The Hardware Archive
From hose clamps to drain covers, Liang-Jung Chen’s Hardware Archive celebrates the anonymous components that hold our world together, arguing that the most important designs are often the ones we never notice
- Words Ayla Angelos
A hinge, drain cover, bracket, a hose clamp… you walk past dozens of them every day and most likely don’t notice any of them, because that is precisely what they are built to do. They work invisibly, in the background, holding things together so well that you never have a reason to look. The Italian designer Bruno Munari spent much of his career arguing that the most honest design wasn't the heroic object but the modest, functional one. Victor Papanek made a related case in Design for the Real World, insisting that the objects which matter most are often the ones nobody thinks to credit. Hardware sits at the furthest edge of that argument. It is design with the authorship deliberately
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