Anonymous Radiators

How do we design technologies to reflect the God-created world they participate in?

(Note: we are testing a new, more regular posting schedule on Monday / Wednesday / Friday with more design critiques and design proposals. Philosophy and theology will still be present as before.)

Based on a recommendation at the New Polity conference, I sat down and read through Romano Guardini's book Letters from Lake Como - and it was a gem. Guardini was a priest, theologian, and philosopher who was a professor at several schools in Germany. His thought has been influential for both Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis. The book is a collection of letters he had written to a friend that outlined how modern technology was changing habits of life. Because ideas emerge over the course of the conversation, it is a more illustrative and more approachable philosophy of technology. The entire book is good, but for this post one passage stuck out to me. Focus on the remark of anonymity here (emphasis mine):

Let us take another example. In older Italian houses, especially in rural areas, you will always find the open hearth. We have here something that is bound up with the deepest roots of human existence: seizing open fire and putting the flame to use to warm us. Mind and spirit are at work here; nature is put to human use, and an element of human existence is achieved. There is a payment in some remoteness from nature, to be sure. I am aware of the roar of fire and the primitive power of uncontrolled flames. Here we have a softening and thinning out and distancing. That is the cost of culture. But nature is still close at hand. We still have here a flaming fire that people have kindled and keep burning. We note the situation of the hearth, the enclosing and protecting chimney walls, the living air current, the hearth's organic integration with the room and the house. This is human living. With some exaggeration we might say that being human means lighting a fire at a protected spot so that it may give light and heat. We are in the sphere of primitive humanity here - Prometheus! But note how we have left all that with our coal stoves that we light in autumn and keep burning in clocklike fashion until spring, or with our steam heating, which completely anonymously keeps the house at a certain temperature by means of a boiler. Or think of heating by electricity, in which nothing burns at all, but a current comes into the house and gives warmth in some way. The manifestation of culture has gone, the link with nature has been cut, a totally artificial situation has been created. Everything that was achieved by human existence before an open fire is a thing of the past.

In other words, the steam radiator is anonymous because the radiator, as designed makes no indication about steam, heating, the family, the hearth, the source of the energy of the radiator, or the natural world at all. Ultimately, this design is more fitting for a world where everything appears human-defined and human-conqured rather than tilled and kept.

The common shape of the radiator is such so that it (1) disperses heat to the nearby air and (2) can be mass-produced. In other words, its primary values are utility and production. Of course, these things are not a problem, they are both good. The trouble - again, an ugliness kind of trouble - comes when the focus on utility misrepresents the focus of our own life. Utility is good and necessary, but happiness does not consist in the summation of utility.

Suppose that we want to make the steam radiator beautiful and more reflecting of the Christian vision of God, human beings, and the rest of creation. What could we make? A full discussion of a radiator goes far beyond a blog post and would be outside of my skill. Nevertheless, these sketches can provide references points - inspirations, perhaps - to discuss beauty for a specific object.

A first approach to add beauty may be the approach of ornamentation. This is a step in the right direction, as it indicates that beauty is important in life in addition to utility. However, it is only slightly better than a utilitarian radiator. The ornamentation being "added on" afterwards indicates the beuaty is not integral to the object (and therefore beauty is not integral to the useful). Its political equivalent is the separation of practical and spiritual life - perhaps some form of early liberalism. Its social equivalent might be a social program to teach people how to appreciate art and beauty without any interest in freeing people from servile labor so that they have the time and desire to become artists. The modernists were right to dismiss the practice of ornamentation.

If the focus is to let the form represent the function, the next might be a very literal kind of design: a radiator designed to look like a campfire, for example. It might seem good that some link to a more natural world is maintained. The problem with a design like this is that an image of fire would be too literal. It wouldn't indicate that we have already mediated the fire. Ceci n'est pas une pipe. To continue the political metaphor, this approach may be something like bureaucracy or technocracy. Neither of them admit a higher purpose of man or admit that technology changes us. Duck architecture is a very direct large-scale architectural version of this.

I don't want to simply reject, so let me propose. This is a concept based upon a drawing of some of the ancient algae that perhaps could have formed the natural gas that boilers use. There is a natural link, if mediated - but here, the mediation (it’s a shape discovered by scientists) is quite in harmony with the mediation of the natural gas itself used in heating boilers today (produced through a scientific-industrial process). Even after explaining it, our perception of algae is as foreign and dead, symbolizing how natural gas is a dead resource as opposed to a living and renewable and living one. Yet at the same time, there is a certain natural beauty to the algae’s shape. Here, the imperfections in the sketch (missing bars, non-circular shapes) are intentional, matching the images of ancient algae. I would also not be surprised if it is possible to still get good heat exchange utility from the design.

There are still many directions to explore in the design of radiators — I don’t pretend to know enough to design them well. Statistically, there is probably no one reading this who designs home radiators or deeply knows how they work. (If you do, reach out!) Nevertheless, it is easier to sketch concepts for radiators than smartphones, given their relative simplicity and longer history. Designing a radiator well would require knowledge of several additional aspects. One would be the details of the physics of heat transfer with the steam radiator to really produce better designs. Was there something ignored in order to make the steam radiator mass-produced more cheaply? I would also like to know how the radiator is used in families - when my family lived in a house with radiators, we would put our socks on them after playing out in the snow so they would dry faster. How can that be symbolized and supported? I am sure this kind of study would produce a far more beautiful and just steam radiator than my drive-by understanding of them, and it could also lead to regional and cultural differences in radiators (always a sign of beauty and fullness.) There is also the question of whether steam radiators are a fitting heating method for a given house - all of this discussion is predicated upon that being the case.

Ultimately, these sketches of radiators highlight just how enjoyable a truly beautiful steam radiator could be by showing us how far we have to go to attain that beauty. In love of God and neighbor, we seek nothing less.

Don’t leave this post as one-way propaganda, join in the conversation here on Substack or the Discord server. Here are some questions to begin:

What about these designs is beautiful, and what about them is ugly?

Have you encountered something recently that was anonymous and therefore ugly, or named and situated and therefore beautiful?

What else in Guardini’s paragraph rings true or sounds hollow?