English architect Edwin Lutyens designed much of the British colonial power’s New Delhi between 1912 and 1930, and his aesthetic dominates the city. While in Delhi I have been staying in a Lutyens-designed house, now a guesthouse in walking distance from the famed Lodi Gardens and from India Gate, also designed by Lutyens.

New Delhi was built as a green enclave far from the dust and activity of Old Delhi. Putting the question of its imperial past aside for a moment, its bungalows were very well designed for the climate. They’re simple, elegant and cool in summer. Their style evolved over the years reflecting architectural movements in Europe; in Lutyens’ work as you can see there are elements of late Georgian, Deco and Moderne depending on the house and year of construction.

This part of the city looks the way it ever did, while massive new development has mostly sprung up in the suburbs.

Below, a Lutyens-designed bungalow:

Below: I attended a literary prize ceremony in a beautiful garden flat in this Lutyens-designed block near Khan Market. It’s difficult to tell from the front but it has Streamlined Moderne elements as you can see in the interior shot.

Not all of the below are by Lutyens but his overall aesthetic is evident all over this part of the Delhi megalopolis.There are many examples of Moderne and Streamline Moderne in Delhi, influenced in some way by Lutyens whether designed by him or not:

And another house in the district – maybe someone can identify this style more accurately than I can:

As an aside, as a favourite architect of the empire, Lutyens also designed most of the war memorial cenotaphs in Canada, including ours in Vancouver. None are as grand as Delhi’s India Gate.

Read about Khan Market here.

I have nothing to add to 1000 Words: A Manifesto for Sustainability in Design by designer Allan Chochinov. To preface his manifesto Chochinov writes:

I don’t like the word manifesto. It reeks of dogma and rules—two things I instinctually reject. I do love the way it puts things on the line, but I don’t like lines, or groups. So a manifesto probably isn’t for me. The other thing about manifestos is that they appear (or are written so as to appear) self-evident. This kind of a priori writing is easy, since you simply lay out what seems obviously—even tautologically—true. Of course, this is the danger of manifestos, but also what makes them fun to read. And fun to write. So I’ll write this manifesto. I just might not sign it.

Anyway, here they are. Exactly 1000 words:

Hippocratic Before Socratic
“First do no harm” is a good starting point for everyone, but it’s an especially good starting point for designers. For a group of people who pride themselves on “problem solving” and improving people’s lives, we sure have done our fair share of the converse. We have to remember that industrial design equals mass production, and that every move, every decision, every curve we specify is multiplied—sometimes by the thousands and often by the millions. And that every one of those everys has a price. We think that we’re in the artifact business, but we’re not; we’re in the consequence business.

Stop Making Crap
And that means that we have to stop making crap. It’s really as simple as that. We are suffocating, drowning, and poisoning ourselves with the stuff we produce, abrading, out-gassing, and seeping into our air, our water, our land, our food—and basically those are the only things we have to look after before there’s no we in that sentence. It gets into our bodies, of course, and it certainly gets into our minds. And designers are feeding and feeding this cycle, helping to turn everyone and everything into either a consumer or a consumable. And when you think about it, this is kind of grotesque. “Consumer” isn’t a dirty word exactly, but it probably oughta be.

Systems Before Artifacts
Before we design anything new, we should examine how we can use what already exists to better ends. We need to think systems before artifacts, services before products, adopting Thackara’s use/not own principles at every step. And when new products are needed, they’ll be obvious and appropriate, and then can we conscientiously pump up fossil fuels and start polymerizing them. Product design should be part of a set of tools we have for solving problems and celebrating life. It is a means, not an end.

Teach Sustainability Early
Design education is at a crossroads, with many schools understanding the potentials, opportunities, and obligations of design, while others continue to teach students how to churn out pretty pieces of garbage. Institutions that stress sustainability, social responsibility, cultural adaptation, ethnography, and systems thinking are leading the way. But soon they will come to define what industrial design means. (A relief to those constantly trying to define the discipline today!) This doesn’t mean no aesthetics. It just means a keener eye on costs and benefits.

Screws Better Than Glues
This is lifted directly from the Owner’s Manifesto, which addresses how the people who own things and the people who make them are in a kind of partnership. But it’s a partnership that’s broken down, since almost all of the products we produce cannot be opened or repaired, are designed as subassemblies to be discarded upon failure or obsolescence, and conceal their workings in a kind of solid-state prison. This results in a population less and less confident in their abilities to use their hands for anything other than pushing buttons and mice, of course. But it also results in people fundamentally not understanding the workings of their built artifacts and environments, and, more importantly, not understanding the role and impact that those built artifacts and environments have on the world. In the same way that we can’t expect people to understand the benefits of a water filter when they can’t see the gunk inside it, we can’t expect people to sympathize with greener products if they can’t appreciate the consequences of any products at all.

Design for Impermanence
In his Masters Thesis, “The Paradox of Weakness: Embracing Vulnerability in Product Design,” my student Robert Blinn argues that we are the only species who designs for permanence—for longevity—rather than for an ecosystem in which everything is recycled into everything else. Designers are complicit in this over-engineering of everything we produce (we are terrified of, and often legally risk-averse to, failure), but it is patently obvious that our ways and means are completely antithetical to how planet earth manufactures, tools, and recycles things. We choose inorganic materials precisely because biological organisms cannot consume them, while the natural world uses the same building blocks over and over again. It is indeed Cradle-to-Cradle or cradle-to-grave, I’m afraid.

Balance Before Talents
The proportion of a solution needs to balance with its problem: we don’t need a battery-powered pooper scooper to pick up dog poop, and we don’t need a car that gets 17 MPG to, well, we don’t need that car, period. We have to start balancing our ability to be clever with our ability to be smart. They’re two different things.

Metrics Before Magic
Metrics do not get in the way of being creative. Almost everything is quantifiable, and just the exercise of trying to frame up ecological and labor impacts can be surprisingly instructive. So on your next project, if you’ve determined that it may be impossible to quantify the consequences of a material or process or assembly in a design you’re considering, maybe it’s not such a good material or process or assembly to begin with. There are more and more people out there in the business of helping you to find these things out, by the way; you just have to call them.

Climates Before Primates
This is the a priori, self-evident truth. If we have any hope of staying here, we need to look after our home. And our anthropocentric worldview is literally killing us. “Design serves people”? Well, I think we’ve got bigger problems right now.

Context Before Absolutely Everything
Understanding that all design happens within a context is the first (and arguably the only) stop to make on your way to becoming a good designer. You can be a bad designer after that, of course, but you don’t stand a chance of being a good one if you don’t first consider context. It’s everything: In graphics, communication, interaction, architecture, product, service, you name it—if it doesn’t take context into account, it’s crap. And you already promised not to make any more of that.

So there’s my manifesto. A little stern perhaps, but that’s what editing down to 1000 words will get you. The power of design is an amazing thing. Let’s wield it wisely.

Photos: design objects made from natural materials with value and longevity in mind: top, pre-Columbian textile found in Peru; indigo fragment from Japan; Anasazi bowl; Berber carpet.

Apologies to Mr. Chochinov for reprinting his manifesto without permission, but it cried out for dissemination. Please visit his site.

Animation shot at Type Bookstore, 883 Queen Street West, Toronto, Canada.

Photography is only minimally allowed at Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter house in Arizona, Taliesin West, so most of these photographs are only exterior shots. I confess I’ve always been less impressed by FLW’s work that most are, so this post is not in praise of FLW or Taliesin West. I visited the place only experimentally, to see if it would change my mind, and though I was hoping it would,  it really didn’t. It’s an interesting place, an odd place, but I wasn’t overwhelmed by its architecture or interiors or design. So much has been written about Taliesin West already that I’ll just offer this potted version: FLW had been to Arizona for work, enjoyed it, and when he began to ail in the Eastern winters his doctor prescribed months in a dry climate and Wright decided to winter in Arizona thereafter. He set up a “desert camp” near Scottsdale and over the years slowly transformed the tent camp (with the help of a lot of slave labour by students) into a built structure. This is how he derived what later because the “desert style” he was famed for, and spawned sprawling ranchers all over American cities and suburbs.

The rooms are odd, with entrances so low you must stoop and. Wright used pony walls or sharp corners at room entrances to produce unexpected room vistas. Much of the furniture is built in. The living room was built to accommodate fairly large parties and encourage conversation while providing a view of the desert.

Wright tried to work around the angle of the sun and the sun’s heat. In doing so he somewhat reinvented the wheel, for of course this is not the world’s first desert friendly structure, but his innovations vastly influenced building styles in American’s Southwest, South and California. You can read more about Taliesin West here.

I’m not sure exactly why I find Taliesin West somewhat off-putting. It was built with local rock, among other locally available (if not local) materials, but all of the beams of imported Douglas fir are painted a sort of awful reddish brown that is all too familiar now if you’ve ever seen 70s tract housing. The whole complex is built on an obsession with the 30-60-90 triangle, which is not only deployed in roof angles but in very deco-flavoured design components including the furniture. There’s a certain pointiness to everything that I suppose is meant to mimic desert shapes, shapes I nevertheless didn’t identify in the surrounding hills. The triangular deco is juxtaposed with other decorative elements including the Chinese, constructivisim, Egyptian-tinged moderne and that same sort of medieval hobbityness that you see in the original Taliesin and his other houses. It’s as if FLW didn’t have faith in the simplicity of his “new” architectural form and needed to explain it through decorative historical reference.

As a textile person I’m always wary of the inattention to fabrics and surfaces, and the cheapness, thinness and clumsiness of the upholstered built-ins and furniture just suggest a failed concept of comfort. His celebrated “origami” armchair, each made from a simple sheet of plywood, is awkward and uncomfortable, as are the rooms in general. Bedouin desert camps seem far more comfortable than this. The manicured green lawns in the desert, and an angular over-slick pool, just suggest resistance to the environment rather than Wright’s much-discussed sensitivity to the landscape. Methinks the exaggeratedly rough mortaring of the local stone doth protest too much. The traditional European-style sculptures in cast bronze plonked everywhere are either an apology or corrective or I am not sure what. Parts of the place seemed a distracting, uncomfortable jumble verging on kitsch.

My sincere apologies to those whose architectural pantheons FLW presides over. I may just be trapped behind a giant wall of aesthetic prejudice built inadvertently by the commercial developers who subsequently riffed off Wright in lazy tract settlements all over America.

I have tried to photograph the place as flatteringly as possible, to make up for my criticism.

Above, a classical bronze sculpture half out of Lord of the Rings, plonked next to standing rock cemented into odd rock plinth. Below, quite a lovely red Chinese door oddly mixed into local rock somewhat swamped by rough mortar. I admit I like the triangular glass surround for that door. But of all FLW’s reds in the complex, that Chinese red was the only one that worked for me, and for me colour is inordinately important.

Above, the dinner cabaret room. Supposedly built for comfort but I didn’t find it that way. Its acoustics however are absolute genius. No parallel walls to produce sound reflection or any phase cancellation. Just superb. Apparently FLW’s wife used it to her advantage, being able to hear all whispered gossip at every table, or so our guide told us.

Above, brutalist, concrete round window decorated with multiple chinoiserie.

Above, an illegal shot showing the interior of the drafting room, jammed full of the desks where FLW’s students laboured. Below, my favourite object at TW: a doorknob in the bathroom.

Sedona, Arizona.