More On Mistakes (who are our friends)

I love Bauhaus architecture.  I mean droolingly love it.  And one of the things I loved the first time I went to Ikea was that I could afford modernist design.  Having grown up on a diet of faux American colonial Ethan Allen furniture that my parents loved, finding Ikea was like heaven.

The only dent in my love of modernist design came from my best friend in college, Jiannis, who pointed out that it doesn't age well.  And he's right.

Jiannis is from Athens and having been there, I can really appreciate his perspective.  The thing about classical buildings and all manner of complex, organic, intricate, and ornate architecture is that it ages really well.  When you look at the Acropolis, battered and crumbling, it's still so beautiful, not "was" beautiful, "is" beautiful.  The marks of time only seem to enhance the design, not detract from it.

I don't know if you've ever seen the Guggenheim up close (in my home city of New York), but it's not been aging well at all.  Over the years I've seen small cracks drip rust onto the smooth white facade, completely spoiling the utopic icon of a building.  When rust drips into the detail of a neo classical building, the colors enhance the design, they don't destroy it.  So the question becomes, given that rust is going to form and roll down a building, is rust the problem, or is the design the problem, or is it a question of craftsmanship?  By which I mean, are the older building methods not better, but just better at hiding weakness and age.

These are important considerations for artists and lead right back to my previous post about mistakes.

The neoclassical model of architecture accepts the inevitability of rust and change and makes it a feature, not a bug, in the design.  But what it also does is give cover for mistakes, because, in a way, the rust is a "mistake" imposed by nature.

And what I mean by "cover" is that a more organic working mode allows more mistakes to be hidden and incorporated into the work than tight/robotic/anal retentive and yes, bauhaus styles do.

Mistakes in Kraftwerk's music would stand out, because it's a music which is about perfection, cold, calculated, machine-like perfection.  There is no room to be loose in something crafted that way.  Just as there is no room for rust on the facade of the Guggenheim New York.

I'm not actually arguing with the post I made previously.  I believe this whole subject is very nuanced and a ready field for many shades of gray.  But there is a point.

Mistakes can even be beneficial, as long as you work in a style that lets you capitalize on them.  It won't help your bauhaus building to have undulating lines, but if you can take the unintended results of your endeavors and incorporate them into the work, the work will grow and be better for it.  And sometimes, mistakes even communicate, telling you you're on the wrong path to start with, encouraging you to go back and take a different route.  Mistakes are your friends.  Welcome them and treat them as such.