Honesty

Honesty noun
1. the quality or fact of being honest; uprightness and fairness
2. truthfulness, sincerity, or frankness.
3. freedom from deceit or fraud.

The word has been diluted in the world of design, overused as a marketing tool like the ever-popular qualifier "green." Designers should take a look what the word means to them in terms of their own values. Here at Giga Studio, we have our own opinions.


Architects design buildings for the “art” of architecture, complete with philosophies, theories, and the promise of being remembered for generations to come. Currently in architecture, there is a popular movement to return to “honest” materials--materials that are used and valued primarily for their function, and are shown proudly in the aesthetic of the building because of this theoretical value. These materials do not “pretend” to be anything else but themselves. Concrete, steel, glass, and wood can be seen predominantly in any modern design blog. These materials are honest in terms of the theories behind them, therefore no more than the preference than the architects that promote them. In fact, no one would be comfortable living in them; the theory forces an impossible lifestyle of an “ideal” patron of the design world. The buildings are designed for philosophies and greatness, not for people. In this way, modern architecture is the least honest of all.

What is truly honest is the tastes of every day people. Not everyone is an architect, but everyone who has redone their living room, picked out draperies, or created a nursery is  a designer in their own right. They do not make their choices based on grandiose philosophies, but based on their own tastes and preferences for comfort. This is the most honest design of all. Though it may not end up in design publications, it is the history of the masses and the history of every day life. Architects like Peter Eisenmann, Norman Foster, and Rem Koolhaas have been reported to live in an 18th century mill, Swiss chateau, and a Victorian apartment, respectively, when interviewed by the likes of the Washington Post and Spiegel Magazine.  Perhaps they have realized what their followers have not: architecture designed to be pure is unlivable, because humans are not. In the classic case of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, Ms. Farnsworth herself sued van der Rohe for designing her a house that was impossible to live in. Van der Rohe had reduced architecture to an object that expresses an artistic visions, but we cannot live in an idea. Some architecture is better left on paper instead of forcing an architectural utopia on real people. 

Tom Wolfe writes on the topic of modern architecture in America in his book, “Bauhaus to Our House” :

"O Beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today? . . . Every child goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicating- machine replacement-parts wholesale distribution warehouse . . . Every new $900,000 summer house in the north woods of Michigan or on the shore of Long Island has so many pipe railings, ramps, hob-tread metal spiral stairways, sheets of industrial plate glass, banks of tungsten-halogen lamps, and white cylindrical shapes, it looks like an insecticide refinery." And every building more than ten stories high is "a glass box." Even the architects themselves now use the term with a snigger.

“Once again Wolfe shows how social and intellectual fashions have determined aesthetic form in our time and how willingly the creators have abandoned personal vision and originality in order to work à la mode.” However, this architecture is not limited to America. The exalted idea of modern architecture can be seen all over the world, as well in design blogs and architectural publications. The publication of works in progress reveal that the end of this whitewashed era is nowhere near the end.

There is a remedy, however. If we look around us in Geneva, we can see the material history that already exists. It may not be famous, but it is the result of a natural progression over time, an honest, living museum of the city. We here at Giga Studio appreciate this and wish to enlighten other designers to do the same. The materials around us were chosen by the grand populous without thought to theories and utopian ideals; they are instinctive decisions based on what is best economically and esthetically according to the user, and were presented by political and cultural circumstances. But because no one has written on these materials or published them in a glossy magazine, they are considered obsolete until the next trend comes around, dictated to us, by whom else, designers.