It seems almost old-fashioned nowadays to retain a belief in the importance of everyday things being appealing to look at and engage with. Holding faith in the uplifting qualities of design doesn’t seem to quite belong to our age of dubious trillionaires and AI-ALL-THE-THINGS intellectual laziness. Most current design (see how broad my brush is) privileges instant readability and the ready signalling of banal and inoffensive values with a wearying sameness.
In the face of this insentient present, it’s easy to be nostalgic for a bygone age in which, we imagine, design mattered more. When you’re driving down the main road in Cape Town’s southern suburbs at night, one of the most captivating sights is the Baxter Theatre Centre, with its distinctive illuminated orange ceiling that shines like a beacon, telling you that interesting cultural things are happening inside. Architecturally, the Baxter is a beautiful late example of that much-maligned design concept, brutalism, and it is deservedly celebrated as a design whose clarity and confidence are inspiring and uplifting.
But barely a kilometre or two away sits another old building from the same period that inspires no veneration from the public. Boarded up like a condemned prisoner, the Werdmuller Centre is a reminder that design is a fickle thing. Built at the start of the 1970s in an attempt to bring architectural modernism to the broekie-lace boredom of suburban Cape Town, it too is an example of brutalism, albeit an unsuccessful one. It’s a dramatically awkward building composed of strange ramps and weird jutting wedges. Architecturally, it’s no worse than the confusingly incoherent Cavendish Square that sits in jeering prosperity across the road, but the latter is dysfunctional in a way that people are used to. Cavendish has a parking garage, for a start.
The two malls are an example of how the populace will often choose the milquetoast over the avant-garde if the boring choice is also the more convenient one. The Werdmuller suffered from the same idealism that doomed many high-rises and social housing projects in Europe and the US, where the utopian visions of the architects crashed into small-minded (apartheid, in this case) government planning. Today, the Werdmuller sits awkward and abandoned on its pilotis, lending a parlous seediness to the street and being resolutely ignored by everyone.
The Werdmuller’s great flaw was that it asked those who used it to step outside of their comfort zones. People seldom like their mental real estate to be invaded unexpectedly. The thing that privileges user-friendliness is the thing that survives. It’s why we’re surrounded by objects, items and buildings that don’t challenge us, or that treat the end-user as a timid simpleton who needs to be mollycoddled by familiarity.
Cars are another notable example of this phenomenon. Next time you find yourself in traffic, spot how many new cars from established brands have abandoned their logos in favour of simply spelling the name out in block letters across the rump. I mourn the loss of logos, and how they communicated heritage in an interesting way. For instance, Opel’s old symbol — a stylised lightning bolt — conveyed a sense of Germanic sporting brio. Now it’s just an unexceptionable typeface that suggests the motorist would be too stupid to recognise it otherwise. No doubt, it polled well with the chatbots.
One of my favourite design objects, the Citroën DS, is an expression of that waning quality, human optimism. It proposed clever design as a way to bring emotional mindfulness to the everyday activity of driving. The DS looked and behaved like a spaceship, and for those with a nose for the new, it was a mental-health tonic on wheels. To everyone else, it was like something out of Jules Verne. It’s a singular design icon today because nobody repeated it, and if repeatability is in some sense a sign of success, then it failed.
Throughout time, we encounter reminders that design depends very much on the people you make it for. The old dictum that people would be led to good design as a horse is led to water has been proven reliably false. When Land Rover first launched its in-between Discovery model at the tail end of the 1980s, the idea was that it had to be a funky, appealing car for young, trendy city types, the kind of upwardly mobile George Michael-haired types who wore lurid tracksuits and carried a Walkman. The interior was styled by design guru Jasper Conran, who gave it a textured blue interior and a canvas holdall (instead of a glovebox) that could be removed from the car and taken with you as you pursued your trendy urban lifestyle.
It looks better than it sounds, but as a product it was not readily understandable, and so when the model was given a nip-and-tuck three years in, the modish Conran stuff was quietly dispensed with in favour of a blander beige interior. People are seldom as adventurous as we would like them to be.
It is a fairly ordinary thing, as a designer, to see your work derided, dismissed and condemned. Good things fall out of fashion. Their rationales become outmoded. It isn’t necessarily true that good design endures, but the quest for relevance in a distracted world is leaving us with fewer things that remind us to be mindful. That’s a pity.
From the July issue of Wanted, 2026.
