Whatever Happened to Total Design?

<em>What does “total design” mean today?</em> What does it mean, let’s say, after postmodernism? Not so long ago, the expression was part of the basic vocabulary of architects, teachers, and critics. Yet it is remarkably absent from contemporary debates and seems to play no role in schools today. What happened?
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Total design has two meanings: first, what might be called the implosion of design, the focusing of design inward on a single intense point; second, what might be called the explosion of design, the expansion of design out to touch every possible point in the world. In either case, the architect is in control, centralizing, orchestrating, dominating. Total design is a fantasy about control, about architecture as control.<br />
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Implosive design takes over a space, subjecting every detail, every surface, to an over-arching vision. The architect supervises, if not designs, everything: structure, furniture, wallpaper, carpets, doorknobs, light fittings, dinnerware, clothes, and flower arrangements. The result is a space with no gaps, no cracks, no openings onto other possibilities, other worlds. The paradigm of this approach is the domestic interior completely detached from the chaotic pluralism of the world. A whole generation of remarkable architects — including Bruno Taut, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Josef Hoffmann, Josef Maria Olbrich, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Hendrik Berlage, Peter Behrens, and Henry van der Velde — produced hyper-interiors that enveloped their occupants in a single, seamless multimedia garment. Inspired by Richard Wagner’s mid-19th-century concept of the “total work of art,” in which different art forms would collaborate to produce a singular experience, these designers were eager to place the architect at the center of the process: the architect would orchestrate the overall theatrical effect. Collaborative organizations of artists such as the Vienna Secession carried out an architectural mission; they would implode design to create environments with an extraordinary density of sensuous effect.<br />
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Print Version: <a href="http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/back/5wigley.pdf">http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/back/5wigley.pdf</a>