What is Design?

 
Metaphor

"A fair suck of the sav, mate!" is a metaphor often heard in Australia as an appeal to its deep sense of egalitarianism. The metaphorically named 'Rolling Stones' gave us "Jumping Jack Flash is a gas, gas, gas" but since we know that JJF is not actually a gas it must mean that JJF is way above the rest, quite beyond definition. If I remember correctly 'sav' is short for sausage. Whether designers see this or not architecture, for Vitruvius, is largely about the architect himself for both his innate and learned qualities. Suffice to say, not everyone has all these faculties and no one could even aspire to inasmuch that would render the architect as far too important, for what his role really is; the interpretor of an higher order through his understanding of geometry. That has always been the critical misreading of the architect's essential role. To combine the envisaging and the living into a workable and pleasant piece of the thing, that will be seen, despite itself to represent the thing that it is providing: that is, a delimited self defining place that is expressive of itself; in another words, its own metaphor. "Words rolled off his tongue like billiard balls." is a metaphor but the imagery of billiard balls really do help in describing a smooth talking rhetorician. Buildings are a bit like that. Think of a cupboard door and ask what it means, then think bigger about more important doors; like those that lead into a courtroom, for example. What are doors if not metaphors for the start of proceedings. So irrespective of quality, design embeds meanings in certain human actions as solid, moving or stationary objects.

"Why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near?" creates an attractive rhyme as does that other great Burt Bacharach song, "And when I wake up, before I put on my make up, I say a little prayer for you." which is a great gesture of love displayed later by a promise to love me forever and ever. The creates a cyclic pattern of self explanatory declarations of passionate feelings punctuated by poetic descriptions of just another day in its external sense. Buildings should be like that, seemingly mundane and yet she does put on her make up every morning somewhere in a corner of a room which makes it a rather repetitive and insistent prayer but when in love simplicity is sumptious elegance. She later mentions that she does the same at coffee break and images of the Seagram Building style imbues an elegant modernity, cool, yet, in modern life, the building cannot match the vibrancy of animated feelings inside these people wound up in the dynamics of love, so they must live it in a song, rather than in real spaces made to complement such abiding passions.