Since the '70s, we've replaced the flappiness of bellbottoms with vacuum-sealed tight skinny jeans; the boxy silhouette of the original Polaroid Land Camera with the minimalism of the new Z2300; and the clunk of Bill Gates's original desktop PC with the sleek portability of Steve Jobs's iPhone. But despite our attempts to escape our bulky past, a relic of the era before we started streamlining our world, the Space Shuttle Enterprise, is making its debut at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum on Manhattan's Pier 86 tomorrow.
Enterprise became the first spacecraft to take flight in 1977, the second half of perhaps the least elegant decade in history. For all its glory, it was contradictorily nubby, from the end of its squat nose and all the way down its boxy body. In spacecraft, function supersedes design for obvious reasons, but the Enterprise exemplifies the aesthetic of the era because it's emblematic of the way everything else was built, too. "Pure, unlovely function was the hallmark of that decade's most successful designs," according to the Daily Beast's Blake Glopnik, who brings to light the shuttle's resemblance to the decade's most popular household items: the Walkman, the Dustbuter, and the Apple II computer.
For all their functionality, they're still paradigms for the look of their moment: a mish-mash of geometric lines dominated by boxiness, what Dieter Rams would describe as "an impenetrable confusion of forms, colors, and noises." To put the '70s into historical context, however, the design dominated by function (which form sometimes never followed) was a backlash to the simultaneous sleekness and decadence of the modernist, swingin' '60s. The response of the following decade, one characterized by recession, rising unemployment, and heightened environmental awareness, was to put appearances in the back seat and leave them to be attended to come better days.
Does that mean our current decade, with all its similar social conditions, will follow suit? According to Kate Moss, the past is already starting to creep back in, one flared pantleg at a time.