| 3.2
Ritual
Artifacts and buildings for ritual purposes are familiar to antropologists and are recorded in archaeological history. Perhaps today the design of ritualised objects has migrated from the social arena to consumption and mass-production where consumer products induce ritualised habits. For example, it is possible to buy a wide variety of coffee makers for the home kitchen. Each design encourages the consumer to adopt certain habits and each design confers a social status with the coffee cognascenti. Coffee making becomes a ritualised performance. Casting an eye beyond consumption, which itself is a ritual visit to the shopping complex or mall, there are designs that embrace ritual beyond the commodified time of industrial production. These designs offer diverse expressions of ritual and different time experiences.
Storytelling Pavillion, Cranbrook, USA by Dan
Hoffman – Constructed of a simple wooden frame covered with
shingles, this ovoid space offers a mini theatre for the art of aural
tradition. With the advent of the printing press and education
of the masses to read, the telling of stories as a means to entertain
and communicate history, tradition, and culture has faded. Television,
radio, movies and the internet provide our modern stories but they
lack the intimacy of face-to-face contact and discourse. Hoffman’s
pavillion dedicates a space to the ritual of telling a story. Inside
this space there is complicity between the storyteller and the listeners,
a closeness borne of knowing that the story and its telling happen
once. Next time the story is repeated the dynamics will shift,
the story evolves, the pavillion reasunates to different people. |