SOUL:The union of art and engineering
Most Americans today live among a chaos of material possessions. Many of which seem to be built only sturdy enough to sell, and last only long enough to keep the customer from complaining. Todays world is composed of particleboard furniture, black plastic stereo systems, broken strings of Christmas lights, cheap plastic lawn chairs shattered in the yard, even cars that seem to be made mostly of plastic. This is a disposable world, our landfills littered with Wall-Mart trash. But this paper is not about this corruption, it is about a quality that is disappearing from these new disposable objects. I will call this quality "soul", although it doesn't matter what I call it, for I will tell you what it is.
This is how I myself came upon soul. I have an old car, and although it is for the most part a high quality machine, it has a few weak links here and there. And so one day upon trying to roll up the window, the cheap window crank handle simply shattered. All I had left were three shards of pot metal and a piece of black plastic with a knob hanging from it. I schemed about making my own heavy duty replacement, but I never did; the answer came to me.
Out in the rolling hills that surround Cripple Creek, at the bottom of a valley, wheel well deep in the dirt, lies the carcass of a great automobile. In it, shining like a jewel in the belly of a fallen beast, was a window crank, the ultimate window crank. It was made of only two basic pieces: a molded steel crank, and a spun steel knob attached by a rivet. In profile, the crank was streamlined like a teardrop, and concentric groves adorned the knob and crank with art deco. It was finished in chrome of the highest quality. Fifty years old, hanging motionless in a field for longer than I have been alive, and yet the knob spun smoothly, and there was not a stain of rust on it. I unclipped the crank, and by sheer luck, it slid right onto the splined shaft on the door of my car, where it remains today.
But there is something different, astounding, about this window crank. It is apparently unaffected by time or weather, it is ten times stronger than almost any other crank, but there was even something more. The previous crank was two different parts; one was a piece of black molded plastic, which looked like what most people think a crank should look like, the other was the actual crank itself, an ugly bit of pot metal designed only to hold the plastic shell together and be dirt cheap to manufacture. The plastic cover was a veil to hide the reality of the unsightly and cheap actual crank. It was a shell of what a good crank looks like with whatever was cheap crammed inside to hold it up. While the crank I salvaged from the car in the field is straightforward, it looks the way it is, the only veil is the highly polished surface of the crank itself. This is soul.
Let me give you another example, particle board furniture. In this brave, new, disposable world, wood is usually replaced by the less expensive and inferior particle board (which is basically sixty percent sawdust and forty percent glue), covered by a thin layer of plastic, or sometimes even a thin layer of wood. This stuff pretty much looks like wood, sort of feels like wood, and mostly sounds like wood. This is all most people are looking for when they go shopping to buy a new whatever. In reality, if something made out of particle board gets wet, it swells up like a sponge and disintegrates. It weighs twice as much as the same thing made out of actual wood, and is far weaker. Not to mention things made out of this stuff can usually be disassembled by a sharp blow with the foot. The coffee table for instance, from an engineering standpoint, must support objects such as feet, little kids jumping up and down on it, or coffee mugs, while resisting surface damage. It must be able to get wet while resisting deformation or just plain falling apart. It also should be strong enough so that it can be moved from place to place without damage. Long ago back when wood practically grew on trees, a good inexpensive coffee table which fulfilled all of these requirements was made of wood, nails, and screws. People began associating what a good wooden coffee table looks like, with good coffee table. So nowadays people go to the store and buy a coffee table based on values established before their time on what a good inexpensive coffee table should look like. But these values are no longer valid, wood is very expensive today, and advances in technology have led to better and less expensive materials than wood. Crazy, isn't it? My point is that the particle board coffee table is art, it symbolic of a good coffee table: it imitates one. Once again it is the shell of what a people think a good inexpensive coffee table should look like filled with the cheapest substance around to hold it together. A stainless steel or aluminum table with a urethane or vinyl top would be far better suited to a coffee tables physical requirements, but people go for the art, they go for tradition. I never knew people were so into art!
The particle board table is art. An aluminum table that is well suited to its job is well engineered. Soul is the merging of art and engineering so that one does not compromise the other.
Soul however, is not to be confused with how well suited an object is for its use, such as how long something lasts or how well it works. These are matters of engineering and opinion, not soul. When designing an object, the engineer considers the criteria: How much everything will cost, what range of uses the object needs to handle, how long it will last, geometric simplicity, manufacturing simplicity, efficiency, tolerance, simplicity of assembly, what it should look like, and so on, and comes up with a good balance. Changing one will change the others, for example; making a machine more durable will make it cost more, or make it harder to work on, or make it less efficient. If an object does not seem to be suited to its use (is a piece of junk), it is because it has gone beyond its intended use, the engineer screwed up, or the thing was built wrong. Pretend something was designed by considering every criterion except what the something should look like. I will call this the blind form. Objects which are never seen, or closely connected to anything you can see are usually already in blind form, such as internal engine components. To these components soul does not apply.
At this point we can define exactly what soul is. Soul is a measure of how far an object is complicated or compromised from its blind form. If an object's form is similar to the blind form in every way, that object is high in soul. My window crank's form deviates from its blind form only in that it is streamlined and grooved, these things do not compromise it, and only complicate it by making it cost a bit more to build. If the object is not at all close to its blind form, it has little soul. A coffee table in the blind form would never be made of particle board, so it has little soul.
Soul is not a measure of good and bad, it is simply a name for a quality. Soul does not matter in a sculpture, but it is usually the highest goal for Harley Davidson enthusiasts.
We live in a time where objects are built only to sell, and boxes of technological gimmicks sit under our Christmas trees. At the top of the millennium, I challenge you. Peel back the curtain of plastic, peer through the veil, and see what your world is truly made of. Art is nothing beyond the surface.
By Glen Urban