Well, I wouldn't use "art" and "design" interchangeably; they're two different beasts. Charles Turner
But art education in school is a major step to create good designers. I think the relation between art and design is mostly that design makes art reproductible. JC Helary
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For me there is no difference between art, design, and some kinds of mathematics, science, and industrial engineering. This interchangeability was developed as a broad spectrum education program at the Bauhaus. So interior design, abstract painting, sculpture, stain glass, photography, ceramics, printmaking, book design, graphic design, furniture design, architecture, city planning, factory design were all merged. There were other branches of this movement for music, theater, dance, etc.
The conceptual key to understand how all of these different professions and skill sets can be seen as different manifestations of some central aspect of human life is to really understand the concept of modularization in lines and space. The most famous example of a design module is the divine proportion. But there are maybe a dozen or more different modular scales that can be used. Each of these give a different and characteristic look and feel. The use of different modular scales changes the architectural space, the plane spaces, and linear spaces all around us.
Most bad architecture uses the US building materials module, like 2 x 4, or 4 x 8, which reduces to a ratio of 1:2. The rectangle is made of two squares. The European standard ISO module is 1:1.414. The rectangle for this looks like a slightly better proportioned rectangle. The golden section is 1:1.618. This produces the long rectangle seen on the Parthenon. The consequence of designing around building material modules for cost reasons, means, you base the design of the space on the 1:2 modular scale. Unfortunately this is a quite ugly system. When home improvement projects use this `natural' scale because sheet rock and two by fours come in these units, the result is really ugly.
I've been out to the newer housing developments and seen nothing but really ugly exteriors and interiors. Well off people think they are living the grand life. They are living in little boxes, made of ... 1:2 ratios.
For anybody interested in book and typographical design which covers this module concept see Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, 1992. This covers a really interesting quote that gives a hint to why the Greeks liked the golden section:
``The relationship between the square and the golden section is perpetual. Each time a square is subtracted from a golden section, a new golden section remains...'' 143p
What this means in construction terms is if you start with a big cube of marble, all you have to do is keep finding GS proportioned rectangular sub-blocks with a chalk line. Do this with each unit cube and you have all your building materials cut up automatically to start your temple. The way this method works you don't need to measure. All you need is a single common stick length to start, the master-stick so to speak. This master stick represents the unit length of the base square side. In other words it is a very convenient design system.
I shouldn't have complained about Art History, because I was really lucky to have great Art History professors. It's Art History the field I am not too crazy about. The guy who taught me about the Bauhaus philosophy was a graduate of the Bauhaus. Naturally the nazis took him off to medical camp for tropical disease treatments. His crime was possession of art supplies without a permit.
Fitz Faiss was his name. He spent a long time going over the Bauhaus curriculum in his Modern Art course. These modular scales were central to their conception of how to do art for modern life in the industrial age. They also had a whole Color Theory section. They were also interested in the revival of materials used in other cultures and other eras. FF's favorite painting medium was wax encaustic, revived from Helenistic Roman painting, particular the funerary portraits on Roman-Egyptian coffin painting. It survives burial in dry soil, that's how tough it is. The original material was bee's wax with dry pigment ground into a paste with a mortar and pestle and thinned with some distilled wood sap, i.e turpentine. I've played with this technique and it produces a magic satin finish that gives depth to color without the glare of varnish.
If you follow all that, this is how philosophy, mathematics, art, design, materials and methods of production (science and engineering) are unified into a way of life.
CG