What’s Interesting? On the Ascendency of an Evaluative Term

Abstract

A celebrated aphorism of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe runs “I’d rather be good than interesting.” However in design discourses today, this relation has been entirely overturned. Now it is good to be interesting, indeed better than to be only “good” (which is no longer what it used to be). Reflecting on this – with reference to the work of Sianne Ngai, Mario Perniola, Robin Evans, and Mikhail Epstein – this paper considers the rise of “interesting” as a critical category and examines the sort of judgment-in-suspension that it seems to enact, addressing what issues might be at stake in it and what it means in relation to our understanding of design pedagogy.

Keywords:

• architectural pedagogy
• aesthetic theory
• design studio
• architectural disciplinarity
• interesting

Notes

¹ Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 110.

² When Mies was interviewed for the phonograph record Conversations Regarding the Future of Architecture, produced by the Reynolds Metal Co. and issued in 1956, he – and indeed the entire recording – concluded with the words “I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be good.” (See http://www.miessociety.org/speeches/conversations-regarding-future-architecture/. The recording itself is available online: https://soundcloud.com/mattgoad/conversations-regarding-the [both accessed February 22, 2016]). Four years later this was quoted in the section on Mies in Peter Blake, The Master Builders (London: Victor Gollancz, 1960), 201: “But novelty for its own sake? That, to Mies, disqualifies a man from being an architect. ‘I don’t want to be interesting,’ Mies told an interviewer, ‘I want to be good!’” The words are reported by Charles Jencks on a number of occasions in the more aphoristic form given here – e.g., “The Modernist approach … is to opt for a Minimalist style which, virtually ignoring the demands of stylistic pluralism and public symbolism, celebrates the hard facts of technology and organisation; thus Mies’ oft-quoted aphorism – ‘I’d rather be good than interesting’,” Charles Jencks, Post-modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1987), 228. Notably, in some renderings, “original” replaces “interesting” – thus, “we must remember Mies van der Rohe who said ‘I’d rather be good than original’ ..,” Robert Venturi, “Frank Lloyd Wright Essay for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts” [1991], in Iconography and Electronics – Upon a Generic Architecture: A View from the Drafting Room (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 67–72, 68.

³ Cf. “Mies’s indebtedness to Kant is … obvious in his striving for universality. … It was this attitude of developing forms out of a material’s nature and of purifying them to a point where they achieved universal applicability, which Mies understood as being good rather than interesting,” Ludwig Glaeser, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe: Furniture and Furniture Drawings from the Design Collection and The Mies Van Der Rohe Archive, The Museum of Modern Art (New York: MOMA, 1977), 17.

⁴ Charles Jencks, “Hetero-Architecture and the L.A. School,” in The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 47–75, 52.

⁵ Ibid., 51.

⁶ Such as, for example, Aldo Rossi, who wrote: “I believe I was one of the worst students at the Politecnico in Milan, although I now think that the critical comments addressed to me are among the best compliments I ever received. Professor Sabbioni, whom I admired especially, discouraged me from pursuing a career in architecture: he said my drawings looked like those of a mason or rural builder who might toss a stone to indicate an approximate location for a window. The comment drew laughter from my friends but it filled me with joy; today I try to recover that felicity of drawing which was taken for inexperience and stupidity, and which has subsequently characterized my work,” Peter Arnell and Ted Bickford, eds., Aldo Rossi: Buildings and Projects (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 18.

⁷ Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 112, 121.

⁸ Friedrich Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 35; cited in Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 121. Original emphasis.

⁹ Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, 72; cited in Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 122.

¹⁰ Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 124.

¹¹ Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 225–248.

¹² Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 135.

¹³ Robin Evans, “In Front of Lines that Leave Nothing Behind,” AA Files 6 (May 1984): 89–96, 96.

¹⁴ Ibid., 90.

¹⁵ Ibid., 93.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Mario Perniola, Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art (London: Verso, 1995), 10.

¹⁸ Ibid., 12.

¹⁹ Jan Mieszkowski, Labors of Imagination: Aesthetics and Political Economy from Kant to Althusser (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 114; cited in Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 26.

²⁰ I discuss this at more length in my Writing on the Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 102–103.

²¹ Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 126.

²² “The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting. That general responsibility rests upon it …”; Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 186–206, 191.

²³ This affective and critical relationship of the project with its own conditions of possibility is the reason why works that exist purely as fantasies, and from which this relation is absent, tend not to be described as “interesting.” The dynamic here is the same as that outlined by the literary theorist Mikhail Epstein, when he writes: “It is [the] internal tension between reasonable expectation and the cognitive value of the unexpected or unexpectable that undergirds the category of the interesting. … [What] makes a certain theory interesting is its presentation of a consistent and plausible proof for what appears to be least probable. In other words, the interest of a theory is inversely proportional to the probability of its thesis and directly proportional to the provability of its argument”; Mikhail Epstein, “The Interesting,” Qui Parle 18, no. 1 (2009): 75–88, 78–79. Original emphasis.