Irregularities in Mexico

Just returned from 16th Century San Miguel de Allende, 7000 feet up in rural Mexico, and I want to paint everything I own red/pink/turquoise/marine blue and gold and bury it deep in bougainvillea.

My spirit is whirling with the irregularity of everything I experienced. Everything WE do is regular, draftable, drawable, engineerable, architectable, aiming to be perfect. In San Miguel, everything is coming and going and living and dying and being patched and repainted, and what emerges from the centuries is a kind of beauty that no designer, indeed no lifetime, could ever design.

Looking into these streets and walls is like looking at geology in the Grand Canyon. The whole history is exposed. And because it is truth, it is beauty – great, deep beauty. It is far beyond the perfections of Disney (where one dead leaf causes a plant to be ripped out and a perfect one inserted before the next guest breathes). This is beauty of a kind that Disney cannot command, nor Frank Gehry create. Nor can anyone designing a store or a bank or a mall or an ad or a window ever come up to the scorching beauty of ancient “custom” design – a design that evolves in every level of an entire society, from the merest hovel to the Grand Inquisitor's residence. And for many generations, the colors of San Miguel are the colors of blood and years of enduring combat with nature. They are the colors of truth.

San Miguel is to Disney what the city of Venice is to the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. The Venetian hotel is perfect. There isn't an irregular line or an unreplaceable geranium in the whole complex. Every plant at every moment is at the peak of ripe perfection. The geraniums in Venice often droop in mismatched pots on their old, irregular balconies, where countesses and courtesans have leaned out over the Grand Canal in the evening, as you can do now. And the imperfection, impermanence and accumulated centuries provide a kind of beauty that we who work at reproducing it will never accomplish.

San Miguel was “designed” by traditional artisans and the collective consciousness of everyone who lived there, from its antediluvian beginnings until the government of Mexico declared the whole city a national monument in 1926 – and from that moment on, everything was preserved for consistency. The steep cobbled streets still dictate the pace of life and traffic. Slow. Irregular.

The minute you hire a “designer,” things get regular, straightened out. No peeling, cracking, sinking, patching, fading, waterlogging, no approximations.

So why study San Miguel de Allende? We're certainly not going to start decaying our walls nor live in a land of burnt-out lightbulbs and uncertain hours. We go for the inspiration.

These are the rewards of vigilant, enquiring travel; forget the heat, the mess, the altitude and the distance:

This is the land of the glorious approximate, where the paint man matches your paint by throwing the ingredients into the mix and making it. There is no computer. No designers! No architects! No engineers! No CAD machines! It's done by expert eye, on the spot, in place, studying the sun and position, and created accordingly. In fact, plumbers and carpenters can be confused because they do both over there. And they paint. Lord, how they paint. They just throw color at the wall, and it works. Their design training? A thousand years of artisan tradition, and the collective unconscious of the beauty of the place, which calls out extraordinary work from ordinary workers.

This is why we all need sharp vacations. You can return to the work you do and infuse it with a blast of foreign thinking. While you go back to practicing regularity, in the hopes of finding practicality, perfection and profitability, you can still inject irregularity into your thinking – even if the boss and the computer want you to straighten everything out.

Just remember that you learned to sleep in the hot afternoon, get up as the sun goes lower and go out to see the cocktail of colors one more time. The whole town comes out to see the spectacle. Just before sundown, every day, 10,000 noisy black grackles come back to the central plaza. And so do you, every day, not to miss the sun going lower while the whole opera glows in the tropical spotlight of the red-orange setting sun.

It makes you want to go back to Cleveland and drown it in fruit cocktail. So take home your 50 photographs of unlikely colors converging, and put them up on your walls. Glance up occasionally from your work of making things regular. It'll inspire you. Add some irregularity to your daily rounds and another kind of beauty will become part of your work.

A video of Peter's inspiring keynote address to R.A.C. 2001, entitled ” 'A'Is for Attitude,” can be ordered from the Retail Advertising & Marketing Association (RAMA). Phone: 312-251-7262, fax: 312-251-7269; Internet: www.rama-nrf.org. A new book of selected articles by Peter will debut at VM+SD's International Retail Design Conference in Orlando, October 28 – 31.