German rationalism. But an increasingly Dutchform of identity found its way into all sorts of designed objects: stamps,

posters, trains, money, buildings, ships, highways, airports, etc. And inHolland, more than anywhere else, much to our envy, corporate andgovernment commissioners would actually choose good design over bad.

It seemed like everything in the post-war Netherlands was being rethoughtand the process of identity design, with its emphasis on analysis, was one



more type of rethinking. If there was any question that Holland was aprogressive, modern state, pull out some money, lick a stamp, pick up a

phone. The proof was everywhere. The Dutch remade modernism in theirown, more eclectic, more tolerant, version. Dutch design was Swiss-lite.

The branding of Holland seemed to be overlaid with other, unassailablevalues: efficiency, legibility, economy, beauty, etc. At least in the 60s thesevalues were still discussed seriously, there appeared to exist an honest

belief that the injection of design into the built environment would make ita better place. So like the Social Democratic politician demanding that thebuilding be a “good” building, public information work demanded good

design -- which was usually interpreted to mean more or less Total Designmodernism. And this form of rational functionalism became the standardof design education as well.

Somehow the heads of Dutch corporations and Dutchgovernment agencies embraced the notion of not only

the value of modern design but also promotion ofDutch talent through commissions. Certain things arepossible in a state where the money looks like this

money. If the most staid organization of any state, thecentral bank, is sponsoring design like that, what isthere left to rebel against. In America we still feel its

out duty to try to inject good design into the fabric ofthe culture that is generally resistant to it. In Hollandthat cultural fabric is saturated and it’s a small

country. But are all big projects done? Is Holland acountry where EVERYTHING is already designed?

Lecture 3. Clash of the Titans

The answer of course is yes and no, and, at least in the late 60s, the thingto rebel against was Total Design’s totalizing effect. In trying to understand

the work Dutch work I find interesting now, I keep going back to the oft-cited debate between Wim Crouwel and Jan Van Toorn in November 1972. Irealize this debate has been mythologized to the point of canonical sheen

but, on the surface at least, the opponents seem to represent the extremesof an irreducible contradiction that still undergrids Dutch design.. Perhapsthe flow of history, however, has slowly reunited them.

The much-touted contrast between van Toorn’s design for the vanAbbemuseum in Eindhoven and Crouwel’s work for the Stedelijk Museum



seems not nearly so pronounced in the branding era. Crouwel seemed toargue for a seamless, rational rendering of information, the designer as

information channel, the perfect expression of the “new objectivity.” (Hisposition in America was mirrored by the likes of Rand and Vignelli.) VanToorn on the other hand argued the position of the designer as editorial

shaper, the one who adds content to content. Van Toorn sees thedesigner’s role as political commentator, even preaching “hindrance”rather than clarity. In van Toorn’s view the designer accepts his distorting

role and uses it to forward a specific social agenda.

But what we have learned in the meantime is that 1) Neutrality is a myth

or at least neutrality is a brand message in itself. 2.) Hindrance and dissentas a method can also become a brand device. So JVT’s claim of theelimination of house style working with Jean Leering at the van

Abbemuseum is as much a housestyle (No style as house style) asCrouwel’s work for the Stedelijk (which relied on one master grid for everypiece of communication.) Each institution used the figure of the designer,

or his purported absence, as an aesthetic expression in itself. By injectingJVT and all his well-known political agenda into the message of the work,the designer himself becomes a kind of authorial presence, an emblem for

the client.

But despite the aesthetic, methodological and political differences, both

Crouwel and van Toorn end up coming off as humanists. Both are workingat the “makeable society”, one from the position of efficiency,modernization and objectification; the other from the position of agitation,

dialectic and the enlightenment of the masses. So Jan and Wim end up notin opposition but as two sides of the same Dutch coin. Both assume apatriarchal belief in their role as guardians of culture. (You rarely miss an

underlying rhetoric of social value, no matter where you scratch thesurface of Dutch design.)

Gramsci argued that the ideology of a dominant culture consumes alldiscourse contained within in it, including the discourse of resistance. Sotheir difference now, in the age of what Max Kisman has dubbed the “style

of styles,” seems to be primarily formal. This disintegration of distinctiondoes not in any way lessen the real ideological differences between the twomen in 1972 but instead demonstrates the way in which the visual

expressions of ideology have been absorbed into one master system thatstrips the meaning of all aesthetic gestures and reduces them to easilyexchanged visual clichés. (See for instance, Experimental Jet Set’s ideology



free regurgitation of Crouwel’s work. It’s not accidental that the politicalpower of the original work has been replaced by a history of conflicted

dramatic “personalities.”

Lecture 4: Dumbar for Dummies

Speaking of personalities… for Americans the ideological debates of thesixties and seventies were more of less invisible. We had our ownconflicted relationship with Switzerland to work out. True Dutchification

crept into our consciousness much later and this “tagging” of officialagencies was profoundly affected by one figure: Gert Dumbar. While wewere following Jan van Toorn, Karel Martens, Anton Beeke and later

studios like Wild Plaka and Hard Werken, throughout the 70’s, 80’s and 90’sit was this one designer – through his burgeoning studio stocked withlegions of stagaires – who seemed to impress his subjectivity on every

aspect of Dutch culture. For most of the rest of the world, Dutch graphicdesign in the 80s became synonymous with Dumbar Design.

For us, Dumbar seemed to impose a kind of irrational exuberance on thestaid institutions of Dutch culture: the post office, the railway, the police,etc. Dunbar neatly synthesized the two competing strains of Dutchness:

the systematic and the wonky. And he seemed to be able to sell hisinstitutionalized wonkiness to even the most conservative commissioners.(As outsiders, we secretly couldn’t believe any self-respecting country

would allow their government officials to wear such outlandish outfits.) By1995 Chris Vermaas, capturing the sensibility, warned that the continued

application of Dumbarism to

the organs of the statethreatened to turn Holland intoa LegoLand: “the Dutch

policeman seems attached tohis motorbike sitting on one bigplastic peg and has a head that

can spin around 360 degreesand come off in one piece.”

Working from a palette of tried and true elements -- brightness, off-kilteredness, geometric abstraction, angularity -- Dumbarism became akind of brand in itself that could be applied to anything, anywhere. Rather

than an expression of a client’s values, Dumbarism became a value initself. (Critics complained he supplied visuals for companies without theirown story to tell.) To associate with Studio Dunbar meant adopting certain



value suggested by Dunbar’s own mythmaking apparatus, basically asystematic modernist approach to corporate identity peppered with a

sprinkling of playful design elements. This approach allowed conservative,often privatizing clients to have it both ways: it promised efficiency andseeming individuality or freedom.

(As an aside, that double-sided rhetoric also served his ends. The studio’subiquitously published “wild” 80’s design – that captured the attention of

the world, was underwritten by conventional corporate identity work, thismuch to the chagrin of the legions of Cranbrook and RCA interns, drawn bythe studio’s public image, only to find themselves composing corporate

identity manuals for a bank or an insurance company.)

The effect of Dunbarism and the frenzy of identity designing over the 80s

and 90s seemed to be that Holland became one continuous sea of logos.Everything was done. Everything was styled. The country took on a qualityof a “Gesamtkunstwerk”: a total work of art and design. Like some Art

Nouveau dream, every surface of the country was fondled. It recalls Loos’description of the bourgeois gentleman subjected to the all consumingdesign of his art nouveau environment:

“The happy man suddenly felt deeply, deeply unhappy… He was precludedfrom all future living and striving, developing and desiring. His thought:

this is what it means to learn to go about life with one’s own corpse. Yesindeed, he is finished. He is complete.”

Are the young graphic designers living with the corpse of their parents’Dutch design? Did Dumbar finish it off with terminal, nationwide over-design? If not what is left? Is there any room left for the Dutch design

imagination?

Lecture 5. Dude, where’s my country?

At the moment of the ascendancy of Dunbarism and Dutch Design as aninternational brand, the country itself was getting harder to find. Brandingis a late cycle phenomena, the next step once the thing itself is no longer

enough. When the consumer needs added impetus to choose one more orless equivalent product over another, the package becomes almost ascritcal as the product. Does a thinning Holland need an ever more robust

package? Is there a relationship between the rise of brand and thedisappearance of nation?



Like everywhere, Holland is under intense pressure. The contemporarynation is stretched: “The domination of information, media, and signs; the

disaggregation of social structure into lifestyle; the general priority ofconsumption over production in everyday life and the constitution ofidentity and interests.” What is Dutch anymore anyway? Clearly what it

means is changing. (The conservatives resort to the sly phrase “Dutch-values” to disguise an overt nationalist/racist appeal.) The demographicsare brutal. The time-honored story of the battle between Catholic and

Protestant is dissolving fast. What percentage of the country is Muslim?Who can speak Dutch? Who is even literate? While no one was lookingHolland became a porous concept.

The famous emblems of Dutchness dissolve through merger and hostiletakeover. The money first, then the post, then what? As production fades,

Holland transforms into BeNeLux or MainPort: Europe’s airport, seaportand warehouse land (with its own special logo). It’s the country as conduit.All that Delta Project territory to create land to store and move someone

else’s things headed somewhere else. There is a shift from commodity toexperience. Everything time, space, service as well as goods, becomebranded.

Some products so are inextricably linked to their nation they take on aquasi-public role. But there is a subtle but profound shift that happens

when major cultural figures privatize. Air France swallows KLM, althoughthe deal is couched in a way to make it seem likean equal marriage. PTT becomes a wholly owned

subsidiary of TNT based in Australia of all places.These great public institutions, flagships of thenation, become profit-driven corporations,

subsidiaries of international conglomerates.What once was an expression of Dutch pride --

PTT showcasing the best of Holland in the design of the stamps and phone

cards for instance, or KLM with their slow motion swans and painfullymatter-of-fact blue-suited fight attendants – either simply disappears orflips to clichés of Dutchness, turned back on the nation as marketing tools.

The public institution represents the state; the private one attempts torepresent the taste and lifestyle of its own market.

It’s the McKroket strategy. Multinational McDonald’s customizes itsinternationally consistent commodity to appeal to vernacular tastes. TheMcKroket is McDonalds going Dutch. The privatized standard-bearers of



the Dutch culture repackage the emblems of Dutchness as a brandingstrategy to maintain the loyalty of their consumers (the contemporary

word for citizens.) So Dutchness, and Dutch Design, become tools forglobalized, capitalist corporations to market to the Dutch audience. Dutchdesign as branding tool and constructed signifier of Dutch values, becomes

as quaint and charming as windmills and tulips.

At the moment of this deep internal insecurity, the nation is embarking on

a major initiative, building signature embassies in world capitals. Oncecontent with low-profile generic office space, Holland now uses embassydesign to make an international show of strength; to shore up the Dutch

Brand. (Remember, branding is the last attempt of the desperate.)Whatever is happening at home, Holland keeps up appearances. Theembassy project is pure ego-booster, reassuring yourselves and the rest of

the world you are still here, and you still matter.

Lecture 6. Two Big Books

In the first five chapters I wanted to suggest an optimistic design cultureready and willing to engage the major challenges of rebuilding Hollandleading to a hyper-design state with increasingly less room for

maneuvering. The next five look for closely at contemporary reactions tothe that state and the concomitant rise in the desire for self-expression.

To explore that shift from public to private alittle further, I turn now to two big Dutch books:Wim Crouwel and Jolijn van de Wouw’s PTT

telephone book of 1977 and Irma Boom’scommemorativebook for the SHV

corporation of1999. I am curious specifically about therelationship between the designer and the

work in two settings: utterly public, the otherobsessively private.

The telephone book maybe the ultimate utilitarian object that is both opento, and includes, everybody. Its function is clearly stated and simply tested.The social contract between the designer and the public is clear and

simple: I need to find a name; the number needs to be legible, etc. Thedesigner has a responsibility, clearly, to clarity, legibility, efficientproduction, etc. You don’t want personality or parody in the phonebook. So



far, so good. This fits comfortably into the definition of Graphic Designer.Problem solver. A scientist of information.

But despite claims to the contrary, the phonebook is an expression of akind of ideology: A belief that it was good for the public to read a certain

way, a typographic aestheticism disguised as altruism. Under the cover ofneutrality, the designer asserts his subjectivity, for instance, Crouwel usesthe limited character set of phototypesetting to justify an all lowercase

alphabet: a long-time dream of modernist designers who saw differentupper and lowercase letterforms as an untenable illogic.

Then do we make sense of Irma Boom’s role with SHV corporation (forwhom Crouwel’s Total Design had created the original housestyle in 1965).The Director of SHV commissioned arguably Holland’s most celebrated

book designer to create a special volume commemorating the 100-yearanniversary of the company. Working in conjunction with an archivist forover five years, Boom shaped a narrative out of an undifferentiated lump of

raw data. The meaning and narrative of the book is not a product of thewords but almost exclusively the function of the sequence of the pages andthe cropping of the images, the basic devices of design.

Boom’s big book is fundamentally a different genre than Crouwel’s bigbook and the role defined for the designer is so antithetical as to almost

demand a different title. The SHV book is a project for one man,representing all the power of his corporation, produced in a hyper-limitededition. (In typical Dutch pseudo modesty, the extravagant display of

conspicuous consumption is hidden from view by limited distribution.) Thebook makes the signature of the designer part of its branding strategy. Thebook says: we are an enlightened company, we are rich, we are cultured,

and we know the value someone like Irma Boom. The corporation uses itsassociation with her unassailable brilliance to advance its own image.

The difference between the two books, I think, is the difference between ahyper-Dutch and a hyper-American project. And it represents the movefrom the public to the private. But in both cases, the association with the

designer has meaning. While Crouwel disappears in the phonebook, thePTT makes an overt commitment to Modernity, through a connection toTotal Design. SHV licenses Boom’s aura and Boom grafts her identity onto

the content of the SHV book. (Crouwel opined in an interview that a recentBoom book on Otto Treumann was “in fact a book about her, not OttoTreumann.”) A book that large and complex, with every page shaped by



one person, becomes a kind of autobiography and Boom is a constant,ghostly presence. It’s not JUST a big book. It’s an Irma Boom book. The

designer, as author, supplies brand value or celebrity endorsement.

Lecture 7. The Organization Men (and women)

I’ll get back to that trend, where the designer makes a guest appearance inthe work. But I actually think those cases of the overt reference ofauthor/designer are anomalies. Holland poses a special condition and the

Dutch designer has a conflicted relationship with the idea of authorship (inthe same way the Dutch seem to have a issues with ambition andauthority.) There’s the divided lust for expression on one side, and moral

rectitude and modesty on the other, which seems to generate a range ofsingular behaviors.

To assuage, or at least to mask, the ambition and ego necessary to buildthe figure of the author, the Dutch designer positions him/herself, not asoriginator, but as one who marshals undeniable economic, legal, textual,

demographic and civic forces and follows them to their irrefutableconclusion. By this technique, the designer eschews celebrity, feignsanonymity, and assumes the role of systems manager.

This bifurcated relationship – dividing the desire to express and the drivefor reason -- is already present in Crouwel’s description of a rational design

process. “The content determines the form, the typeface, the format, thecover, the binding. Every assignment can be divided into several factors,which are all interrelated. With each commission, as it were, you have to

plot those factors along a horizontal and a vertical axis, stretch out a stringand then see where it takes you.” (Wim Crouwel, 1961) The image of thematrix is brutal: its findings, absolute. Notice the passivity, the submission

to the data. You wait and see where the data takes you. His experiments intype design test the same formula. He sets up the system but thenslavishly follows it to some logical conclusion.

This matter-of-factism, hyper-pragmatism, this surrender to theomnipotent effect of the diagram is present in all manner of Dutch work.

Perhaps the strategy derives from a natural reaction to a country in whichevery centimeter is regulated by preordained rules. But the buildings ofarchitects like MVDRV and their attendant documentation and reliance on

so-called “Datascape,” take that Dutch rationalism and stretch to produceabsurd, even parodic results. Research and analysis form a diagram anddiagram derives a building. The designers are represented as bystanders or



objective scientists watching with grim satisfaction as their bizarretheories give rise to even more bizarre forms. See also Koolhaas’s plan for

New York’s MoMA that simply uses the givenzoning envelope as form generator – coupledwith the title: “Architecture without

Architects.” Or also OMA’s soon to becompleted Seattle Public Library in which theDewey Decimal organization of the library

books drives a diagram that drives a building.

Critic Thomas Daniell put it nicely comparing the method of the Japanese

architect and the Dutch: paraphrasing: The Japanese architect begins witha poetic concept and refines it into plausibility, the Dutch architect beginswith analysis and extrapolates it into poetry. These Dutch buildings have a

kind of brutal, self-evident ugliness to them. Of course they’re ugly, currentconditions, objectively measured, don’t necessarily render beauty. Beautywould imply a subjectivity. Facts are facts. You take the building the facts

give you.

Perhaps much of the strange shapes of recent Dutch buildings can be

attributed to this devotion to the diagram, and the authorial absolution itgrants. By taking traditional Dutch pragmatism to absurd, deadpanextremes, the designer generates new, wholly unexpected forms. Some of

Droog Design – which has been so publicized it doesn’t need anymore fromme – embodies this absurdist-hyper-rationalism. The designer simplycontinues to apply the system until the form appears in all its strangeness.

This authorial avoidance strategy seems to have spawned the enthusiasmfor the generic, the recycled, the already done, the undersigned, the

preexisting that dominate contemporary design debates. Much of recentDutch design seems intent on erasing the sense that any designer imposedany subjectivity. Take Pascale Gatzen reworking of photographed clothing.

By copying an existing item, not from the original but from the ad,remaking it, and then re-photographing it and re-advertising it, she callsthe origination of the object into question. Is it her work? Klavers &

Engelen make a simple change in orientation adefamiliarization strategy. Or Hella Jorgenus’stextile “Repeat” uses pre-existing traditional

textile designs reorganized by curiousjuxtaposition and unifying overlays. OrExperimental Jet Set’s project that samples the



work of a previous generation, its style stripped clean of any politicalassociations. Or Archis magazine’s use of found typographic style,

absolving the need for any subjectivity, that is eliminating the designerspresumed responsibility to create distinct, unique identity (More on thatshortly.)

Lecture 8. Author as Value-Added

But if it is a Dutch Design trait to disappear into data or system, and at

least feign a lack of real ambition or subjectivity, there is an emergingtendency in which the designer assumes a central role as character in theirown work. This tests the way in which the treatment of given material –

what JVT might call the critical perspective – amounts to a kind ofauthorship.

Many designers have enthusiastically embraced the idea of authorship inhope of dipping into the authority traditionally granted to authors. Butdesigners have generally misconstrued the idea of the author as a power

strategy: a way to wrest control over their projects from the various forcesintent on limiting power. Most design use of the phrase links authorship toa kind of artistic or self-expression. But I am much more interested not so

much in trying to recuperate the prominence of the designer through theapplication of authorial principles but in trying to pick out the way thefigure of the author (which is always fictionalized) meshes with branding

strategy.

(In all cases its important to remember that when I use the term author, I

am never referring to the writer but a fictional figure that serves to unify awhole variety of diverse texts. The author is a function, a term ofexchange.)

Dumbar could be seen to embody one model of the designer as auteur,managing an army of underlings to impress his stamp on the broadest

possible canvas. Dumbar – actually NOT Dumbar but Dumbar’s studio –creates Dumbar signature work. Dumbar as flamboyant stands for the workgives it a public face and a branded “personality.” Irma Boom working with

SHV seems to represent another model in which the designer uses thetools of design to construct meaning. But more recent work engages thesubject in more complex and nuanced ways.



One well-publicized example of the fictionalized author can be discerned inJop von Bennekom’s self-motivated “Re” magazine. JVB links his magazine

-- which started as a school project at the Jan Van Eyck Academie – to “atypical Dutch approach ... A conceptual position of self-irony and self-questioning.” Through this overt form, a magazine dedicated to his

interests, proclivities, possessions, friends, life events,etc. JVB positions himself as both the originator andsubject of the magazine. The magazine generates a

fictional presence – the designer JVB – who permeatesevery aspect of the project. Even as JVB moves fromsole proprietor to executive editor or when the subject

of a specific issue shifts to focus on a single individual,JVB serves as both author and subject in an intenselyautobiographical project.

I want to turn back then for a moment to look closely at one project: ArchisMagazine and its transformation from somewhat straight, analytical

professional journal to an international style magazine whose subjecthappens to be architecture. (As the magazine was recently celebrated againin the Rotterdam Design Prize, I think it is safe to assume that it is an

example of what is somehow considered by some as the “best of thecontemporary Dutch design.)

While the core of the magazine is still articles, reviews, critiques andeditorials, Archis adopts another voice that appears spectrally among thearticles, offering choices, garnering information, asking questions, making

jokes. But whose voice? The editor? The designers? A phantom that hauntsits pages? Who is the “I” of Archis?

Since that voice has nothing ostensibly to do with the delivery of thecontent -- that is the articles and items that make up the body of themagazine -- at first it would seem to be a van Toornian hindrance strategy.

The designers editorialize through shaping the material. But the Archisauthorial presence has none of van Toorn’s desire for social reformation orpolitical agitation. The Archis voice is that of the court jester; it’s about

richness, pleasure, irony, humor, i.e. value-added content and shading.

Archis furthers that relationship between author and reader through a

series of specific shifts and moves. The voice directly asks questions,leaves blank spaces to be filled, supplies forms to fax back, overwritesother texts and generally interferes. (And it can be maddening, like an



annoying friend reading over your shoulder making comments.) Somepages are perforated suggesting reader-driven mutability; that the

presented form is merely one incarnation, not the finished state. It invitesis own disfiguration.

The voice of Archis moves it from the writerly tothe readerly text. By goading readers to literallyfill in the blanks, the Archis author implicates

them in the design itself. This gestureculminates in the recent move toward organizedpublic events that suggest a completely user-

centric forum where content is specificallyformatted in direct response to an audience gathered in a specific spot at aspecific time with the Archis author assuming the role of maestro,

conducting.

And then this. Visiting the recent AMO/OMA exhibition at the National

Gallery in Berlin, I was greeted by this figure. Artist Tony Orsler created aspecial Rem Koolhaas doll for the exhibition. Koolhaas can be read onseveral levels, as literal author and as coalescing figure – the ringmaster --

marshalling the forces of a broad, decentralized, international cast ofcollaborators whose work is unified under his name. Orsler’s figure ofKoolhaas floats spectrally over a smashed and decayed pile of garbage and

broken design elements and reads, over and over again in continuous loop,his article entitled “Junk Space.” The Rem doll makes a perpetual celebrityappearance endlessly spouting his famous, branded, rhetoric

Lecture 9. Dressing down.

In typical Dutch fashion, no one dresses up to make an appearance. The

Dutch author comes in unshaven and informal. His or her presence isalmost always padded in irony and self-deprecation. There seems to be is aclose connection between the rise of the author and of subjectivity and the

un-designing of design.

But what drove that shift to the un-designed design in the 90’s and the

attendant Dutch Design explosion internationally. While certainly part isclearly a reaction to the slickness of the 80s and early 90s, I nominate oneman: Joop van den Ende as the real source of inspiration. JVDE is of course

the father of the worldwide global phenomenon known as Big Brother andbubble gum television. The basic tenant of Big Brother is that compelling



television may result from simply sticking a bunch of unlikable charactersin a house and videoing the ensuing friction.

Reality TV has exploded in US and around the world. Television producerslove it because its cheap, easy to make, easy to serialize and most

importantly easy to localize, hence the success of Big Brother around theglobe. BB satisfies a grim desire to inspect the dirty laundry of yourneighbor. But in Holland it seems to have a special resonance, perhaps

because the whole country is a kind of artificial reality of closely packedneighbors, or perhaps due to the brutal efficiency of the concept. Its seemsto embody the “not one penny more” credo.

Recent work focuses on the banal: the areas untouched by Dunbarism andthe sweeping over-design gestures the years before. Van Lishout’s AVLville

is a kind of artificial reality TV. The work seems to reference the standard,accidental items of an in-between space, but always with some ironictwist. But actually it’s a romanticized banality. This work ignores the

corporate, globalized reality of Phillips and PTT or Rabobank. Theromanticized reality focuses on the generic apartment, the refugee camp,the abandoned embankment and the vernacular language of the amateur

do-it-your-self’er.

That same aesthetic is repackaged by agencies

like KasselKramer in campaigns for the likes ofDiesel and Ben. In fact their own sly, funnywebsite perfectly embodies the the methodology.

It adopts all the familiar clichés of the web,injects into them and produces and new form of

writing that is part reference, part narrative, part playacting. Of course this

casualness is so enormously cultivated and styled that it is immediatelyrecognizable as design with a capital D. No one would miss the joke.

But the question is: does banality have an agenda? Is anything advancedexcept the blasé, detached bemusement of the designer? Has Hollandbecome so comfortable, so completely designed that the only thing left is

ironic commentary on the act of designing itself? Does anyone think abouta kind of makeable society or have we just given up? Is design simply afree-floating reaction, all verb without direct object. Just against…but

against what? Note this remark from EJS:“What we have…drawn from postmodernism is the realization that thereare no objective, neutral or universal values. But that does not discourage



us from pursuing those values; that is our modernist inheritance. In theend, we've actually arrived at something of a synthesis of modernism and

postmodernism; working with a utopia in mind, while being fully awarethat we will never achieve that utopia.”Yikes. Has it really come to this: A pure, sweet, innocent cynicism?

We have all gotten used to accepting whatever comes along, whomever isin the house. One will get voted off each week but don’t worry; the whole

thing will start again next season. It’s just a game. It’s as if after 20 years ofabsolutely relentless shifts in style, and years of being berated for theirlack of political commitment by their May 68 professors, young Dutch

designers simply turned inward. The kind of Dutch design that capturesour attention now almost always has a layer of humor and reference thatseems to say, like EJS, we don’t really believe this but lets pretend anyway.

But more strikingly, for a country once known for big, bold, broad publicinitiative Dutch design seems to have taken to tackling small issues. Thedesigner cast his/her gaze on something so low; so insignificant it imbues

the object with almost mythic power.

I turn briefly to a contemporary identity project:

Daniel van der Velendan’s design experiment --government subsidized of course -- developingan brand for Sealand; a single abandoned North

Sea defense platform cum principality. Whateverthe merit of the design experiment -- to createan identity for an entity without substance, a

pure data space – it may point to a fatal fact: Dutch designers may havegiven up on the mainland, have turned their attention off-shore, given upbelieving their work can affect the “real” world. Maybe there is no running

room left in Holland. Maybe the “makeable society” is simply the basis for acruel parody.

Lecture 10. We are what we eat.

The production and consumption of style has accelerated so quickly, beenbroadcast so widely, that trends and countertrends develop

simultaneously. Action and reaction are linked inextricably. This is due inpart at least to the fact that you really do have a culture of design here, aculture of experiment, discourse, and discovery.

I originally titled this talk “Mad Dutch Disease” and obvious allusion toMad Cow Disease or more officially: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.



The scourge of Europe, Mad Cow is theorized to appear when cows eat feedthat contains the remains of other cows. When our diet starts to be

restricted to the point of devouring and regurgitating the trends of lastweek, we are in serious jeopardy of succumbing to a similar fate.

But as I mentioned at the beginning, I don’t see Dutch design as confinedto the Netherlands. This is happening everywhere. It’s just that due toadvantageous conditions, it seems more pronounced here. Our flights of

fancy are constantly quelled by the market. Because of that we use Hollandas a kind of quarantined breeding ground, carefully observing what is surehappen everywhere sooner or later.

Perhaps this is a better metaphor. I wonder if we have all worked ourselvesinto a trap of our own making. Or perhaps we have been building this

elaborate contraption of a self-reflective design culture over the last 20years only to realize that we may be its ultimate victims. When it comestime to hit the switch, who knows what the result will be?

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