Breaking Modernism
When I was in the 9th grade, I started to devour Modernism.
I would go to the hulking, brutalist Faulk Central Library on Guadalupe, sit in the old Eames-descended armchairs and pore through picture books of Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. I checked out Brockman and only got halfway through before I decided I already knew it, that I’d learned it by osmosis (and, well, through Khoi Vinh). Dieter Rams was my new hero and Jony Ive my antecedent. I overloaded on type for a while, bought and read Robert Bringhurst’s “typographer’s bible” The Elements of Typographic Style. I once got points docked from an AP English paper because I refused to set it in 12pt Times New Roman, double spaced. (I was kind of an asshole.)
I loved the aesthetic of Modernism, but I hadn’t ever really considered its ethic. The clean, simple, machined look of Modernist objects is undoubtedly beautiful. It speaks to clarity and wholeness. It is timeless in that it can be applied to many processes and materials, and it is cohesive enough to have kept its shape through the decades.
But it also exists out of time. Modernist designs look great new, but they also tend to wear out instead of in. They’re often made of materials completely divorced of context, materials that are themselves manmade (glass, steel, concrete). Leather, wood, stone—these things weather. Glass breaks.
Discovering wabi-sabi broke Modernism for me. “Wabi-sabi” is one of those words that is difficult to translate; it isn’t merely an aesthetic but a concept that we in the West don’t have a name. “Wabi” used to refer to the feeling of isolation one gets from being close to nature and far from society, but has come to refer to “rustic” simplicity and beauty. “Sabi” meant chill, lean or withered, but today refers more to the beauty that comes with age. Thus “wabi-sabi” encapsulates the beauty of simple, rough, imperfect and transient things. It is not only about objects that become or stay beautiful with age, but the beauty of age itself. It’s a concept steeped deeply in time.
The Modernist aesthetic and ethic both resist time. Wabi-sabi embraces it. Wabi-sabi designs tend to simplicity not just because it’s beautiful, but also because it lasts. Modernism rejects the past; wabi-sabi objects use natural materials—bamboo, clay, wood—that echo their past and last into the future. The simplicity of Modernism is machined, but the simplicity of wabi-sabi objects is more natural: it reflects the way in which nature is simple, which is not perfectly. Nature, in its whole, is not simple. Nature starts simple and grows, usually to breathtaking complexity.
The geometry of this pot is simple and clear, and it’s been carefully molded for its use in a tea ceremony. It’s well-proportioned, with thick walls and glaze to last through time. But the irregularity of its hand-shaped form is randomly complex. It is imperfect by design.
Wabi-sabi is often described as “perfectly imperfect”, as about finding beauty in imperfect, impermanent design. That’s a good description, but I think of wabi-sabi in both aesthetic and ethic as being about control and time, rather than perfection.
The Modernists believed that by controlling our human environment, by filling it with architecture and products and graphics that were perfect, they could push humanity towards perfection along with their newly-built world. This is the holistic side of modernism, the one we have to thank for the idea of “systems thinking” (and to some extent all sorts of other things: the modern environmental movement; ergonomics as a science; those criminally simplified sun > plant > rabbit > hawk diagrams).
Modernists were right that our built world influences our worldview, and they made some good-hearted attempts at changing that relationship for the better. But Modernism was wrong about control, or at least too broad in its ambitions. Perfect human control doesn’t exist at the scale of a city, or culture, or planet. It doesn’t work because these gargantuan, amorphous systems work on a different time scale from us, one where we have imperfect vision and terrible reflexes.
When wabi-sabi lets go of control it embraces time.
The pot above is not (just) “old”, it is weathered. It is worn. Its imperfections have added to its value over its 500 years of life. Its patina, its stains, its residue, have painted onto it a record of its life. And quite unlike a gleaming chrome iPod back scratched with age, this record has been written without “ruining” any initially-spotless canvas.
To my mind that’s beautiful. The best design doesn’t fetishize imperfection, but it does embrace and understand it. Life’s crazy and time is inevitable. We might as well make our things to wear their age and their imperfections proudly. And hey, if our stuff ends up rubbing off on us, that might not be so bad.
