The death of detail: modern design is headed in the wrong direction

Kylie Grunsfeld, Contributing Writer

While driving on Belvidere Street last week, some friends and I pulled up next to a car that looked both familiar and completely alien. It was, I would soon learn, Volkswagen’s new ID. Buzz — an all-electric “new generation” of their beloved VW Type Two, colloquially known as “the hippie van.” 

I was struck by how much duller the ID. Buzz looked in comparison to the original hippie van. Bulky, boring and lacking the charm of the original, it is like a Tesla Cybertruck with rounded edges. In their attempt to achieve a sleek, retro-modern look, VW has effectively stripped the van of the intricacies that made it iconic in the first place. It would be one thing if the van’s visual rebranding was an isolated incident, but it is part of a larger, unfortunate design trend. 

In the past few years, we have seen an increasing number of brands redesign their logos for seemingly no reason, stripping down their existing designs by muting colors, simplifying fonts and sometimes eliminating iconic visuals. This transition to minimalism has been made by brands such as Cracker Barrel, Yves Saint Laurent and Apple. 

The result? A brand logo that is less distinguishable from others than it was to begin with. 

More than anywhere else in the world, we have seen a gravitation toward minimalism in architecture. It is hard not to notice how uninteresting modern buildings are, especially in comparison to older buildings like what we have here in the city. 

Any Richmond lover will rave about how much they enjoy walking through the Fan, observing houses on either side of the street with stained glass windows, Grecian columns and pointed turrets. You could stare for hours at a single house and find hundreds of design details, something you cannot do with the majority of modern architecture. It seems that as time goes on, more emphasis is placed on the items inside a building than the building itself. 

Companies value efficiency above all else, and maximizing efficiency often means sacrificing imagination. Looking back at the death of the hippie van; by creating a minimalistic, futuristic vehicle, Volkswagen is only doing the same as other companies. Still, it is disappointing to think that these companies believe our future should look like a bunch of soulless metal boxes flying down the street as we travel from one bland, blank building to another. 

It is no secret that as culture changes, so does art, it is how we respond to the world, and how we respond to the past is going to differ from how we respond in the 2020s. I am not suggesting we should only follow design trends of the past, but rather take inspiration from how previous designers and architects put care and imagination into their work — such as those who created the hippie van. Not everything needs to be sleek. Frankly, sleek is getting boring.