Purposive Drift

Celebrating the mess

I haven't noticed Jaffer Kolb's writing on 3Quarks before, but I found myself warming to his piece I read today, in particular this extract:

"Nothing sets me quite on edge as much as things that aspire to be perfect but fall short. Crisp trousers? What about that microscopic fray at the bottom right corner of the left pant? And that tie? The little tail is sticking out just enough to make me want to take a pair of shears to it. The desire to attain perfection inevitably magnifies the ways in which the aspirant falls short, in a kind of asymptotic frustration.

This, for me, was the ultimate failing of modernism in architecture and design. An architecture of purity? Designing with purity in mind in a fundamentally impure world is idiotic. And whether this purity is in concept, form, or physical execution is irrelevant. The best architects understand that we live in a conceptually, formally, and physically messy world."

My only quarrel is that I wouldn't limit this to architects. This is a message for all of us. Accepting that "we live in a conceptually, formally, and physically messy world" seems to me to offer a route to a more humane, celebratory way of living in the world.