For this assignment, we were given the task of creating an editorial design for Beatrice Warde’s essay The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible. Additionally, we had to choose a secondary text that relates to The Crystal Goblet thematically and highlights or contrasts the points of view expressed in the essay. The four major themes in the essay were Invisibility, Trendiness, Modernity, and Text vs. Image (reading vs looking).
I decided to look for a text that addressed the theme of modernity, as the argument of function vs form appealed to me. I thought of Feng Shui, and how it shapes Eastern architectural and interior design in an invisible way. Based on Daoist philosophy, Feng Shui focuses on maximizing the living energy of a building; in other words, it facilitates interaction between people and buildings, which is the function of architecture. To look for a specific text, I visited the Kranzberg Art & Architecture Library and found the perfect book: Living Design: The Daoist Way of Building by C. Thomas Mitchell and Jiangmei Wu.
Through pairing C. Mitchell’s Living Design and Beatrice Warde’s Crystal Goblet, I want to offer readers a comprehensive view of Eastern and Western approaches to functional design. In Mitchell’s Living Design, he critiques the isolation of the public from modern and post-modern architecture, as they have become elevated to the status of art objects. They no longer address the context in which they are situated, and as a result, become meaningless and “dead”. He offers an Eastern approach to “living” design, based on Daoist philosophy and principles of Feng Shui. Similarly, Warde argues for the functionality of type over its appearance. She strongly believes that type will never be fine art, as long as people still understand the English language.
To encourage comparisons, I decided to set the two texts on the same page rather than have them follow each other as they would in a typical editorial layout.
