Doing Away With Design

Abstract

The disassociation of the kitchen from the parlor a few hundred years ago originally had the result that only the parlor was decorated. The kitchen was spared of such aspirations for considerable time, its design being based on functional aspects. When collectors today sell old decorative furniture as kitchen furnishings, then you can be sure that they never stood in a kitchen. Only used furniture with decorative details lands in old kitchens, but such furniture was not specifically designed for kitchens. When one speaks of design in common parlance one is referring to a clear, visible creative impulse as was found in arts and crafts about a hundred years ago. Today’s decoration can no longer be easily recognized as such. Decoration today hides behind a smooth form and can thus no longer be simply identified as an object collecting dust. In the past it was ornaments with exaggerated carvings when provoked the ire of the modernists who were anxious to remove them. Today, by contrast, we have adorning pieces not needed by furniture. Or precisely those pieces are omitted that an object would need to function smoothly.