If we are what we consume, then nothing tells us more about who we are in the early 21st century than the energy drink. Caffeine delivery systems in a can, energy drinks promise to make us perform, whether this is on the bureaucratic terrain of spreadsheets and performance targets or the sports courts where we thrash out our fantasies of being all we can be. There is a multibillion-dollar industry built on the commodification of latent energy. For the protestant subtext of capitalism means that we can question our talent but never our work rate. A can of Relentless, a sugary stimulant sold under a gothic logo, is a step towards a life of “no half measures”. Relentless is the corner shop’s quick fix for flagging performance, the equivalent of a Duracell suppository. Relentless is a one-word manifesto.The great cliché of late capitalism is that ours is an age of excess. But an excess of what? Marc Augé defined what he called “supermodernity” as an excess of space — of airports, shopping malls and other spatial wastes. But if architecture is plagued by non-places and junkspace, then design indulges in a different kind of excess. Design is drowning in a surplus of performance. It is caught in a 2,000-rpm spin cycle set in motion by modernism. Relentless. The modernists gave us function as a credo, and once we got a taste for it the market took over and did what it does best. It took modernism’s obsession with function to its absurd conclusion. Brands heaped function on top of function, they honed and enhanced, they boosted and superseded, they spent millions on r&d in pursuit of infinitesimal advancements. We, the consumer, tried to keep up but we were always one step behind.
Condemned to longing and jealousy, we watched rapt as consumer products took on a spectral brilliance. Goods were no longer good, they were incredible. They didn’t just perform, they over-performed. Ours is the age of the ultramundane. Far from meaning what it sounds like it means (i.e. very boring), “ultramundane” refers to the otherworldly. Ultramundane products are both banal and yet too good for this world. Belonging to the realm of hyper-performance, they test the limits of our understanding. Where we fail, they succeed. They are the reification of all that we wish we could do, of our longing to perform. (...)
In furniture, hyper-performance achieved its apotheosis in the Aeron chair. What began as a process to design a comfortable chair for the elderly ended as a trophy of the boardroom and the dotcom boom. The Aeron’s unashamed technicality was its selling point. It mechanised comfort, stripping away the layers of foam and leather to leave mesh and a machinery of levers and tilt mechanisms. In fact, this technical system was never meant to result in just a chair. Its designers were developing a concept called Metaforms, which was supposed to produce a furniture system that could support any task, any human behaviour — but it was reduced to just a chair. As such, it did its job too well. It made it possible to sit for hours on end without interruption, rendering you a slave to your work. Cruelly anticipating your every move, it tied you to a life of hyper-performance.
Mechanisation was supposed to be liberating. The problem with technological determinism is that technology determines our behaviour as much as we determine its. Siegfried Giedion warned us about this 65 years ago. Mechanization Takes Command is full of “purely technical solutions” that “found no response in the emotional temper of the time”. In it, you’ll find the 19th-century ancestor of the Aeron, the Invalid Chair of 1838, a multi-hinged reclining number that is basically a less obese La-Z-Boy. (The La-Z-Boy is of course anything but lazy, but by over-performing it allows us to be.) And yet Giedion was clear that mechanisation was progress.
by Justin McGuirk, Domus | Read more:
Illustration by Danilo Agutoli
