undercoat
The landscape of the contemporary design world is not as smooth and white as some modernists imagined, but the influence of Adolf Loos's Ornament and Crime, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's "less is more", and Corbusier's whitewash ideal is still very visible in the applied arts. Consider Apple's successful move from the early adopters of the personal computer to the mainstream electronics market by covering their machines in a shiny layer, or the way IKEA conquered the world with their chunky but minimalist design for the masses.
modern tech giants have convinced us that clean and shiny is synonomous to beauty
Ornaments are still widely considered kitsch and bad taste. The preferred appearance of products is sleek and minimal. Clean modernist aesthetics have thrived in the age of mass-production and developed side by side with the mechanization and automation of industry.
primer
Swiss/French architect, urbanist and designer Corbusier can be considered one of the founders of the modern aesthetic, bringing many design ideologies together in his influential modernist grand narrative. Taking cues from Ebenezer Howard's The Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898) and Adolf Loos's Ornament and Crime (1913), among others, Corbusier devised a radical, all-encompassing theory of what the modern world should look like and how its inhabitants should look at it. And looking is the key word here.
Corbusier's central point that shaped his idea of the modernist revolution, is that in the industrial age people grow from appreciating color and decoration, which are "of a sensorial and elementary order suited to simple races, peasants and savages" to preferring harmony and proportion which "incite the intellectual faculties and arrest the man of culture". The sensation of the physical material is replaced by the rational contemplation of form.
Corbusier deemed the modern surface a superior and universal aesthetic that all should strive for
stripped
Yet this new, modern aesthetic was not the universal given waiting to happen in the linear development of cultural refinement that Corbusier made it seem. It can also be seen as both a very political reaction to the contemporaneous Art Deco style and the earlier Aesthetic Movement, which was considered effeminate, degenerate and decadent by the modernists like Loos and Corbusier, and as a quintessential modernist quest for abstraction through self-consciousness and focus on form and material.
Corbusier did not stop at the dismantling of prior aesthetic preferences, but he took the removal of decoration a step further when he argued for a white layer of paint to replace it. Calling decoration a mask that hides the true nature of the object and intending to cleanse the world of such perversity, he reasoned that by adding a white layer, the proportions of the object are emphasized and any sense of ambiguity is erased.
cracks
But how did a visionary like Corbusier not see this as yet another mask? Is a white layer not also a kind of decoration? Can it not be that the white layer, like the decoration he so condemned, still hides the object as it really is, and might actually be abused to cover up the dirty realities underneath?
Today the whitewash of design objects continues, but it has parted with the ideal of the strictly visual and harmonious proportions that Corbusier recommended. It has come to stand for a chic, glossy finish that can be used on any kind of product. Anything seems to instantly transform into a design object when it is covered with a shiny, not necessarily but often white layer.
Whitewash has become the illness it was supposed to be a medicine for: it has become the mask itself
Clean, shiny, white design. It makes me want to throw a paint bomb into an Apple store. I have a hard time not adding dents and scratches to expensive cars, or writing my name on an empty white wall. Why do people consider that vandalizing, while the fumes of that same car damage my lungs and the earth's? Why is graffiti illegal, but giant billboards in public spaces are tolerated? Apparently, I have a very different view on what is dirty and what is clean.
The shiny white layer has come to stand for the dirty reality underneath it: waste, pollution, and exploitation
reveal
I think the anonymity of mass-produced goods and their dominant surface aesthetics fuels indifference. If you cannot see what a product is made of, you forget about its material existence. If something looks shiny and new, you will not think about the toxic mine it came out of, you can dismiss the underpaid labor of an individual on the other side of the earth, and you can ignore the mileage and the months it took to reach you. These aesthetics are an ethical thing. Beauty is used to cover dirt.
We must involve context into the appearance of everyday objects, we must hold those responsible accountable
Obviously, something like this has already been happening in the realm of recycling and cradle-to-cradle design, but most of this is still happening on the scale of the alternative, as the hip and trendy way to go for the eco-conscious in-crowd, or by companies looking to tap into that considerable market with varying degrees of sincerity. These eco-narratives are in danger of becoming fashionable, one-dimensional labels, because they generally do not take into account the full scope of how the looks of a product, its production methods, its usage and its expiration are an integral system, and all of these aspects need to be confronted at once.
friction
As the full consequences of a dirty design ethic and aesthetic inevitably go against purely capitalist motives, it might be doomed to remain alternative idealism. Yet our age seems to call for a new set of norms and ideals, as globalization and network culture is breaking down so many of our old ones.