Is Instagram Ruining Design?
The app can help expand our love of the designed world and incite our curiosity. Or it can turn us into sheep.
On instagram in trend stories and anxious conversations, the focus is almost always on commercial influencers and sponsored content, how the rise of the Instagram-friendly museum is cheapening our experience of art, or how Instagram’s gaze is making us worry about keeping our bodies and our houses in picture-perfect condition. But that’s not all Instagram can be.
There are plenty of people among Instagram’s 100 million users who march to the beat of their own aesthetic drum, sharing images of places and artifacts that will eventually be transformed into something new that will itself be posted on Instagram. With Instagram, you can copy or you can create. You can use it to contribute more visual delight to the digital world, or you can use it to collect digital souvenirs picked out by other people.
The result is a cycle that can be either vicious or virtuous. Vicious, when Instagram produces copycats and environments are ravaged by selfie-taking; virtuous, when Instagram provokes an interest in new places (like centuries-old Shaker villages) or new styles (like the Italian modernism that has now spawned a new trend, chubby furniture).
Take, for example, the Colossal Cacti. This April, at the annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California, these seven towering structures captured visitors’ imaginations: With upturned arms that mimicked the saguaro, they served as the backdrop for hundreds of selfies.
Office Kovacs, the designer of the Colossal Cacti, intended them to be a little bit more. “When you go into the desert towns you see symbols of the cacti everywhere,” said Andrew Kovacs, founder of Office Kovacs. “I like to collect old images of architecture, and there are postcards from the early 20th century of people in front of large cacti in the desert.”
The urge to capture, whether cactus or city, is far older than any app. Mr. Kovacs knew cactuses would be visually appealing, but he also wanted them to be useful, giving festivalgoers a meeting point and a place to sit in shade.
Architects have always designed spaces to be seen in specific ways: It is only now that everyone has the ability to stop and take the perfect shot. When I visit famous postwar American houses, I often find myself mimicking the vantage points of classic architectural photographers, as if the house is telling me how it wants to be seen. I’ll take that picture, but I will also try to find a detail you notice only when you are on site.
Not everyone has the approach. Rebecca Jennings recently wrote for Vox about Antelope Canyon in Page, Ariz., an undulating array of flame-colored sandstone walls made famous by their inclusion in Microsoft Windows 7 desktop backgrounds — one of a series of photos of places so beautiful they seem unreal. But the canyon is real and, as Ms. Jennings wrote, “On social media, Antelope Canyon has become more than a beautiful image of rocks in the desert — it’s a status symbol, a luxurious backdrop over which to perform one’s adventurousness and wanderlust.” Tour guides tell visitors which filters to use to make their photo look exactly like all the others.
Every Instagram pilgrimage doesn’t require an extended journey. Barbara Bestor, the founder of Bestor Architecture in Los Angeles, has seen several cycles of Instagram lust for her projects. Her first experience with Instagram fame began in 2009, thanks to her design of an outpost of the Intelligentsia coffee chain in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake. She chose concrete tile in a pattern of blue-on-white squares. The hand-painted tiles seemed, at that time, like an appealing contrast to the high-tech “kawaii” (a Japanese word roughly translated as “cuteness”) look of Pinkberry. These geometric tiles running horizontally, then vertically, tweaked to reflect the local color palette, can now be found in coffee bars from coast to coast.
“You came, you saw, you stood there, you took your picture,” said Ms. Bestor. “That was my first realization how status can be brought through a photograph.” It is like bagging a seven-point Instagram buck.
There are Instagram-famous places that are deep and Instagram-famous places that are shallow. Not even every pink wall is alike. The most famous is the wall of the Los Angeles Paul Smith clothing store, which has its own hashtag. The second most famous are those designed by Luis Barragán for the Cuadra San Cristóbal, a modernist “ranch” in Mexico City built in 1968.
But while the Paul Smith wall is simply a wall on a bunker-shaped, largely windowless building, Cuadra San Cristóbal is a house and stables with a pink-walled courtyard, adjacent to a shallow turquoise pool. After you take a photo there are places you can explore, journeying deeper into the combination of spaces, the shadows and the colors, that Barragán laid out for his clients. It’s much more than one shot — even if it is the pink walls that brought you there.
Via The New York Times by Alexandra Lange
Photo credit: Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
