The only rule to timelessness is authenticity
A chat with Noah Daniel on Modernism, interior design, and honest materiality.
I discovered Noah Daniel a few weeks ago thanks to the YouTube algorithm which must have been feeling particularly generous that day.
His videos on architecture and design are so thoughtfully and intelligently expressed, with a deep appreciation for the principles behind historical design movements, rather than simply the aesthetics that are borne from them.
Up until now, Noah has mainly focused on Modernism, so this is what we spoke about on our call — how misunderstood it is as a concept, its key pillars of ‘form follows function’ and ‘honest materiality’, how these principles run through Noah’s own approach to choosing a home and making it his own, and some good tips for renters.
At the end, as always, there is a special treat for paid subscribers in the form of Noah’s most-loved Modernist designers and the books he is reading and loving on architecture right now. It all makes for a very inspiring visual story.
Where I try to start with everybody is to ask them to describe themselves without saying what they do, just to get to the essence of who you are before saying what your job is.
Ok, very interesting, let’s see. I am Noah. I’m originally from Seattle, Washington in the US. I currently live in Copenhagen. I am simultaneously a very creative and analytical person. I’m highly interested in architecture and interiors and I’ve sort of centred my life, my studies, and my career on that because it’s one of my favourite things. Space is so important to me, I’m such a homebody, nesting-type person and I think that’s the root of it. I’ve always been fascinated by the built environment and how it affects us. There is this cliché that architects always say about how “we shape it and then it shapes us” and it’s so true, it has such a big impact.
You have a YouTube channel where you talk about design, but more specifically you dive into the principles behind design and different movements. You talk about the thoughtful considerations behind how people live rather simply the aesthetic considerations. You’ve mainly started off talking about Modernism…
I’m a huge fan of Modernism but it’s so different to how a lot of people understand or interpret it. In general, I think that design, architecture, and interior design are pretty misunderstood and approached in the wrong way — from the outside and even sometimes from the inside of the field.
The name of my undergraduate degree was Interior Architecture, which is ironic because in the US it’s illegal to call yourself an interior architect if you’re an interior designer. But the concept of interior design has — I don’t want to say a stigma, but a big misunderstanding of what it means to create a space for people. I think it’s really rooted historically in a lot of misogyny and looking down on domesticity in general, but when you think of the principles of design and when you’re thoughtfully approaching how you design a space, it’s so much deeper and more important than a fashionable stylised approach. There’s a lot of beauty in design and it’s a lot more fascinating than people realise. When you approach interior design or any kind of design with theory and principles and let that inform your aesthetics, that is when design is working.
It’s not just this frivolous thing.
People think of an interior designer and they tell you what colours to use and what’s beautiful and it’s so not that. It’s so based on problem-solving, it’s such an important, thoughtful field and tons of interior designers or decorators don’t give it that respect.
Even when I started studying interior architecture, I had a bit of embarrassment saying it because it sounds like something so frivolous and like it doesn’t have much value, and I think that’s a big shame, I wish people realised how important and fascinating it is.
Yeah, for sure. And I think you capture that a lot in your content.
That makes me so happy.
Yeah, you intellectualise it but in an accessible way. I’d love to talk to you about Modernism — why you’re so into it, the guiding principles of it, and how it’s misunderstood.
Well, the biggest reason that Modernism is misunderstood is because of the word “modern”. I think very few people who haven’t studied design understand the difference between contemporary and modern design. Contemporary means just new buildings of the time, and Modern means modernist philosophy.
Modernism is actually a lot older than people realise. It’s well over 100 years old, it goes back to the 1800s and it was re-thinking the values of designing architecture and the built environment to adapt to our industrialised world. That took a lot of different forms and there is a lot under the umbrella of Modernism, there are so many different schools and movements and regional examples, but the common thread through all of it is essentially this idea of “Form Follows Function” — respecting and finding the beauty in buildings based on their function.
That was quite a radical idea. A lot of people don’t realise that architecture for many centuries before that, at least in Western civilisation, was very much rooted in expressing power or wealth.
Not considering a space as a place to live or work in, but rather a tool to say I’m really rich.
Exactly, think of Versailles. In all of our architectural history classes, we were always looking at churches or government buildings or things that aren’t necessarily human-oriented.
The way that Modernism is misconstrued by people, they understand it as this very clean, minimal, basic look when really that’s just the smallest little nugget of it.
That’s a symptom of it, essentially, and it’s not necessarily always like that. A lot of architects today who aren’t taking such a critical, academic approach create these buildings that, if you just glance at them for a second, they look Modern, but if you look closer, you notice that there are all these design moves where you wonder why they did that. A person on the street might think it’s a Modern building, but it’s just a contemporary building mimicking the clean lines of Modernism but in a really horrible way. There are a lot of buildings like that, especially in the US and it makes me sad because it gives Modernism a bad name.
So in your mind, what are the key tenets of Modernism and why are they so important?
I think in a successfully Modern building, you could go there with the designer and point at anything — the proportions of a window, the material on a wall, every single thing, every proportion, every shape, any element at all, and they would be able to justify it or explain why it’s there. I realise that that’s kind of like a strict ideology, but I really believe that about design. I believe that at every scale — think of if you look at an iPhone — the designer should be able to explain why every millimetre is the way that it is.
Ultimately, Modernism and ‘form follows function’ in general are rooted in thoughtfulness. That’s what it is. And ‘form follows function’ essentially means a lack of unnecessary ornament, which is a very complicated two little words strung together that I could write a full dissertation on, because unnecessary ornament is so subjective, and necessary ornament is a little bit confusing when you think about it.
What it’s getting at — and a lot of iconic modern buildings might not even fall into this so maybe what I am about to say is a little radical — is that ornament can be necessary and important for the effect of a building. It’s difficult because it’s hard to define, but that’s where designers with a keen understanding of what spaces should feel like come in and it becomes a feeling thing. I think the idea that there should be no ornament is pretty problematic because it makes people over-strip a building and then it loses any sort of human feeling.
What I imagine when I think of “ornament” is just the features of a building, so if you use, for example, genuine wood and stone and glass, naturally by using those materials, there will be an element of ornament throughout the building just from the natural characteristics of those materials. Another thing that you talk about in your videos is material honesty and I think that’s a huge thing that I connect with — as somebody who literally has nightmares about grey wood laminate flooring.
It’s so bad, isn’t it?
Anyway, material honesty was the topic of one of the videos you made recently and I felt like the idea of that principle of material honesty and ornament could kind of be married together, in a way.
I think that’s exactly what it is. You can make certain decisions to highlight a material and I think that can be a really solid reasonable direction to introduce ornament. If you think about a kitchen counter and backsplash, you can imagine where the detail there is meant to highlight the natural features of the stone and that can drive the designer to create a touch of ornament without it being this flat, bare, blank thing.
The big thing that I want to talk about with honest materials — because whenever I have spoken about this on TikTok or YouTube, people just don’t get it and they come after me because everybody thinks that you’re talking shit on cheap materials, especially when you talk about the wood example, and people get very defensive and think you’re being elitist and not understanding that people can’t afford high-end materials and that’s so not what I am getting at. I am so ok with a Formica countertop, I am so ok with any cheap material, I just have a big, big problem with it when it starts to pretend to be a different material, if that makes sense.
Like when you have a vinyl that looks like wood when you can get high-quality ply that’s not expensive…
Exactly. Or a CMU, concrete masonry wall — it’s one of the cheapest building materials and just letting that be is stunning. Any type of cheap wood, even a wood veneer rather than a solid wood I think is ok. Even a vinyl floor. Every material has an authentic way of looking even if it’s synthetic. Even if it’s plastic!
When it becomes bad design in my mind is when it’s trying to fool you and mask something, it’s just really bad energy and it will never be timeless. People love to talk about timelessness. I feel like a lot of the interior designers that are really on top of trends are always calling things timeless and I really believe the only rule to timelessness is authenticity.
Even in the 50s when they started to use synthetic materials, you could find a Formica with a wood grain printed on it or one with a wood veneer — even those two examples, you can understand the value of the authentic one better. They are equally vintage, they are the same style, but the timelessness will always come from authentic materials.
If I can’t afford a BMW, I’m not going to put a sticker over my Honda logo that says BMW, you know? The issue is the fakeness, not the expensiveness of the material.
I think the most important lesson to take from that is that things don’t need to be as hard as you’re making them. Any material that you choose can look good if you just let it be itself.
100%. There are so many cool budget materials. I don’t have that much money and I will be using those in my upcoming home design. I think there is something really nice about their modesty and celebrating a simple material. It’s really easy to buy an expensive stone or an expensive marble or something that’s really obviously beautiful and I think it requires a bit more talent and skill to make cheaper materials work and it can be really cool.
What you’ve just said about incorporating things into your own design takes me very neatly to my next question which is that you’ve just moved to Copenhagen, you don’t have your flat yet, but once you do, I’d love to know what kind of approach you’re going to take and how you’re envisioning the process.
One of my upcoming videos is going to be about apartment searching on the apartment hunting websites here to talk about what I like, what I don’t like, and what I am drawn to. A huge one when you are apartment hunting and looking to rent is honest materiality. Any time I see the vinyl floor, it’s just out.
It’s interesting because when you’re renting, there are things like the kitchen and bathroom and built-in features that you likely can’t touch or renovate, and how you can make those work can be a really interesting challenge.
Something that I love about design, whether you’re designing a building as an architect or you’re working as an interior designer in an existing space, is that it’s all about problem-solving and responding to what is. Say you’re building a house on a hill, the hill is going to inform how the house looks, ideally, in a well-thought-out design. But in interior design, it’s much more precise and there are many more problems to solve which drew me to interiors in the first place.
At my university, all of the architecture and interiors students start together in the first two years and you’re taking the same courses and then you need to pick either architecture, interiors, or there’s also a landscape program. But for the studio projects, we were given a building rather than a site, and to me, that’s so much more exciting. In a way, because of the sustainable aspect of working with what is already there is pretty cool, so I’m really excited to find a place.
I’ve rented a few places before but this will probably be the nicest one and it’s my first one in Copenhagen that I’m going to have full control over. I’m really looking forward to talking to my audience about what you can work with, and what’s harder to work around. I will say that being in Denmark, you’re playing on easy mode because everything is already so pretty.
I guess you have to consider things like light and temperature. When you are looking for a place, what are the key things that you look for? For me, it’s always where the sun is shining.
100% the sun shining, particularly in Denmark. I learnt this winter that it’s very important to be high up. Luckily the place that we’ve been subletting is on the 5th floor, so you get a lot of sunlight in the winter which is very nice. Light is key.
Also, in general, just the logic of the floor plan. A lot of places that people rent have been either chopped up and divided into multiple units or haphazardly renovated because they’re doing it with renters in mind, which can be harder to work around, so making sure that it makes sense. One of the sublets that we were in this year could so obviously have been a wonderful one-bedroom apartment but they tore down all these walls and made the strangest, wasted floor plan, so making sure that the floorplan makes sense.
And just the architecture of the building, how easy it is to work around. Bathrooms and kitchens are the big definers because they are so hard to change and I don’t want to be in a situation where I am wishing I could rip out the kitchen. I think that’s something you need to have a clean canvas on as a renter.
Books and Buildings
A few of Noah’s favourite resources and sources of inspiration.
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