iBauhaus by Nicholas Fox Weber

Author:Nicholas Fox Weber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

Part VI

1.

The workings of the iPhone echo activity within the Bauhaus in their sheer rapidity. What happens happens lickety-split—but only as a consequence of a lot of reflection and meditation first, and of what we now call “mindfulness.” The term has become irritating because of the inevitable lugubriousness with which it is uttered, and because of the implicit suggestion that no one before, in all of history, has actually concentrated on what he was doing and expanded his awareness through contemplation. Still, focus and careful planning precede quick construction and then activation. Then the building goes up, or the weaving gets created on the loom; the intelligent preparation allows action and spontaneity to follow. The development of the iPhone was long in coming. Every aspect took years. The internal mechanism was revised time and again. Its housing went through an incalculable number of propositions and rejections. Once the basic shell was selected and approved, modifications and refinements ensued. The packaging and the marketing strategy followed, none of it fast or simple. But once the end result was launched, the iPhone was out there to be sold quickly and in volume. Then, as soon as it is bought, the user charges it, turns it on, and knows that every pressing-down of a fingertip will bring instant results.

Speed is part of the essence of modernism. Jet airplanes fly us across vast oceans almost as fast as the earth rotates. Television brings, in an instant, events that occur in China to people watching them in France or Brazil. We no longer expect to wait for anything. Our predecessors, in earlier centuries, lived at a different pace. The potato that gets cooked completely in ten minutes in a microwave oven took three hours when the only way to make it edible was in a wood fire that first had to turn to smoldering coals.

The experimental Haus am Horn that was part of the 1923 Weimar Bauhaus exhibition went up in four months. Chairs in Dessau progressed from design to completion in weeks. Stainless-steel door handles required elaborate conceptualization, but the journey from fabrication to installation to use occurred in days. After all those years of development, the iPhone gives us, right away, the family photo we want to show a friend or the YouTube video we insist must be viewed immediately or the boarding pass that gets us onto the plane.

The new words that developed with the first computers and all of their variants have now become part and parcel of modern life, with the iPhone having made their use even more widespread. But, like Bauhaus design, before they had been invented by a few intrepid word-jugglers, the larger populace could not have imagined them. The vocabulary that includes “screen savers” and a “mouse” that is not a rodent is revolutionary. So is the imperative to “log in” by using your thumbprint or your private password. The capacity to make our iPhone our own is essential to the independence all human beings want,

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