To Destroy is to Create / To Create is to Order

Designers are reluctant to comply with the demand to destroy their work. Even in everyday life, acts of destruction are seen as the exact opposite of a creative process. Destroy something in which you have put your heart and soul? Never! In “To Destroy is to Create / To Create is to Order,” Sabine Kost shows us that there are definitely possibilities to understand destruction not only as something purely destructive but to use it conceptually in the creative process. By recognizing conscious acts of dissolution of material or abstract orders as a creative method, paralyzing habits and logics in the creative process can be called into question. This path of the unplanned and spontaneous ultimately enables innovation.

The book “To Destroy is to Create / To Create is to Order” analyses the relationship between chaos and order and highlights the role of destruction in the creative process by using works by well-known artists and designers such as Duchamp, Arp, Tinguely, Burroughs, Rainer, Carson and Gehry. At the same time, Sabine Kost with her innovative book design provides an example of her method: forget everything you know and work with what is revealed to you in chaos.
Sabine Kost, born 1983, studied communication design at Merz Akademie Stuttgart.