 |
|
 |
|
Intangible Aesthetics. It's the artists versus the engineers down in Texas, where a new E.P.A. code is forcing restaurateurs and other retailers to use ugly-but-efficient fluorescents instead of beautifully wasteful incandescent lights, as reported by Virginia Postrel in The New York Times. At this point, the E.P.A. is simply encouraging states and cities to adopt the International Energy and Conservation Code. But for designers like Granville McAnear of Craig Roberts Associates in Dallas, it's a problem. "You have to have incandescent sources to be able to light the space nicely, softly -- to get that warm feel, even in contemporary spaces," he says. Observes Ms Postrel: "For...any business that wants customers to feel special, lighting isn't just illumination anymore. It's identity, emotion and drama."
Actually, the point of the matter is not lighting so much as it is those many intangibles that create value in the hearts and minds of we consumers. As Ms. Postrel notes: "Cellphones do not just communicate; they let owners swap face plates and personalize rings. Toilet brushes do not just remove grime; they come in caddies with personality -- from Phillippe Starck's sleek Excalibur to Stefano Giovannoni's playful Merdolino." Prices, she explains, "capture the relative value people put on intangibles," and reward "value you cannot easily count."
Just ask anyone in California politics about intangibles. But this is Texas, where notions of "tangible mechanical performance," as the economist Thorstein "Conspicuous Consumption" Veblen termed it in 1921, are giving the intangible types fits. "There is a significant difference between being able to see and being able to appreciate," says Fred Oberkircher, director of the center for lighting education at Texas Christian University. Mark Rea, however, sees the issue in a different...light. "I can demonstrate through research that your color perception is better with fluorescent than it is with incandescent," he says. He's with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and says the designers don't know what they're talking about. Retorts Jan Martin, of Dallas design firm Zero 3: "I don't care what they say. Fluorescent is just not attractive."
Tim Manners, editor
|
|
|
