The future is a curved, white, and shiny cocoon of plastic. It envelops our bodies as suits, shapes chairs that hold us in place, and surrounds us in an eggshell. That was the message I received from viewing the spacesuits, furnishings, interiors and even exterior of the Space X Falcon 9, Elon Musk’s most advanced manned (and wo-manned) capsule. The successful launch was means to be a prototype for the equipment that will take us away from an earth he and his rapacious billionaire friends are mining and polluting into extinction to a new place of exploitation, Mars. Let’s call the whole idea and design the most advanced example of x-ism.
The Falcon 9, created by an inhouse team augmented by experts who names the egocentric Musk of course withholds at all costs, is in many ways a more complete version of the Tesla car that is now cruising the roads by the hundreds of thousands. You can also find x-ism in his other ventures, from the redesign of Twitter to the Boring company tunnel in Las Vegas that lets you bypass a mile of the Sunset Strip. And all those efforts are themselves an extension, most clearly, of the aesthetic Jonathan Ive and the late Steve Jobs developed for Apple, but also of the kind of environments Zaha Hadid was able to create for the Soho development company in China and other blob-fancying designers are oozing through our built environment around the world.
This is not, to judge from the images of the Falcon 9, an unpleasant space. Nor is it ugly, unless you have an aversion to scenes that might remind you of sci-fi horrors where the monster is bound to erupt out of a place that pristine and organized. Every surface and form flows into the other using a variety of curves, softened angles, and articulated layers. Each one has been obviously considered not only for its utility and use of material, but also for its visual effect. The chairs on which the astronauts sit are highly evolved versions of the Saarinen Womb Chair or other such midcentury masterpieces of minimalist, but monumental furniture design.
Nor is all white and continuous, either here or in other elements of the Falcon program. The struts holding up the chairs are splayed pistons that recall the kind of supports holding up the roofs of our newest airport terminals and expo halls. The material where the bodies rest is black. On the straight panels, rivets are visible. The screens are suspended in space as black planes. The effect is a combination of fluidity and structural expression in which the human body and the equipment it uses come together. That is an intensification of the visual relationship between continuous planes, expressed structure, and articulated equipment that has been one of the continuous themes through modern architecture for the last century.
You can see the Falcon 9, in fact, both as another fetish object for architects to take as a model in the manner that Le Corbusier looked to ocean liners and cars and Norman Foster to airplanes, and as a merger of architecture and such objects. It is also a paradigm of what is happening all around us. The Tesla car interiors represent many of the same elements, even if their structural expression is largely repressed. Many stores and restaurants, the kind of spaces where enough money is spent to pushy design to the extremes, have similar qualities and firms such as OMA are dreaming of hospitals that will look like healing versions of those supposedly self-driving cars.
Tesla has even aspired to take the aesthetic to the home themselves: moving beyond the battery packs and solar roofs disguised as shingles they produced, they wanted, a few years ago, to mass produce homes in a similar look and hired top Ivy League talent to help them with that effort. Unfortunately, that effort went the way of all previous attempts to make buildings like we make cars, though ex-employees of the firm are still trying to take the venture further.
What is particularly fascinating to me about Musk’s aesthetic is the way it not only extends the ways Apple reshaped the devices we carry around all day –an effort that has also led to the Ive-ing of almost every object of every use—and intensified the work Hadid and others pioneered in architecture, but the ways in which it sums up some of the central themes in modernist architecture. It is a marriage of the trend towards the reduction of all forms to continuity and planes to abstraction, as well as the preference for white, as developed at the Bauhaus and other such laboratories of modernism, and structural expression.
The later emergence of ergonomics and human factors, first signaled at the design school in Ulm after the Second World War and developed by pioneers such as Dieter Rams until it turned into the implements everybody from OXO to most car manufacturers sell, then fed into this aesthetic. The blurring of building and object, space and form and its gelling into curves that only the computer has allowed us to make led to an approach to picturing the realities of our modern world and its technology that indeed had a sci-fi, and thus rather alien sensibility. We can now more readily accept this “form factor” as the future to which we are really destined.
This is not to say that X-ism is all-conquering. The design of the Falcon X already seems a tad dated, like all sci-fi: it projects the future we thought we were going to have. It is impossible to keep up with the future, because as soon as you make it real, it is already what was made in the past tense. Perhaps it is no coincidence that x-ism is the result of such a not only libertarian, but also reactionary political bias as Musk espouses. The future as utopia is totalitarian.But it certainly is beautiful. That, in the end, is how x-ism is good: as a vision of a total world that supposedly will liberate us but instead imprisons and destroys us. The true precedent for x-ism is not the Bauhaus or Apple, but the icily and eerily beautiful work the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and the architect Albert Speer did to visualize Adolf Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.
Read more: The latest from columnist Aaron Betsky includes reviews of: AMAA | DIGSAU | Art Biennales | B+ | William Morris's Red House | Dhaka | Marlon Blackwell's new mixed-use development | Eric Höweler’s social media posts,| Peter Braithwaite's architecture in Nova Scotia,| Powerhouse Arts, | the Mercer Museum, | and MoMA's Ed Ruscha exhibition.
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