Balancing The Poetics And Pragmatism Of Everyday Design

Humanity is faced with an oxymoronic crisis. The crisis involves the earth, the environment, impending looms of climate change, deforestation, loss of species, dwindling resources etc.

- Nischal Abhaykumar

In the face of crisis, our hopes and fears are pitted against manmade forces as well as human endeavours to proliferate natural forces and ways of living. While the need for manmade forces of technology cannot be denied or escaped, the resulting environmental deterioration cannot be left unchecked either. Amidst these realities, perhaps, architecture and design will balance the poetic and pragmatic.

While architecture and design are often perceived as visual entities; and the service and product are often pictorial, open to critique by the user and the onlooker; the intention of good design should ideally entail human betterment. All design; prima facie; is about buildings and objects but good design involves enabling these buildings and objects; and primarily all built-form must improve lives and not at the cost of impairing or consuming excessively. Luxury too, on similar lines, need not be a Louis Vuitton bag (which is attainable to anyone who can pay the price) but clean water, energy and air (which is increasingly diminishing and the damage is perhaps irreversible).

Studio Roosegaarde’s work is an expression of this idea. For example, the Smog Free Tower (A) uses positive ionisation technology to suck up the air around it, clean it and release it, all while running on wind energy. The world has to be creative and innovative in order to survive.