Why Do Authors Write Cautionary Tales in Literature

Cautionary tales have been an essential part of a design imagination that has attempted to frame the relationship between the systemic complexity of design problems and what counts as modern architectural solutions in other ways. Cautionary tales do not seek consensus, leading to proposing design resolutions or establishing a given technical fix as a norm. Instead, they make productive use of differences manifesting as contradictions, ambiguities, and paradoxes and provoke the need to reframe the problem itself. In published formats, cautionary tales appear early on in the context of children's literature. They can be traced across various styles ranging from the more didactic forms such as Cautionary Tales for Children by Hilaire Belloc (1907) to more humorous forms such as Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories (1958) by Dr. Seuss. ¹ One of the best-known examples of the use of cautionary tales as a mode of working with design is Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas: Premonitions of the Mystical Rebirth of Urbanism (1971) by Superstudio. ² A less known cautionary tale worthy of exploration is How to Live in a Flat (1939) by K.R.G. Browne and Heath Robinson, written around the time of the great depression in Great Britain ³ (Figure 1). The cautionary note in these stories emerges by extrapolating modern technological solutions to their ambiguous but logical extremes so that the system starts to flip, bend, act weird, and appear not so rational. Twelve Cautionary Tales amusingly suggests how seemingly perfect applications of modernist norms such as planned zones, automation of everyday life, and intelligent service environments, when carried to their extremes, become not such promising solutions after all. How to Live in a Flat produces a giggle, a laugh, together with an understanding of the absurd problems that have arisen through the normative acceptance of the flat as a typology for modern living. Circulating images from How to Live in a Flat in contemporary post-COVID media indicate how the humor in the tales makes them accessible for a general audience. The eerie relation is evident between the tales and the daily post-COVID spatial struggles of most city dwellers, who were forced to be locked in their rooms for a considerable amount of time. After all, Browne and Robinson's intention was that the tales reach all the relevant stakeholders of modern flat life. Namely: "flat builders, flat dwellers, flat managers, flat borrowers, people who let flats, people who design bell pushers for flats, people who operate lifts in flats, people who deliver beer at flats and even people who merely gawp at flats from the top of passing trams." ⁴

Cautionary Tales of a Whacky Kind: On the Uses of a Design Imagination that Avoids Consensus

Published online:

07 September 2021

Figure 1. Cover image of Twelve Cautionary Tales For Christmas by Superstudio (Image@ Architectural Design # 12, 1971).

Figure 1. Cover image of Twelve Cautionary Tales For Christmas by Superstudio (Image@ Architectural Design # 12, 1971).

Heath Robinson, who was born in a period when there was a significant increase of machinery in England's everyday landscape, is known for his obsession with gadgetry. ⁵ During the interwar years, his experience designing advertisements and brochures for industrial products sharpened his critical eye towards how industry and professionals peddled modern design solutions as quick fixes to complex urban problems. ⁶ British humor writer K.R.G. Browne proved a perfect collaborator to collectively question the ills of a 1930s industrialized Britain congested but mobile. Their series of "How to…" books focused on modern contraptions ranging from flat typologies to motor cars. ⁷ The modern flat as it appears in the story is both a spatial story about mechanical technologies and a machine in itself where the spatial components are parts of a larger mega-machine that is architecture, produced when a building interacts with its occupants. ⁸ The infamous Heath Robinson Machines make these interaction processes visible by using cogs, levers, bits of string, screws, bolts, and running chains, and setting up a frame full of humor around them, communicating to the reader how cause and effect around design decisions operate in peculiar ways within the built environment.

The way that Robinson and Browne frame the complex nature of the modern housing question in 1930s Britain can be better defined by the term "wicked problem." Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber introduced the term to distinguish design and planning problems as a different category of problems that are not amenable to conventional problem-solving. ⁹ They insisted that design problems are "wicked" because the problem itself is not a given. ¹⁰ Most design approaches looking for solutions focus on taming the issue by omitting differences in stakeholder voices and other nonhuman elements that are inherently part of the design problem. Rittel and Webber insisted that the problem frame, when considered as an information frame, can emerge only via bringing these different elements into a conversation. ¹¹ Humor thrives on information frames that can carry different, contradictory elements together. Elements of difference appear as inconvenient externalities within socio-economic debates and policy-making discussions related to modern city planning. These elements are often representationally reduced to numbers, dots, and lines. Browne and Robinson use the story as a frame to gather these elements and reintroduce them to a design discussion in more animate ways.

The maintenance of balcony projection lines and flat service roofs appear in city planning and building regulations books as modes of regulating city form. Nevertheless, in real life, they take on a radically different life. At times these regulation-driven building elements appear questionable. However, they are also packed with unique advantages like enabling roof golf, communal eurythmics, or the ability to climb a hill within the comfort of one's flat via the ingenious employment of the roof hiking method. For the policy and urban development discussions, the questions of zoning appear as lines in city plans. Naturally, how this zoning might impact the views of the flat dwellers is not clear. More often than not, the zoning can result in views of the wrong kind. Thanks to the miraculous device the Robinson synthetic outlook, which can be hung in front of the windows, the flat dwellers are saved from these planning disasters (Figure 2). ¹² For a city flat developer, space allocation can be an economic decision based on economic value. How such developer decisions translate to the economics of space in strange ways is demonstrated by discussing the curious plight of thin partition walls. The thin partition walls' easy construction is described as follows: "walls less than three feet thick they considered almost as vulgar as walls more than three inches thick. As a result, it takes considerably longer to pull down one old house than erect a block of twenty-seven new flats on its site (there is probably a moral here somewhere, but we have no time to hunt for it now)." ¹³ For developers and contractors, these thin walls appear as mass-produced marvels, enabling low-cost construction. Within the cautionary tale, the thin partition elements from walls to floors are depicted as problematic agents that cocreate life within the flat and are exposed for the sheer inconveniences of not being soundproof or warping under the influence of extra pressure (Figure 3). Through the 'naming' and 'framing' of the underlying controversial systems and the possible idiosyncrasies in the given design and policy strategies, Browne and Robinson make the various stakeholders' different interests visible. ¹⁴ The tales help make visible what is politically and ethically at stake when design solutions leap from data to recommendations and facts to value statements.

Cautionary Tales of a Whacky Kind: On the Uses of a Design Imagination that Avoids Consensus

Published online:

07 September 2021

Figure 2. Robinson synthetic outlook. (Image © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.)

Figure 2. Robinson synthetic outlook. (Image © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.)

Cautionary Tales of a Whacky Kind: On the Uses of a Design Imagination that Avoids Consensus

Published online:

07 September 2021

Figure 3. The sneeze. (Image © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.)

Figure 3. The sneeze. (Image © Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.)

Within the tale, facts and fiction start to relate to each other in complicated ways. Browne and Robinson manage to freeze some flat stories, such as the stories of progress and urban living told by policymakers, building developers, and landlords, to tell 'other' stories of the inhabitants. They indicate how important it is not to hold one-story form to normalize the others. Donna Haraway stressed the need to use speculative fabulation and science facts in the same 'SF' figure as a mode of dealing with complicated relationships between questions of fact (reserved for professionals) and fiction (reserved for nonspecialists). ¹⁵ Neoliberalism that produces the common sense of our times uses fiction effectively to hold one set of facts that are beneficial for a minority to motivate consensus and influence daily design decisions. ¹⁶ How to Live in a Flat provides a glimpse of how one may reframe the relation between fact and fiction in ways that invite differences. Browne and Robinson's humorous tale matters as it gives courage and helps develop a caring attitude towards the unresolved tensions of the present.

Notes

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dulmini Perera

Dr. Dulmini Perera is an architect and architectural historian with a research interest in architecture's encounters with scientific practices and technologies that have contributed to the emergence of various techno-social models of framing the environment. At present, she explores the connection between design methods and mess (or wicked problems) in its many forms. Her current teaching studios at the Bauhaus University Weimar are focused on developing systemic tools that aid designers in dealing with these messy situations.

Notes

1 Hilaire Belloc, Cautionary Tales for Children (Everleigh Nash, 1907); Dr. Seuss, Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories (Random House, 1958).

2 Superstudio, "Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas," Architectural Design, no. 12 (December 1971): 737–742.

3 Heath Robinson and K.R.G. Browne, How to Live in a Flat (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2015).

4 Robinson and Browne, How to Live in a Flat, 135.

5 Heath Robinson, Wonderful Contraptions and Extraordinary Inventions (Gloucestershire: Amberley Publishing, 2015), 4.

6 Bruce Heydt, "The Art of English Cartoonist and Illustrator William Heath Robinson," British Heritage Travel, accessed May 05, 2021, https://britishheritage.com/art-culture/art-william-heath-robinson

7 Heath Robinson and K.R.G. Browne, How to be a Motorist (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2015); Heath Robinson and K.R.G. Browne, How to Make a Garden Grow (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2016).

8 Note that Heath Robinson resorted to a different stripped-down version of his original drawing style with much cleaner lines and lots of white space within the "How to" series. As such, one does not find the usual one Robinson image that gives an overview of the entire system, but instead micro-events detailed out as drawings and spun into the textual narrative.

9 Horst W.J. Rittel and Melvin Webber, "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning," Policy Sciences 4(2) (1973): 160–167.

10 Rittel and Webber, "Dilemmas": 160.

11 Horst W.J. Rittel, "Second-generation Design Methods," in Developments in Design Methodology, Nigel Cross, ed. (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1984), 317–27, 325.

12 Robinson and Browne, How to Live in a Flat, 76–78.

13 Robinson and Browne, How to Live in a Flat, 124–125.

14 Donald A. Schön and Martin Rein, Frame Reflection: Toward the Resolution of Intractable Policy Controversies (New York: BasicBooks, 1994), 23.

15 Fabbula TV, "Donna Haraway / Speculative Fabulation," May 24, 2016, YouTube video, 4:44, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFGXTQnJETg&t=27s.

16 Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, "Engineering Consent" in Inventing the Future: Post Capitalism and a World without Work (London: Verso, 2015), 132–137.

Why Do Authors Write Cautionary Tales in Literature

Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10464883.2021.1947712

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