By Michael Salvo
In the years since it was built, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in Stewart Township, Pennsylvania, has become a kind of Modernist Disney World. Trams shuttle sunburnt tourists from the extensive parking lots to the entryway. Signage points the way to the ticket booth to be divested of burdensome cash as visitors are ushered into the hushed lush green garden and amble toward the building.
I was aware that Fallingwater has been periodically closed and partially inaccessible for repairs. Wrights’ failures: the foundation is crumbling at Fallingwater. The insides of this house are gorgeous. They are beautiful. But no one actually lives the way Wright insisted they live. You have to live a Wright life, the right life, to survive the imposition of the architecture upon you.
Fulfilling my role as tourist, I was taking many pictures and began to notice how many problems, minor and major, were visible. There were numerous patches: reconstruction work on cement and plaster exterior structures. The building has been standing 80 years—since the late 1930s. Some of these problems—mostly water damage—stemmed from the fact that Wright did not take into account elements like water’s impact on the materials he had chosen. Without constant and continuous upkeep, Fallingwater would have already fallen down. Fallenwater.
There are stalactites growing from the structures connecting the walkway from the guesthouse to the main house. The minerals are eating the structure. This is a damp little valley; at the time it was barely drizzling, and there was substantial water washing down the rock face—more than a ripple but not a torrent. Over time, I can see the supports bridging the walkway channeling the water into and onto the braces, creating the seepage that results in these stalactites of dripstone. I am watching it happen; I have no architectural training. I am just watching the relationship between limestone, water, and cement, watching the structure slowly erode, slowly bubble, slowly wash away.
The theory of Fallingwater is beautiful. Its reality is less harmonious. It ignores its natural context and fights against nature, pretending limestone and water do not result in small amounts of carbonic acid. Perhaps taking pains to redirect water away from the limestone, accounting for the water table, and directing the flows to the creek without flowing on, over, and through parts of the structure itself is all that’s really necessary. But I am not an architectural historian. I simply want to point out this gap between theory and application, a failure of praxis, to account for the impacts of water and limestone on cement structure.
Fallingwater Is a Failure
The building is a failure because it isn’t doing what it was built to do: it is only a monument to modernist architectural genius. Nor has the building really changed human behavior or patterns of action—habitués. At night, Fallingwater is silent: nobody lives here. And it is perhaps good for the rural Pennsylvania economy when the ski slopes aren’t open, and iron is no longer poured in Pittsburgh’s foundries, that this site is an architectural amusement park, attracting thousands upon thousands to gawk. Perhaps it’s better than letting the limestone molder and the supports collapse, letting the vines pull apart the mortar, and the trees crash through the skylights. At least at Fallingwater, all these people have changed their behavior to witness, to travel, to make a pilgrimage to the high church of Frank Lloyd Wright as it struggles to survive against topography, geology, and chemistry.
But Wright and the modernists were not without their own ethics: Wright believed he was on the path of improving human existence by bringing more light into homes, improving how we utilized space by designing it for the lives we wished we lived—or more accurately, the lives he imagined we should live. He also imagined entire suburbs: his Usonian homes and Broadacre City. Corbusier in France believed his designs could decrease domestic violence. Neither architect consulted with their users, but rather designed spaces, artifacts, processes, and technologies for users, and to change the behavior of users, without consulting the users themselves. Perhaps my rant applies to modernist thinkers in general. Even the binary distinction, separating users from producers, feels dated.
Users and/with Producers
Instead of a user-producer binary, current practice insists on iterative design wedded to participatory culture. In part, this shift from designing for to designing with technological consumers recognizes both the high cost of technological design and development, and the even higher cost of product failure, as well as always-faster contemporary software design. “Facebook,” for example, “will never be finished.” Interestingly, the source of this quote is in question. It is given to Jesse Eisenberg, the actor playing Mark Zuckerberg in 2010’s movie The Social Network, and it captures the social networking phenomenon, but Zuckerberg has not been directly quoted. He has said things like it, but the phrase has never been directly tied to him. Somehow Facebook manages to upset users with each change while Amazon launches new features and redesigns and products without raising user hackles. It is old news: new tools will never be finished, and versions will proliferate in ever-maddening new cycles of almost-finished “stable” builds where the new tool is the error-reporting dialogue box. After a crash, users are offered the opportunity to report the crash with varying levels of contextual information provided.
Participatory culture and iterative prototyping already reveal some of their faults, and their shortcomings. But the strengths, as Huatong Sun’s work attests (See Sun 2006, 2012), not only complete the cultural circuit so dear to cultural studies theorists, but also make complex systems robust (see Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile). In short, building vigorous systems involves redundancy, clarity, and effective use of what Peter Moreville and Thomas Rickert independently articulate as ambient data. Sun’s articulation of the cultural circuit is important not because of the new annoyances that frequent updates and user input strategies reveal, but because the contrast created by valuing the continued input and using that input to impact the design and functionality of the artifact continues to distinguish postmodern design from modern design, and at least gestures toward a contemporary design ethic.
Sun’s research articulates culturally embedded technology design. She builds her authority partly through including many examples of designers engaged with users and participants. Engagement with technology and people demonstrates the profound impact closing the cultural circuit has had on the design of technologies. It is participation borne of valuing users, valuing participants, and of engaging those people in discussion. It moves toward dialogic engagement with partners. Seen in this way, arguments for usability and participatory design share common ancestry with those posited for accessible and simple language. These discourses, these design languages, concern themselves with an ethical engagement with otherness and the ethical burden of understanding and hearing multiple voices of culture that are not often heard. It is the voice of the subaltern, or the voice of the Other, those people and populations often not engaged in dialogue with economically empowered communities and organizations.
We have to learn to hear into the interstitial silences and to value the voices of those traditionally unheard, or silenced. Designing for and with disabled and differently-abled users—Universal Design—then also becomes part of a larger discourse not only of ethical and culturally attuned artifact creation, a method for design, but part of a larger societal concern with inclusion and dignity, more broadly construed.
Behavioral Innovation
How is it that Facebook manages to upset its participants with each change, each introduction of new features and taxonomies, and reworked navigation pathways and organizational taxonomies? In contrast, how does Amazon continue to innovate without upsetting users, while making dramatic changes to expected patterns of use? Interestingly, and in contrast to Facebook, Amazon demands payment for its services. In fact, millions of Amazon customers pay an annual fee for access to premium Amazon services, while Facebook is aggressive in its assertion that everyday participants do not pay and will not pay.
By defining its relationship with its participants as explicitly commercial, Amazon defines its interaction as transactional and, if dissatisfied, customers can complain and receive monetary compensation in recognition. The real economic exchange limits the relationship to one of commerce, and it seems participants understand their role in this context: they are consumers, customers, and they produce responses in the form of reviews about products. The cultural circuit, though closely circumscribed, is also comprehended by participants as well as by Amazon employees (note that I have kept aside Amazon’s labor relations and a growing number of worker complaints). But the relationship between Amazon and its participants is a familiar one: people transfer their understanding of commercial interactions across the virtual boundary and play the accustomed role of customer, with added benefits of digital communication, data-driven logistics, and infinite-seeming selection.
Facebook, on the other hand, has blazed new territory and gets punished for innovation. It isn’t that the organization has failed to clearly define roles for itself. Rather, there are no models for understanding the complex and sometimes conflicting actions taken by different parts of a large and new bureaucracy. As maintainer and administrator of the interface for our friendships, opinion-sharing, picture-sharing, and humble-bragging, the social and cultural interests are sometimes in conflict with its publicly traded stock, commercial interface, and company identity. Google, with its famous, or infamous, promise to “not be evil,” has run into similar challenges. Facebook users seem to get angry precisely when change to the interface and/or functionality remind them that their participation, their opinions, their interactions, and their attention are—sometimes seemingly magically—turned into a commercial product that make Facebook worth (currently) 160 billion dollars (versus Amazon, which is currently worth about 158 billion, according to Forbes). But these are the new, emergent concerns: both organizations successfully invent new experience architecture.
Things, Space, Ethics, Design
In including the long description of structural failures at Fallingwater above, I want to call attention to the structural problems that genius-centered design reveals, as well as the power dynamics it conceals. Wright had lofty goals, driving both architecture and the people inhabiting the structures he designed to prescribed behaviors. All architectures encourage and discourage behaviors—Donald Norman called them forcing functions in 1988, and this terminology remains in the latest revised edition of the book (Norman 1988, 2013). Norman’s user-centered design has been important as design attention shifted in the late 20th century from things to screens, from devices and artifacts to interfaces and virtual places. As we move back to artifacts—things—and then to larger places and spaces, the lessons culled from explorations of virtual space can similarly be transcribed from the virtual back to the physical, with all that we learned about encouraging and valuing participation.
The ability to recognize, acknowledge, value, and include those traditionally excluded from the design of artifacts has to be transported back to design in the real world, informed by the driving participatory ethic of user-centered design. There can be no return to the designer-centered visions of Frank Lloyd Wright, Corbusier, or Albert Speer. These modern architects are celebrated precisely for the wrong reasons, as they sought to discipline the human users of their designs rather than design spaces that accommodated human desire and activities. Aggressively, judgmentally, deciding which human activities and appetites were permissible in a Usonian home, in Broadacre, or as Corbusier was fond of saying, “Revolution or Architecture.” No revolutionary, his saying was a warning that, without modern architecture, there would be social revolution and disharmony among social classes unless design was used as a social balm.
Explicitly rhetorical, explicitly ethical: experience architecture self-consciously accepts it is engaged in fraught territory and invites participants into the process of design. It values a completed cultural circuit, meaning that some expertise, specialty, and professional status accrues to producers, but this status comes with responsibility for those participating and dwelling within the designed artifact. It implies both an ethic to attend to the voices present among participants as well as an ethic of care that requires translation of the stated needs of participants into palpable change of the experience of the artifact. Experience architecture also recognizes that design for the virtual and for the physical are mutually informing and mutually reinforcing.
To design means to accept responsibility for articulating competing and contradictory voices and accounting for a range of values, turning what traditional systems of communication might label noise into signal, and to listen into the interstitial silences in order to hear new modes of discourse—a far cry from designing high-rise towers to literally lift privileged citizens above the city. Architecture need not be an imposition of wealth and power upon silenced masses of people, but rather acknowledge the many competing stakeholders of the city, of technologies, and that wealth and power flows throughout culture, connecting producers and consumers, blurring boundaries between them, and acknowledging there are technologies and techniques that require both accountability and change.
The boundaries blur between the producers and consumers—prosumers—as well as between the powerful and the disempowered. It is an age of asymmetrical warfare as well as asymmetrical cultural exchange and communication, beyond broadcast into peer-to-peer.
I wonder about Fallingwater moldering in the Pennsylvania hills. Is it, rightfully, a monument to a way of designing that has now passed, or is it a reminder of what to avoid moving forward? Is it a reminder of the height of modernist hubris from the industrial age, a fitting atheist temple declaiming the decontextualized aims of a lost time? Does it remind us to listen more closely and attentively for the voices that might not otherwise be useful for establishing robust, sustainable architectures and the experiences these human-designed environments support?
MICHAEL J. SALVO is associate professor and director of professional writing at Purdue University. He is currently researching innovation in Midwest manufacturing as sites of future technical communication practice as well as rhetoric and experience architecture with Liza Potts.
The author wishes to thank John Sherrill for his timely input.
References
Moreville, Peter. 2005. Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Norman, Donald. 1988. The Design of Everyday Things. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Norman, Donald. 1988. The Psychology of Everyday Things. Doubleday, New York.
Norman, Donald. 2013. The Design of Everyday Things, Revised and Expanded Edition. MIT Press.
Rickert, Thomas. 2013. Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Sun, Huatong. 2006. The Triumph of Users: Achieving Cultural Usability Goals With User Localization. Technical Communication Quarterly, 15.4: 457–481.
Sun, Huatong. 2012. Cross-Cultural Technology Design: Creating Culture-Sensitive Technology for Local Users. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. 2012. Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder. New York, NY: Random House.
