The Cunning of Cosmetics

Definition

"The Cunning of Cosmetics" is Jeff Kipnis's 1997 essay on Herzog & de Meuron — the term for the surface and atmospheric effects that entangle with architectural form: cosmetics as the apparently superficial layer whose cunning lies in producing effects that no planning or form-making can deliver alone. Clay Odom imports the essay as his chapter's theoretical framework: "In writing about what could be called an entanglement of effects and form found in the work of seminal practice, Herzog and de Meuron's (entanglements understood here as Venturian contradictions), Jeff Kipnis seeks to reconcile rigorous planning and form production with surface and atmospheric effects in what he described as 'The Cunning of Cosmetics'." For Odom the essay's framework — "its timing at the beginning of contemporary production-oriented practices" — recapitulates "the dialectical tension between what is traditionally the domain of design preoccupation (the object) with a growing focus on the manipulation of the surfaces of form and the production of effects."

The concept answers a pejorative: productions risk being dismissed as "superficial" concerns — the "cosmetic" charge. Odom's answer is the entanglement thesis: "To accomplish this turn toward productions (of space, atmosphere, surface, and even contemporary investigations of glamour) design processes and design outcomes in the form of materials, codes, criteria, atmospheres, affects, and effects must be intertwined as Kipnis suggests." Cosmetics are cunning precisely because they are not additive decoration but the co-production of form and effect: Kapoor "leverages form and material integration not as ends, but as means of producing new situations and effects within the city"; the effects are "generated by and entangled with other conditions through patterning processes, rather than selected and applied hierarchically." The concept makes the ornament debate's contemporary front explicit — ornament's newest form is not applied decoration but systematized, process-produced effect.

Key Thinkers

• Jeff Kipnis — the concept's author: "The Cunning of Cosmetics" (El Croquis 84, 1997), written on Herzog & de Meuron; his "A Question of Qualities" (2013) supplies the chapter's performance epigraph ("performance in architecture is closer to theater and music than to science or engineering") (not yet paged — see log).
• Clay Odom — the concept's interior-practice redeployer: the framework of his Reader chapter, with POPs as the practices the cunning operates in (2018).
• Robert Venturi — the dialectic's ancestor: "entanglements understood here as Venturian contradictions" — Complexity and Contradiction as the source of the formal unease cosmetics complicates.
• Herzog & de Meuron — the seminal practice whose work the essay theorizes: the "entanglement of effects and form" (not yet paged — see log).

Related Concepts

• productions — the broader concept cosmetics serves: the turn "toward productions (of space, atmosphere, surface, and even contemporary investigations of glamour)."
• architectural-ornament — the debate cosmetics re-opens: surface effects as ornament's process-produced contemporary form (see ornament-vs-purity).
• atmosphere — the atmospheric half of the entanglement ("atmospheres, affects, and effects must be intertwined").
• production-oriented-practices — the practice genre whose framework Kipnis's essay "inadvertently helps to position."
• ephemeral-interior — the temporality of cosmetic effects: transitory, elusive, but not without material implications.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Productions: spatial practices, processes, and effects (Odom 2018) — the concept's wiki source: Kipnis's essay framed as the chapter's theoretical backbone; the entanglement thesis ("design processes and design outcomes… must be intertwined as Kipnis suggests"); the dialectical tension between the object and "the manipulation of the surfaces of form and the production of effects"; and the glamour clause.
• source-notes/erdman-2018-altered-estates

Open Questions

• Is the cosmetic the honest name for all effects-production (Kipnis's "cunning" implying the effects always dissemble their means), or a name for one pole of the object/effects dialectic that productions dissolve?
• Kipnis wrote on Herzog & de Meuron's buildings; Odom extends cosmetics to installations and interiors. Does the concept survive the scale change — is a temporary installation's atmosphere a cosmetic without a building beneath it?
• "Contemporary investigations of glamour" appear once, in a parenthesis, as part of the turn toward productions. What is design's glamour literature (Odom does not cite it here), and how does glamour differ from atmosphere as an effect-category?