Motion Design Lab

The other day I was on another photo shoot for the abandonment project. I was in an old abandoned building built in the late 1800s. As my host and I went up to the second floor and were looking around I noticed and commented on a beautiful set of 8 foot high, oak, double doors that were used to close off a lovely, sitting area with lots of windows. My host chuckled and commented, “I don’t know why anyone would ever need 8 foot doors.” I realized that this was a great expression of the problem with the value of design in our current culture.

Unfortunately this comment is symptomatic of the function dominance in our culture’s current view of design. Design has diminished value (”Why would we need it?” translates into “What value does it have?”). What function would an 8 foot door have on the second floor of a building in the 1800s when it merely closed off a smallish gallery? None. Its presence and scale were almost certainly dictated by design—the need to use scale to create a grand entrance to the gallery space—to give the inhabitant a sense of formality and awe coming into this lovely, well-lit, open, but otherwise small space. The height also made the width (since these were double doors) much more proportional and helped create an open feeling in this otherwise smallish gallery.

I can almost see the expression on the face of the first owner of this space, hear their “ooohs,” when he or she walked up, saw these large, solid, double doors and then opened them for the first time revealing this beautifully lit, airy space. I suspect this original owner didn’t walk into the space and shrug with the comment of, “I don’t know why anyone would need 8 foot doors.”