Grids and Guns, Cars and Avatars

Guest blogger Phil Patton highlights some books he is currently reading, and rereading, on a wide range of design subjects. —SK

Phil Patton

Guest blogger: Phil Patton (New York Times, New York)

Profile    Notable Books of 2011

This year marks the bicentennial of the New York City street grid, explored in an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York and the accompanying book, The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811–2011 (2012), edited by Hilary Ballon.

The story of the grid is all about utility and efficiency and real estate development—but it is also about the democratization of the city. There were complaints about a city plan that included no noble squares for cathedrals or city halls and no noble boulevards for vistas. But the very equality of the block, as Rem Koolhaas has argued, produced the competitive flowering of skyscraper design.

The Greatest Grid by Hilary Ballon (Columbia University Press, 2012)

Reading about the grid’s history sent me back to take another look at Koolhaas’s Delirious New York (1978, 1997) and—to see how specific neighborhoods change even as the blocks remain the same—made me dip again into The WPA Guide to New York City: The Federal Writers' Project Guide to 1930s New York (1939, 1995). There, you can travel almost street by street, time travel style, through New York City. Another look at city geography with a smart discussion of the city grid is Phillip Lopate’s Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (2004).

Among other things, the exhibition and the book explain the tools and methods of surveying—the theodolite and Gunter’s chain. The New York city grid is one of many American grids that surveyors would slap down over the continent: grids to possess and sell land, grids for distributing water, power and information. (Today we speak of getting off the grid.)

The story of this larger national grid is told in Andro Linklater’s Measuring America (2002), which is productively read while looking out an airplane window and noting the neat roads and fence lines of middle America. The father of our country, Linklater points out, was a surveyor. General and statesman, George Washington was also a land speculator, and as a young man learned to lay out lots and plat maps.
 

On the Grid by Scott Huler (Rodale, 2010, 2011)

Both Washington and Jefferson were critical in establishing a national system of land marking and measure. The European “conquest” of America meant laying Cartesian grids across a varied and often uncooperative landscape. Manhattan’s grid flattened its hills and valleys. The national land grid ignored the difference between dry desert and fertile prairie—as the continent was laid out in sections and townships and 40-acre plots, immigrants were swindled with sales of dry or rocky land for farming.

Scott Huler's book On the Grid: A Plot of Land, An Average Neighborhood, and the Systems that Make Our World Work provides an entertaining look at how all those grids really work, from a personal perspective.

Innovations in devices for war have usually preceded those in devices for peace: human nature, alas, is like that. But the patterns of high tech at the Pentagon or early gun building can also be instructive in developing more benign technology. The possibility of challenging an established industry is the moral of Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun (2012) by Paul M. Barrett, a new book on the famed hand gun. It tells how one amateur inventor looked at a static industry from the outside and then changed it.

The story of the Glock is a parable of design with a fresh perspective. Firearm manufacture of course was the first modern industrial enterprise because it pioneered the use of interchangeable parts—the so-called “American system” that was applied to make sewing machines, typewriters, cash registers and ultimately all the machinery of modern life. The social implications of the gun world, from the Colt Peacemaker to the AK-47. touch on virtually every aspect of design—invention, marketing, cost, and maintainability. 

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (2011, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Barrett’s book on the Glock could usefully be read in tandem with C. J. Chivers’s The Gun (2011, 2010), which explains how the “just good enough” but rugged Kalashnikov became the tool of freedom fighters and terrorists alike. Both books in a sense continue the story told by John Ellis in his classic The Social History of the Machine Gun (1986). One key tale here is of the resistance of the French army to the machine gun. French generals even insisted their troops continue wearing Napoleonic-era uniforms with red stripes, however handy they turned out to be for gunners to aim at. The story is relevant not just to weaponry (and Pentagon budget cutters ought to read it) but to the many enterprises today facing the prospect of disruptive technology in their business.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman is one of the leaders of the new emphasis in economics on psychology, providing a richer understanding of decision making. This thinking offers critical support for designers, because it emphasizes that far more is involved in buying or choosing products than so called “rational” decision making on price or even value. In Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) is ammunition for every designer who ever talked to a sales or marketing executive: proof that that buyers don’t only pick the coffee maker with more buttons or the family sedan with more rear leg room. The book is not easy going, but well worth dipping into and out of.

A few years ago, Ford product development executives who had read Kahneman’s work began development of a new car not with the usual grid of cold hard numerical targets but by imagining ideal customers, with names and personalities, to guide designers. This sort of holistic thinking gets a boost in Kahneman’s approach, which is a more profound version of the sort of ideas found in Freakonomics.

Peter Teufel by Chris Bangle (2012)

It is rare when a designer writes a novel. Chris Bangle may be the first automobile designer to ever produce one. Bangle is the controversial former head of BMW design who left in 2009 to set up his own consultancy. His book Peter Teuful: A Tale of Care Design in 3 Parts (2012) is so far available only as an e-text. It is the tale of—surprised?—an automobile designer who travels into future. The bones of the tale have been borrowed from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. And Teuful, if you didn’t get it, is a pun on the German for devil.

Chris Bangle’s reputation with some BMW traditionalists verged on the diabolical, thanks to his expressive surfaces and so-called “Bangle butt” rear ends. He also dreamed up such futuristic notions as GINA, a car with a pliable, expressive fabric skin. In the book, he imagines a future in which vehicles assemble themselves from parts on demand. Some are called “Cvars”—a Philip Dick like conjunction of car and avatar.

There is a bonus for designers who read the book: Bangle is holding a contest for illustrated imaginings of some of the sort of vehicles he describes in his text. Turning the tables on design managers, he is offering as top prize a week-long workshop at Bangle Associates studio near Turin or a 2000 euro cash purse. For the terms of the contest, see the Chris Bangle Associates website (www.chrisbangleassociates.com), which is so far the only source for the book as well.