Between his birth on February 11th 1902 and his death on March 3rd 1971 Arne Jacobsen had a most remarkable life and professional career. He became not only Denmark's most prominent architect and prolific designer but also one of the most well-known functionalists in the world.
Only 37 years before reaching this unique status a Danish newspaper, commenting on the newly finished "Stelling" house, had written that he should be banned from building for life and one of his masterpieces the SAS Royal hotel (1958-1960) in Denmark's capital Copenhagen won on it's inauguration a public competition for "the ugliest building in the city".
We must immediately reassure those who think that they missed some important information about this small kingdom. The King of the Belgians remains Albert II. No coup d'état in this curious European country. No, we just want to refer to the prestigious award received a few days ago by Koen De Winter. Design Vlaanderen has given him the Henry van de Velde 2005 Career Award, the highest token of recognition a designer can hope to receive in Belgium. Which makes Koen the King of Belgian design.
Many people, both on the active and on the consuming side of the design community, share a restless fascination for "originality". This fascination is more than the usual form of design entertainment provided by design magazines and exhibitions. For nearly a century, originality has been closely linked to creativity. It is often seen as the inevitable result of that creative process. As in other creative activities like writing, composing and sometimes cooking, it has also become the ultimate criteria for the use of creativity in the development of products. There is little doubt about the fact that even in Western culture this longing for originality is a relatively recent phenomena. Tracing its origins is a task for social anthropologists and not the purpose of this essay. One constructive hypothesis is that the willingness of the modern movement to establish new standards and break with the past "at any cost", has not only generated new standards but also a new vocabulary in which "new", "original" and "innovative" have been redefined. Instead of defining the character of an object, they started to define original as a quality. To some extend art historians have re-written Western European art history in function of the innovative role different artist played in their times, but there is not much evidence that this was indeed the real motivation at the time. Skill and craftsmanship, mastering perspective and depth, conformity to the requests of the patron and professional competitiveness were more important motivations than the search of originality. Even in the early XXth century originality did not play a role in the relationship between Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso when they both were the pillars under the cubist movement. In fact their collages and paintings of that period are almost identical. Over the past thirty five years, which coincides with my years of practicing industrial design, I have been intrigued with our continuous search for originality, our fascination and admiration for its results, and with the fact that reaching an "original" result has never been questioned against the real aim and goal of our profession: user satisfaction. In fact, promotion of design, originally intended to enlighten the public on the benefits of useful and beautiful products, has slowly become a promotion of originality at any cost including the neglect of one of the pillars of the modern movement: making good and beautiful industrial products accessible to all; along with the neglect of informing the users about good, useful and environmentally responsible products.
