Sustainable Architecture in Chicago: Works in Progress | Museum of Contemporary Art
If Mau were a cobbler, no doubt he’d see the world progressing through the evolution of shoes, but instead design is the atomic force he sees shaping our existence. “If you can imagine,” Mau says, “the number of times you can close your eyes and open them in a space where you’re not looking at design things, you realize that it’s almost zero. Your reality is a designed reality.” We can no more avoid designing than breathing, he says, and even when we refuse to design, we’re designing. Take a controversial subject like genetic engineering, represented by that featherless chicken. “Let’s say,” Mau posits, “that we took a global referendum and said we’re not going to do it, we’re not going to design one more thing. We would by that action be responsible anyway because we’ve decided to take an accidental evolutionary path as opposed to an intentional one.” And while the show lays out the hopes and fears implicit to the engineering of animals, Mau’s own feelings are unambiguous. “We have every intention of designing life,” he says. “In the past it was crude and rough. Today we are quite precise.”
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Still another gallery has a prototype of the Model U. “This car is designed so that all the material can easily disassemble and go back into the production cycle without ever going back into the landfill,” says Mau. In contrast to traditional auto construction methods, the Model U’s “materials don’t get sandwiched together. They can easily get delaminated and put back into the waste streams in the most effective way.” Except, of course, that they don’t, because the car doesn’t exist. Back in 2003, Ford’s PR people heralded the Model U as “the Model T of the 21st Century…a car designed to be good to you and good for the world.” That was the concept’s high point. Last month, of course, the automaker announced it was cutting 45,000 jobs and closing 16 plants, and the Model U was nowhere on the production radar.
That’s a point of view you can bet Karl Rove understands, but I’m not sure Mau does. No doubt that’s the sort of counterproductive thinking he says he encountered back when he was first creating “Massive Change,” a general mood that was “very negative, pessimistic, and tending to be cynical.” He cites historian Arnold Toynbee’s conclusion that “the 20th century won’t be remembered either for technological invention and innovation or for violence and conflict. Instead it will be understood as the moment in which we dared to imagine the welfare of the entire human race as a practical objective.” When he read that Mau thought, “that’s exactly the pattern that we can see. Knowing that against that movement there are terrible people, there’s greed, there are accidents, there are wars. You have all these sort of negative potentials, but the underlying movement is a movement forward that’s extremely positive.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
