have been found only in fancy homes, but this Australian carrying tray would never be. It was made by Aboriginals, in the time before the first European migrants arrived in 1788, from the bark or outer edge of a tree trunk. Women carried fruit, fish or their child in it, holding it under their arms or on their heads.
Its open-ended, concave shape means that it was probably a digging implement too, and also used for separating heavier from lighter granular materials. It is sculpted but also heat-bent. To stop it from cracking and to make it waterproof, it will have been oiled, probably with emu fat.
Our sense of the tool’s beauty comes in part from the fact that it visually echoes nature – the curve of the tree – and also from the sensuality and patina of the oiling. More than that, the designer-artisan has found a shape which underlines, or is inherent within, the three jobs it does: carrying, digging and winnowing. As we look at it, we imagine it doing each, and it starts to seem like a distillation of rural women’s work, a mathematical equation.
In the dark homes of early peoples, it was of course hard to see. In the late 1200s in Italy, monks illuminating manuscripts began to attach to their noses lenses on wire, wooden or shell frames, to enhance their vision, to bring detail into focus. Reading glasses were born and lives were transformed.
In this pair of glasses, from the twentieth century, the upper edge is darker than the lower, and more pointed at each end. The design echoes eyebrows, creating an architrave. In some societies, ideal faces are heart shaped or triangular, with the apex downwards. These glasses’ exaggeration of the brow width plays to that ideal. Earlier models pinched the nose (‘pince-nez’), but these rest on it and, via extended sides, the ears too, thereby applying minimal pressure to the wearer’s skin. The whole front section has not a single straight line, nor do our faces. There is an almost Pictish flow to the design. The jagged lines of the Iranian bowl would work better on a warrior helmet than on these glasses.
The most famous design movement of the twentieth century, the Bauhaus, produced this teapot in 1924.
Human beings by then had produced thousands of pot designs, but not one quite like this. Its main hemispherical chamber has similar proportions to the Iranian bowl – that narrow base/wide brim ideal. But it sits on a cross, and the spout does something like the pin on the brooch: it daggers the curves. The lid is a circle within a circle, but set back to the rear of the pot, to counterbalance the spout-dagger. Beneath the lid is a leaf infusion chamber. The black ebony handle is a half-moon rudder, which makes a coracle of the pot. A century earlier, its surfaces might have been etched and decorated, with metal figures or even a landscape on its lid, but here the lid is an ultra-simple mirror, and we get to see the basic rivets which attach the handle to the body. The designer wants us to look at the pure geometric forms which underlie the object, and also how it is made.
Clearly there was revisionist visual and material thinking at the Bauhaus. The tea infuser’s designer, Marianne Brandt, was a central figure there. The school emphasised the interaction of the arts and, appropriately, she was a painter, sculptor and photographer as well as designer. She and her colleagues were inspired by the medieval craft guild system which emphasised the integrity of materials and practices, as well as the role the craftsperson plays in the city. The Bauhaus embraced the industrial age and manufacturing techniques, but felt that that age’s use of workers as cogs in a machine had resulted in a loss of soul, that designers were not understanding their object, its function and materials, holistically. They had to problem-solve. Design was research. Brandt’s teapots were research. She made several of them as a student in 1924. One recently sold for $361,000.
It is hard to think of two less related objects in human history than a teapot and a space satellite, but look at Sputnik 1, the first manufactured object to orbit the Earth.
It is like two of Brandt’s teapots welded together. Launched by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957, it orbited the Earth every 96 minutes – 1,440 times, before it fell to Earth. The spindles are two sets of antennae. It contained three batteries, a fan for heat regulation and a radio transmitter, and was filled with dry nitrogen.
All this was achieved on a small scale by its design leader Mikhail Stepanovich Khomyakov. He made Sputnik 1 no bigger than a beach ball, and had its surface covered with 1mm aluminium-magnesium-titanium. Function was primary, of course – the satellite had to be a heat-resistant, self-cooling radio station – and yet Khomyakov, like Brandt, used one of nature’s most basic forms, the sphere, as his model. He had an orb circle an orb. It is possible to see the Pictish horseshoe and pin in the Sputnik, and, if we look at the shapes it reflects, the pattern on the Iranian bowl.
Reprinted courtesy of Össur
Coming into the twenty-first century, our last design object is this running blade.
Its shape shows that design sometimes requires a counter-intuitive thought detour. When an athlete loses his or her leg, the obvious thing would be to replace it with something that looks like a leg – vertical with some kind of ankle joint and a telescoping, compressing, shock-absorbing system. The aim, you would think, would be to make the prosthetic resemble a real leg.
But research by the Icelandic company Össur showed that it needed to have horizontal stress capability. Running is, after all, forward, so an unexpected line – a parabola which flattens at the top – became the shape. Material is again key: carbon fibre makes it light, flexible and strong. Though it extends to below the knee, the blade’s shape looks like a foot and ankle, the toes pointing left, the heel raised. Nike designed the lower part of the prosthetic specifically for world-record-holding runner Sarah Reinertsen.
What would the makers of the Iranian bowl, or the Australian tray, have thought of the running blade? By looking at Reinertsen using it, they would have seen, and probably marvelled at, its function. A problem in the world had been solved. It had been solved in conjunction with an awareness of visual pleasure or geometry. It seems absurd to suggest that the Iranian, the Australian, the German, the Russian, the Icelander and the American had much in common, but designers look into the future. They see an object that is not yet there, but that will satisfy when it is. They look beneath the fuselage.
This chapter has been about things, and us as things. It has given our story a set, a set design. We have seen how looking describes self, how homes shape behaviour and how we see how things are used. Looking has been material in these pages, but in the next chapter it is back to immaterial things. We start with desire.
CHAPTER 4
GROWING UP LOOKING: DESIRE, ABSTRACTION AND GOD
LOOKING, BODIES AND DESIRE
Imagine, now, a child who is approaching puberty in Italy in the late 1400s. She is becoming aware of sexual desire and is developing the intellectual ability to think more abstractly.
In the 1460s, a four-metre block of marble lay in the grounds of Florence’s cathedral. Almost fifty years later, the authorities commissioned a twenty-six-year-old Tuscan from a banking family to make a sculpture from it of a warrior king who may have lived around 1000 BCE. Whilst still a boy, the warrior had killed a giant on a battlefield by hurling five smooth rocks at him, and then cut off his head.
The sculptor worked on the commission for three years, drawing on the marble’s surface rather than using a life model. Usually in art, the warrior in question was depicted after his triumph, and with the giant’s severed head at his feet, but the sculptor decided to show him before the killing, once he had decided to square up to the giant, but in advance of him setting off. His brow would be tense with resolve, his eyes