Historical Zealot

Nuts-and-Bolts Rationalist

There’s a difficulty in designing one thing for multiple locations, such as a bus shelter or a public toilet. You can’t design for context since the surrounding of each installation is unique. Whatever the design, it can only display the unity of its own system.

Too often, this frees a designer to promulgate his particular style at the expense of all else.

Two such ubiquitous aliens pepper the sidewalks of San Francisco. The quaint-historical public toilets installed by JCDecaux look downright Disneyesque amid downtown’s modern office blocks. And the MUNI shelters of Lundberg Design’s Erector-Set aesthetic look especially graceless amongst the city’s myriad historical districts. Like a religious zealot and a hard-core atheist, each is too absorbed in its own convictions to acknowledge the other.