Interesting, Boring, Indifference

Contemporary Design Approaches Week 5

Tyler Babb, Soraya Mbaoua, Kelsey Mitchell, Samuel Harrison, Alex Agyekum, Brianna Thornhill,
Malika Yansaneh, Linzi Swittenberg, Natalie Jablonski, Mavin Liu, Nathanael Musera, Lily Wood
Systems and Shapes
Michael Meredith
Shape
● Shapes prefer singularity
● Shapes are based on elevation and silhouettes
● Use fillets and round corners to reinforce shape
● Centripetal (gravitate toward center)
● Don’t like anything that disrupts shape
● More physical
Systems
● System obsess over means
● Centrifugal (gravitate away from center)
● Systems are repetition and difference
● Systems are based in plans
● Produce their own ground
● Conceptual
Shape vs. Systems
● Form is a system
● Shapes are shapes
● Shape is more physical while systems are more
theoretical
● Shape focus on pictorial while systems focus on process
● Shape is how something is made, system is why
something is made
Museum of Outdoor Arts Elements House
Museum of Outdoor Arts Elements House
● Organization based off of additive geometric system of
growth
● Stripped down to basic components
● Indifferent to both shape and systems
BORING
Atwood
What makes an object ‘boring’?

- Open-ended - Non-directional
- Generic - Ambiguous
- Lack of Attention - Insignificant
- Amateur - Permissive
- Non-judgmental - Dull

Ed Rushca uses a lot of rigour and
technique in the quest to make his
photographs appear ‘generic’
“Improper relation of lenses to
subject distances, insensitivity to
time of day and quality of light,
excessively functional cropping,
with abrupt excisions of peripheral
objects, [and] lack of attention to the
specific character of the moment
being depicted”
-
Catherine Opie’s photos don’t attempt
“well composed, perfectly framed,
to cover up her skills as a
full-contrast images”
professional photographer
 - Non-directional
- Ambiguous
- Insignificant
- Permissive
- Dull

- Open-ended
- Generic
- Lack of Attention
- Amateur
- Non-judgmental
 “It should be obvious, but this
installation isn’t about a vacuous
...And container waiting to be filled, or an
imposed absence in the wake of
Pedestals withdrawal or in the name of
sobriety. It’s about facing the
Boredom, Comfort and strange blankness of an installation
Confusion about an installation’s liminal
elements.”
“The result was a seemingly blank
installation- an installation that was somewhat
confused as it attempted to make visible
things we do not typically see, but used
methods of low saturation and contrast to
bring them together.”
CRITICAL RECEPTION
“The lack of a specific and obvious focal point at first produces boredom, but when
combined with the context of the gallery, this boredom produced an expectation
that there must be something to see if you looked hard enough, even if you didn’t
know what you were looking for.”
 willful blur
The negative of interested or interesting
“But artists and designers have
found that true breakthroughs result
when they drive the inquiry down a
new path. They question the
question. And willingly stumble into
the unknown.”

-Rosanne Somerson, RISD President

Detail from Christ & Gantenbein’s extension to the Swiss National Museum
 Who is the audience?
What is the intent?

● Boredom is a deliberate act

● It occurs when the expectation BOREDOM IS A DELIBERATE ACT
for interest is not met.
● Boringness can be productive as
a mode of attention whether the
author intended it or not.
A. Did the author intend the work to
be boring?
B. What does this say about the
audience? ENCOUNTERING BORING WORK
C. What expectations did the
audience have?
D. What qualities might be attached
to those expectations?
“No one wants to be boring”

“The audience is required to confront

its own creative and subjective limits” DISPLACING AUTHORSHIP

This assumes the audience is

creative to begin with.
QUALITIES SYNONYMS

SLOW HUMDRUM

REDUNDANT MUNDANE

REPETITIVE ONGOING

ANACHRONISTIC MONOTONOUS

LOW-SATURATION NOTHING

LOW-CONTRAST DETACHED

DULL DEADPAN

MONOCHROME

UNIFORM
Boredom equates to the absence of
meaning.

Meaning: significance and purpose

(in an object) (in a subject)

Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting [three panel], 1951

“Sometimes things are just bad. Bad is not
the same as boring. A car crash is not boring,
but it’s usually bad”
MERELY INTERESTING
From the Text...
● Ngai argues that its growing use reflects society’s loose
connection with aesthetic standards.
○ We use words like “interesting” without understanding
the visual qualities of the things that we describe.
Applying it to Ourselves
● This generation of architectural designers has a weak
sense of understanding the world of aesthetics around us.
1) We have no basis of the general concepts
2) The content that we take in is heavily saturated
3) The culture of “eccentric oddities” is fading
1) We have no basis of the general concepts
● Without being introduced to what makes things “mediocre”
vs. “excellent” (pp. 779), we have no way of accurately
interpreting visual qualities.
○ Lack of exposure to a variety of themes and ideas in
our education
2) Our Intake of Content is Heavily Saturated
● Ngai speaks about a sense of logic being applied to our
reasoning with the word
○ However, our social outlets through media and
technology are extremely streamlined and skewed,
which hurts our understanding of abstract visuals.
3) The Culture of “Eccentric Oddities” is Fading
● Shakespeare was successful in avoiding these problems
because he always strived to portray “unique individuals”
and other “eccentric oddities” (pp. 786) in them.
○ It can be argued that we aren’t as adventurous when it
comes to breaking the rules or exploring new
boundaries.
“Das Interessante” and “the Interesting”
Understanding “das Interessante”

● “Das Interessante” was originally only applied to literature.

● “Das Interessante” is meant to oppose other concepts and carry a sense of
irony.

Understanding “the interesting”

● “Interesting” and “Das Interessante” are not the same thing.

● “Interesting” is a term that tends to be kept more vague.
● “Interesting” is a term that is typically a label for something indescribable.
Architecture and Literature
● In what way can “das Interessante” be applied to
architecture?
● What are the similarities to “das Interessante” and “the
interesting” when they’re applies to architecture?
Application of das Interessante

Das Interessante must:

● Be open to criticism.
● Respond to culture.
● Be recognizable as significant to its
time even at other points in history.
First interesting now beautiful
Interesting seems sensitive to change from within

What is cool now is not likely to be cool next season

“Now that I look back on it…. Its beginning to loot like the ‘60s … in the future this
book is going to look totally dated; and that's one thing that I was totally against.”
Beautiful versus Interesting
Beautiful - pleasing the senses or mind aesthetically.

Art - Exhibits certain colors, nostalgic characteristics, unique technique, etc.

Interesting - arousing curiosity or interest; holding or catching the attention.

Art - Thought provoking, addresses certain topics, enigmatic characteristics,

etc.
Interesting to Beautiful
Interesting is just beautiful lacking certain aspects

Interesting - concepts and manifestations that begin to address certain ideas and
concepts but are not quite there yet

Beautiful - Concepts and manifestations that are well thought out and executed
with great ability
 Aesthetic//Beautiful v. Interesting

● of, relating to, or dealing with aesthetics or the beautiful

“Beautiful Architecture”
“Interesting Architecture”
“Beautiful Women”

“Interesting Women”
 “Beauty awakens the soul to act”
-Dante Alighieri

Aesthetic
Interesting//Beautiful
 Aesthetic
Interesting//Beautiful
 Conceptual Art
If one "respects the art," that is, judges the art to be important and affecting
(interesting), what one says about it will ultimately take a backseat to
the sheer fact of its being talked about. -Lucy Lippard

"by 1965 ...articles which criticized an artist's work began to have the same effect
as articles which praised it,"
The intensified publicity surrounding interesting art in the 1960s led to a
diminishment of the critic's influence on public culture. By 1970 most
conceptual artists were acknowledging that the main audience of
their work would be other conceptual artists.
The audience of conceptual art is
composed primarily of artists--which
is to say that an audience separate
from the participants doesn't exist. In
a sense, then, art becomes as
"serious" as science or philosophy,
which doesn't have "audiences"
either. It is interesting or it isn't, just
as one is informed or isn't

Joseph Kosuth Art-Language (1970)

In addition to mimicking art-specific strategies of disseminating and circulating
information, like the poster and catalog, conceptual art became interested in all the
ways in which information might be displayed.

Artists began using charts, specimen cases, and reference manuals to create
displays that resembled science fair projects, boardroom presentations, or
information booths. The look of merely interesting conceptual art would evolve
into the look of public exhibition. What set the ambitious 1960s artist apart from
the amateur is the work of presentation
Q: How can presenting almost exclusively to peers limit the expansion of
a field? How are we limiting ourselves by only presenting to individuals
within our major? Is some of the art in Architecture being lost this way?
Interesting v. Unexpected
un·ex·pect·ed
/ˌənəkˈspektəd/
adjective
1. not expected or regarded as unlikely to happen.
Chiayi County Church
Taiwan
in·ter·est·ing
/ˈint(ə)rəstiNG/
adjective
1. arousing curiosity or interest; holding or catching the attention.
2. "an interesting debate"
 9/11
Memorial
Master Plan
Daniel
Libeskind
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Frank Lloyd Wright
nature v. nurture
“form follows function”-Louis Sullivan
Guaranty Building| Buffalo, NY
Biré Bitori | Chihuahua City, Mexico
why?
form follows function or function follows form?
Are you really interested?
Le Corbusier
Peter Eisenman
One might think these is more appealing
Than this
Which of these images do you find interesting and
why? Early 2000s
How do you feel about these images?