Verticality

Abstract

The present flyer series #01-#06 springs from a distiction between the current and the present in a family-portrait by Wilhelm Bendz of the Waagepetersens in 1836.

Based on an understanding of a Biedermeier interior and the ways adults and children are portrayed in that painting, a broader exploration of the relation between children and adults in built/settled human environments is engaged: with the painting as a contraption featuring more than one time-zone—here the current, present, past and future—and the opportunity for developing an anthroponomic understanding of role of design in shaping public culture, based on a notion of saddle-points referred to Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of possible alternative futures.

The anthroponomic venture proposes to bundle art, science, history, mathematics in an attempt to model the human life-form, under impact of paradigmatic constraints (such as, currently, the pandemic).

The topic of verticality relates to what is present to us, and the experience that public culture traverses a variety of spaces (of which the private, or domestic space is but one example).

Within this framework verticality is not explored in above/below relations, as in hierarchies, but in scope of lifelong learning: in the sense of rising to the task and growing by the challenge.

ANTHROPONOMY is proposed as an alternative framework—both artistic and scientific—to research and discuss design in the scope of prototypical life-worlds, rather than stereotypical presets. An Altmodern framework.