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Title: Books Pages: 92, 93, 95   
Author: Editorial Text: Books Old master Man and machine by Henry Cartier-Bresson: Thames and Hudson, £5.50 In the last 12 months we have had Lartigue's astonishing photographic diary, McCullin's book and exhibition on the brute fact of war, Euan Duff's laconic How are we, and "The casual eye", a show devoted to the proposition that the nearer to the naive snapshot photography aspires the more it fulfils its function. All this eddies around Henri Cartier-Bresson without eroding his position as the supreme humanist photographer. He began as a painter not an especially good one - and his photographs show the stigmata of his fine-art training. Sometimes they are actually composed: never are they less than highly organised. His method now is widely understood and imitated: the Leica withdrawn from the centre of action, photographing obliquely, showing people watching an event rather than the event itself, their faces registering delight and wonder - every day Christmas day. Cartier-Bresson is great because he is humble before his subject. The format of his pictures is conventional - every picture desk is familiar with the rubber stamp on the back of his photographs: "Do not crop", and he never takes a photograph that makes you want to know how he got it, what lens he used for it. Man comes before machine, which is where his latest book comes in. Man and machine contains 75 photographs interspersed with instant philosophy quotes. The first of these broadly sums up the theme of the book: ''One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man" (Elbert Hubbard). The subjects take us from the invention of the wheel (a bullock cart in India) to man's conquest of the moon. What we see, of course, is not man on the moon (which would not in any case accord with Bresson's approach), but a shirtsleeved technician making notes before the banked up monitoring screens and switches and dials and knobs and levers and microphones of the John F Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In front of computers, working with a palette and brush in the paint shop of Rolls- Royce, confronting a mass of intricate wiring in the cockpit of a plane, peddling a bike with a wife in Greek national costume riding side saddle behind carrying a tiny baby: the picture shows man being his idiosyncratic self in the presence of technology, though one marvellous photo shows him acting like a machine: a group of Japanese photographers grouped together on a bend at a big athletics meeting, all pointing telescopic lenses in the same direction, all poised to click; and the white curves of the track, the verticals of the flagpoles, the speckles of the homunculi on the terraces accentuate the sense of a piston-like compulsion to an ordained end. In this one photograph, brilliant as it is, there is the feeling of Cartier-Bresson standing outside the group, observing, godlike. But that is a rare lapse, because normally the pictures are about dignity. One can turn again and again to photographs by Cartier-Bresson because they perform art's primary function, which is to quicken life. Michael McNay Factory fresh Technological eating or where does the fish finger point? by Magnus Pyke; John Murray £2.50 Magnus Pyke has practically cornered the market for popularly slanted books on food technology. His style is lively, punctuated by a dour humour which belies the last 23 years he has spent in Scotland at the Distillers Glenlochil research station. For each of his food books (he also writes on the social implications of the science and technology explosion) he draws on substantially the same material, his own vast experience of food processing, and interprets its relationship to science or, in the case of Technological eating, the future of mankind. He traces how the march of technology has had profound effects on the food producers from the days of plantation slaves to the animal prisoners of today's factory farms. He pins changes in man's pattern of work and leisure activities, perhaps too firmly, on the way increased availability of prepared or semi prepared foodstuffs has freed housewives from the drudgery of a kitchenbound existence and, earlier in our history, hastened man's escape from the role of hunter. More forcefully he outlines how humanity, the world's newly acquired environmental conscience, love of good food and, turning full circle, pleasure in the art of preparing it may eventually limit the progress of food technology. The limit may come soon enough since many of Magnus Pyke's predictions, like integral domestic freezers taking modular food baskets holding a whole month or quarter's requirements, are already possible. His only plea is that consumers should not condemn factory farming, meat and vegetable analogues or any of the other products of food engineering and chemistry without a logical consideration of the social, religious and economic factors affecting their view. This book allows him to present a more sensitive appreciation of these questions than brief television appearances, cast in the role of archetypal pills-for-breakfast-and-dinner scientists, have previously allowed. David Rowlands A planner looks back The making of cities by Walter Bor: Leonard Hill Books, £4.80 As a preparation for writing on the gentle art of city making, Walter Bor's pedigree is about as right as can be a stint as deputy planning officer to the LCC, a period as city planning officer of Liverpool, moving on to be a senior partner in planning consultants Llewelyn Davies, Weeks Forestier Walker & Bor (and therefore involved in plans for Washington New Town and Milton Keynes New City). In the meantime he became president of the Town Planning Institute and is currently teaching at University College, London. But the message of this book must largely be to other well-bred planners-keep off. Neither a writer nor a photographer be! Struggling to get out is a wealth of experience here and abroad, an ability to sift and extrapolate other people's ideas, a total committal and a team leader of singular determination. In short the book does a gross injustice to the author. It offers within a structure surely taken from Frederick Gibberd's classic Town design (potted chapters followed by ''all my own work'' appendices) a pot pourri of ideas and exemplars in a disjointed and staccato style. Some of the examples are of great interest intrinsically and are unpublished at least in this country his firm's study of constraints on the poor in Nassau USA, a new town in Columbia and another of his firm's studies commissioned by Frank Lloyd Wright's old patrons the Johnson Wax Company of Racine neighbourhood in Milwaukee USA. Others are suffering from over exposure and ought to be allowed to wither except in a compressed and more general coverage - Barbican London and the reconstruction at Stepney and Poplar. But the commissions are in many ways less surprising than the omissions. Bor was after all a belated convert to high buildings policies for historic cities - at the LCC he was both on record as saying a high buildings policy for London was impossible and instrumental in formulating one that made a brief appearance in a Town Planning Institute conference (after the horse had bolted) and a more sophisticated appearance in the Report of Studies for the Greater London Development Plan. On arrival in Liverpool he wrote an article in Architectural Design on the need for such policies and promptly produced one for Liverpool. But this summation of his experience contains no maps in appendices to show either of these creative systems of control for which Bor can justly claim credit. The only appendix to the section dealing with high buildings (Caption page 93) Japanese photographers take aim, and a tail-coated Etonian plays mechanic in the school workshop; from Cartier-Bresson's ironic Man and Machine, reviewed opposite and the new scale of motorways in cities is a plan by his firm for the Summerston areas of Glasgow which purports to show a massive motorway dealt with at birth in the design of new housing surrounding it. The caption tells us that the proposed housing is set well back from it and a new district centre under the motorway links the two parts together again''. Hardly what Buchanan meant by traffic architecture! Walter Bor's book is a disappointment because it smacks too much of a thinly disguised brochure for Llewelyn Davies, Weeks Forestier Walker & Bor and it draws on his experience and his intelligent knowledge of the field too little. Because of these limitations and because of its indigestible form it is neither a good crib nor a good read. Tim Rock Making a mark Kerly's law of trade marks and trade names Tenth edition by TA Blanco White and Robin Jacob; Sweet & Maxwell £12.50 The purpose of a trade mark is to indicate a connection in the course of trade between the goods in relation to which it is used and the proprietor of the mark. The common law action for passing off gives a trader protection against imitation of his name, or the get-up of his goods, but the greater protection afforded by trade mark registration did not become necessary until the appearance of the limited liability company made it possible for more than a handful of manufacturers to establish a national or international reputation. Registration has now been in force for almost a hundred years, and the history of trade marks runs parallel with the history of the corporation as a legal entity. The current statute is the Trade Marks Act 1938, and it is beginning to show signs of strain, for its draughtsmen did not foresee the networks of parent, subsidiary and holding companies which make up the post-war business empire. Some reform is likely before long, and it may also provide for the registration of service marks, which are still only protected by the more cumbersome action for passing off. These developments are exciting to a practitioner, who is delighted to see in the new edition of Kerly that the earlier Trade Marks Acts are printed in an appendix. They have been put into the space left by the disappearance of the Merchandise Marks Acts, repealed by the Trade Descriptions Act 1968. Unhappily nowhere does the latter act appear, and the chapter on criminal liability for deceptive marking of goods has disappeared without trace. These, and a new style of paragraph numbering, are the novel features of the tenth edition of Kerly. It is, as always, a very useful book for those who are concerned with this branch of the law, and very dull for those who are not. David Micklethwait Italian school Metaphysical Art by Massimo Carra; Thames and Hudson. £2.50 Metaphysical art, the search for the truth behind appearances, crossed with psychology and conceived the bastard infant surrealism. Yet in essence it was an attempt to return to what Carlo Carra called the Italian Principle (his initial capitals). Carra's son Massimo has written the first book on the subject to be published in England. It is in Caroline Tisdall's translation, with an historical foreword by her and with epilogues by Patrick Waldberg and Ewald Rathke linking the movement with Surrealism and with German metaphysical art - some early Grosz, Oscar Schlemmer, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann. All these contributions are valuable, but the meat of the book - as in the others in the Modern Movements series - is in the contemporary documents by the artists. These are full of the bombast that seems inseparable from all the major movements of the period outside France, but compared with the megalomania of de Chirico's autobiography they are almost modest affirmations of faith in the Italian Principle exemplified in the work of Giotto, Massacio, Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Signorelli, Carpaccio, the youthful Raphael and, in the seventeenth century Poussin and Claude (French indeed, but imbued with the Principle from their working trips to Rome). There is in all this an unmistakable note of xenophobia, but Carlo Carra rationalises cleverly, arguing that naturalism is, in effect, an abdication of responsibility by the artist; that impressionism is the most naturalistic and therefore the worst; and that cubism, "in disdaining problems that go beyond the material,'' is the heir of naturalism. In spite of their subsequent differences, Carra and de Chirico agreed about these things, though the Italian Principle was more clearly at work in Carra's metaphysical paintings: de Chirico's work was overlaid by a belief in the magical properties of geometrical shapes - their metaphysical reality. De Chirico writes of a plate in an old book that impressed him when he was a child: "The World Before the Flood." The picture was unpeopled, a landscape of the Tertiary Period. ''There are paintings by Bocklin, Claude Lorrain, and Poussin which are inhabited by human figures, but which, in spite of this, bear a close relationship with the landscape of the Tertiary . . . Only in the new Italian metaphysical painting does the second solitude appear: solitude of signs, or the metaphysical." That is the theme of Metaphysical painting - the development involves de Chirico's concept of inhabited depth: ''The flat surface of a perfectly calm ocean disturbs us, not so much because of the idea of the measurable distance between us and the sea bed, but more because of all the elements of the unknown hidden in that depth. ' As a capsule statement of the aims and experience of Metaphysical art that is never likely to be improved upon. The irony of it is that the work of both Carry and, especially, de Chirico showed a sad falling off in the years to follow; their discoveries were pushed through to other conclusions by painters like Mayritte (using de Chirico's discoveries about the reality of dreams); Metaphysical art, meanwhile, reached its highest expression in the work of their humble camp follower, Giorgio Morandi, a man given to painting and to silence. Michael McNay The enemy within Design for the real world by Victor Papanek; Pantheon Books, $8.95. Thames and Hudson, £4 Buckminster Fuller, prophet and practitioner of comprehensive anticipatory design science, the original philosoper-engineer of Spaceship Earth, tells us with characteristic optimism in his introduction to Victor Papanek's bookthat "we are throwing the switch to connect humanity with the universe's eternally regenerative system''. Two pages later in the opening words of his own preface, the author himself launches into a frontal assault on industrial design as it is now practised in a passage that sets the scene for his own conception of what needs to be done. ''There are," he writes, "professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don't need, with money they don't have, in order to impress others who don't care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers, comes a close second . . . And the skills needed in these activities are taught carefully to young people." He goes on, "Design must become an innovative, highly creative, cross disciplinary tool responsive to the true needs of men.'' And again, ''our society makes it crucial for designers to understand clearly the social, economic and political background of what they do." Papanek's style makes this an easy book to read. It is full of examples, many of them illustrated, both of the traits and tendencies he abominates, and of the needs he believes we can and must meet, as he has tried to meet them in his capacity as design school dean and UNESCO consultant which has taken him all round the world. His audience is far wider than those who practice design, which he sees as the ''conscious effort to impose a meaningful order'' believing that all men are designers. He defines the essential elements of design, and gives his own account of its history and purpose''to transform man's environment and tools and by extension, man himself''. He points to the new processes and an endless list of new materials which has led to the tyranny of ''absolute choice'' end roundly denounces ''the never ending search for novelty". Unlike the decadence of Rome when the barbarians were outside the gate, "we have become our own barbarians, and barbarism has become a do-it-yourself kit". His main thesis - as the title of his book makes clear - is that ''so little design, so few products, are really relevant to the needs of mankind''. He lists the many areas of teaching aids, diagnostic devices, safety gear, basic shelter, and equipment for the elderly, the senile, the obese and the pregnant in which designers should be - and generally are not - working, suggesting that, on the tithe basis, they should be devoting one-tenth of their time to these tasks. His own candle wax (or dungpowered) tin can radio, taking only one example of his own work in this field for the Third World, costing 9 cents (less than 5p) is already in production and use, and he writes of a $9 (£4) tv set that could be made widely available. For Papanek, the designer should be a community problem-solver, able to provide low-cost products for the deprived, disadvantaged and retarded: this requires in him to be more sensitive in also ''realising what problems exist'', and nurturing the creativity which our society and its educational system seem bent on inhibiting. ''The latter day witch-doctors of market analysis, motivation research, and subliminal advertising have made dedication to meaningful problem-solving rare and difficult.'' To help exorcise this witchcraft Papanek lists and attacks five myths. These are the myth of mass production, obsolescence, people's wants, designers' lack of control and the myth that quality no longer counts. He identifies some of the more obvious gaps in design work: the under-developed world,the handicapped, and disabled, experimental research and systems for sustaining life under marginal conditions, and lays great stress on the need for all design to be related to the sociological and psychological surroundings in which it will be used. Predictably he devotes a chapter to the ecological disaster he believes lies just ahead. Some of his severest criticisms are directed at the education of designers, which ''has been made into a method of preserving the status quo'', He writes that ''for millions of years man's little red schoolhouse was earth itself. Mankind was taught to react and behave by the environment, disasters and predators. But now we have replaced our natural enemies with educators . . . to brutally twist man away from his natural heritage of non-specialisation in this way can only have brutal results." Later he becomes more specific and claims that part of the philosophical and moral bankruptcy of universities and design schools lies in the ever-increasing trend to train students to become narrowly "vertical" specialists, whereas the real need is for broad, "horizontal'' generalists or synthesists. I have deliberately allowed Papanek's own words to come through because so much of the pleasure of reading this book derives from his vivid imagery and the directness with which he expresses his very strong views. It could, however, be cut to half its length without losing any of its essential arguments or examples. There are some curious omissions. For example, no consideration of China's approach to the problems of which he writes is given, though their experience would interest him greatly. Despite his passion for designers to commit themselves to the problems of the world, the political implications of doing so are never explained or explored. He (sensibly) doubts whether much of what he wants can be achieved under a system of private capitalism, and asserts that "if design is ecologically responsive, then it is also revolutionary", and for those who react to his catalogue of criticism by allowing a feeling of deep lethargy to set in he says, "If we respond in this manner we are lost". For him involvement in the world's problems is inescapable if not for vaguely humanitarian reasons, then because we will ''be forced to do so by the simplest desire for survival within the not too distant future". But as to what this means in terms of social and political action he is strangely silent. What Papanek needs is to make contact with some political philosophers or practitioners who also see themselves as potential problem-solvers. They would have a lot to talk about. Anthony Wedgwood Benn (Caption page 95) Wants and needs are tellingly contrasted in Victor Papanek s book, reviewed on this page. Above, unmentionables for parakeets, which sell at a rate of 20,000 a month in small, medium, large and extra large sizes. Top, nine cent tin can radio receiver for the Third World, lovingly customised with felt and sea-shells. Right. artificial hooking seeds, made from biodegradable plastics and coated with plant seeds, for refertilising the desert Corrections The fun-Pig pop-up calendar (DESIGN 277/38) was designed in Britain, not the United States, by Stevens Secunda Associates (designers: T Stevens, M Secunda and J Fizpan illustrator: B Meek), and is distributed by Clark Warner Marketing Ltd. Sole UK importers of the Eames chair and ottoman are Herman Miller United Kingdom, and not as stated in DESIGN 279/21. |
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