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Abstract
The idea of designing for everyday life on every scale, through objects, spaces, and systems, is central to modern design and architecture. The Italian architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers is often quoted for urging his fellow architects to design everything “from the spoon to the city” (Rogers 1946, 2). For designers and architects of the high modernism of the 1950s and 1960s this motto stood for the pursuit of “total design,” in which every detail should be taken care of and aligned according to an overall scheme, from small living units to grand urban plans. The ideal is still very much alive today but is accompanied by the general criticism of modernism: that totalizing schemes confine everyday life in rigid frames and conformity. The idea of total design belongs, however, to a long tradition of thinking in art, design, and architecture. I will discuss key statements from high modernism on total design and total architecture, and revisit earlier expressions of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk as a comparable concept in art nouveau and the avant-garde. This broad notion, also called the Total Work of Art, was very productive and widespread, and has been widely discussed. I will discuss some of the dilemmas of this ambition to make comprehensive designs framing the experience of everyday life. This ideal contains some of the most valuable ideas in the history of design and architecture, which we should strive to keep alive whilst remaining aware that they have also been a continuous source of troubles and fierce discussions.
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