Cultural Landscapes

“We shape our buildings: thereafter they shape us.”—Winston Churchill

I think we all shape the cultural landscape, and it in turn shapes us.

The cultural landscape is a multi-dimensional space which changes continually throughout time and therefore constantly needs to be re-reinterpreted and re-calibrated.

Much of the data which forms the landscape is intangible and un-quantifiable.

The landscape must be interpreted and explained in order to be understood; it must be qualified.

I will now attempt to explain what I mean by cultural landscape and what my role within the landscape is.

My role in the cultural landscape

Design

Firstly, I call myself a designer. I’m also part of the cultural landscape which makes it impossible for me to stand apart from it to get a clearer view. It’s useful to be asked to talk about my work from different perspective; to be asked to describe or interpret what I do everyday in terms of the ‘landscape’ because it alters my perspective and gives me a fresh insight on my work. As a designer, I share the same common understanding of the creative process with all artists and architects.

I work across several traditional disciplines, usually as a graphic designer but also as a product designer and occasionally as part of a team with interior designers, architects or artists. Much of my work is about analysing and interpreting the cultural landscape. Expressing a new and contemporary view of the world through designed solutions which might be books or might be bars. I analyse intangible information, which I collect from the wider landscape, and synthesise tangible solutions which in turn produce predictable results for my clients—the people who pay me to act as interpreter and synthesiser of solutions. Clients pay me to create objects which fit appropriately within their corporate environments; smaller cultural landscapes with their own grammar of language, symbols, rituals and values expressing their own distinctive personality.

Creative process

In order interpret accurately and create effectively and appropriately I have developed a broad definition of my role within the landscape; I use an analytical, creative process which is concerned with the ordering, interpretation and manipulation of ideas—the process of designing a train, a book or a building is essentially the same, except that the technical constraints differ. The creative process is essentially the same as the process an artist uses to produce art, this process is made up of ‘intuition’ or ‘taste’ and qualified or underpinned by analytical method, such as colour theory, psychology or sociology. The production of ‘art’ sometimes involves more intuition and less analytical method than architecture and design, but not always.

I think design is a controlled process which allows me to interpret data, supplied by a client, and render it in the form of typography and designed objects. These designed objects, or products, perform an active role within the cultural landscape; I create the props and backdrops, the typography, the objects and interiors against which individuals and organisations play out the rituals of their everyday lives. My work provides organisations with a tangible personality, giving form and clearly articulated meaning to their transactions with other organisations.

Elements of culture

The best description of culture I have come across is ‘social glue’—the stuff that makes the landscape stick together. I manipulate many elements within the cultural landscape: language, symbols, myths, rituals and values, like five layers of skin on an onion, which, when peeled away, reveal the ideologies of a culture, the things that we get excited about and impel us into action. All of the elements exists within a multi-dimensional place—the cultural landscape; I control the manner and pace with which a book reveals it’s information or the speed and demeanour with which you pass through an interior space. I control all the references which allow you, like an archeologist, to analyse and understand what kind of place you are at and what time you are in.

Creativity makes use of a sensorial vocabulary which manipulates all of the human senses: taste, touch, smell, sound and sight, bringing order out of apparent chaos and revealing cultural landscapes within of a confusion of dust and ritual. Castelli used only the ‘soft’, intangible elements of the sensorial vocabulary to design ‘soft architecture’.

Typography

My work as a graphic designer has much to with typography in same way that my work as a product designer has much to do with the history of objects and materials. Type is a ‘container’ for language, changing it’s values and meanings—a ‘meta’ language, a language within a language. The way in which something is said or the pace at which information is revealed can be manipulated through typesetting. Typography is intrinsically linked with the history of the world and all of its cultures; it charts the development of speech, conscious thought, the pre-Classical and Classical world, the industrial and the information revolutions. Typography reveals and celebrates cultural differences in exactly the same way that furniture does. We don’t need to sit in chairs, we can sit on the floor, but we choose to sit on a chair because it says something additional about our situation within the cultural landscape.

I am particularly interested in expressing cultural difference through typography, designed objects and interiors. I am not a nationalist or a native Glaswegian but I think it is valuable to understand and celebrate the things in our culture that make us special. We need to feel we have a unique identity in a world which is quickly becoming a global village; a virtual space where we all speak and write with an American accent; where we all have pearl-white products, drive the same cars and have buildings in the same internationally fashionable style. I like to encode my work with culturally loaded references which will have some broad meaning to everyone but special meaning to people who understand Glasgow’s ideologies. These references are like a magic mirror which allows the beholder to see the local cultural landscape.

The Glaswegian cultural landscape

Glasgow used to be the ‘workshop of the world’, an industrial city which likes to make rather than service. It was a city which expressed it’s proud personality to the world through it’s products; it’s ships and locomotives. The city is now a post-industrial city with international aspirations but no tangible vehicle through which to express it’s changing identity.

I work with others, with Graven Images and Nice House, to try and tangibly represent what it means to be in Glasgow in the 1990s—to express what it is to be alive in the city today. We create props and backdrops which allow the people who experience them to gain a unique perspective on the city. We try and help Glasgow reveal a brave, contemporary cultural landscape. To offer an alternative to the landscapes which Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Cunard Queens gave to the world and which they still carry in their mind’s eye. We try to give shape to our own time; to several new cultural landscapes which all co-exist simultaneously and which are continually changing and continually in need of re-calibration and new expression.

Creativity is a potent tool for both analysis and synthesis or reconstruction of the world. It allows us to distil the important components from a multi-dimensional landscape and recompose them in a new way. Analysing and selecting the powerful, recognisable components from the past, re-calibrating the ideologies and aspirations embodied in them and creating a framework with which to construct a meaningful map of the past and the present. Revealing the ideologies that motivate us, excite us and are most meaningful to us. This gives us clues which we can then use in developing a strategy which may yield a future which will be appropriate; familiar yet new, challenging yet supportive. This is my motivation.

I design typography, products and spaces which have some relationship to the city and the wider world. They are backdrops and props which allow me to live in a Glaswegian cultural landscape rather than in a ersatz Tudor landscape filled with Japanese products and Italian furniture. These new tangible representations are a journey through a Glaswegian cultural landscape. They are, in a sense, site specific because they are created through the power of a specific cultural landscape—they couldn’t have happened in the same way in Nantes or London. These spaces and objects offer a positive vision of the future which using the old cultural grammar and ideologies in new ways, creating a future which is appropriate for Glaswegians.