Plugimi (Sascha Pohflepp)

I’m currently starting off my dissertation at the Royal College of Art and have to submit a draft by Friday, which will pretty much define the boundaries in which I will move about in my research and writing. The subject is Grand Gestures and focusses primarily on ambitious projects that aimed to be world-changing or were generally megalomaniac in one way or the other.

In doing so, I am hoping to extract some assessment of what made work resonate with the world in general and gave it agency (or maybe why it failed spectacularly), which might lead to humble hints of strategies for current and future endeavors in art and especially design.

So, since it’s (quite literally) a biggish subject , I’m looking for projects to research around and structure my point with. If anything comes to mind when reading the above, please quickly drop me a line in the comments. Think Buckminster Fuller, Superstudio’s architecture visions, Herman Kahn redesigning whole nations from a flying think tank or also the notions of the Californian ideology with some of its roots in the 1960s. Any hint appreciated, from the obvious to the weirdest.