“Disneyland is presented as imaginary to make us believe that the rest is real.”21
Can we give up thought, give up design? Better yet, can we create reality?
We can not. We are trapped within our thoughts, within our designs, within our own utopia. Design automatically places ourselves within the product of our own dream, within the product of our own utopic hell.22 Designers can not reject design; this is an impossibility.
A rejection of design yields brushed on patinas, fake broken glass, intentional incompleteness and designed fragmentation. To attempt to include reality in design is to make it not reality, but to make it design. We can make the appearance of reality by designing failure and incompleteness, but a designed failure is a design. Designs which attempt to reject design are irreconcilably flawed by this fact. Designers can not reject design, this is an impossibility. It is reality which designers most want because it is reality that designers can never have. Reality is the difference between design and the objectification of design. Reality is the failure of design.
“The only legitimate relationship that architects can have with the subject of chaos is to take their rightful place in the army of those devoted to resist it, and fail.”23
We must attempt to create utopia. We have no other choice.
We must believe in reality. Utopia will not be achieved. We will never be able to agree on one utopic vision. Our effects will be violated with physical needs, worn by time, run down by lack of upkeep, and immediately obsolete. It is not necessary to build failure into a design, because failure is inevitable. It was the disregard for the void, the perceived impenetrability, the necessity of simplicity, which created the complex relations that exist between objects. It is within this space that conflict and clash, degradation of utopia, and resultant reality, will continue to be produced. Complexity creates itself, there is no need to design it. Entropy is decay.
We must anticipate the outcome of our failed utopia. When designs are objectified, is the difference hidden or displayed? Is it possible to identify reality, failure within the simulacrum24 of reality and failure?
This anticipation the unavoidable condition of realization: the “omnipresent fourth dimension” of the simulacrum, of seeing ourselves, and seeing ourselves seeing ourselves.
