The Design of Carpets That Design Us

When the building is big enough, deep space emerges, and with it the flickering promise of past megastructures which Rudolph liked so much. 

It is then that I become landscape, a rolling sea of fiery orange. 

And on this sea, everything may be possible.

In the 1960s, Western architecture sought salvation by turning to the idea of the Megastructure. These immense buildings, it was argued, could offer relief from the monotony and anonymity of industrial civilization, giving outlet to people’s creative impulses and providing a path toward a more perfect future society. Quickly, this idea was co-opted by advanced capitalists, who saw in it a potential for new kinds of spaces: very large buildings that were designed as total environments optimized for money making and mental control. Their projects—interconnected complexes of hotels, conference centres, and casinos—came complete with lavish and dazzling carpets. 

These carpets are often the most dominant design element in such spaces, controlling movement and atmosphere, defining programmatic areas, and enhancing psychological comfort. But who designs them—and with what motives? While carpets may be the most dominant designed elements of some spaces, their power to determine our behaviors is often overlooked underfoot, and requires attention from multiple perspectives: the architect, the industry, the brand, and the user.

The Design of Carpets That Design Us, curated by Dan Handel, parses and explores how big corporation design rules have taken over carpet production, and looks at moments in which this production meets its match in the types of buildings Handel refers to as “deep spaces”—buildings that are large enough to make the user lose coordinates. Ultimately, this exposes how carpets play a key role in conditioning user behaviours, and transforming architectural spaces into devices for profit. As Handel makes clear, “In the carpet spaces we look at in this exhibition, extreme and lavish as they may be, architecture is understood to be always less eternal than money.”

By focusing on the performance—rather than just the appearance—of carpets in architecture we are prompted to ask how much architects actually control what happens inside their buildings. The exhibition explores these questions in reciprocal ways: display cases invite visitors to delve into case studies and histories of carpets in buildings; four videos by filmmaker Ralitsa Doncheva highlight the complexities in conceiving, producing, and articulating the meaning of these carpets; and a series of photographs by artist Assaf Evron explore the specific effects and atmospheres made possible by the more extreme articulations of carpet space.

In its attention to the pathways that guide or misguide us, The Design of Carpets That Design Us aims to decipher the mechanisms that shape some of the most profitable spaces that are being designed today. 

An economic approach to architecture will be the subject of two independent projects in the coming year, as the CCA continues to explore the apparently banal and considers how it might act as an architectural element that determines space and even our behaviour. Following Dan Handel’s The Design of Carpets That Design Us, the exhibition Retail Apocalypse curated by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen will open in April 2022. The CCA’s Octagonal Gallery remains pivotal to the arguments of both projects, each of which offer a shared reflection on the relation between architecture and the economic models through which it can be understood.

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