‘Hybridity and Experimental Aesthetics in the Performances of Anne Imhof’

Artificial lighting has received increased attention from urban scholars and geographers in recent years. It is celebrated for its experimental aesthetics and experiential qualities and critiqued for its adverse effects on biological life and the environment. Yet scholars and practitioners unite in their disapproval of uniform and homogenous lighting that follows from standardised lighting technologies and design principles. Absent from debates in urban scholarship and geography, however, is any serious consideration of how lighting designers respond to such standardised measures and regulations. In this article, I address this lack of academic attention by exploring how designers overturn the restrictive challenges posed by the standards and regulations of the design and planning process. Drawing on interviews with designers involved in the lighting design of a mixed-use redevelopment project in Canning Town, East London, I demonstrate how the interpretation and translation of lighting standards and regulations resist the tendency to predetermine design aesthetics and functions. By drawing attention away from the technical specifications and numerical values that are prescribed in standards and regulations, and towards lighting’s experiential and performative effects, the article argues that lighting designers can play an important role in challenging how standards and regulations are measured, defined and maintained. Calling on urban scholars to play a more prominent role in foregrounding this process of translation, I suggest that standards and regulations can provide frameworks within which luminous differentiation and preservation of darkness can be achieved, playing a potentially crucial role in ensuring a socially and environmentally sustainable transition to energy efficient lighting.

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Ulm Aesthetics

Journal of Design History ◽

10.1093/jdh/epz038 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 33 (2) ◽

pp. 140-157

Author(s):

Matthew Holt

Keyword(s):

Industrial Design ◽

Experimental Aesthetics ◽

History Of ◽

History Of Design ◽

Information Aesthetics

Abstract In order to contribute to the widening and enriching of the notion of aesthetics as it applies to design and so to the historian’s task in this field, this essay examines the theories of aesthetics promulgated at the Hochschule für Gestaltung at Ulm (1953–1968), still a much-understudied institution. In particular, it will investigate the confluence at that school of semiotics and semantics, information aesthetics, and experimental aesthetics. It looks at the break Ulm made with its predecessor, the Bauhaus, on the role of art and aesthetics in design. That break is seen as result of the HfG’s re-evaluation of the profile and substance of industrial design, a re-evaluation itself contingent on an updated understanding of the contemporary ‘environment’ (Umwelt). The article also examines the key aesthetic theories of the figures who passed through Ulm and shaped its curriculum in order to establish the influence of those figures on the wider history of design.

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