The Culture of Nature in the History of Design 9781138601918, 9781138601925, 9780429469848, 1138601918

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THE CULTURE OF NATURE IN THE HISTORY OF DESIGN

The Culture of Nature in the History of Design confronts the dilemma caused by design’s pertinent yet precarious position in environmental discourse through interdisciplinary conversations about the design of nature and the nature of design. Demonstrating that the deep entanglements of design and nature have a deeper and broader history than contemporary discourse on sustainable design and ecological design might imply, this book presents case studies ranging from the eighteenth to the twenty-​first century and from Singapore to Mexico. It gathers scholarship on a broad range of fields/​practices, from urban planning, landscape architecture, and architecture, to engineering design, industrial design, furniture design, and graphic design. From adobe architecture to the atomic bomb, from the bonsai tree to Biosphere 2, from pesticides to photovoltaics, from rust to recycling –​the culture of nature permeates the history of design. As an activity and a profession always operating in the borderlands between human and non-​human environments, design has always been part of the environmental problem, whilst also being an indispensable part of the solution. The book ventures into domains as diverse as design theory, research, pedagogy, politics, activism, organizations, exhibitions, and fiction and trade literature to explore how design is constantly making and unmaking the environment and, conversely, how the environment is both making and unmaking design. This book will be of great interest to a range of scholarly fields, from design education and design history to environmental policy and environmental history. Kjetil Fallan is Professor of Design History at the University of Oslo and a founding member of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities. He is the author of Designing Modern Norway: A History of Design Discourse (2017) and Design History:  Understanding Theory and Method (2010), editor of Scandinavian Design: Alternative Histories (2012), and co-​editor, with Grace Lees-​Maffei, of the book series Cultural Histories of Design as well as the volumes Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization (2016) and Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design (2014).

If, to Dieter Rams, good design is environmentally friendly, good design history is environmentally aware. Design history thrives when it interrogates the environmental complexities of human creations, and environmental historians can learn much of human behavior from design history. The essays in The Culture of Nature in the History of Design draw upon design histories of landscapes, communities, buildings, and materials around the world as different cultures, economic systems, and movements of resistance moved to create the new, create anew, to transform the discarded, and to reimagine the possible. The cumulative effect is a multifaceted conversation that systematically and profoundly examines the history of design’s entanglements with nature, a conversation that promises to inspire important discussions in the future. Carl A. Zimring, author of Aluminum Upcycled: Sustainable Design in Historical Perspective The essays collected in The Culture of Nature in the History of Design offer fresh insights into environments and the objects that populate them. Its authors examine topics ranging from Victorian ecotopias to thermonuclear shelters, the totemic materiality of consumer goods to cybernetic mapping, desert and hydropower landscapes to ‘garbage housing’ and cultures of D.I.Y. making, and experiments in postwar design pedagogy spanning continents and political systems. The volume’s vivid mosaic of theoretically grounded essays challenges readers to reconsider humanity’s making (and unmaking) of nature and the built environment. Greg Castillo, College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley

THE CULTURE OF NATURE IN THE HISTORY OF DESIGN

Edited by Kjetil Fallan

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Kjetil Fallan; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Kjetil Fallan to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Fallan, Kjetil, editor. Title: The culture of nature in the history of design / edited by Kjetil Fallan. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa Business, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018053725 | ISBN 9781138601918 (hbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138601925 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780429469848 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Design. | Nature–Effect of human beings on. Classification: LCC NK1520 .C85 2019 | DDC 745.409–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018053725 ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​60191-​8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​60192-​5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​429-​46984-​8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

CONTENTS

List of illustrations  Notes on contributors  Introduction: The culture of nature in the history of design  Kjetil Fallan

viii xiii 1

PART 1

Conceptual environments 

17

1 Design’s ecological operating environments  Simon Sadler

19

2 Pattern watchers I: environmental seeing, c. 1970  Larry Busbea

31

3 Computing environmental design  Peder Anker

44

4 Ludic pedagogies at the College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley, 1966 to 1972  Timothy Stott

58

vi Contents

PART 2

Ecotopian landscapes 

73

5 A cityless and countryless world: the total appropriation of nature in Victorian utopias  Nathaniel Robert Walker

75

6 Clean and disciplined: the garden city in Singapore  Jesse O’Neill

89

7 Desertification, or designing new worlds in the dust  Fattori Fraser

103

8 ‘There’s a world going on underground’: ecotopian realism in subterranean design  Even Smith Wergeland

116

PART 3

Design in the garden 

129

9 Contested development: ICSID’s design aid and environmental policy in the 1970s  Tania Messell

131

10 Power in the landscape: regenerating the Scottish Highlands after the Second World War  Frances Robertson

147

11 Design for the garden: questioning gardening as environmentalism  Jette Lykke Jensen

161

12 Permanence and magic: super-​natural metaphors of stainless steel  Nicolas P. Maffei

175

PART 4

Design as ecology 

187

13 Forms of Human Environment (1970): Italian design responds to the global crisis  Elena Formia

189

Contents  vii

14 Environmental design pedagogy in Leningrad in the 1980s  Yulia Karpova 15 Throwaway houses: garbage housing and the politics of ownership  Curt Gambetta

206

221

16 The unmaking of Autoprogettazione  Avinash Rajagopal and Vera Sacchetti

237

Index 

248

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 Patrick Geddes, Notation of Life diagram, c. 1904–​1905. From Amelia Defries, The Interpreter Geddes: the Man and his Gospel, London: George Routledge and Sons, 1927. Public domain/​Out of copyright  1.2 Clifford Harper, ‘Vision 6: Community Media Centre’, Radical Technology, 1976. From Peter Harper and Godfrey Boyle (eds.), Radical Technology, New York: Pantheon. Courtesy of Peter Harper/​ Penguin Random House LLC  2.1 ‘Duplex crystals with bands of different composition in exact orientation relationship within one grain, but forming an overall foam structure like a pure metal, here seen in a copper-​ silicon alloy, worked and annealed.’ From Smith, C.S. (1965) ‘Structure substructure superstructure’ in Kepes, G. (ed.) (1965) Structure in Art and in Science. Copyright 1965 George Braziller, Inc.  2.2 ‘Truncation and Stellation’. Reprinted by permission from RightsLink: SpringerNature, Space Structures: Their Harmony and Counterpoint, by Arthur Loeb (1976)  3.1 Apparent chaos: the problem unstructured. From Chermayeff and Alexander (1963), courtesy of Doubleday/Random House  3.2 Constellation: the problem structured. From Chermayeff and Alexander (1963), courtesy of Doubleday/Random House  4.1 Anon. Plan of People’s Park, Berkeley, May 1969. Photograph: Simon Nicholson. Courtesy of the Estate of Simon Nicholson  4.2 Robin Moore, Behaviour-​environment ecosystems of the Environmental Yard (derived from May/​June 1977 behaviour mapping data). Published in Moore, Robin, 1986. ‘The Power of Nature: Orientation of Girls and Boys Toward Biotic and Abiotic Play Settings On A Reconstructed Schoolyard’. Children’s Environments Quarterly 3, no. 3 (Fall). Courtesy of Robin Moore 

21

28

37 39 51 52 61

63

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4.3 Anon. Flyer issued by Farallones Design showing Campe in the driver’s seat of ‘The Eagle’, Van der Ryn standing atop a garbage can, and a group of CED radical recyclers with their motto, ‘Trash Can Do It’. 1970. Photomontage. Environmental Design Archives Exhibitions, accessed 4 March 2018, http://​exhibits.ced.berkeley. edu/​items/​show/​1646. Source: Campe Collection. Courtesy of Jim Campe  66 4.4 Jim Campe, Campe with children at Castro Valley Elementary, CA, 1970. Environmental Design Archives Exhibitions, accessed 4 March 2018, http://​exhibits.ced.berkeley.edu/​items/​show/​1650. Source: Campe Collection. Courtesy of Jim Campe  67 5.1 Henry Olerich, diagram of utopian layout from A Cityless and Countryless World, American, 1893. Public domain/​Out of copyright  83 5.2 H. G. Wells, an ideal residential garden from A Short History of the World, British, 1922. Public domain/​Out of copyright  85 6.1 ‘A Clean Round-​up for Our Singapore’, 1978. Ministry of the Environment Collection, courtesy of National Archives of Singapore  92 6.2 School children taking part in community gardening on Tree Planting Day, 1973. Ministry of Information and the Arts Collection, courtesy of National Archives of Singapore  94 6.3 View of Raffles Place, after construction of an underground carpark and rooftop ‘pleasure garden’, 1966. Ministry of Information and the Arts Collection, courtesy of National Archives of Singapore  98 6.4 Singapore Tourism Promotion Board postcard: ‘While most countries have a park in the city, Singapore has a city in the park’, 1982. Author’s collection  99 7.1 Mexico-​US Border wall prototype, Cadell Construction, Montgomery, Alabama, 2017. Photo by Mani Albrecht. United States Department of Defense. Public domain  112 7.2 The remains of the St. Francis Dam, Los Angeles County, 1928, following the flooding of the dam. Also visible is the San Francisquito Fault. United States Geological Survey, United States Department of the Interior. Public domain  112 8.1 A plan and section drawing of Holmlia Swimming Pool and Sports Hall. Drawing by Jan Anton Rygh. Courtesy of Fortification AS  117 8.2 Jan Anton Rygh depicted outside the eastern entrance to Holmlia Pool in August 2014. Photo by Tove Solbakken. Courtesy of Byantikvaren i Oslo  118 8.3 ‘Protection from nuclear weapons’. An illustration from the book Tilfluktsrom i praksis: krigskatastrofe og beskyttelsesteknikk (1977). Graphics by the Norwegian Armed Forces. Courtesy of Jan Anton Rygh  123

x Illustrations

8.4 An illustration of the Gjøvik Olympic Mountain Hall and surrounding area, made by Bjørn Holthe for the 1994 Olympic Winter Games. Courtesy of Atelier Holthe  124 8.5 The sleeping anti-​nuclear machinery of Holmlia Pool. Photo by Tove Solbakken. Courtesy of Byantikvaren i Oslo  125 9.1 ‘Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development, ICSID, UNIDO, 1979’. ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​06/​4/​4  136 9.2 The theme of renewable energy was most potently conveyed through the representation of a helix on the event’s documents. Interdesign logotype, 1978. ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​05/​5/​1  138 9.3 Sketches of the DIY greenhouse developed by Group 1. Carl Auböck, ‘ICSID UNIDO Interdesign Mexico 1978’, Annex, 1978. ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​05/​5  139 9.4 Interdesign participants devising design solutions and prototypes. Carl Auböck, ‘ICSID UNIDO Interdesign Mexico 1978’, Annex, 1978. ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​05/​5  140 9.5 Interdesign participants further developing design solutions and prototypes. Carl Auböck, ‘ICSID UNIDO Interdesign Mexico 1978’, Annex, 1978. ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​05/​5  142 10.1 North of Scotland Hydro-​Electric Board Moriston Project Contract No. 50, No. 150 Ceannacroc Generating Station. Tailrace Tunnel. View of portal from bridge deck 2/​7/​56. This project record photograph shows the way in which a vernacular or traditional style of stonework facing was inserted so as to blend in to the natural living rock face. Copyright SSE plc Corporate Archive, with permission  156 10.2 North of Scotland Hydro-​Electric Board Moriston Project Contract No. 50, No. 179 Ceannacroc Tunnel. Ceannacroc Generating Station. View of Machine Chamber from South West showing 16MW ­alternator 3/​12/​56. This project record photograph shows that ­underground structures were straightforwardly technical and functional, with few deliberate decorative or stylistic additions. Copyright SSE plc Corporate Archive, with permission  157 11.1 Extract of a review of garden sprayers for the private garden, by Helge Petersen, featured in Haven, 1969. Published by permission of Magasinet Haven, Haveselskabet  165 11.2 Advert for Gardena robotic lawnmower featured in Haven, 2016. The headline reads: ‘Your new best friend’. Published by permission of Gardena, Husqvarna Danmark  167 11.3 Advert for manual tools produced by Lysbro (now Fiskars) featured in Haven, 1982. The headline reads: ‘Lysbro –​the best for the soil. Both

Illustrations  xi

beneath and above the surface of the soil’. Published by permission of Fiskars Denmark  11.4 Compost bin made by Rotocrop Ltd and advertised in Haven from the mid-​1970s. Designed by Clifford Wilson, it was one of nine products recognized in the Contract and Consumer goods category of the 1975 Design Council Awards. Published by permission of Design Council Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives  12.1 Steelmark with the word ‘Steel’. Original design by Lippincott and Marguiles 1958. Courtesy of Hagley Museum and Library  12.2 Gateway Arch for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, St. Louis, completed 1964. Designed by Eero Saarinen. Photograph by Bev Sykes, 2005, CC-​BY-​2.0  13.1 Guide to the First International Biennial of Global Design Methodology, entitled Le forme dell’ambiente umano (Forms of Human Environment) (Strutture Ambientali, no. 4–​5, 1970, front cover). The event occupied an area of 5,000 square metres of Rimini Fiera expo centre; exhibit project by Kuniko Watanuki and Renzo Sancisi. Right: Eighteenth edition of the Convegno Internazionale di Teoria e Metodologia della Forma (International Conference of Formal Theory and Methodology), September 1969, for the preparation of the Biennial (Strutture Ambientali, no. 2, 1970, p. 50). Courtesy of Cappelli Editore  13.2 Formal scheme of the Biennial as represented in the catalogue of the event (Strutture Ambientali, no. 4–​5, 1970, pp. 62–​63). The main parts were made up of operational (displays and exhibitions) and didactic (theory and methodology of design) sections, linked by a connecting section for roundtables, conferences, talks, and workshops. Courtesy of Cappelli Editore  13.3 Top: Exhibition by the group coordinated by Herbert Ohl on ‘Free Time and Environmental Structures’, with the Univac 1108 computer and the spheres used to explain the ‘mechanized museum’. Bottom: Display by Bruno Munari of the group ‘Regional Planning as Equilibrium of Self-​Management in the Ecological System between Mankind and Environment’, coordinated by Leonardo Mosso. The modular structures were used as support for the projection of videos and slides documenting a possible answer to the ‘ecological catastrophe’. According to Mosso, this outlined a ‘processual’ and ‘systemic’ research on new design tools and services created by the communities for the communities (Strutture Ambientali, no. 6, 1970, pp. 50–​51, 56–​57). Courtesy of Cappelli Editore  13.4 The exhibition organized by the Art Directors Club Milano, Aggressività e violenza dell’uomo nei confronti dell’ambiente (Man’s Aggression and Violence toward the Environment) (Strutture Ambientali, no. 6, 1970, pp. 62–​63, 94–​95). Top: Entrance with the installation Week End. Courtesy of Cappelli Editore 

169

171 181 182

192

193

196

198

xii Illustrations

13.5 From left to right: Egidio Bonfante, Produco con licenza di uccidere (I produce with a license to kill); Ilio Negri, No alla civiltà se questa è civilta. L’ignoranza uccide (No to Civilization, if this is Civilization. Ignorance Kills); Giancarlo Iliprandi, No alla violenza nei centri storici (No violence in historical centres). The posters were included in the ­exhibition Man’s Aggression and Violence toward the Environment curated by Iliprandi (Art Directors Club Milano). Courtesy of, respectively, Paola Bonfante/​Archivio Storico Olivetti, Ivrea; Archivio Ilio Negri, Aiap Museo della grafica/​CDPG, Milano; Giancarlo Illiprandi, Archivo privato, Milano  199 14.1 T. Dubenskaia, Model of an environmental object of the first type for Vuoksa National Park, 1987. The model consists of a system of catamarans with sails and electric engines, serving a number of different functions. Courtesy of Moscow Design Museum  213 14.2 E. Shaitarov, Model of an environmental object of the second type for Vuoksa National Park, 1987. Floating entertainment centre made of collapsible modules and tents. Courtesy of Moscow Design Museum  214 14.3 G. and L. Tkachuk, Model of an environmental object of the third type for Vuoksa National Park, 1987. All-​year recreational complex. Courtesy of Moscow Design Museum  215 14.4 Svetlana Fedenko, drawing for the workshop Interdesign ’92. Courtesy of WORLDESIGN FOUNDATION, INNOVATION, Spring 1993; www.IDSA.org  218 15.1 Drawings, Automobile Body Components Housing, Citroen 2CV Fourgonnette, Jeffrey Skorneck, 1973. Source: Reprinted from Garbage Housing, Martin Pawley, pp. 90–​91. Copyright (1975)  225 15.2 ‘A roof good for 30,000 miles’, showing the neoprene tiles of Dora Crouch House, 1976. Source: Private collection of Philippa Morrison and Oliver Pawley  228 15.3 Filling the Buchan House ‘auto collector’ with disused cans, 1978. Source: Private collection of Philippa Morrison and Oliver Pawley  230 15.4 Space Addition System (SAS), David Tod Hollister, 1979. Source: Private collection of Philippa Morrison and Oliver Pawley  231

CONTRIBUTORS

Peder Anker is Associate Professor in the History of Science at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and Adjunct Professor of Environmental History at the University of Oslo. He is the co-​author of Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned (Prestel, 2014)  together with Louise Harpman and Mitchell Joachim. He is also the author of From Bauhaus to Eco-​ House: A History of Ecological Design (Louisiana State University Press, 2010), which explores the intersection of architecture and ecological science, and Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–​1945 (Harvard University Press, 2001), which investigates how the promising new science of ecology flourished in the British Empire. See www. pederanker.com. Larry Busbea is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Arizona, Tucson, where his research focuses on the interactions of design, art, and critical theory in Europe and the United States after the Second World War. His essays and reviews have appeared in October, The RIBA Journal of Architecture, Design Issues, The Journal of Design History, www.we-​aggregate. org, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. His book Topologies:The Urban Utopia in France, 1960–​1970 was published by MIT Press in 2007. A second book, The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. Kjetil Fallan is Professor of Design History at the University of Oslo and a founding member of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities. He is the author of Designing Modern Norway: A History of Design Discourse (Routledge, 2017)  and Design History: Understanding Theory and Method (Berg Publishers, 2010), editor of Scandinavian Design: Alternative Histories (Berg Publishers, 2012), and co-​editor, with Grace Lees-​Maffei, of the book series Cultural Histories of Design (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012)  as well as the volumes Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization (Berghahn Books, 2016) and Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).

xiv Contributors

Elena Formia is Associate Professor at the Alma Mater Studiorum –​University of Bologna’s Department of Architecture. Within this context, she is investigating, in a historical perspective, how ideas of futures were embedded in artefacts and/​or in design projects. Her publications include articles in the Journal of Design History and the International Journal of Critical Cultural Studies and the books Storie e cronache del design (Allemandi, 2012, with Pier Paolo Peruccio) and Storie di futuri e design. Anticipazione e sostenibilità nella cultura italiana del progetto (Maggioli, 2017). Fattori Fraser is a Design Strategist based in New York and London. Her academic research focuses on design mythologies and practices in extreme environments, ranging from the American desert to the Mediterranean Balearics. Her writing has appeared in Plot(s) Journal of Design Studies and The Edgar Wind Journal for Art History, and she has also curated contemporary art exhibitions for The Ruskin School of Art. She holds a Masters degree in Design Studies from Parsons The New School for Design, and a Bachelors degree in the History of Art from the University of Oxford. Fattori currently works at Gemic, a strategy and innovation agency, where she specializes in design, technology and social practices. Curt Gambetta is a PhD candidate in the history and theory of architecture and urbanism at Princeton University and is co-​editor of Attention audio journal. Formerly, he was the Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, a teaching fellow at Woodbury University School of Architecture in Los Angeles and a resident of the Sarai programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi, India, from 2002–​2003 and 2004–​2005. Jette Lykke Jensen is Assistant Professor of Design Culture at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) at Kolding. She teaches various courses at both MA and BA level in the Design Culture, Design Studies and Design Management programmes at the Department of Design and Communication. Her area of research is the material culture of leisure with a special interest in the interrelationship between the production, mediation and consumption of design products and the practice of leisure. Currently her focus is on gardening as a leisure activity and the role of garden products in the everyday human-​nature interaction in gardens. Yulia Karpova is a research fellow at the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark. She holds an MA in Art History from the Alexander von Stieglitz Art and Industry Academy, St Petersburg, and a PhD in History from the Central European University, Budapest. Her research interests include history of Russian design and decorative art, Soviet design diplomacy during the Cold War, professional communities under state socialism, and feminist critiques of design. Currently she is preparing a monograph on Soviet objects and material culture in the 1960s–​1980s. Nicolas P. Maffei is a senior lecturer at the Norwich University of the Arts, UK and a member of the Editorial Board for the International Journal of Food Design. His most recent book is Norman Bel Geddes: American Design Visionary (2018). He has published widely in Design Issues, Design and Culture and the Journal of Design History on modernism in American

Contributors  xv

design, focusing on the history of museums, industrial design, packaging, and more recently, stainless steel. Reading Graphic Design in Cultural Context, co-​authored with Grace Lees-​ Maffei, was published in 2019. Tania Messell is a doctoral candidate at the University of Brighton, completing her thesis on the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (1957–​1980). Her research forms part of the Centre for Design History, directed by Professor Jeremy Aynsley. She previously completed an MA on early French corporate identities at the V&A/​RCA History of Design programme, and has been teaching History of Design and Cultural and Critical Studies at the University of Brighton. Jesse O’Neill is a lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art, where he coordinates design history and theory courses at the school’s Singapore campus. He received his PhD from the University of New South Wales for research into the print cultures of colonial Australia, and his current work concentrates on the development of design and lifestyle in British colonial centres in Southeast Asia. Avinash Rajagopal is the editor-​in-​chief of Metropolis magazine. He is the author of Hacking Design (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2013) and has contributed to many publications, including The Adhocracy Reader (Istanbul Design Biennial, 2012), Making Africa (Vitra Design Museum, 2015), and Atlas of Furniture Design (Vitra Design Museum, forthcoming). As a cofounder of the editorial consultancy Superscript, he organized events at the Museum of Art and Design in New York and at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Rajagopal has also lectured on design history and writing at the School of  Visual Arts, New  York; the University of Texas at Austin; and the National Institute of Design, India. Frances Robertson is Lecturer in Design History & Theory at the Glasgow School of Art. Her research crosses design theory and history, cultural history and science and technology studies, investigating drawing discourses as a means of shaping the three-​dimensional world. Recent publications include: Print Culture: From Steam Press to Ebook (Routledge, 2013); ‘David Kirkaldy (1820–​1897) and his museum of destruction: the visual dilemmas of an engineer as man of science’, Endeavour 37:1 (2013); and ‘Thomas Telford’s tour in the Highlands: shaping the wild landscape through word and image’ in Art and Science in Word and Image: Exploration and Discovery (Brill, 2019). Vera Sacchetti is a design critic, co-​curator of TEOK Basel and co-​founder of editorial consultancy Superscript. She serves in a variety of curatorial, research, and editorial roles, most recently as associate curator of the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial –​A School of Schools. She was curatorial advisor for the 24th Biennial of Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia, web editor at Domus, and co-​editor of The Adhocracy Reader for the First Istanbul Design Biennial. With Superscript, she headed the ‘Towards a New Avant-​Garde’ event series at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Her writing has appeared, for example, in Disegno, Metropolis, and The Avery Review.

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xvi Contributors

Simon Sadler teaches the history and theory of architecture and design at the University of California, Davis, USA, where he is a Professor in the Department of Design. His research focuses on the ideologies of design, and his publications include Archigram: Architecture without Architecture (MIT Press, 2005); Non-​Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism (Architectural Press, 2000, co-​editor, Jonathan Hughes); The Situationist City (MIT Press, 1998), and numerous essays and articles on counterculture and design in California. Timothy Stott is Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at Dublin School of Creative Arts, Technological University Dublin and Associate Researcher at the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media, Dublin, where he leads a seminar on environmental art and design. Special thanks are offered to Silvie and Tuula Nicholson, Jim Campe, Greg Castillo, and Robin Moore. Research for this chapter was supported by a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, in 2016. Nathaniel Robert Walker is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the College of Charleston. He earned his PhD at Brown University, and studies the relationships between architecture, public space, and socio-​political power networks. Much of his research has focused on the utopian dreams of progress and futurity that proliferated in nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century literature, film, advertising, and other media. His work has been published in Buildings and Landscapes, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, Utopian Studies, and several edited volumes focusing on topics such as revivals, war, literary architectures, and iron buildings. Even Smith Wergeland is Associate Professor at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design’s Institute of Form, Theory and History, where he teaches building heritage and architectural history. His main research interests are postwar architecture and urban planning, sports architecture, mobility, and the role of culture in contemporary urban development.

INTRODUCTION The culture of nature in the history of design Kjetil Fallan

From adobe architecture to the atomic bomb, from the bonsai tree to Biosphere 2, from conservationism to climate change, from ecology to ethology, from genetic engineering to the Great Pacific garbage patch, from pesticides to photovoltaics, from rust to recycling, from urban exodus to urban farming –​the culture of nature permeates the history of design. As an activity and a profession always operating in the borderlands between human and non-​human environments, design has a pertinent yet precarious position in environmental discourse. It is part of the problem, but also an indispensable part of the solution. Despite this long-​standing centrality of design to environmental discourse, and vice versa, these interrelations remain underexplored in design historical scholarship and environmental history alike.This book aims to articulate such conversations and stimulate reflections on the design of nature and the nature of design. Half a century ago, Leo Marx (1964) coined the phrase ‘the machine in the garden’ to describe a trope he identified as a prominent feature of nineteenth and early twentieth-​century American literature, in which the pastoral ideal is seen as disturbed by the invasion of modern technology. Crucially, though, he was not out to cast technology as either good or bad, but believed that ‘the task of the cultural historian is first and foremost to expose these diverging valences and unfold their complexity, which emerges dialectically from technology’s interplay with the pastoral’ (Erbacher, Maruo-​Schröder, and Sedlmeier 2014, 20). Marx subsequently shifted perspective from this fascination with ‘the technological sublime’ to a deep concern for the environmental ramifications of technological progress (Meikle 2003, 153). The question of how we as society deal with the allegorical machine in the proverbial garden is more relevant than ever. And because human experience of/​with/​in nature is predominantly and increasingly mediated by design and technology (Jørgensen 2015), this nexus commands our attention.

2  Kjetil Fallan

‘The scandal of society is now culminating in the scandal of nature’, Tomás Maldonado concluded in his attempt at reconciling Design, Nature, and Revolution: ‘Now one can finally say, with good reason, that society and nature belong to the same order of problems’ (1972, 75). Acknowledging that ‘the making of our environment and the making of ourselves has been a single process’ (1972, 3), Maldonado argues that ‘the scandal of nature’ can not be adequately understood without a corresponding understanding of ‘the scandal of society’ (1972, 76). This resonates well with more recent attention to the social and cultural underpinnings of the environmental crisis. Because the big ‘we’ looming large in the Anthropocene debate is of course deeply problematic, as it obscures the fact that neither the causes nor the effects of human-​induced environmental destruction are by any means evenly distributed amongst the earth’s population (Chakrabarty 2009, 216). ‘The radically unequal history of human impacts and hence of human responsibilities’ must not be suppressed, writes Rob Nixon (2018, 8): ‘For Anthropocene thinking to retain any credibility, it needs to negotiate the complex dynamic between a shared geomorphic narrative and increasingly unshared resources. We may all be in the Anthropocene but we’re not all in it in the same way’. Cultural and historical nuances of where, when, how, and by whom the environment has been made and unmade are therefore sorely needed in order to better understand our predicament and stake out routes to a more just and sustainable future.

Designs on nature Both as a species and as individuals, humans have designs on nature. Ourselves integral to nature, the crew aboard ‘Spaceship Earth’ is constantly making and unmaking the environment through design. Design is both making and unmaking the environment. Conversely, it might be argued that the environment is both making and unmaking design. How these processes unfold, across timescapes and landscapes, was at the heart of the Design History Society Annual Conference I  convened at the University of Oslo in September 2017, gathering some 200 delegates from 30  countries around 90 presentations and engaging discussions. Developed from this rich intellectual soil, the contributions to this book push the conversation further towards a better understanding of the culture of nature in the history of design. This book is addressing some major, overarching issues arising from the premise that design in all its shapes and sizes is deeply entangled with nature, and that these entanglements need to be understood in a historical perspective and a cultural context. Despite this broad agenda, no single volume can be exhaustive in its scope.Therefore, this introduction will begin by clarifying which understandings of design as practice and culture inform the various contributions, as well as how these relate to other key concepts such as ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’. The culture of nature stretches as far back as does the history of design.The culture of nature reaches as wide as does the history of design. The culture of nature concerns all facets of the history of design.This volume is no survey and can not be comprehensive –​or even representative –​in its coverage, but the contributions are

Introduction  3

selected with a view to acknowledging that the topic has a deeper and broader history than the contemporary discourse on sustainable design and ecological design might imply. Presenting case studies ranging from the eighteenth to the twenty-​first century and from Singapore to Mexico, the book argues that the culture of nature is perhaps the most unifying and important issue in design history today and for the future. Consequently, the book gathers scholarship on a broad range of fields/​ practices usually treated separately –​from urban planning, landscape architecture, and architecture, to engineering-​, industrial-​, furniture-​, and graphic design –​and examines these from an array of perspectives, looking variously at the phases of ideation, production, mediation, consumption, disposal, and reuse/​recycling. In a similar vein, it ventures into domains as diverse as design theory, research, pedagogy, politics, activism, organizations, exhibitions, and fiction and trade literature. What is the culture of nature, then? At the most basic level, it concerns how humans through intellectual achievement, creative pursuits, and social practices interpret their natural surroundings (Simmons 1993). This book examines the role of design in such processes in historical perspective. It is important to note that the title does not imply an adherence to the stubborn and by now outmoded culture/​nature dichotomy, or to any sort of speciesism or other variety of exceptionalism that places humans outside or above nature (Wilson 1991, 12). Rather, it reflects the inescapable subjectivism inherent to all historical scholarship, in its actors and authors alike (Fallan and Lees-​Maffei 2015) –​even if in its most general form of the human, rather than personal, viewpoint. In short: any nature (in)formed by or (in)forming design is a culture of nature. One iteration of this acknowledgement is how values associated with ‘wild’ or ‘pristine’ nature are profoundly cultural: ‘Untamed nature begins to figure as a positive and redemptive power only at the point where human mastery over its forces is extensive enough to be experienced as itself a source of danger and alienation’, writes Kate Soper: ‘It is only a culture which has begun to register the negative consequences of its industrial achievements that will be inclined to return to the wilderness, or to aestheticize its terrors as a form of foreboding against further advances upon its territory’ (Soper 1996, 25). At the other end of the spectrum, the culture of nature extends to the most unlikely and stereotypically ‘unnatural’ places. Interviewed shortly before he died about the topic for the 2019 edition of the Triennale di Milano, ‘Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival’, Italian critic Gillo Dorfles warned that It is impossible to go back, as though there were a sort of Garden of Eden of design: we are part of history and we must act upon history. This means that, to improve the current situation, we need to ‘redeem the unnatural,’ transforming artificial events into natural or ‘naturalized’ events, through our knowledge and willpower. It means considering nature not only in its wildest state, but especially in all its new mechanized, electronically integrated, and internetized forms. Dorfles in Colonetti 2018

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In recognition of this substantial diversity The Culture of Nature in the History of Design includes contributions spanning from Victorian pastoral utopias to the ‘super-​natural’ qualities of stainless steel. What is the historical culture of nature, then? Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that one of the key implications of the Anthropocene debate for history is that it dismantles the traditional distinction between natural history and human history (2009, 201–​207). Nature is no longer the virtually immutable backdrop to societal changes and human actions as in Annales School-​style history, but is now moving front and centre. According to Sverker Sörlin, ‘Nature and history are increasingly becoming intertwined. We need the history of nature in order to write history’ (2018, 23). Importantly, though, we do not need nature just in order to write environmental history. The aim should not be, argues Linda Nash, to frame environmental history as a distinct subfield but to consider it an analytical approach that can shift our perspectives on topics which ‘have extensive historiographies that are overwhelmingly nonenvironmental’ (2013, 133)  –​such as design. The Culture of Nature in the History of Design thus seeks to blend natural history and human history; to emphasize the centrality of nature to cultural history; and to bring an environmental history orientation to bear on design. What is the environment, then? A conventional understanding of the environment entails a notion of exteriorization, be it in a pastoral or an instrumental sense. When seen ‘as a series of objects for examination, and as things to be “discovered” and transformed into something of greater value’, argues Robert Crocker, ‘the term “environment” … is thus inflected with a Western tendency to turn nature into substitutable objects to be controlled for our benefit, and systems of objects, also “out there”, for intellectual discovery and commercial use’ (Crocker 2016, 139). Sörlin has dated the emergence of our contemporary understanding of ‘the environment’ as ‘that thing out there that humans destroy’ to the early post-​Second World War period, but places its wider impact in the 1960s and 1970s, with the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm as a turning point (Sörlin 2018, 12–​13;Warde, Libby, and Sörlin 2018). Both the modern environmental movement, political environmental governance, and environmental history as a dedicated field of scholarship are to a certain extent products and producers of this process. And, as Ingrid Halland has shown, this new conception of the environment around 1970  ‘transformed both critical and aesthetic modes of thinking’ in design discourse (2018, 13). It is hardly surprising, then, that current scholarship expresses considerable interest in this period. This tendency is reflected also in this book, e.g. in the chapters making up Part 1. But if these investigations into the concept of the environment and the associated intellectual and institutional histories have a rather limited chronological bandwidth, the same does not apply to the culture of nature in general or its association with the history of design. Just as environmental history is not limited to the history of environmentalism, the culture of nature in the history of design spans much wider than the contemporary understanding of ‘the environment’ (Fallan and Jørgensen 2017, 107). So although several chapters are concerned with that seminal period of the 1960s and the 1970s,

Introduction  5

the book as a whole suggests a much broader remit for environmental histories of design. As an established concept and part of the professional idiom, ecological design has a relatively brief history. Much of its basic principles were developed in the above-​mentioned seminal period of the 1960s and 1970s, but only at the turn of the twenty-​first century was it explicated and popularized as a distinct, professional approach (Van der Ryn and Cowen 1996; McDonough and Braungart 2002). However, as Lydia Kallipoliti (2018) has argued, it has a much longer prehistory –​ tracing a genealogy from naturalists like Carl Linnaeus and Ernst Haeckel (who coined the term ecology in 1866), via the evolutionist ideas of designers like Patrick Geddes and Frank Lloyd Wright and the biocentrism flourishing at the Bauhaus, to the comprehensive systems thinking of design theorists like Richard Buckminster Fuller, John McHale, and Ian McHarg on the one hand and the more pragmatic, activist approach promoted though countercultural outlets like the Whole Earth Catalog on the other. Thus, as many of the contributions to this volume exemplify, there is a long and rich history of design’s conversations with ecology. This book seeks to push at the nature of that relationship, proposing also that design in itself can be understood as ecology –​ as ecological systems, ideas, thinking, and practice. Such an extended understanding of design as ecology may also overcome the misconception common to much environmentalist discourse that ecological principles presuppose a ‘static’, unchanging nature as the ideal condition, recognizing instead that natural systems are open, dynamic, evolving (Emmett and Nye 2017, 101; Phillips 2003). A  notion of ecological design as ‘an ideational and philosophical system of viewing the world of ideas, information and matter as flow, rather than as the accumulation of discrete objects’ is in line also with the shift in focus from conservation and restoration to resilience, requiring a conceptualization which ‘signals the migration of life through the conversion of one thing to another’ (Kallipoliti 2018, 43).

Throughout any scale Reflecting its character as a topical examination rather than a survey, the structure of this book is thematic rather than chronological. It is divided into four parts organized according to scope, each probing the culture of nature in the history of design on different levels of abstraction and scale. Part  1 consists of conceptual discussions of the relations between design and environment, moving from the ontological and epistemological underpinnings for design practice, via shifting borders in design theory and radical technological developments in design methodology, to novel explorations in design pedagogy. Part  2 offers analyses of the ideological-​environmental implications of design in/​of nature on a large scale, from regional and urban planning to the exploration/​exploitation of sublime spaces such as the desert and the underground. Part 3 explores the socio-​environmental entanglements of design practices, from the inherent paradoxes of ‘design for development’ programmes and modernization/​preservation efforts in rural landscapes to

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the material culture of gardening practices and the social construction of modern materials. Part 4 delves deep into the core of design practice understood as an ecological system, from efforts at radically rethinking design’s contributions to consumer society and reform experiments in design education to early investigations of design for recycling and Do-​It-​Yourself manufacturing.

Conceptual environments Part 1, Conceptual environments, groups four chapters all examining various ways in which ‘the environment’ in its contemporary meaning is taken up by design professionals in that seminal period straddling the 1960s and 1970s. It starts off with Simon Sadler’s querying of how design should conceptualize environmental challenges in the post-​paternalistic, post-​positivistic worldview emerging since the 1960s. Arguing that counterculture, with its dedication to the overthrow of technocracy, was paramount in introducing the ecological worldview to design, he probes the ontological and epistemological implications of this watershed.Taking as his point of departure the Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, Sadler traces a range of ecological operating environments devised –​explicitly or implicitly –​ in response to that totem of countercultural design. Questioning the boundless, market-​ driven negotiator-​ role envisioned for design in much contemporary approaches to ecological design, from the alluring tales of sustainable development by means of adjustment and experimentation masterfully packaged e.g. by Rem Koolhaas (2001) and Bruce Mau (2004) to Bruno Latour’s figure of the ‘Cautious Prometheus’ (Latour 2009), Sadler returns to earlier, more critical reactions to the eco-​ontology set up by the Whole Earth Catalog. His disparate ­examples –​the US Black Panthers party; the British Radical Technology movement; the Italian Global Tools design collective –​serve to demonstrate important problems inherent to the ‘fantasy of entrepreneurial globalization’ epitomized by the Catalog, calling as they did instead for more politically-​conscious, more bounded operating environments where sensibility towards the commons is empathetic rather than transactional and within which design would be more capable of actually accomplishing desired change. In the second chapter, Larry Busbea shows how patterns became a conceptual tool of choice in a new type of design theory –​or design science –​which was less concerned with discrete objects than with their relationality and environmental systems in general. In a liminal space between the arts and the sciences we meet a set of unconventional figures negotiating the ‘two cultures’ in search of a visual language capable of articulating the structure of our material and natural environment as pattern designs across all scales, from the micro to the macro. Busbea duly acknowledges and outlines the long history of pattern recognition and thinking in the history of design, but argues that the 1970s brought a qualitative shift making the patterns and their significance more and more environmental –​meaning that the emphasis shifted from internal structures to the relations and spaces between things. These ‘pattern watchers’ were thus instrumental in shaping how the environment

Introduction  7

was understood in design discourse, and also contributed to a new understanding of form as something substantial rather than superficial, dynamic rather than static, relational rather than singular. Conceptually linked to theories of pattern recognition is the rapid development in computer technology and its applications in environmental design in the same period. In Chapter  3, Peder Anker tells the story of how Harvard and Yale professor Serge Chermayeff and his network of prominent colleagues explored and promoted the potential of computers in a new, more systemic and rational approach to environmental design. Against a somewhat exotic backdrop where Chermayeff joined forces with John F. Kennedy and several of their Cape Cod vacation home neighbours, including Walter Gropius and Herbert Bayer, in campaigning for the creation of a national park in order to protect their beloved natural idyll from further housing development, Anker efficiently demonstrates the significance of both personal trajectories and political connections. In their lobbying for the Cape Cod National Seashore Park these well-​connected and resourceful design academics combined these private interests with a professional interest in the computer as a tool for efficient processing of the multitude of factors and large amounts of data involved in the complex processes of environmental design. If the origins of this story might appear anecdotal at first sight, Anker goes on to elaborate on how this experience and the ensuing experiments, which conceptualized the environment as complex but quantifiable information rendered manageable through computing, became formative for Chermayeff ’s own theoretical work and got a wider legacy through the work of other collaborators. Key examples include his PhD student Christopher Alexander who would go on to become professor of architecture in UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design and Ian McHarg whose Design with Nature (1969) remains a seminal treatise on landscape architecture methodology. The College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley in turn provides the setting for Chapter  4, where Timothy Stott discusses how, from the late 1960s, key faculty including Sim van der Ryn and Simon Nicholson reformed the institution’s teaching informed by ecology, environmentalism, and social-​and behavioural sciences, and to focus on design for non-​prioritized user groups such as children and local communities. Local playgrounds and schools became their favoured design studios, and the assignments were consistently to transform what was often dreary environments into ones which provided more stimulating habitats for plants and people alike. Given such a context, the notion of play formed part and parcel of the pedagogical underpinnings of these courses. It was particularly the constructive, intuitive, spontaneous, adventurous, and egalitarian character of play which appealed to the Berkeley design educators, who considered these traits ideal also for larger-​scale design and planning tasks. Stott argues that the concept of play thus was integral to these pedagogical practices, which sought to increase social and ecological responsibility, and therefore contributed to a new understanding of what ‘the environment’ meant in design, from one more or less synonymous with surroundings (as in ‘the built environment’) to one more familiar today privileging ecology and the biosphere.

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Ecotopian landscapes Moving on from mental topographies to geological ones, Part 2, Ecotopian landscapes, encompasses four studies that explore different natural environs normally considered at the margins of design discourse. These case studies span three centuries and three continents, showcasing the broad geographical and temporal relevance of the culture of nature in the history of design. In Chapter 5, Nathaniel Robert Walker turns to the realm of utopian fiction literature to recover a strand of Victorian visions of dispersed settlement planning that entailed a very utilitarian conception of nature combined with high hopes for technological progress in the quest for an exodus from the polluted and overcrowded industrial city’s grime, hardship, and tristesse to a new suburban bliss for all. Based on the biblical binary of nature as either productive, peaceful garden or useless, dangerous wilderness, these utopias take the notion of human exceptionalism and mastery over nature to the extreme and prefigure latter-​day concepts such as anthropocentrism, eco-​modernism, and techno-​fix. The paradox, though, is that whereas the nineteenth-​century industrial city was viewed as an unsustainable environment and an ecological disaster zone, the re-​urbanized twenty-​first century post-​industrial city is praised for its ecological performance and cast as a key component of a sustainable society –​but our understanding of nature and its relation to design remains crucial to these endeavours (Emmett and Nye 2017, 63–​69). If Walker’s Victorian utopias tell of a disciplined nature, then Jesse O’Neill’s Chapter  6 portrays a disciplining nature. Zooming in on the formative period of post-​independence Singapore, O’Neill demonstrates how the city-​state’s famously clean and neatly trimmed landscape is a result of political planning using environmental design as a disciplinary measure. Albeit a nineteenth-​century concept, the garden city movement spread throughout the British empire and was still alive and operational in the new state formations arising in Southeast Asia in the wake of the Second World War. This mutation of the garden city was turned into a tool for postcolonial civic development and identity formation, quite literally redesigning Singapore’s physical and social landscape through policy, campaigns, and public participation. The notion’s allure for the government stemmed from its association of the beauty of nature with modernization and technological progress:  a modern and advanced state was a clean and green state. The key to success, O’Neill argues, was to enrol the citizens themselves, instilling a sense of ownership and responsibility for the garden city in which they lived. This was promoted through a variety of strategies, including communal tree planting events, introducing gardening to school curricula, encouraging neighbourhood watch practices to prevent littering and vandalism, etc. Designing out dirt became a way to design out delinquency. Cultivating public space became a way of cultivating public behaviour. At the other side of the globe from Singapore, the deserts of Western United States make up the ecotopian landscape explored in Chapter 7. Here, Fattori Fraser unpicks the myths of the desert as barren land, void space, blank canvas  –​the ‘sandbox’ of modern society –​and exposes the power structures which underpin

Introduction  9

these myths and the design practices that perpetuate them. She argues that the dominant practices and narratives, built on a legacy of anthropocentrism, colonialism, and patriarchy, have made the desert a marginalized body –​a place for nuclear bomb tests, hazardous waste storage, and server farms. As a marginalized body (of land), the desert contains other marginalized (animal) bodies  –​those of animals, native Americans, and (feminist) artists and characters. The experiences and stories of these non-​hegemonic desert dwellers allow us to not only think (differently) about this extreme environment, Fraser argues, but to think through the environment. Doing so will in turn improve our capacity to design with nature. As a direct consequence of the nuclear weapons developed and tested by scientists and the military in the American desert, Norwegian engineers and architects also went underground in their effort to design an efficient defence against the same technology. In Chapter  8, Even Smith Wergeland digs into the cold-​war iteration of subterranean design, excavating the curious case of Holmlia Bad, a municipal swimming pool in a south-​Oslo suburb doubling as a nuclear fallout shelter. Designed by two fortification engineers, the pool/​shelter exemplifies an approach to subterranean design Wergeland dubs ‘ecotopian realism’ –​a distinctly pragmatic and rather well-​functioning ecological design response to an equally distinctly dystopian problem. As uncanny as it is unassuming, featuring advanced yet –​fortunately –​unused technology for long-​time underground survival hidden behind a persuading and pervasive layer of mundane design, this structure reminds us that there is indeed, in the words of Tom Waits, ‘a world going on underground’. Wergeland’s study deftly demonstrates how the trope of the underground figures as prominently in the ecology of the mind as in the ecology of designed space, and offers the important insight that any adequate understanding of it requires us to consider the two in tandem.

Design in the garden Shifting scale from grand ecological utopias and dystopias to more earthly endeavours, Part 3, Design in the garden, consists of four chapters which expose and examine some of the many ecological challenges, paradoxes, and dilemmas arising whenever and wherever practices and cultures of design are enacted in everyday environments. In Chapter 9, Tania Messell chronicles the disharmonious encounter in a Mexican village in 1978 between two of that decade’s most significant efforts at using design for the greater good: ecological design and design for development. Tracing the responses to the environmental crisis in the policies of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID), she finds that the organization’s Western origins and close bonds to the realm of industry and commerce led it to divert its advocacy of ecological design to its work in developing countries. In close collaboration with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), ICSID thus promoted ecological design as part of the effort to stimulate industrialization and economic growth based on a Western model. What is in retrospect easily identified as patronizing and neo-​colonialist overtones came to

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the fore on the occasion of a workshop organized under the auspices of ICSID in Mexico in 1978. Inspired by the appropriate technology movement, the aim was to design agricultural and cooking equipment for the local Nahua people using low-​tech, affordable, and ecologically sound technologies. The experience became something of an epiphany for many of the Latin American participants, however, as they discovered the limited value of such top-​down approaches, arguing instead for design solutions based on local specificities and indigenous knowledge. As international design organizations continue to bridge ecological design and design for development and to collaborate closely with UN initiatives, Messell’s study provides a poignant reminder to always check one’s biases (see also Banu 2009; Clarke 2016; Oropallo 2017, 80–​109). The uneasy communion between local ecologies and centralized modernization imperatives is at the heart of Chapter 10 as well. Here, Frances Robertson considers the many conflicting visions of nature involved in the massive development of hydroelectric power schemes in the Scottish Highlands after the Second World War. Whereas technocrats and industrialists considered the region a backwards periphery in dire need of modernization and full of underexploited natural resources, others –​ notably local gentry and tourist entrepreneurs flanked by their clientele of urban elites –​thought of it as something of a museum for preservation of the nation’s cultural heritage. As the most widely developed renewable energy source, hydroelectric power is generally considered a sustainable solution –​at least compared to alternatives based on fossil fuels. Nonetheless, these schemes required a long range of design interventions in a contested nature rife with symbolic meaning and identity politics. From dams, road systems, and buildings, to pipelines, turbines, and pylons, these ‘large technological systems’ (Hughes 1987) are not only socially and politically constructed, but also designed in a very material, tangible sense, with significant impact on local and wider ecologies. Robertson’s perceptive analysis of this process exemplifying ‘the naturalization of the technological and the technologizing of the natural’ so central to Leo Marx’s work (Erbacher, Maruo-​Schröder, and Sedlmeier 2014, 30)  as inherently fraught and fractured resonates with our suggestion that the design-​nature relation is best understood as ‘always-​already broken’ (Fallan and Jørgensen 2017, 117). From the large machinery in the national garden of the Scottish Highlands we move on to consider the myriad of inconspicuous implements used to negotiate nature in the Danish domestic garden. In Chapter  11, Jette Lykke Jensen examines our most ubiquitous interaction with nature: everyday gardening. Whilst far removed from any notion of ‘wilderness’, even this most completely and consistently designed nature is rife with non-​human life acting up in ways which require meticulous coaxing and curtailment (Jørgensen 2014). Tracing the material culture of gardening in Denmark since the 1950s through the pages of a garden magazine, she emphasizes the crucial role played by the wide range of specialized tools and equipment in enacting the changing cultural paradigms for sanctioned design and use of the domestic garden  –​from the sustenance-​supporting kitchen garden of the early postwar period to the extended living room of today. Singling out four

Introduction  11

significant object typologies for analysis –​the sprayer, the hand tool, the lawnmower, and the composter –​Jensen shows how these exemplify very different conceptions and uses of the garden.The sprayer is the product design which facilitated the age of DDT and the quest for productive plants, whereas the hand tool is predicated on its ability to (quite literally) tread lightly on the earth and the promise of a healthy and heterogeneous flora.The lawnmower brought monoculture to the domestic garden and turned it into an extension of the living room, replete with a lush, green carpet, whereas the composter is emblematic of ‘everyday environmentalism’, simultaneously solving practical problems and cleaning our conscience (Jørgensen 2013). By following all these machines in the garden, Jensen’s study explicates the reciprocal dynamics of environmental epistemologies, everyday practices, and design cultures. It thus allows us to expand Melvin Kranzberg’s first law of technology to include both nature and design as well, as they all fit the same paradoxical characterization as being neither good nor bad –​nor neutral (Kranzberg 1986). If the nature we encounter in the domestic garden is both immediate and palpable (albeit distinctly cultural), stainless steel does not spontaneously conjure up the same sensations. Nevertheless, as Nicolas Maffei points out in Chapter 12, this marvellous material of modernity and industrial strength design originates in the crust of the earth. As a cultural construction, though, it took on a super-​natural aura, playing off its visual qualities of light and lustre as well as its material properties of strength and resilience. In the progress-​oriented consumer society of postwar USA, the gleam of stainless steel allowed the industry to shed its association with the heavy, murky, and rusty embodiment of a bygone industrial revolution and in its place cultivate a more up-​to-​date image of lightness, brightness, hygiene, and durability. From a sustainability perspective these can be highly desirable qualities mitigating against the throwaway society –​but at the same time, the environmental damage caused by the sourcing, production, and distribution of steel remains considerable (Fry and Willis 2015). Maffei’s reflections on the complex ‘enviromateriality’ (Martinez-​Reyes 2015) of stainless steel thus serve to remind us of the crucial and inseparable connections between natural resources, construction materials, and manufactured product –​and how design culture, for better or for worse, is at the heart of these socio-​material ecosystems (see also Rezende 2017).

Design as ecology As the above cases demonstrate, design’s ecological entanglements are myriad and multifarious. In Part 4, the final part of the book, Design as ecology, the four contributions double down on the practice of design considered as an ecological system or process in its own right. In Chapter 13, Elena Formia examines how the ‘global crisis’ c. 1970 resonated in Italian design culture, taking as her case study the response provided in the form of the First International Biennial of Global Design Methodology held in Rimini in 1970 under the banner Forms of Human Environment. Through working groups, seminars, reports, and exhibitions, it was suggested that the future relevance of design hinged on its conception as a political

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ecology of industrial society. Involving familiar figures such as Tomás Maldonado, Giulio Carlo Argan, Gillo Dorfles, and Giancarlo Iliprandi, this nonetheless little known event represents a sustained effort from within the Italian design establishment to profoundly rethink the social and environmental role of design. Crucially, this new approach, which had many affinities with the ambitions of the environmentalist movement, was developed in the context of commercial design practice, public institutions, and the intellectual mainstream –​independently from countercultural initiatives and radical design ideology (see also Formia 2017a; 2017b). If the public event is one favoured forum for rethinking design practice, pedagogy is another. In Chapter 14,Yulia Karpova explores late Soviet design environmentalism through the teachings of Vladimir Kirpichev at the Vera Mukhina School of Art and Industry in Leningrad from 1978, eventually developing into a dedicated department of environmental design in 1990. The communist context allowed Soviet designers perhaps more effortlessly than their Western counterparts to conceive of their vocation less in terms of commodities and markets than as a critical practice responding to current social and environmental problems (Cubbin 2018). Through a project-​centred pedagogy based on collective creativity, Kirpichev’s work at the Mukhina School drew on humanist thinking and systems theory to forge an ecological approach to design.This approach reached a zenith when in the summer of 1992, just months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kirpichev and his students participated in an Interdesign seminar in San Jose, California organized by the Industrial Designers Society of America with the support of the Environmental Protection Agency. Here, Karpova argues, the Leningrad contingent ousted the consumer entirely from their vision of the environment, and thus, arguably, took the first step towards a post-​humanist take on ecological design. Design thought as ecology is fundamentally about resources and relations. This perspective is played out in full force in Chapter 15, where Curt Gambetta examines British architect Martin Pawley’s experiments with low-​tech ‘upcycling’ in the form of direct reuse of waste products in housing design. In the 1970s, frustrated with the rigid regulations and intricate infrastructure of conventional housing and the wastefulness of consumer society, Pawley envisioned putting the discards and residues left behind by mainstream industrial design practice to good use as resources and construction materials. His radical ideas caught the attention of Chile’s socialist government, whose ambitious Cybersyn project –​a comprehensive cybernetic industrial management system –​provided an optimal framework for his vision on a larger scale. The Chilean iterations of Pawley’s experiments imagined a systematic distribution of leftovers and by-​products from factories to a coordinated, democratic, DIY-​driven housing construction initiative. These ideas never got past the concept stage, though. Through the actual construction of ‘Garbage Housing’ on a much smaller scale, he learned the hard way that substituting paper tubes, plastic panels, and empty tin cans for bricks and mortar was no easy feat. Ultimately, however, as Gambetta shows, Pawley’s aim was not primarily to design buildings, but to recast the design process itself as the management of material flows.

Introduction  13

A critique of the consumer society and an affinity for the Do-​It-​Yourself ethos are key concerns in the sixteenth and final chapter as well. Avinash Rajagopal and Vera Sacchetti trace the afterlife of Enzo Mari’s radical 1974 project Proposta per un’Autoprogettazione, a set of rudimentary furniture pieces sold as instruction manuals rather than physical objects. DIY, both its practice and its promotion, has a long history, of course, but the 1960s and 1970s counterculture added new dimensions to its conventional thrift and hobby associations: ‘the idea of making things as a rebellion against participation in the aboveground consumer economy –​ production as a joyful act of nonconformity’ (Wild and Karwan 2015, 51). Mari’s idea was thus decidedly of its time, but this radically democratic and distributed approach to design also prefigured more recent notions such as open source and the sharing economy, accounting, at least in part, for Autoprogettazione’s twenty-​ first century renaissance in contexts as diverse as art galleries, NGOs, and commercial design. However, as Rajagopal and Sacchetti argue, this contested afterlife shows that the idealism which was at the heart of the original project, and arguably its true innovation, has proved difficult to sustain.  A  bold attempt at rethinking design as ecology, Autoprogettazione’s legacy can not be contained by conventional instruments and institutions of culture or commerce. Its historical value is not in the shape of a totemic object, but in the form of its inspiring idea. Taken together the 16 chapters comprising this volume offer significant new insight into the culture of nature in the history of design. The book aims to stimulate new directions in design historical discourses that take seriously design’s complex interrelations with nature and the environment. Conversely, it highlights for environmental history the agency of design. Not only does design feature prominently in the making and unmaking of nature and the environment; studying the history of these processes in turn reveals how ideas of nature and the environment themselves have been formed and transformed over time. Whatever the nature of design, it holds designs on nature.

References Banu, L.S. (2009). ‘Defining the Design Deficit in Bangladesh’. Journal of Design History 22(4): 309–​323. Chakrabarty, D. (2009).‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’. Critical Inquiry 35(2): 197–​222. Clarke, A.J. (2016). ‘Design for Development, ICSID and UNIDO: The Anthropological Turn in 1970s Design’. Journal of Design History 29(1): 43–​57. Colonetti, A. (2018).‘A conversation between Gillo Dorfles and Aldo Colonetti on the theme of the XXII Triennale di Milano, “Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival” ’. Last modified 13 March 2018. www.brokennature.org/​conversation-​gillo-​dorfles-​aldo-​ colonetti-​theme-​xxii-​triennale-​di-​milano-​broken-​nature-​design-​takes-​human-​survival/​ Crocker, R. (2016). Somebody Else’s Problem: Consumerism, Sustainability & Design. Sheffield: Greenleaf Publishing. Cubbin, T. (2018). Soviet Critical Design: Senezh Studio and the Communist Surround. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

14  Kjetil Fallan

Emmett, R.S. and D.E. Nye (2017). The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Erbacher, E., N. Maruo-​Schröder, and F. Sedlmeier (2014). ‘Introduction: Rereading The Machine in the Garden’, in E. Erbacher, N. Maruo-​Schröder, and F. Sedlmeier (eds.), Rereading The Machine in the Garden: Nature and Technology in American Culture. Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 7–​41. Fallan, K. and G. Lees-​Maffei (2015). ‘It’s Personal: Subjectivity in Design History’. Design and Culture 7(1): 5–​27. Fallan, K. and F.A. Jørgensen (2017). ‘Environmental Histories of Design: Towards a New Research Agenda’. Journal of Design History 30(2): 103–​121. Formia, E. (2017a). Storie di futuri e design: Anticipazione e sostenibilità nella cultura italiana del progetto. Santarcangelo di Romagna: Maggioli Editore. Formia, E. (2017b). ‘Mediating an Ecological Awareness in Italy: Shared Visions of Sustainability Between the Environmental Movement and Radical Design Cultures (1970–​1976)’. Journal of Design History 30(2): 192–​211. Fry,T. and A.-​M.Willis (2015). Steel:A Design, Cultural Ecological History. London: Bloomsbury. Halland, I. (2018). ‘Error Earth: Displaying Deep Cybernetics in “The Universitas Projects” and Italy:The New Domestic Landscape, 1972’. PhD thesis, University of Oslo. Hughes, T.P. (1987). ‘The Evolution of Large Technological Systems’, in W. Bijker, T.P. Hughes and T. Pinch (eds.), The Social Construction of  Technological Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 51–​82. Jørgensen, D. (2014). ‘Not by Human Hands: Five Technological Tenets for Environmental History in the Anthropocene’. Environment and History 20(4): 479–​489. Jørgensen, F.A. (2013). ‘The Backbone of Everyday Environmentalism: Cultural Scripting and Technological Systems’, in D. Jørgensen, F.A. Jørgensen, and S.B. Pritchard (eds.), New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 69–​86. Jørgensen, F.A. (2015). ‘Why Look at Cabin Porn?’ Public Culture 27(3): 557–​578. Kallipoliti,L.(2018).‘History of Ecological Design’.Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science. Retrieved 18 May 2018, from http://​environmentalscience.oxfordre.com/​view/​ 10.1093/​acrefore/​9780199389414.001.0001/​acrefore-​9780199389414-​e-​144. Koolhaas, R. and Harvard Project on the City (2001). ‘Lagos’, in A. Lavalou (ed.), Mutations. Barcelona: Actar, 651–​719. Kranzberg, M. (1986). ‘Technology and History: “Kranzberg’s Laws” ’. Technology and Culture 27(3): 544–​560. Latour, B. (2009). ‘A Cautious Prometheus? A  Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk)’, in J. Glynne, F. Hackney, and V. Minton (eds.), Networks of Design: Proceedings of the 2008 Annual International Conference of the Design History Society. Boca Raton, FL: Universal Publishers, 2–​10. Maldonado, T. (1972). Design, Nature, and Revolution: Toward a Critical Ecology. New  York: Harper & Row. Martinez-​Reyes, J. (2015). ‘Mahogany intertwined: Enviromateriality between Mexico, Fiji, and the Gibson Les Paul’, Journal of Material Culture 20(3): 313–​329. Marx, L. (1964). The Machine in the Garden:Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Mau, B. and the Institute without Boundaries (2004). Massive Change. London: Phaidon. McDonough,W. and M. Braungart (2002). Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point Press. McHarg, I. (1969). Design with Nature. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press.

Introduction  15

Meikle, J.L. (2003). ‘Review: Leo Marx’s “The Machine in the Garden” ’. Technology and Culture 44(1): 147–​159. Nash, L. (2013). ‘Furthering the Environmental Turn’. Journal of American History 100(1): 131–​135. Nixon, R. (2018). ‘The Anthropocene: The Promise and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea’, in G. Mitman, M. Armiero, and R.S. Emmett (eds.), Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1–​18. Oropallo, G. (2017). ‘Making or Unmaking the Environment: The Role of Envisioning in the History of Sustainable Design’. PhD thesis, University of Oslo. Phillips, D. (2003). The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rezende, L. (2017). ‘Manufacturing the Raw in Design Pageantries: the Commodification and Gendering of Brazilian Tropical Nature at the 1867 Exposition Universelle’, Journal of Design History 30(2): 122–​138. Ryn, S. van der and S. Cowen (1996). Ecological Design. Washington, DC: Island Press. Simmons, I.G. (1993). Interpreting Nature: Cultural Constructions of the Environment. London: Routledge. Soper, K. (1996). ‘Nature/​‘nature’’, in G. Robertson, M. Mash, L. Tickner, J. Bird, B. Curtis and T. Putnam (eds.), FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture. London: Routledge, 22–​34. Sörlin, S. (2018). ‘Reform and Responsibility  –​The Climate of History in Times of Transformation’. Historisk tidsskrift 97(1): 7–​23. Warde, P., L. Robin, and S. Sörlin (2018). The Environment: A History of an Idea. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wild, L. and D. Karwan (2015). ‘Agency and Urgency: The Medium and Its Message’, in A. Blauvelt (ed.), Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center,  44–​57. Wilson, A. (1991). The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to Exxon Valdez. Toronto: Between The  Lines.

PART 1

Conceptual environments

1 DESIGN’S ECOLOGICAL OPERATING ENVIRONMENTS Simon Sadler

‘Everyone designs’, political scientist Herbert Simon famously declared in 1969, ‘who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ (Simon 1969, 130), but those courses of action depend on assumptions about what the world is and how it can be acted upon. Accepting Simon’s initial premise  –​that beyond the variables of design like style and programme, it is at core about making change –​I propose that design necessarily ‘imagines’ the situation in which it operates –​that in setting out to make things and change things, designers (whether amateur or by vocation, singly or collectively) assume or create mental models of the environment in which they will work. As Simon explained, problem-​solvers delimit and reframe problems in order to allow the calculation of best-​fit solutions; design, in short, projects ‘operating environments’ for its ‘change-​ making’, and so it is ontological, delving into the mechanisms of being. To offer an obvious and stark illustration, in a Western technocratic culture, the environment is considered a resource to be brought under control by design, top-​down –​rivers dammed, spaces enclosed, food cultivated, regions planned. But that relatively stable, ‘modernist’ model has been upset over the last half-​century or so by an ecological, inside-​out worldview:  the sort of command over the world found in Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture (1941) shifted to the eco-​ontological uncertainty described by Gregory Bateson’s Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind (1972) or Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies (1989), with their emphasis on the interconnection of many systems, organic and inorganic, technological and natural, observers themselves subsystems along with their languages and mental processes, allowing no ultimate outside, centre, control, or truth. So we find competing models of change and environment; indeed, the ecological worldview was in large part brought to design through the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, which was dedicated to the overthrow of technocracy. In that contest –​what change? in what environment? –​some worldviews emerged

20  Simon Sadler

as particularly charismatic:  they were ‘keynote’. A  keynote of countercultural ecology, for example, was the Whole Earth Catalog (first published in California in 1968). Then, like all good keynotes, it could in turn be contested –​it attracted ‘respondents’, such as the change-​making operating environments hailing from Oakland, California (with the Black Panthers), from the UK (with the book Radical Technology), and from Italy (with the Global Tools initiative). Some ecological operating environments fell more to the ideological left, some more to the right. The Whole Earth Catalog declaimed the planet a unitary operating environment of which everyone is a designer –​a fantasy of entrepreneurial globalization. It’s a model that is influentially reproduced in Actor Network Theory; anthropologist Bruno Latour, for instance, welcomed an ecological tangle to be navigated by the ‘Cautious Prometheus’ of design, in which struggle (of class and race, for example) is replaced by negotiation (Latour 2009). Not so, of course, for the Black Panthers, finding themselves excluded from a unitary operating environment in downtown Oakland, and so compelled to design community in their inner city; the Radical Technologists, meanwhile, sought socialism (not enterprise) through ecology, while Global Tools participants wanted an environment for unsullied, hands-​on creativity. Common to all of these more leftward, politically-​conscious operating environments was their cherishing of ‘autonomy’, which harkened back to William Morris and which, I will conclude, still underwrites a resistance to an unhindered globalism and its purported alternative in nativism.

Keynoting the stakeholder environment from the Whole Earth Catalog to Bruno Latour What sort of eco-​ontology was keynoted by the Whole Earth Catalog? The Earth without, the action within: in the poetic diagram that was the typically dog-​eared, over-​sized copy of one of the millions in circulation, the Whole Earth Catalog was one of those rare instances of design’s operating environment rendered (somewhat) explicit, allowing its users to debate what in our relationship to nature can and cannot be changed. Compare it, perhaps, to Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s 1338–​9 frescos The Allegory of Good and Bad Government in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, which measured the city’s internal harmony against a nature unkempt and managed. In tandem with the centralization of political economy in the state, this re-​emergence of classically-​based urban planning in Siena invited the possibility of environmental design as a coherent whole that could exclude an outside beyond the city walls. By contrast, the Catalog’s covers showed nothing but unitary environment: our recognition of our ultimate Biospheric environment, it’s generally agreed, was conveyed by NASA’s famous photographs of Earth seen from Outer Space, and the covers of the Whole Earth Catalog first put those haunting images into mass circulation, complete with its strapline Access to Tools –​the tools being the literature and equipment, from shovels to computers, available for sale on the pages within. In this, it was the legatee of the modern environmental concept writ large. In his grand Notation of Life diagram, under development from 1904–​1905, biologist and

Design’s operating environments  21

Geddes, Notation of Life diagram, c. 1904–​1905. From Amelia Defries, The Interpreter Geddes: the Man and his Gospel, London: George Routledge and Sons, 1927. Public domain/​Out of copyright FIGURE 1.1   Patrick

sociologist Patrick Geddes imagined design’s operating environment as an holistic region holding its citizens, their freedoms, functions, and networks in harmony with one another and with nature, human history become natural history (Figure 1.1). Geddes’ enigmatic model, which runs through design at such a deep level that we barely detect it, informed even Le Corbusier’s Cartesian, mechanistic and systems environment, the healthfulness of roof gardens embedded within his Ville Radieuse (1930), and it was surely present in some very different form in the Whole Earth Catalog. Different, because the precise, separated, teleological allocation of resources by technocracy anticipated by Le Corbusier, and enacted by a governmental urban and regional planning internationally after the Second World War, was now to be overturned by a countercultural experiment in a deregulated biosphere where change was ever-​immanent and ever-​imminent. The Whole Earth Catalog illustrated how the concept of environment transitioned from one in which it seemed possible, via expert government, to act upon the natural sphere as something separate from the human sphere (the binary of Lorenzetti’s frescos and Le Corbusier’s urbanism), to one in which the natural sphere and human spheres were inextricably tangled –​to act upon nature was to act upon ourselves, and vice versa, as sub-​systems reacted to sub-​systems nested within bigger systems. Live lightly: the

22  Simon Sadler

better human actions adapt to the limit conditions imposed by the biosphere and its laws –​the better that the human race’s technological and economic Second Nature intuited the rules set down by the planet’s First Nature –​the better for everyone and everything. Push back too hard with giant technocratic techniques of infrastructure and agriculture, and the environment will bite back –​so cautioned the Catalog’s environmental literature, keynoted by Rachel Carson. This portentous shift is a lot to claim for what was, at core, just a hippie shopping catalogue. Yet the Catalog has seemed increasingly ‘keynote’ over the last decade or so, in computing and environmental histories as well as that of design, recently positioned between Mary Quant’s mini-​skirt and the UK New Town of Milton Keynes within the permanent history of design presented by London’s Design Museum. Perhaps one reason is that it helps us grasp an epistemological shift. In it, problem-​solving moved from a technocratic to a stakeholder operating environment. Indeed the Catalog’s first authority, Richard Buckminster Fuller –​who conceived of the world as an engineering problem, in which resources could be redistributed and energy conserved  –​was quickly jettisoned by the Catalog’s founding editor Stewart Brand in favour of a cybernetics allowing feedback between the world’s entities. This dispelled the possibility of an overview sufficiently comprehensive for total environmental design; in Gregory Bateson’s second order cybernetics, instated as the central epistemology for later editions of the Catalog, so tangled and nested were these relationships that the sort of delineation which once allowed a ‘bounded rationality’ to separate artificial and natural, inside and outside, became moribund: everything, in a sense, was the same, without hierarchy, flattened –​or, rather, made spherical, like the whole earth, a complex system of systems, without absolute boundary or centred authority.The new operating environment for design suggested by the Whole Earth Catalog was at a maximum, universal, global and cosmological scale, where design surrendered its domination of nature and acceped partnership with it. From this would proceed the now rote frameworks of sustainability and complexity. Complex relationships could be transformed by living them, unhindered by planning or by the Hegelian state of perfection which inspired scientific modernist design earlier in the century. In our era of unpredictable, tangled ‘thing-​ness’ (fundamental to contemporary epistemology and ontology, for instance that of Bruno Latour and Peter Sloterdijk), we might well be nostalgic for the relative clarity of scientific planning. Consider how John Snow’s 1854 epidemiological map of London’s cholera epidemic could prompt engineer Joseph Bazalgette, and the Metropolitan Board of Works which employed him, to engineer out a clearly defined problem with complete success, impelled by the straightforward (if gargantuan) need to expunge sewage from London.When, by contrast, Stewart Brand took a keen interest in California’s water supply (editing the 1979 California Water Atlas for the Office of the Governor), it was no longer in the blithe belief that water engineering merely conveyed water from one part of the state to another: to think about water was to think about the interacting web of life, natural and artificial, human and animal  –​the irrigation of a farm in one place linked to run-​off in another place linked to atmospheric

Design’s operating environments  23

conditions in another. Hereon the ‘bounded rationality’ of an environmental system was complex, in water as in all other systems –​social, communicative, economic. No longer was it possible to plan an environment as a stable and coherent place, not even from the ‘top-​down’ privilege afforded from the Office of the Governor and its cartographers, towards a clearly delineated future. Likewise for the reader of the Catalog: the designer had instead to design from within the ecological tangle, and iteratively, since the environment would respond. The future would not be controlled; it would emerge, and could be at best ‘nudged’ (to draw on a term prominent in the study of complexity). But nudge how? How was it possible to intervene in ecology –​to design? By being pragmatic, informative, and fun, the Catalog implied.‘Access to tools,’ its strapline promised: here’s the world, its pragmatic worldview told us, and here’s how to fix it.This operating environment commanded us to be constructive, not critical (to invert Daniel Burnham’s famous rallying cry –​make no big plans!). Newly aware of their capacity to reason and act, readers of the Catalog would recognize their role as change-​makers within a connective environment. In a departure from the exquisite forms of modernism earlier in the century, it did not now matter much what design looked like –​the shaggier the better, maybe –​but it did matter a great deal whether it worked, and whether it felt right: a windmill generator acquired from the Catalog had a certain frontier aesthetic, for sure, but the main thing was that it extracted free energy from the planetary system, which felt righteous for the hippie erecting it, and which could inspire other hippies to do the same, without being told to, offsetting –​one micro-​intervention at a time –​the environmental damage imposed by large-​scale dams and power stations. As a highly desirable by-​ product, designing and making and doing thus organized the polity: hippies doing their own thing would prompt a better world to emerge beyond some moribund, directive, left-​r ight, top-​down politics. The common interests of the post-​ technocratic polity could instead be networked by ‘making things public’ (to borrow Latour’s phrase) through forums like the Catalog, and through fun (Brand organized a New Games Tournament in Marin in 1974, for example). The application of fun, play and games was not quite as innocent as it may seem, since it fused the old Romantic belief in the innate creative capacities of humans with insights derived from Cold War strategic studies like game theory, in turn helping revive a classical economic reverence for the organizational capacity of markets. The year 1968 was when Brand launched the Catalog, and also saw the publication of ecologist Garrett Hardin’s keynote essay on economics, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. A common resource like the seas can collapse due to over-​fishing, Hardin reminded readers, because individual users act independently according to their own self-​interest, contrary to the common good of all users. What to do? Gardin’s essay became one source of the prevalent model of sustainable development which harnessed economic growth to environmental protection by encouraging ownership, private enterprise, and mediation. Hardin’s understanding of the commons might be seen as something like undergirding that of the Whole Earth model: enforcing personal freedom, through private enterprise,

24  Simon Sadler

will save the commons for natural capital, end the need for top down governance, correct the imbalances imposed by regulation, and prompt innovation. This ‘tragic commons’ became perhaps the most successful eco-​ontology of our time. In a 2010 approach he called eco-​pragmatism, Brand praised African entrepreneurialism and informal urbanism (Brand 2010), while in 1997 Rem Koolhaas gestured to Lagos, Nigeria as an exemplary self-​organizing mutation of 21 million lakeside entrepreneurs (Koolhaas 2001). Koolhaas’s reading of Lagos was later shown by geographer Matthew Gandy to be a post-​colonial fantasy (Gandy 2005), though Koolhaas is praised by pragmatist keynoter Bruno Latour (Latour and Yaneva 2008). It’s not hard to see the appeal to designers of this keynote messaging, from Brand to Koolhaas to Latour, of a planet of global adjustment, inter-​relation and fit –​its inclusiveness, the loss of design’s executive presence in the world upturned with Nietzschean joy as an invitation to experimentation floating seemingly without political gravity (Brand forbad any discussion of politics in the Whole Earth Catalog, hailing his readers as gods –​‘we are as gods and may as well get good at it’). Matters of fact, Latour and his colleagues in Science and Technology Studies have shown, are human constructs, and we do better to follow incrementally matters of concern that fall neither to the left or right. At his keynote for the 2008 Design History Society meeting in Falmouth, Latour continued his battle against the Promethean delusions of modernism by arguing that, as beings together, we are, rather, a Cautious Prometheus –​this was the title of Latour’s Falmouth address, just as the discipline was becoming heralded as exemplary for its ‘design thinking’ –​freed of the delusion that we can make executive decisions about the world as though it was founded on matters of fact, or categorical distinctions, or politics. Latour quoted a pun derived from Martin Heidegger, via philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, that ‘Dasein ist design’, as though simply existing, being (Dasein) is design –​freeing design of any telos or stated criteria (Latour 2009). For Latour, at Falmouth, Sloterdijk was ‘THE philosopher of design’, because Sloterdijk described a spherical planet of humans whose capabilities were extended prosthetically by technology, and whose actions were pragmatic: was this Brand’s Whole Earth technical ecology coming to pass? Yet the Cautious Prometheus ethos offered design a false modesty. The turn from top-​down to bottom-​up served if anything as the imperious extension of design  –​Being is Design. One effect was to place designers as green ‘accelerationists’ of sorts. ‘There is a proposal integrated into Massive Change’, announced Bruce Mau and his colleagues about their 2004 world-​designing project (which invited the counsel of Stewart Brand), ‘for a right-​angle shift in the axis of discourse defined by right and left, socialism and capitalism’, to include a global mind, an entrepreneurial Third World, a zero waste economy, poverty eradication and deathless war (Mau 2004, 19). Like Koolhaas and Latour, Mau packaged news about our tragic commons in that strangely exhilarating, playful way modelled 50 years ago by Brand and his colleagues at the Catalog, and then in books and exhibitions by Theo Crosby (whose 1973 Environment Game tried to assemble a public concerned by environmental crisis but offering only a ‘pessimist utopia’, as he called it, of informational tackboards, inventories, and history

Design’s operating environments  25

lessons). Always, there was the graphic strength of presentation, the iconic imagery (recall the covers of the Whole Earth Catalog), the cartoons, laconic phraseology, the diagrams, the memes (‘access to tools’,  ‘Dasein ist design’), breaking down critical resistance through a ‘facticity’. The capacity of something as artificial as capitalism to look natural –​for it to appear to be something untamable, for its profit motive to seem the lesser part of its purpose, for the environment to seem open for business to more and more actors (rather than more and more exclusive), for the market to appear as a regulator protecting us against the destruction of commons –​all this is a ruse, statistics on inequality and climate change would strongly suggest. At its most utopian the Whole Earth keynote would have us imagine our operating environment as a site of economic primitive accumulation –​a commonwealth, unenclosed, networked and smoothly distributed, with equal access  –​the only barriers to entry being initiative (‘innovation’) and a work ethic (‘enterprise’). In the Catalog, we are all entrepreneurs: innovation and enterprise were not the preserves of ‘The Man’ at IBM, General Electric, General Motors, and so forth. This tough love emphasis on innovation and enterprise was at least as important to Whole Earth eco-​ontology as its emphasis on conservation, and it synchronized with the libertarian and neoliberal keynote of political economy emerging at the same time (which today dominates political economy). Catalog editors like Brand and Kevin Kelly looked to the operations of the networked free market, unhindered as far as possible by regulation, as the final element in ‘natural’ self-​organization  –​Brand introduced his readers to the pitiless classical economics of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman (Brand 1971). The ‘tragic commons’ was a hippie revival of that old question in design: could capitalism be made to work for all? But some respondents dissented.

The commons without tragedy: three respondents Were  –​are  –​other understandings of the commons possible? In the 1970s, respondents to the keynote sounded by the Whole Earth Catalog described alternative commons without the ‘tragedy’ of individual users acting independently according to their own self-​interest, and so sustained something of that other old question in design:  do we need capitalism to organize us? Part of their response was to swap out the Catalog’s vanguard complexity and libertarianism for more traditional mutualism, socialism, and anarchism. The human condition, and its relationship to nature, was not necessarily tragic in the absence of top-​down authority. Bonds of community and the pressure to survive could instill cooperation, according to the anarchism propounded at the time by Ivan Illich and Murray Bookchin. Although an appeal to a de-​regulated environment and bottom-​up initiative united radicals to the left and right at the time, then, the sovereignty of the unconstrained market as the hidden hand of environmental organization was not yet a given. While radicals to the right considered the market wholly ethical and necessary for human enterprise and sustainability, innovating and learning faster than government, for leftists the sovereignty of the market ultimately threatened to reinstate utilitarianism.

26  Simon Sadler

‘It is clear … that the problems confronting non-​industrialised countries cannot be solved by the adoption of Western patterns of free enterprise capitalism. Many of the problems confronting these countries started with this type of development which was a result of their colonial past’ –​Tanzanian ecologist Jimoh Omo-​Fadaka’s 1972 comments in The Ecologist magazine were reprinted in Radical Technology, a book of 1976 produced by a consortium of British technologists, environmentalists and scholars (and repeatedly excerpted in the British periodical Architectural Design) (Harper and Boyle 1976, 256). Radical Technology was one of three ‘respondents’ to the Whole Earth Catalog ‘keynote’ we can briefly consider here, alongside the Fall 1974 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog’s journal Co-​Evolution Quarterly, guest-​edited by the Black Panther Party of Oakland, California, and Global Tools, published in Italy in 1973 by a consortium of architects, designers, and artists (under the initial patronage of Italy’s venerable design magazine Casabella) as ‘a yellow pages for culture … based on the Whole Earth Catalog’ (Branzi 1984, 84). Though likely unknown to one another, their readings of the commons, and the seminars and programmes associated with them, learned from the pragmatist environment being described by the Whole Earth Catalog. Repelled, like the Catalog’s editors, at dependence upon politically and physically unravelling technocratic welfare states, its architecture, and its environmental planning, they explored self-​help as an ideal for the left and right alike: Stewart Brand praised the Panthers’ ‘survival programs’, like the Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program, which reportedly enrolled 10,000 children in breakfast kitchens across the US by late 1969, as ‘model ­activities … for cities everywhere’ (Brand 1974). Survival within an imperilled and perilous environment by deploying tool culture and integrated approaches –​these were themes headlining all the publications; the Global Toolers ‘were mulling over the notion of “elementary survival” ’, as one of its members recently recalled of an existential dread as terrorism swept Italy during the so-​called Years of Lead (Sadler 2015, 72). Radical Technology promoted appropriate technology –​decentralized, labour-​intensive, energy-​efficient, environmentally sound, and locally controlled design –​as a route for small communities to autonomy from the state and corporations. But –​in a crucial distinction –​these respondents also demonstrated the impossibility of a singular whole earth, of a unitary environment, of one commons, of a single mode of survival. It emerged in the pages of the Panthers’ edition Co-​Evolution Quarterly that the operating environment laid out by the Quarterly and its parent publication was simply unrecognizable to African Americans in Oakland drawn to the Panthers:  as the readers of the Whole Earth Catalog fantasized about a life off the grid, the better to intuit natural law, the Panthers outlined ways of surviving on the grid. For the Black Panthers, the system boundary was not the whole earth, but the city limits of Oakland, to which they were confined by systemic inequality, within which they found themselves repressed by policing, and to which they brought the analytical methods of race and class (derived from Marxism and Black nationalism) utterly rejected by the Whole Earth Catalog. So, respondents to the Catalog drew in the boundary of the commons to encourage deepened community, not its atomization –​to encourage co-​operation

Design’s operating environments  27

rather than co-​evolution. Whereas the key mode of architecture in the Catalog was that of ‘shelter’, of the individual in Nature –​by default, a White male individual, like Henry David Thoreau –​ Radical Technology for example sustained interest in housing, which implied an urban, working-​class, social product: its most celebrated vision was of an ‘Autonomous Terrace’ of urban terraced row housing. The Whole Earth Catalog seemed to see in appropriate technology a mode of primitive capital accumulation; Radical Technology saw in it a means to undercut imperialist capital accumulation along the lines laid out by Mao and Gandhi. ‘Workers of the world, disperse’, editor Fred Richardson amusingly reversed Marx’s famous dictum in the Whole Earth Catalog (Brand 1971, 111), but Global Tools sought an environment in which subjects would be linked in creative solidarity. One of the members of the Italian collective, Andrea Branzi, recalled that, for all its qualities, the Catalog ‘still looked … like a theft of information, a narrowing of the possibilities promised by an alternative use of capitalism’ (Branzi 1984, 84). Global Tools instead enabled a non-​utilitarian making for its own sake, countering an era of de-​skilling through rising automation. While the Whole Earth Catalog looked towards the new frontier of electronic networking, Global Tools’ post-​industrial future returned to the sorts of networking mapped in the Middle Ages by Florentine workshops. Respondents ‘hacked’ (to borrow a term popularized by Stewart Brand) the food, housing, and technology necessary to sustain the social. Global Tools’ enchanting documentation of its own meetings and makings depicted the sort of lifeworld for design demanded by its member Ettore Sottsass in Casabella in 1973, when he announced he simply wanted to ‘find a place where, together, people could try to make things’ (Sottsass 1973, 7).

Conclusions Global Tools and Radical Technology harked back to the Arts and Crafts and subsequent environmental reform, offering a communitarian approach to design after the matter-​of-​fact, scientific design methods of the 1960s. So, too, did they recall the socialist politics of the Arts and Crafts. ‘NO ONE IS GOOD ENOUGH TO BE ANOTHER’S MASTER’ read the slogan for the stained glass of a secularized church depicted in Radical Technology (Harper and Boyle 1976, 228) (Figure 1.2). Its artist, the noted anarchist illustrator Clifford Harper, took the slogan from William Morris, and paid homage in his designs to Morris’s News from Nowhere. Design isn’t only a facilitator and mediator for existing processes re-​shaping the world, adjusting everyone and everything to a unitary transactional agenda. Design is also a way of drawing a line around environments worth nurturing –​it is pastoral. Wittingly or not, design can promote environments that are likely amenable to prevailing interests, which in the last few centuries have been mostly those of capitalism, and it can offer counter-​environments that present news from nowhere. There are perhaps two versions of design history:  one that responded to the Industrial Revolution by seeing in it something gloriously global, fast, fluid, versus another seeking the local, slow, deliberate. The latter is a sort of dissent-​by-​design. In their varying ways the respondents to the Whole Earth Catalog upended the

28  Simon Sadler

Harper, ‘Vision 6: Community Media Centre’, Radical Technology, 1976. From Peter Harper and Godfrey Boyle (eds.), Radical Technology, New York: Pantheon. Courtesy of Peter Harper/​Penguin Random House LLC FIGURE 1.2   Clifford

reassurance of a unitary operating environment for design. There’s an environment out there into which we might fit, these respondents seemed to say, but we respectfully decline it:  we are the unfit. In many ways these respondents seemed to be going with the prevailing globalist programme, but then elected to make environments they hoped would be more conducive to general wellbeing. In fairness, I am not sure what got ecologically fixed by those 1970s respondents; but at least they reigned in the boundaries of their operating environments to something somewhat viable, and reignited the guilt, conscience, indignation, and solidarity that I think is part of design. If keynotes from Brand to Koolhaas to Sloterdijk to Latour have found utopian content in a ‘realism’ about the commons –​at the risk of reductivism, that capitalism is a grand, post-​political game through which we will find ourselves cooperating in pursuit of our common interest in sustaining a liveable environment, across lines of race, even across lines of species –​respondents wear their disillusion on their sleeves, the Panthers, Global Tools members and Radical Technologists often almost laconic in their efforts to find another way. And now the spirit of William Morris, that perennial Romantic keynote of design, complete with his contradictions (one foot in capitalism, the other in socialism; one hand in a vat of natural dye, the other in a vat of industrially produced arsenic green) reappears as impatience and anxiety around design’s default, neoliberal operating environment grows, and as its still more conservative nativist ‘­alternative’ induces outright disgust. In Falmouth, a decade ago, Latour praised how the old design

Design’s operating environments  29

trades –​what Morris called the Lesser Arts –​had been admirably pragmatic, crafting change gradually (Latour 2009). But Morris also saw in the Lesser Arts a preparedness for what he called an innate socialism, founded in a reverence for nature and of those social relations that come from making things, a sensibility towards the commons that is more empathetic than transactional, and an outlook that is foremost concerned with the wellbeing of all things (Morris 1882). Designers recently are threatening to withdraw their labour from unjust environments and from the supposed naturalist realism of the tragic commons, declining on occasion to participate in economic growth that is heedless to wider, collective consequence.Theorist Cameron Tonkinwise defends the un-​fit and an un-​making: ‘I argue that the most creatively destructive thing designers can do is work to restore previous more sustainable ways of living and working’. He too draws on anarchism (the Occupy movement lurks as an influence): ‘I prefer what I am not supposed to, and I use design to encourage others to also’ (Tonkinwise 2018). I noticed something of the design discipline’s purposive dissent back at my home department following the 2016 US election. In an awkward faculty meeting we said, look, in this department we don’t agree on what design is, but our students deserve to know on what side of history we stand. They need to know we get environmentalism. And some students could face deportation, or have family who do, and they need to know that the department would not mediate with a political environment beyond the pale: they need to know that this department would try to offer a buffer. Students need to know what sort of environment design creates as a discipline, in other words. And then all of us –​colleagues working in industry, colleagues working with labour –​signed off on a slightly goofy statement which, in its liberal elitism, its righteous indignation, its muddled wishing for another world, would have been castigated by anyone sympathetic to the new Administration. It indicated a shared, implicit understanding of design as pastoral. Before it was posted to the department website, I slipped in a socialist epigram from William Morris, and still no-​one objected, so Morris and his nowhere operating environment were keynoting for us, again.

References Brand, S. (1971). ‘Capitalism’, in The Last Whole Earth Catalog. Santa Cruz/​Harmondsworth: Portola Institute/​Penguin, 344. Brand, S. (1974). ‘Gratitude to Our Guest Editors’. CoEvolution Quarterly (Fall): np. Brand, S. (2010). Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary. New York: Penguin. Branzi, A. (1984). The Hot House: Italian New Wave Design. London: Thames and Hudson. Gandy, M. (2005). ‘Learning from Lagos’, New Left Review, 33 (May–​June): 36–​52. Harper, P. and G. Boyle (eds.) (1976). Radical Technology. New York: Pantheon. Koolhaas, R. and Harvard Project on the City (2001). ‘Lagos’, in A. Lavalou (ed.), Mutations. Barcelona: Actar, 651–​719. Latour, B. (2009). ‘A Cautious Prometheus? A  Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk)’, in J. Glynne, F. Hackney, and V. Minton (eds.),

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Networks of Design: Proceedings of the 2008 Annual International Conference of the Design History Society. Boca Raton, FL: Universal Publishers, 2–​10. Latour, B. and A. Yaneva (2008). ‘Give me a Gun and I will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture’, in R. Geiser (ed.), Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research, Basel: Birkhäuser, 80–​89. Mau, B. and the Institute without Boundaries (2004). Massive Change. London: Phaidon. Morris, W. (1882). ‘The Lesser Arts’, in Hopes and Fears for Art. London: Ellis & White, 1–​37. Sadler, S. (2015). ‘The Hammer And The Garrote: A Parable Of “Tool Globalism” ’, in V. Borgonuovo and S. Franceschini (eds.), Global Tools 1973–​75, Istanbul: SALT/​Garanti Kültür AŞ: 69–​90. Simon, H.A. (1969). The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sottsass, E. Jr. (1973). ‘Per ritardato arrivo dell’areomobile/​Because of Late Arrival of the Aircraft’, Casabella 377(May): 7. Tonkinwise, C. (2018). ‘ “I prefer not to:” Anti-​progressive Designing’, in G. Coombs, A. McNamara, G. Sade (eds.), Undesign: Critical Practices at the Intersection of Art and Design. New York: Routledge.

2 PATTERN WATCHERS I Environmental seeing, c. 19701 Larry Busbea

‘Patterns are everywhere’, the designer George Nelson wrote in 1977, ‘they emerge in the eyepiece of an electron microscope and get recorded by cameras in satellites’ (Nelson 1977, 144). Nelson’s gloss on patterns came in the middle of a book called How to See: Visual Adventures in a World God Never Made, which was literally intended as a kind of public service manual to sensitize laypeople (as opposed to professional designers) to the world around them. That world was one in which natural and cultural forces had been thoroughly shaped, mapped, and visualized by a technologically extended humanity immersed in an unprecedented environment. This environment emerged alongside new conceptions of design that, no longer attached to the shaping of singular objects, could address itself to the totality of environmental systems. In what follows, I  will elucidate the technological, epistemological, and aesthetic conditions that animated design’s engagement with environment. We can see these passages from the optical to the operative, the micro to the macro, and the exterior to the interior in some of the first descriptions of environmental patterning by modernist epigones such as Erwin Anton Gutkind, György Kepes, the so-​called Harvard Philomorphs, Gregory Bateson, and Buckminster Fuller, all of whom sought a new kind of understanding of human action and thought in the world. In a very real sense, the interactions described by these design thinkers were shaped by patterns. In the decades following the Second World War, patterns came to function as a common phenomenal and noumenal currency; a lingua forma promising to reconcile those dichotomies that seemed to animate and unbalance life –​ art and science, nature and culture, the macro and micro, the intrinsic and observed, the inside and the outside. To put this less cryptically, by 1970, environment was literally coming into view for the arts and sciences in ways it hadn’t previously. It was haltingly divulging its interactional character, its subject-​based specificity, its omnipresence, and its conditioning mechanisms. By thus appearing, environment

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also seemed to be offering itself up as a new medium for the discipline of design. Indeed, it is difficult to separate the appearance of design from the conceptualization of a conditioning environment, and from the reform of those within it (Çelik-​ Alexander 2017). It is also equally difficult to separate this understanding of pattern watching from the appearance of a new type of designer –​a total designer, design researcher, or design thinker. This designer was now equipped with a new kind of perceptual capacity; an ability to see the environment in ways that were themselves an integral part of that environment. But these remarks must be viewed against a much longer tradition of pattern watching that, to a certain extent, defines modernity itself (Hight 2008). Indeed, it seems as though virtually every generation gets its own pattern book. The ‘fearful symmetries’ of the Romantics were evidence of a sublime divinity. Ernst Haeckel’s patterns (or Kunstformen) demonstrated his profound belief in the ordering principles of life itself as a vital force (Haeckel 1904). D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s posited mathematics as an ordering principle running through organic matter and dynamic flows alike (Wenthworth Thompson 1917). Later, Matila Ghyka would emphasize the geometries common to both natural and aesthetic objects (Ghyka 1946). Philip Ball relies on physics (Ball 2009). And, perhaps predictably, a new generation of ‘biomimetic’ designers has found parallels between algorithmic processes and natural morphology (Tibbits 2017). But the period that concerns me here distinguishes itself from these other moments because of its insistence on the relational and interactional dynamics of pattern. Another way of putting this is to say that, c. 1970, patterns were not observable entities that existed in a given environment, but actually structured environment itself. This situation seemed to render that environment accessible to the type of design I mentioned above. To pattern watch in the decades following the Second World War was to aesthetically and technically reorder –​design –​the fabric of both culture and nature. Still, undertaking such a totalizing project was a utopian enterprise. The elusiveness of pattern required a certain commitment on the part of those attempting to describe it, obsessiveness even; a compulsion to understand the formal similarities among so many different environmental systems. The sensuous, mathematical, and cognitive demands of pattern seemed capable of pushing these researchers beyond their disciplinary boundaries, outside their epistemological comfort zones. This is likely why they tended to be somewhat liminal characters; aesthetes among scientists, or empiricists among humanists. These demands turned painters into crystallographers and physicists into poets. They also turned virtually all of these pattern watchers into designers of one sort or another. With a bit of philological labour, we can find one such character at the origins of our current usage of the phrase ‘the environment’. When we look up the word ‘environment’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, we learn of its ancient origins, and its elaboration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Only in the late 1940s did the definite article appear, allowing the other term a bit of autonomy to signify the world writ large:  the environment. Chasing up the sources cited for the first such usages from the 1940s and 1950s, we find that one is a classic in

Pattern watchers I  33

environmental studies: Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, which was the published proceedings of a symposium sponsored by the Wenner-​Gren Foundation and organized by Carl O. Sauer at Princeton University in 1955 (Thomas 1956). German architect E.A. Gutkind gave a keynote called ‘Our World from the Air:  Conflict and Adaptation’. In addition to a compelling text tinged with Whiteheadian processual and Buberian ethical overtones, Gutkind presented here a series of aerial photographs of human settlements. In these, it is as though the categories of nature and culture have become something like tectonic plates squeezing together, one rubbing against the other. Gutkind writes: Man and nature are the twin agents of the perennial revolution which shapes and reshapes the face of the earth.This struggle, at times violent and sporadic, at others gentle and consistent, but forever demanding a new response to a new challenge, activates the potential energies of man and nature molding them into a grand pattern of advance or retreat, of creative interaction or disastrous antagonism, and of promise or failure. Gutkind 1956, 1 So, to be very didactic, here we have a modernist architect of the Bauhaus generation (who would go on to become one of the leading figures in the emerging field of human geography) utilizing the technology of aerial photography to discern various shapes on the surface of the earth in one of the earliest explicit articulations, not only of the environment, but also what would come to be known a few generations later as the ‘anthropocene’.  And furthermore, these myriad components are held together in a very particular kind of form; not a formal object with stable outlines, nor a defined figure on a ground; but rather a dynamic set of interacting forces that constitute a perceivable series of patterns. If Gutkind had relied upon a fairly traditional technology to reveal his patterns, aerial photography was nonetheless a part of a much larger trend for using new optical and imaging devices to peer into the fabric of matter and space. But patterns were never simply revealed. They seemed not to be inherent, but rather comparative and contingent; the result of a perceiving apparatus as much as a particular material attribute. Accordingly, as new technologies divulged new patterns to be perceived, other technologies were tasked with the act of perception itself. Consider the rise toward the end of the 1960s in experiments in machine ‘pattern recognition’. Already by the late 1960s, the ambitions for this field were great, as Paul Kolers and Murray Eden acknowledged in their anthology on the subject. Here, the editors listed a daunting variety of patterns susceptible to either living or ‘automatic’ perception: ‘fingerprints, electrocardiograms, radar echoes from celestial bodies, engine noises, seismic events, white blood cells, clouds, diseases, nuclear events (in bubble chamber photographs or spark chamber tracks), leaves, insects, psychopathies, faces, and so on’ (Kolers and Eden 1968, 210).This seems like a very ambitious list of ‘objects’ for any perceptual apparatus to be able to recognize or process. Many of them are less objects, than they are fleeting phenomena, waves, particles, parts of larger wholes, or events. Indeed, Kolers and Eden acknowledged

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that it was precisely a limiting notion of objects in space that formed the principle hurdle for their new science: We are using the term [pattern recognition] in a far broader sense than that of two-​dimensional visual patterns; we mean it to comprise the detection, perception, or recognition of any kind of regularity or relation between things. Both things and the relations between them are patterns; there is little justification for restricting the objects of study to things. Indeed, the recognition even of things requires some formulation of the relations between their identifiable parts. Perhaps the reason that successes in the field of automatic recognizing of patterns have been so few is that the ‘recognizing’ has been built upon the identification of templates (things) rather than upon the principles that guide their construction and of the contexts in which they are found. Kolers and Eden 1968, ix This implies that getting a machine to perceive patterns might involve a total reconceptualization of the way humans perceive, and an acknowledgement of not only the biological, but also the social limitations of that perception. The aesthetic and ecological ramifications of pattern recognition were demonstrated most enduringly, perhaps, in the work of György Kepes. From his earliest book The Language of Vision of 1944, Kepes acknowledged the transformative power of technology on the face of the earth (as Gutkind had), but also its perceptual and epistemological implications: ‘Technological discoveries have extended and reshaped the physical environment.They have changed our visual surroundings partly by actually rebuilding the physical environment, and partly by presenting visual tools that are of assistance to our discernment of those phases of the visible world which were previously too small, too fast, too large, or too slow for us to comprehend’ (Kepes 1944, 13). This text would inaugurate a new epoch of pattern recognition, aided by emerging technologies and a cybernetic paradigm. It also foreshadowed Kepes’s entire utopian project to synthesize the resources of both art and science to design a new environment for a humanity desperately estranged from itself and its world. This project was extended in Kepes’s subsequent publications with George Braziller known as the Vision+Value series, most of which appeared between 1965 and 1966. Throughout the pages of these books  –​which have now been very thoroughly discussed (Martin 2003, Halpern 2015, Blakinger 2016) –​we find physicists, biologists, psychologists, media theorists, philosophers, art critics, painters, sculptors, architects, and industrial designers attempting to find a common ground via a method that Kepes himself described as ‘pattern-​seeing’. This was a way of looking beyond the mere appearances of things to find their underlying organizational principles; principles that could then be recognized, and synchronized among any number of different natural and artificial systems (Martin 2003, 40).

Pattern watchers I  35

But despite the advanced technologies giving access to new patterns at both micro and macro scales, Kepes’s morphologies continued to function as they had historically: as scalar, synecdochic, visual, and epistemological forms that seemed to emanate through everything in the universe. But, while such studies were still tinged with Victorian metaphysics, their postwar iterations underwent some significant shifts. One of these was that patterns became ever more environmental.What I mean by this is that, as the 1960s came to an end, pattern migrated somewhat from the internal structures of things or phenomena, to the spaces between and relations among them. Kepes acknowledged this in 1972, when a belated Vision+Value book appeared, titled The Arts of the Environment. Kepes’s introductory essay reads like a phenomenological and ecological explosion of his earlier interest in the fundamental structures of visual phenomena. Here, environmental patterning allowed Kepes to extend his utopian project to the infinite complexity of, well, everything around us: Every physical form, every living form, every pattern of feeling or thought has its own unique identity, its boundaries, its extension and its wider context; it contains or is contained by another pattern; it follows or is followed by another pattern. The unique identity, discrete shape, and nature of a space-​occupying substance are shaped by the boundary that separates it from and connects it to the space outside. An organic form lives and grows only through its intricate transactions with its environment. An optical event becomes a visually perceived figure only when seen against its ground. The quality, feeling, and meaning of a sound is cast in the matrix of the physical processes that generated it […] In the same way the physical, biological, or moral individuality of man is the function of his active relationship with the physical and social environment. Kepes 1972, 3 But the expansion of patterns into the fabric of environmental interaction and design were already being elaborated by others in Kepes’s earlier volumes. This occurred by remapping the activities of the so-​called two cultures into the same environment. The eccentric engineer turned evolutionary biologist Lancelot Law Whyte used pattern, structure, and form to suggest a new epistemological basis for science writ large, which he summarized in the following list of questions: What is the relation of the two cosmic tendencies:  towards mechanical disorder (entropy principle) and towards geometrical order (in crystals, molecules, organisms, etc.)? […] What kind of ordering of parts underlies the functioning coordination of organisms? How does the inherited structural pattern in the germ cells produce mature functional forms? How does the brain discern patterns and make its own?

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What marks those genic arrangements that produce, in appropriate environments, beautiful bodies and minds? Whyte 1965, 27 But perhaps it was Cyril Stanley Smith –​metallurgist and co-​inventor of the atomic bomb –​who would express these epistemological, genetic, and perceptual questions most compellingly (Figure 2.1): ‘Everything that we can see,’ he wrote, Everything that we can understand, is related to structure, and, as the Gestalt psychologists have so beautifully shown, perception itself is in patterns, not fragments […] The very nature of life is pattern-​ matching, whether in the simple acceptance or rejection of ‘food’ units to fit the RNA molecules within a cell or the joining together of conforming and differentiated cells in the overall pattern of the organism which the parts themselves both dictate and conform to. The growth of ordered but lifeless matter typically occurs by the addition of atoms or molecules to the very surface of a crystal. A not dissimilar process of structural matching is involved in the duplication of protein within a living cell, but a complete organism grows by internal multiplication, and the consequent burgeoning of outward movements produces the differing environments for cells which is an essential characteristic of a living organism. Smith 1965, 41 Here, it is as though Gutkind’s aerial p­ hotos  –​and the frictional and dynamic ways in which human activity contacts, aggravates, and patterns the physical landscape –​have been both expanded and condensed simultaneously; projected both outward and inward as processual forms of cognition, perception, and environmental interaction. Smith was an active member of another initiative in pattern watching emerging in Cambridge at this moment. This was a group of scientists and designers who frequently met at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Arts. They called themselves the Philomorphs, and they included in their ranks Smith, architect Ranko Bon, biologist Stephen Jay Gould, and the visionary crystallographer and pioneer of design science Arthur Lee Loeb, among others (a few of whom contributed to Kepes’s books).2 The kaleidoscopic patterns that emerged from this group are far too numerous and complex to describe in any detail here, but one or two examples seem particularly relevant to tracing the ways patterns moved into environment itself, and into the deepest conceptions of what it meant to design. Take Philomorph and architect Peter S. Stevens, who, in 1974, published Patterns in Nature; arguably the definitive pattern book of the decade.Thanks to the influence of the Philomorphs, Stevens’s approach to patterns was unique. It largely eschewed vitalism, physics, geometry, and so on, in favour of a charged understanding of space as the source of nature’s divine proportions; ‘[f]‌or space itself has a structure that influences the shape of every existing thing,’ he wrote. Continuing:

FIGURE 2.1   ‘Duplex

crystals with bands of different composition in exact orientation relationship within one grain, but forming an overall foam structure like a pure metal, here seen in a copper-​silicon alloy, worked and annealed.’ From Smith, C.S. (1965) ‘Structure substructure superstructure’ in Kepes, G. (ed.) (1965) Structure in Art and in Science. Copyright 1965 George Braziller, Inc.

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The idea that space has structure may sound strange, since we usually think of space as a kind of nothingness that is the absence of structure. We think of space as the emptiness within an empty container, as the passive backdrop for the lively play of all material things. It turns out, however, that the backdrop, the all-​pervading nothingness, is not so passive. The nothingness has an architecture that makes real demands on things. Every form, every pattern, every existing thing pays a price for its existence by conforming to the structural dictates of space. Stevens 1974, 12 Unlike Haeckel, Stevens did not consider patterns as emanations from organic energies. Nor were they, as in Wentworth Thompson, dictated as if from above by unchanging mathematical principles. Instead they were produced by the contact between what Stevens described as the ‘little particles’ or the ‘tiny grains’ of space and those of other structures. If Stevens was intent on tracking the imprint of spatial patterning on various natural and artificial objects, his colleague Arthur Loeb would provide a more thorough analysis of spatial patterning itself. His own Space Structures appeared a year after Patterns in Nature. Introducing the book, Loeb spoke to the universal applicability of his spatial geometries: The subdivision of space and the quantitative expression of spatial order are a concern to all who deal with spatial patterns, whether with crystals whose interacting elements are but angstroms apart, or with cities extending over many kilometers. Space is not a passive vacuum, but has properties that impose powerful constraints on any structure that inhabits it.These constraints are independent of specific interactive forces, hence geometrical in nature. Loeb 1976, xix For Loeb, a pattern was an ‘ordered array’ of any entities whatever. Ordering denoted relations among these patterned entities, and this ‘set of relationships’ was the ‘structure of the pattern’ (Loeb 1976, xix). Here, Loeb was very close to Stevens’s ‘tiny grains’ of spatial substance. It is also important to note that in Loeb’s capacious method, he was not simply employing numbers to explain space, but quite the inverse: ‘The language of structure to be explored here deals with numbers as three-​dimensional entities: we shall think of a number as a distribution in space of structural elements’ (Loeb 1976, xx).What follows in Loeb’s text is an accumulation of progressively more complex and symmetrical polyhedral forms, all subjected to various types of consistent transformation (Figure  2.2). Remarkably, and just to stress this point once more, these forms refer neither to physical structures, nor to ideal geometrical principles, but to space itself and anything in space (if the word in has any meaning at all at this point). In a sense, Stevens’s Patterns in Nature served as a kind of empirical, environmental proof of Loeb’s principles of spatial structuring. Theirs were patterns out there, embedded in the ontic fabric of space itself.

FIGURE 2.2   ‘Truncation

and Stellation’. Reprinted by permission from RightsLink: SpringerNature, Space Structures: Their Harmony and Counterpoint, by Arthur Loeb (1976)

40  Larry Busbea

We can see from these examples that patterns were reorganizing both the literal fabric of environment, as well as the perceptual apparatuses that were an integral part of this fabric. Perhaps the individual who would most explicitly join these models of patterned environment and environmental patterning was neither a Philomorph, nor one of Kepes’s pattern-​seers. It was Gregory Bateson, a figure intimately connected to the formation of cybernetics in the 1940s, but who, by the 1970s, wasn’t discussed very much on the East coast. Nonetheless, his collected writings, published in 1972 as Steps to an Ecology of Mind, would galvanize a new generation of environmental activists and design scientists. In his vast body of research, pattern and form were the basic principles that underlay explorations of the cultural dynamics of Balinese villagers, the communicational capacities of dolphins, the morphology of octopi, the psychology of alcoholics, the family dynamics of schizophrenics, and the ecology of cities. In these studies, a topological understanding of form was opposed to the traditional objects of Western scientific attention: energy and matter. ‘The conservative laws of energy and matter,’ Bateson wrote, ‘concern substance rather than form. But mental process, ideas, communication, organization, differentiation, pattern, and so on, are matters of form rather than substance’ (Bateson 1972, xxv). For Bateson, everything was form; everything was pattern.There were no isolated objects in his system. Static entities did not exist except insofar as they entered into a relational feedback loop with one another, and, perhaps most importantly, a perceiving, thinking subject. The world he described was made of nothing but pure relation. ‘What pattern,’ he wrote famously, ‘connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me? And me to you? And all the six of us to the amoeba in one direction and to the backward schizophrenic in another?’3 (Bateson 1979, 7) If the scientific community largely balked at Bateson’s ecological aesthetics, design would not. Indeed, it would be one of the most significant figures of this period who would insist on an expanded notion of design thinking as the only way to engage with a universe of pattern newly accessible to human perception and techniques. This was R. Buckminster Fuller.4 Fuller’s connections to the historical origins of environmental design have been emblematized by his Geodesic domes and his World Game undertaking (see Scott 2009). I would add to these the central role of a patterned epistemology in his universal design system. In his later works, Fuller provided new virtual diagrams of the man-​environment relation in a series of isomorphic models of complex patterns that culminated most spectacularly in his 1975 magnum opus, Synergetics, the subtitle of which was Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking –​which I believe should be taken as literally as possible. At the same moment he was completing work on his own Space Structures, Arthur Loeb was also crafting a preface for Synergetics. Of Fuller, he wrote: ‘His is not the burden of proof: the pattern is assumed significant unless proven otherwise’ (Loeb 1975, n.p.). And, indeed, Fuller’s synergetic system was not empirically verifiable in any traditional sense. It was in fact less about the visual patterns of the environment than it was about the metaphysical energies animating universe and

Pattern watchers I  41

‘mind’. For Fuller, it was these patterns that needed to be traced and multiplied; expanded and diversified. This was a system in which patterns were not impressed upon the material of the world, but in which everything was literally suspended. Pattern dictated not just what could be seen, but seeing itself. More practically, thinking through these geometries (and the geometries of thinking itself) would lead humankind out of the evolutionary cul de sac it found itself in, and toward a more holistic and optimized existence; to optimize, in other words ‘the most powerful human environment transforming events of our totally known and reasonably extended history’ (Fuller 1975, 18). Doing so would re-​ synthesize the various fields of specialization that currently characterized civilization: ‘It is synergetically reasonable to assume that relativistic evaluation of any of the separate drives of art, science, education, economics, and ideology, and their complexedly interacting trends within our own times, may be had only through the most comprehensive historical sweep of which we are capable’ (Fuller 1975, 18). This historical sweep would be brought about through the human mind’s capacity for design thinking, or ‘the nature of mind’s design science capability to render all humanity physically successful, thus eliminating human preoccupation with the struggle and thereby freeing all humanity to become metaphysically preoccupied with fulfilling its cosmic-​regeneration functioning’ (Fuller 1975, 326.08, 208). For Fuller and the other pattern watchers I  have mentioned here, design thinking was the privileged modality whereby the alienated realms of human activity might be synthesized toward productive ends. These ends had the broadest possible field of application: the environment itself, or, more precisely, any point of interactional contact between the human subject and the environment, natural or artificial. Within this new model, pattern played a foundational, but also somewhat ambiguous role. It was both form and material; figure and ground; object and method. It slipped among all scales of human experience and cosmic extension. It was the very stuff out of which connections might be made between the aesthetic/​ perceptual capacities of the subject and the material/​technical affordances of the world. Making these connections was the task of the new design science. This was design thinking joined to environmental seeing at their purest and most utopian. But a world in which everything is pattern does not so easily submit to the dictates of design.Though it was figured as pure form, pattern resisted direct observation and representation; not to mention manipulation and optimization. For patterns cannot exist in objective isolation. They only have meaning insofar as they are multiple, relational, translational; overlays, or filters. They only exist insofar as they modify one another. During this moment, pattern became something like the material trace of metonymic slippage, the movement from one frame of reference –​ one epistemic regime –​to another. It wove disparate entities and material together into a vast cosmic polyhedron, fractal, or spiral that disintegrated the sovereign subject into simply another relation within it. On the other hand, pattern is what called the subject forth, as the only entity that might be able to trace its shape, expanse, and symmetry; that might be able to assemble something recognizable from the infinite complexity of environment.

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Coda To revisit a particular historical moment in which environment was understood and designed as a convergence of so many patterns may seem an indulgent exercise in the face of our current dire environmental and social circumstances. It might be seen as a reduction or a flattening of the real concerns we face to a kind of surface effect; a fetishization of an outmoded modernist formalism. But such a dismissal would itself belie an equally outmoded critical epistemology  –​one grounded in the revelation of the true contents underlying shallow formal illusions. The assumptions of such a critical modality have recently been challenged by a contemporary resurgence of patterns and form in critical discourse (Levine 2015; Best and Marcus 2009). Bruno Latour has said that within a given network ‘the notion of form takes a very concrete and practical sense: a form is simply something which allows something else to be transported from one site to another. Form then becomes one of the most important types of translations’ (Latour 2005, 223). This essential but contingent life of form is affirmed by Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian when they write: ‘That form appears sometimes as shape, sometimes as pattern, sometimes as habit, line, structure, model, design, trope, and so on suggests not that formalism is incoherent but that form […] is not a word without content but a notion bound pragmatically to its instances’ (Kramnick and Nersessian 2017, 661). This situated, interfacial, interactional, emergent model of form was precisely that being recognized half a century ago by the pattern watchers invoked above. Then and now, form appears as both an abstraction of certain material properties, but also a concretization of the forces ordering them; a making manifest of the dynamic processes of environment and seeing equally.

Notes 1 The patterns brought together in this chapter are related to others I  trace elsewhere: L. Busbea, The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming). 2 Both Gould and Loeb dedicated their most important books of the 1970s to the Philomorphs: (Gould 1977) and (Loeb 1976). 3 The allusion to the primrose was a famous motif for Bateson and derived from Wordsworth’s Peter Bell: ‘A primrose by a river’s brim; A yellow primrose was to him; And it was nothing more’. Bateson invoked this quote to characterize the attitude of modern science. 4 I am not suggesting here a direct connection of influence between Bateson and Fuller; though they were both taken up by the west coast counterculture at a certain moment, and for similar reasons.

References Ball, P. (2009). Shapes: Nature’s Patterns. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine. Bateson, G. (1979). Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: E.P. Dutton. Best, S. and S. Marcus (2009). ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations 108: 1–​21.

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Blakinger, J. (2016). Artist under technocracy: György Kepes and the cold war avant-​garde. Unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University. Çelik-​ Alexander, Z. (2017) Kinesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Eden, M. (1968). ‘Other Pattern Recognition Problems and Some Generalizations’, in Kolers, P. and Eden, M. (eds.), Recognizing Patterns: Studies in Living and Automatic Systems., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 210–​230. Fuller, R.B. (1975 and 1979). Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, 2  vols. New York & London: Macmillan Publishing. Ghyka, M. (1946). The Geometry of Art and Life. New York: Sheed and Ward. Gould, S.J. (1977). Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gutkind, E.A. (1956). ‘Our World from the Air: Conflict and Adaptation’, in Thomas, W.L. (ed.) (1956) Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Chicago: Wenner-​Gren Foundation,  1–​23. Haeckel, E. (1904). Kunstformen der natur. Leipzig: Bibliographisches institute. Halpern, O. (2015). Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hight, C. (2008). Architectural Principles in the Age of Cybernetics. New  York & London: Routledge. Kepes, G. (1944). Language of Vision. Chicago: Paul Theobald. Kepes, G. (1972). ‘Art and Ecological Consciousness’ in Kepes, G. (ed.) (1972) Arts of the Environment. New York: George Braziller, 1–​12. Kolers, P. and M. Eden, (eds.) (1968). Recognizing Patterns: Studies in Living and Automatic Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kramnick, J. and A. Nersessian (2017). ‘Form and Explanation’, Critical Enquiry, 43: 650–​669. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-​Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levine, C. (2015). Forms:Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Loeb, A. (1976). Space Structures:Their Harmony and Counterpoint. Boston: Addison-​Wesley. Loeb, A. (1975). Preface, in Fuller, R.B. (1975) Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking. vol. 1. New York & London: Macmillan Publishing. Martin, R. (2003). The Organizational Complex Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nelson, G. (1977). How to See:Visual Adventures in a World God Never Made. New York: Little, Brown & Co. Scott, F. (2009). ‘Fluid Geographies: Politics and Revolution by Design’, in Chu, H. and Trujillo, R. New Visions on R.  Buckminster Fuller. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 160–​175. Smith, C.S. (1965). ‘Structure Substructure Superstructure’, in Kepes, G. (ed.) (1965) Structure in Art and in Science. New York: George Braziller, 36–​41. Stevens, P. (1974). Patterns in Nature. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. Thomas, W.L. (ed.) (1956). Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Chicago: Wenner-​ Gren Foundation. Tibbits, S. (2017). Active Matter. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wentworth Thompson, D. (1917). On Growth and Form Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whyte, L.L. (1965). ‘Atomism Structure and Form: A Report on the Natural Philosophy of Form’, in Kepes, G. (ed.) (1965) Structure in Art and in Science. New  York: George Braziller,  27–​31.

3 COMPUTING ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN1 Peder Anker

‘[S]‌urvival of mankind as we know it’ is at stake, and the ‘natural human ecology stands in jeopardy’. Serge Chermayeff ’s plea for environmental conservation addressed the growing use of cars, as he thought everyone’s access to them resulted in a noisy ‘auto-​anarchy’ with roads depredating the natural environment.‘Personally, I observe these probabilities with profoundest melancholy’ in Cape Cod, he noted (Chermayeff 1960, 190, 193). The things affected by this predicament ranged from the privacy of his cottage, to the ecology of the neighbourhood, the social order of the Wellfleet community, and even the planning of the entire peninsula. Only a powerful computer could solve the complexity of the problem, Chermayeff thought. Through the lens of social history of design, I  argue that the early history of computing in design established a managerial view of the natural world reflecting the interests of the well-​educated, liberal elite. Chermayeff was part of a group of modernist designers with vacation homes on Cape Cod who nurtured political ties to the Kennedy family. Their community was fashioned around using the Wellfleet environment as a place for leisure and vacation, a lifestyle threatened by various local housing and road developments. In response they began promoting a national park to protect the area, and began pondering on finding new tools for proper environmental design that could protect their interests.The computer became their unifying tool for a multilayered approach to environmental planning, which saw nature as rational in character. It offered managerial distance and an imagined socio-​political objectivity. As a device the computer emerged out of Chermayeff ’s comprehensive ‘Environmental Design’ courses at Harvard University, which sought to merge arts, science and technology in the design process modelled on the Bauhaus legacy.

Environmental conservation at Cape Cod Since the arrival of former Bauhaus faculty to the United States in the late 1930s the picturesque and beautiful town of Wellfleet, Cape Cod, had been their annual

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summer residence. Bauhauslers such as László Moholy-​ Nagy, Walter Gropius, Herbert Bayer, and Marcel Breuer spent their vacations there on an annual basis, along with prominent modernists such as Eero Saarinen, Paul Weidlinger, and Jack Hall. Chermayeff was very much a part of this community, having bought his own property there in 1944. It was 1,500 square feet of playful avant-​garde and the only place he would ever feel truly at home. Located at the Slogh Pond close to the beaches it was in the midst of, what was then, and indeed still is today, beautiful natural scenery. The architectural history of this modernist community has been well documented by Peter McMahon and Christine Cipriani (2014), who tell a story of a tight knit group of friends enjoying a laidback culture of beaches, woods, art, architecture, and each other. Hard as it may be to imagine today, back then Wellfleet was a place with no restaurants and only a few tourists.  And this was exactly what Chermayeff cherished the most.What raised his concern for nature conservancy were numerous new parcels of buildings that were put on the market in the late 1950s, with new developments built for vacationers as well as local residents. The town’s modernist designers were less than pleased at seeing their beloved scenery being invaded by people and homes that did not belong to the community of the avant-​garde. First among them to express concern about the loss of natural habitat was Gropius, who in his lectures at Harvard tried to convey an environmental ethic to his students that could halt such development: the greatest responsibility of the planner and architect, I believe, is the protection and development of our habitat. Man has evolved a mutual relationship with nature on earth, but his power to change its surface has grown so tremendously that this may become a curse instead of a blessing. How can we afford to have one beautiful tract of open country after the other bulldozed out of existence, flattened and emptied for the sake of smooth building operations and then filled up by a developer with hundreds of insipid little house units, that will never grow into a community […] Until we love and respect the land almost religiously, its fatal deterioration will go on. Gropius 1955, 184, his emphasis Chermayeff was most definitely among those who loved and respected their land almost religiously. His property, his community of designer friends, and the natural scenery that surrounded him were most precious to him, and the arrival of new developments with cars, people, and noise were personally upsetting. As will be apparent, both his writings and teachings addressed this problem head-​on, and the computer would surface as an objectifying tool in planning for a more cautious development. It was the prospect of creating the Cape Cod National Seashore Park that sparked Chermayeff into action. In the fall of 1959 the Senator of Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, reached out to Chermayeff and asked him his opinion about a possible park, as he was planning to sponsor a bill in support of it and wanted Chermayeff to testify in its favour. In his enthusiastic reply, Chermayeff said he would gladly testify,

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and that he could also provide a Harvard study in support of the park.2 He immediately formed the Wellfleet Study Group of Harvard undergraduates, and would, in subsequent months, lobby local and federal politicians about the importance of the park by focusing on the ecological vulnerability of the Cape.3 In the summer of 1960 Chermayeff invited Directors within the Department of Interior to be shown around the possible park area, which included his own property. In December the same year he would testify at the House of Representatives in favour of the park, arguing that it should be as large as possible. If the Senate voted in favour of a tiny park, he argued, ‘Conservation would then be just a word. It would not have any serious meaning because the ecology of wildlife cannot jump quarter mile gaps with residents, their pets and cars and so on’ (Chermayeff 1960). What was needed was a larger plan for Cape Cod and Wellfleet that would make sure that neither the town nor the surrounding landscape would be shattered by suburban sprawl. There was plenty of local opposition to the park reflecting an ongoing tension between local and summer residents, with the visitors being inclined to support nature conservation. The visitors tended to be wealthier, better educated, or also having a wider social network (Corbett 1955, 214–​229). The Kennedys considered themselves to be true Cape Codders, having spent more than 40 summers at a place they considered their home.Yet this identification was not recognized by all. Hyannis Port, where their estates were located, was considered a part-​time summer colony by most Cape Codders, and John F. Kennedy’s self-​identification was not taken entirely seriously by true locals.While serving as US Senator for Massachusetts between 1953 and 1960 Kennedy did his best to keep these tensions buried, so as to maintain the political cache of having a local identity and support base, but despite his attempts, they surfaced in the debate about a possible Cape Cod National Seashore Park. Those living in Cape Cod year-​round feared a tax increase with the loss of property tax revenue on the land that was turned into a park, and there was also a fear for a ban on of developers in the areas. As a result there was much controversy surrounding Kennedy and his plans for the park in the summer of 1959, even leading to some demonstrations against the project. The managerial culture that later came with the computer planning would magnify the social distance with the machine serving as an objectifying tool controlling such local opposition. Yet in light of Kennedy’s bid for Democratic nomination for Presidency, Kennedy decided to postpone support of the park so that the local opposition could not be used against him during the election year of 1960. Having been elected President, he finally established the Cape Cod National Seashore Park in August 1961 while he was enjoying his vacation at Hyannis Port. This was his first show of support of environmentalism, and it propelled him to think further about the issue, as he later did in his endorsement of the conclusions of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). A local historian correctly noted, ‘[i]‌t was as much to protect beaches of the lower Cape for the people as it was to save them from the people’ that the park was established (Schneider 2000, 304).The beaches were to be as accessible as possible fostering tourism business, while the green mantle was to be protected. Only homes already built within the park could remain, and one of those belonged

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to Chermayeff, who was overjoyed about the prospect of ‘escape into a wilderness’ knowing that there would be no new developments in his neighbourhood (Chermayeff 1962, 7). Gropius was also thrilled. To him, the new park was a vehicle for protecting both the environment and the community of avant-​garde that were encroached upon by developments and conventionals’ traditional architecture and style. It is telling that he advised the National Park Service that ‘only fresh and imaginative contemporary design’ should be built within the newly established Cape Cod National Seashore Park.4 Chermayeff agreed. In addition to requiring contemporary architecture, he thought the park authorities should also think using an environmental design aesthetic that included everything from road planning to graphic signage of its displays.True nature conservation, he argued, entailed ‘a total architecture which must be designed simultaneously with the landscape, the roads and the buildings’.5

Environmental design Chermayeff ’s ‘total architecture’ approach to environmental conservation reflected his adaptation of the Bauhaus legacy. At the Bauhaus school, it is worth recalling, students of the ground course were asked to study biology, along with colour studies, history of art, materials, and tools (Moholy-​Nagy 1938). The curriculum was replicated by the School’s former professor Moholy-​Nagy at the Institute of Design where students were encouraged to design everything from cities to tea-​sets. When Moholy-​Nagy learned he had terminal cancer in 1946, he asked Chermayeff to be its new Director, knowing that he endorsed the pedagogy of the Bauhaus programme. Being a Russian émigré from rural Grozny (currently in the Chechen Republic, Russia), Chermayeff had lived most of his life in London, after which he moved to the US in 1940. In London he was known as an architect of modernist buildings, and he, from the mid 1930s on, would hang out with Bauhauslers such as Moholy-​ Nagy, Gropius, and Breuer, along with socialist proponents of planning such as Julian Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane and J. Desmond Bernal. Following in their footsteps, Chermayeff would, in his capacity as new Director in Chicago from 1946 to 1951, argue that the role of the designer was that of ‘social therapy’ (Chermayeff 1950, 142). Design should have a ‘social purpose’ and designers should aspire to be like an ‘artist-​scientist-​technician’ (Chermayeff 1950, 68). When he used the term ‘environmental design’ for the first time in 1949, it was to promote integration of science and art, but also by bringing together architecture, landscape design, and planning in pedagogy (Powers 2001, 177). Early on, Chermayeff had been sceptical of the word ‘architecture’, a word he thought should be dropped in favour of the more comprehensive word ‘design’, inspired by insights of the natural scientists. The ‘social responsibility and the ethics’ of the designer, Chermayeff argued, included an aspiration to protect ‘man’s physical environment’, a sentiment that was shared by Bauhauslers such as Moholy-​Nagy, Herbert Bayer, and Gropius (Chermayeff 1951, 12, his emphasis;

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Anker 2010).They all argued in favour of a comprehensive design that took care of both humans and nature. In 1951 Chermayeff resigned as Director due to the financial difficulties of the institution and disagreements with the terms of its incorporation into the Illinois Institute of Technology. He subsequently moved to Cambridge where he set up his own office and began a lectureship at MIT, followed by a professorship at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) in 1952. Gropius had just retired as Chair of the Department of Architecture, and Chermayeff was hired to reenergize GSD under its new Dean, Josep Lluís Sert. Under the heading of ‘Environmental Design’, Chermayeff taught Harvard’s first-​year students the environmental friendly comprehensive and interdisciplinary Bauhaus-​inspired foundation course that he knew from Illinois, after which the students went on to focus on architecture, urban planning, landscape design, and so forth. He adopted the ‘total architecture’ approach of Gropius, ‘embracing the entire visible environment from the simplest utensil to the complicated city’ (Gropius 1956, 9). In the mid 1950s Chermayeff began advocating moving ‘Environmental Design’ beyond just first-​year students, as he imagined an Advanced Studies Program with PhD students under the rubric, which, after some dispute, was approved by the school’s faculty in 1958.6 The pushback addressed a real concern: how could a student carry out research and receive a PhD without appropriate specialization? As will be apparent, the computer became an important tool in providing a unifying mathematical language for the comprehensive environmental research design programme. Yet the lack of appreciation for his pedagogical programme made Chermayeff exclaim in frustration that ‘most architects have not yet joined the 20th century!’ (1959–​1960, 18). Indeed, much of the educational programme at GSD was badly organized under Sert’s leadership. This, at least, was the opinion expressed in a letter to him signed by the students at GSD in May 1960. They claimed that their hard work only led to ‘dissatisfaction, confusion, anger, disappointment and finally apathy’.7 Chermayeff ’s first-​year course was the exception, and Sert assumed he was the one firing up the students’ anger. At GSD Chermayeff was known to be blunt and lacking in social skills. He kept largely to himself and it is understandable that Sert was suspicious, though the Students Council wrote to Sert telling him that Chermayeff did not ‘instigate’ the criticism.8 Yet the students’ anger refused to fade away, and Chermayeff somehow became associated with the unrest. This may explain why Sert withdrew the funding for Chermayeff ’s research programme in 1961, after only two years.9 The fallout was detrimental to Chermayeff ’s relationship to GSD, as he resigned in protest and accepted a professorship at Yale University where he was allowed to pursue his Environmental Design pedagogy when teaching graduate students.10

Environmental privacy in a community His most talented PhD student while at Harvard was Christopher Alexander. Alexander began in 1958 and would feed his adviser with what was worth knowing

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about computers, as using an IBM 704 to model buildings was at the heart of his PhD proposal.11 The computer could be instrumental, Alexander argued, as a tool for the mass production of house designs so that modernist architecture could be delivered to everyone. Given the urgent need for housing, the computer would enable the architect to be more socially responsible. The computer could also provide a clear mathematical language and thus replace the ‘abstract phraseology’ of architectural theory.12 In the following years Alexander and Chermayeff would collaborate and merge their thinking. Chermayeff came to embrace the computer while Alexander adapted to the comprehensive programme of environmental design. Soon Alexander followed the advice of his mentor in making elaborate notes about the importance of climatic factors and ‘bioclimatic discomfort’ in his computer modelling of housing units, while Chermayeff learned from Alexander the possibilities and limits of computers.13 Addressing environmental problems was at the heart of what they tried to achieve. Chermayeff told his graduate students at Harvard that the task of the environmental designer was to create architecture of privacy with respect to noise and access to nature, while, at the same time, plan for a social community with minimal use of cars. These were the real issues he knew from Wellfleet which he began to conceptualize into a larger book. ‘Our humanity is at stake,’ he told his students. And designers, ‘in perhaps a dim way, [were] partially responsible for its survival’.14 He decided to bring his student Alexander along on the book project, as Alexander had access to an IBM 704 at the Computation Center at MIT and also intimate knowledge about how to use it. As the historian of architecture Margot Lystra has shown (2017), Alexander was at the time working on innovative methods of computer-​inspired highway designs with hand-​drawn overlays that included untraditional factors such as noise, pollution, weather, and eyesores. In the book Chemayeff and Alexander envisioned to bring forth a novel environmental design approach. The first draft of their manuscript was finished in the summer of 1960 while the debate was raging about the possible Cape Cod National Seashore Park. Entitled Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism, it argued for a humanism that placed environmental concerns at the forefront. They sent it to Athenaeum who rejected it based on a harsh peer-​review,15 to Chermayeff ’s old friend Lewis Mumford who was unable to read it as he was away,16 and finally to Peter Blake, the editor of Architectural Form, who was ‘tremendously impressed’, but thought it needed better graphic design.17 What is remarkable in the first reaction to the manuscript is that none of the recipients noticed what the book became known for, namely the call to protect the environment with the help of computing methodology. In any case, Chermayeff and Alexander brushed up and finished the manuscript at Cape Cod in the summer of 1962. Chermayeff had just resigned his professorship at Harvard and moved to Yale to pursue environmental design there. When the book, which was dedicated to Gropius, appeared in the bookstores in the fall of 1963, it was his first public statement as Yale professor. It was a timely book for designers. Rachel Carson had recently published her Silent Spring (1962), and its impact put environmental concerns very much on

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the public agenda. The problem that Community and Privacy sought to address was how to find a balance between the town and the individual in the age of environmental destruction. Nature was vanishing and the town was vanishing, resulting in a pseudo-​town, a pseudo-​nature, and a loss of equilibrium between them. This reflected what they had observed in Cape Cod. What was needed was a new environmental order provided by the architect-​planner. Soon ‘man will have invaded every corner of the earth’, with their cars, they pointed out. ‘A New Ecology’ in which humans would adapt to the environment was necessary. The solution to these problems was to be found in reestablishing the lost equilibrium. ‘Either he [the designer] must learn to preserve the existing equilibrium of life or he must introduce a new equilibrium of his own making. If he does neither, his present unplanned conduct may deform human nature beyond all cure, even if it manages to survive the more violent holocausts’ (Chermayeff and Alexander 1963, 43, 46). This trivialization of Jewish history may illustrate how serious the authors took the issue to be, but also their insensitivity towards the complexity of social processes. In any case, if equilibriums were to be achieved, the designers would have to address head-​on the question of how to plan for a world with more people, but less cars and less noise. The computer was to be the tool helping designers to achieve equilibrium by creating a new balanced system for both nature and society. ‘The problem of this kind cannot be solved without the help of electronic computers,’ they argued. And creative designers should not fear it. ‘The machine is distinctly complementary to and not a substitute for man’s creative talent […] The computer, while unable to invent, can explore relations very quickly and systematically, according to prescribed rules. It functions as a natural extension of man’s analytical ability’ (Chermayeff and Alexander, 1963, 160). Chermayeff and Alexander used spaceships as their model as they saw the internal environment of these vehicles being in balance thanks to computer technology developed by NASA.The aim was to build a fully functioning framework for ecological equilibrium for the Earth modeled on the order of spaceships. Thus, the computer was to be understood as a useful tool that could enlarge the designer’s rational power, but not necessarily their creative ability. The task of the designer was to make ‘Art for Ecology’s Sake’ (Chermayeff and Alexander 1963, 110). And the computer was to help the artist to design within the complexity of ecological relations, without having to engage too deeply with the social realm. The environmental issues were intricate with many layers of information. ‘Problems have outgrown a single individual’s capacity to handle them,’ they argued. ‘Society must invent ways and means that, in effect, magnify the designer’s limited capacity and make it possible for him to apply himself more completely’ (Chermayeff and Alexander 1963, 109). Both Chermayeff and Alexander saw the computer as the key tool that could bring together the complexity of ecological problems by creating a hierarchy of number systems that they would be manageable to the designer. Their hopes for computing reflected a deep optimism on behalf of technology and science in the Bauhaus tradition. The unification of art and science to improve

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9 8 13 31 18 28 22 32 30 26 5 3 29 12 14 15 106 7 27 2 1 19 24 16 20 33 4 25 21 23 11 17 FIGURE 3.1   Apparent

chaos: the problem unstructured. From Chermayeff and Alexander (1963), courtesy of Doubleday/​Random House

culture was at the very heart of modernist architecture. ‘Designers need to come face to face with the facts of science and technology; their real hope for the restoration of humanism lies in their ability to exploit techniques to its limits’, Chermayeff and Alexander argued (1963, 111). The problem was the mass amount of different types of numerical data about the environment the designer had to think through. The computer could help in structuring and ordering this numerical data, thus turning unstructured problems into order by means of mathematical representation of different aspects of the environment (Figures 3.1 and 3.2). ‘Congratulations on the book! It has been very difficult to obtain a copy in the Harvard Square area. The man in the Mandrake [bookstore] (when I grabbed the last of his third order) told me that each batch has sold out almost immediately,’ a friend of Chermayeff reported.18 Soon they received letters of praise calling the book ‘a real contribution to environmental literature’19 and ‘a smashing success!’20 Indeed, Community and Privacy would do well, selling over 2,000 copies in fall of 1963 alone, and over 50,000 copies by 1976.21 It thus set the agenda for architectural environmental debates for at least a decade. Yet the immediate response in the form of book reviews was mixed. To one reviewer, it was ‘a most irritating book’ filled with ‘pompous pseudophilosophy’

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8

9

31 13 18 28 22 32 30 26 5 3 29 12 14 6 27 15 10 7 2 1 19 16 24 20 33 25 4 21 23 11 17 FIGURE 3.2   Constellation: the

problem structured. From Chermayeff and Alexander (1963), courtesy of Doubleday/​Random House

(Von Eckardt 1964) while another pointed to ‘a danger in the currently fashionable preoccupation with computer machinery’ among designers (Anonymous 1965). The idea that ‘we should be thinking in terms of the village to which technology has shrunk the globe, our earth,’ was troubling (Rowntree 1964). For the most part the book was praised for its timely environmental agenda. Typically, the New York Times placed it among the growing genre of ‘environmental literature’, arguing for planning with the help of ‘an electronic computer’, and the newspaper placed it on the important ‘Christmas Guide for Readers’ (Temko 1963; Anonymous 1963). The most euphoric review came in The Cape Codder editorial, which noted that Chermayeff was a ‘familiar figure’ in Wellfleet as one of the backers of the Cape Cod National Seashore and that the book’s argument about protecting the environment to secure both privacy and the community was ‘what Cape Cod is all about’ (Burling 1964). These readers and reviewers saw the computer as central to the book. Apparently, some even thought the authors made a case for replacing human reasoning and imagination with that of a computer, as Chermayeff and Alexander in the preface

Computing environmental design  53

to the 1965 edition thought it was necessary to answer this concern by emphasizing that ‘this book does not advocate the substitution of computer techniques for human thought. It simply recognizes the usefulness of this new tool’. Instead, they restated that the purpose of the book was to advocate and develop a new ‘Science of Environmental Design’ (Alexander 1964, 19–​20). Indeed, Chermayeff would argue that the architectural profession was ‘obsolete’ as it had failed to recognize that humans were responsible for their own environment and that a comprehensive design that included both the natural and social realm was the way forward (1964a, 26).

The architecture and computer conference In December 1964 the Boston Architectural Center organized what may have been the first conference on the role of computers in architecture. It became a major event with more than 500 attendees from all parts of the country, including students. This took the organizers by surprise, as they were hoping for 200 (Jaffe 1964).The question at stake was what the relationship should be between designers and machines, and Community and Privacy would set the agenda for the conference with Chermayeff as the keynote or ‘luncheon speaker’. At the podium, in front of people enjoying their white-​cloth lunch, Chermayeff embraced the computer as an important tool. It could help the architect in the comprehensive analysis of ‘Environmental Design’ problems. The environmental designer had to deal with ‘Planning, Construction, Control and Conservation’, which meant dealing with ‘extraordinary quantities, complexity and newness’ of environmental information. Only the mastery of sophisticated computers could help the designer in sorting it out, and the design community should consequently embrace the new tool (Chermayeff 1964, 22). There were mixed reactions to this sentiment among those enjoying their lunch. Gropius was enthusiastic and thought computers ‘might help us to free our creative power’ (1964b). Perhaps computers could bring together the complexity and different fields of environmental design? The computer would, perhaps, make the specialist obsolete while it could empower the comprehensive generalist addressing complex environmental issues, such as planning ‘a conservation area’ for ‘a nature-​starved’ city. Yet this approach to nature conservation was not an easy sell to computer geeks and urban planners, as Chermayeff ended his Q&A with the blunt: ‘nobody gives a damn. Thank you’ (Chermayeff 1964, 44). Chermayeff had a point, as much of the conference was focusing on issues such as how computers could aid architects cataloguing building products, how they could help save costs associated with repetitive designs, and how they could solve complex structural analytical problems. These were exciting improvements for the engineers but a bit humdrum for the architects. The highlight of the conference was, perhaps, a ‘live’ closed-​circuit TV installation demonstration of the STRESS software by MIT’s new IBM 7094 computer. Could such software help architects in their creative process? Was the machine to be understood as a practical extension

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of the architect’s creativity? There was no shortage of optimism and vision, though few details on the specifics of what this would actually mean. One paper that stuck out was Howard Fisher’s presentation of the technique for processing complex statistical data into meaningful graphic form by using the SYMAP (‘synagraphic mapping’) program (Fisher 1964). Fisher was a recent professor of city planning at GSD who, in his study of Boston, used statistical data to generate computer maps visualizing housing density, income levels and recreational land (Fisher 1982; Chrisman 2004). What was exciting about his work was not the data, which was well known, but the ways in which his SYMAP program brought together the data through mapping. The SYMAP program was the cornerstone at the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis, which Fisher would start the following year. It was exactly this possibility of computers helping designers to master complexities that Chermayeff found so appealing. Fisher argued that computers constituted a critical tool for analysing and comprehending environmental complexity, allowing for the integration of the built environment into the natural environment. In the subsequent years the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis would turn the innovative SYMAP program towards environmental issues, thanks to funding from the Conservation Foundation. They were largely responsible for developing what today is known as the Geographical Information System (GIS). The 1964 conference was the very beginning of this endeavour. The Laboratory was initially more about urban planning than environmental conservation, though the SYMAP program would train an influential trio of environmental planners. First among them was the soil scientist G. Angus Hill, who designed the Canada Land Inventory in 1968, which was a very early GIS study of landscapes (Hill 1974). Second, the landscape architect Philip Lewis, who became a powerful advocate for environmental corridors through his Wisconsin Recreation Study (1964). And third, Ian McHarg, whose use of transparent overlays of maps in Design with Nature (1969) became perhaps the most influential approach to landscape architecture in the twentieth century. Their respective work and thinking harkens back not only to the SYMAP program, but also to Community and Privacy and Chermayeff ’s Environmental Design programme. As professor of architecture at UC Berkeley, Alexander would continue to advocate for the use of the computer in dealing with the complexity of environmental design. ‘Consider the task of designing a complete environment for a million people,’ he wrote in his PhD thesis. ‘The ecological balance of human and animal and plant life must be correctly adjusted both internally and to the given exterior physical condition’ (1964, 2). This reflected the sentiment that nature and society mirror each other, and that environmental solutions thus in the end would solve social issues. The same went for Chermayeff, who, for the rest of his life, continued to enjoy his cabin at Wellfleet, and wrote important books and articles on the value of using computers in environmental design, such as Shape of Community (Chermayeff and Tzonis 1971).

Computing environmental design  55

In summary, computers were first introduced into the fields of architecture and design in order to reduce the complexity of environmental problems to a manageable mathematical language. They were imagined as useful tools to coordinate the use of architecture, landscape design, and urban planning in comprehensive environmental design. This was a top-​down approach to both nature and society, reflecting the liberal elitist culture of modernists. The optimism with respect to what computers and rationalism could do was shared among modernist designers, and it reflected the Bauhaus legacy of trying to unite science and the arts through technology. The computer became a unifying tool, bringing together a diversity of fields in an effort to protect the natural environment and thereby also our humanity. Computers could order both the human and natural environment by using the same mathematical language, thus bringing ecological sciences, landscape, and architectural design together.

Notes 1 This chapter came to life as a key-​note lecture at the Design History Society Annual Conference in Oslo entitled Making and Unmaking the Environment, September 2017. I am grateful to helpful comments from Kjetil Fallan, from the conference delegates, and from valuable editorial work and remarks by Rachel Stern, Olga Touloumi, and Theodora Vardouli. A longer version of this chapter was first published in their edited volume Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground, 1945–1980 (New York: Routledge, 2019). Unless otherwise noted, all archive references are to the Serge Ivan Chermayeff Architectural Records and Papers at the Avery Library, Columbia University, New York, USA. 2 John F. Kennedy to Serge Chermayeff, 16 Oct. 1959, with reply 20 Oct. 1959. Frederick L. Holborn (Assistant to Kennedy) to Serge Chermayeff, 15 Dec. 1959, Box 1. 3 Serge Chermayeff to Congressman Wayne N. Aspinall, 5 Aug. and 21 Nov. 1960, Karl S. Landstrom to Serge Chermayeff, 21 Nov. 1960, Box 1. 4 Walter Gropius, ‘On the Desirable Character of Design for the Cape Cod National Seashore’, Letter to the National Park Service, undated (Jan. 1963), Cape Cod Park files, Dept. of Interior Archive. 5 Serge Chermayeff to Josiah Child, 23 Jan. 1963, Cape Cod Park files, Dept. of Interior Archive. 6 Serge Chermayeff, ‘Environmental Design’, ms. 1955; ‘Docket for the [Harvard GSD] faculty meeting in the last week of April [1955]’; Chermayeff to Dean Sert, Jan. 1956, Box 6. 7 Edward K. McCagg III to Jose Luis Sert, 10 May 1960, Box 1. 8 Edward K. McCagg III to Jose Luis Sert, 15 May 1961. Edward K. McCagg III to the Faculty GSD, 14 Sept 1960, Box 1. 9 Jose Luis Sert to Chermayeff, 14 June 1961, Box 1. 10 Jose Luis Sert to Chermayeff, 8 Dec. 1961. Chermayeff to President Nathan Marsh Pusey, Harvard, 24 Jan. 1962. Pusey to Chermayeff, 20 Feb. 1962. Chermayeff to E.K.Wickham, The Commonwealth Fund, 5 Nov. 1963, Box 1. 11 Christopher Alexander, ‘Progress report’, Sept. 1958. Box 1. 12 Christopher Alexander, ‘Report on current Ph.D. work’, 27 Oct. 1958. Box 1. 13 Christopher Alexander to Serge Chermayeff, notes ca. 1960, Box 1. Alexander’s emphasis.

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14 Serge Chermayeff, ‘Let us not make shapes: let us solve problems’, typescript, 1963, p. 8. 15 Marc Friedlander, Athenaeum Publishers, to Chermayeff, 19 Aug. 1960. Ruth N. Denney, Center of Urban Studies, MIT and Harvard, to Chermayeff, 22 June 1961, Box 2. 16 Lewis Mumford to Chermayeff, 26 Dec. 1962, Box 2. 17 Peter Blake to Serge Chermayeff, 21 Aug. 1961. Box 1. 18 Peter Floyd to Chermayeff, 24 Oct. 1963, Box 2. 19 Allen Temko to Chermayeff, 24 Dec. 1963, Walter Gropius to Chermayeff, 16 Sept and 13 Nov. 1963, Box 2. 20 Arthur Maass to Chermayeff, 27 Nov. 1963, Box 2. 21 At least 2,204 copies were sold in 1963, and 54,899 were sold by 1976. Constance F. Riehl at Doubleday to Chermayeff, 30 March 1976, Box 2.

References Alexander, C. (1964). Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University  Press. Anonymous (1963). ‘A Christmas Guide for Readers’, New York Times, 1 Dec., 86. Anonymous (1965). ‘Abstracts’, Architecture and Engineering News, March, 101. Anker, P. (2010). From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Burling, F.P. (1964). ‘An Important Book’, The Cape Codder, 20 Feb., 12. Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. Greenwich, MA: Fawcett Crest. Chermayeff, S. (1950). ‘The Social Aspect of Art’, in Harris, J. (ed.), The Humanities: An Appraisal, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 140–​142. Chermayeff, S. (1950). ‘Architecture at the Institute of Design’, L’Architecture D’Aujourd’hui, 20:  62–​68. Chermayeff, S. (1951). ‘Education of Architects’, Perspective,  16–​18. Chermayeff, S. (1959–​1960). ‘The Shape of Quality’, Architecture Plus, 2:18–​26. Chermayeff, S. (1960). ‘The New Nomades’, Traffic Quarterly, 14: 189–​198. Chermayeff, S. (1961). ‘Statement of Serge Chermayeff, Professor of Architecture, Harvard University’, Cape Cod National Seashore Park: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Public Lands. 16 and 17 Dec. 1960, Serial no. 28, US Government Printing, Washington, DC, 102. Chermayeff, S. (1962). ‘The Designer’s Dilemma,’ in Zagorski, E. (ed.), A Panel Discussion, IL: Industrial Design Education Association, 1–​9. Chermayeff, S. (1964). ‘Random Thoughts on the Architectural Condition’, The History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture Whiffen, M. (ed.) Washington, DC: The American Institute of Architects, 23–​36. Chermayeff, S. (1964). ‘Lunchen Speaker’, Architecture and the Computer. Boston: Boston Architectural Center, 21–​22. Chermayeff, S. (1964). ‘Panel Discussion’, Millon, H. Architecture and the Computer Boston: Boston Architectural Center, 44. Chermayeff, S. and C. Alexander (1963). Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Chermayeff, S. and C. Alexander (1965). Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism, 2nd edition. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Chermayeff, S. and A. Tzonis (1971). Shape of Community. Middlesex: Penguin. Chrisman, N. (2004). Charting the Unknown: How Computer Mapping at Harvard became GIS. Boston, MA: ESRI Press. Corbett, S. (1955). Cape Cod’s Way. New York: Crowell Comp. Fisher, H. (1964).‘A Technique for Processing Complex Statistical Data into Meaningful Graphic Form’. Architecture and the Computer. Boston, MA: Boston Architectural Center, 13–​18.

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Fisher, H. (1982). Mapping Information: The Graphic Display of Quantitative Information Cambridge, MA: Abt. Books. Gropius, W. (1955). Scope of Total Architecture. New York: Harper & Brothers. Gropius, W. (1956). ‘Apollo in the Democracy’ [1956], in Apollo in the Democracy. New York: McGraw,  3–​18. Gropius, W. (1964). ‘Computers for Architectural Design’, Architecture and the Computer, Boston, MA: Boston Architectural Center. Hills, G.A. (1974). ‘A Philosophical Approach to Landscape Planning.’ Landscape Planning, 1: 339–​371. Jaffe, N. (1964). ‘Architects Weigh Computers’ Uses’, New York Times, 6 Dec., 69. Lewis, P.H. (1964). ‘The Landscape Resources of Wisconsin’, in Rupert, T.H. ed Natural Resources of Wisconsin. Madison, NY: Department of Resource Development, 130–​142. Lystra, M. (2017). ‘Drawing Natures: US Highway Location, Representational Techniques and the Rise of Ecological Design’, Journal of Design History 30: 157–​174. McHarg, I.L. (1969). Design with Nature. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. McMahon, P. and C. Cipriani (2014). Cape Cod Modern: Midcentury Architecture and Community on the Outer Cape. New York: Metropolis Books. Moholy-​Nagy, L. (1938). ‘Why Bauhaus Education?’ Shelter. March: 8–​21. Powers, A. (2001). Serge Chermayeff: Designer Architect Teacher. London: RIBA Pub. Rowntree, D. (1964). ‘Chermayeff Architect’, Guardian 29 April. Schneider, P. (2000). The Enduring Shore: A History of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. New York: Henry Holt. Temko, A. (1963). ‘Things are Getting Too Crowded, Too Mechanized and Too Noisy’. New York Times Book Review, 13 Oct. 1963, 343. Von Eckardt, W. (1964). ‘Architecture’, Library Journal 620.

4 LUDIC PEDAGOGIES AT THE COLLEGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN, UC BERKELEY, 1966 TO 1972 Timothy Stott

‘The environmental crisis is a design crisis’, declared Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan in their seminal Ecological Design. ‘It is a consequence of how things are made, buildings are constructed, and landscapes are used’ (1996, 9). Van der Ryn was appointed Professor of Architecture by the College of Environmental Design (CED) at UC Berkeley in 1961. He became one of a handful of CED faculty during the decade from the mid-​1960s to the mid-​1970s to experiment with design pedagogies to address ecological and social problems, a time when environmental concerns entered mainstream public discourse and government policy in the US, leading, in 1970, to the National Environmental Policy Act and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (Lowell et  al. 2009). This chapter studies how these experimental pedagogies at CED used play to advance design that coupled social and ecological responsibilities. Reinhold Martin points out that, by the early 1970s, environmental design was ‘well prepared’ to adopt the ‘systematic, interdisciplinary approach’ to ecology advocated by the EPA (2004, 81). Martin begins from the work of György Kepes at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT and focuses on the writings of architect Peter Eisenman. Yet, CED, too, had a central role in this preparation. In 1959, it was the first College in the US to synthesize those ‘fields which deal with the functional and aesthetic quality of man’s surroundings’ under the label of environmental design and encouraged architects to collaborate with other designers of the built environment (University of California 1966, 69). From the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, Germany, established in 1955, CED inherited a methodology for environmental design shaped by cybernetics, information theory, and systems analysis (Esherick 1963; see also, Dubberly and Pangaro 2015), which promised designers and architects an integrative approach to design problems and their logics and a turn outward, to think and practice environmentally. During the same period at CED, design methodology was under transformation, as the College imported

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the ideas of the Design Methods Movement, two members of which, Christopher Alexander and Horst Rittel (previously at HfG Ulm), were hired to the College in 1963, the former as Assistant Professor of Architecture, the latter as Lecturer in the Science of Design. Upon arrival at CED, Rittel founded the Design Methods Group, the general aim of which was to make design rigorous and, above all, systematic, without thereby excluding intuition (Rittel 1971, 16; 1972, 395–​396). By the early 1970s, CED faculty such as Van der Ryn, Simon Nicholson, Claire Cooper Marcus, Robin Moore, and others, had transformed design methodology and pedagogy to include knowledge of human and non-​human ecologies, sustainability, and social behaviour, and to engage otherwise neglected client bases such as children and local communities. During this time, ‘Berkeley –​university and city  –​[became] a laboratory for design experiments that sought to recalibrate everyday urban environments in the service of ecological well-​being’ (Castillo 2015a). Necessarily, Cooper Marcus recalls, ‘This was a time of experiment … also in teaching and learning methods’ (2009, 142). This chapter will outline some of those CED courses that fostered greater social and ecological responsibility, and, in doing so, transformed the meaning of what was ‘environmental’ in design, toward a more familiar concern with natural ecosystems and the biosphere. The testing grounds for these courses were often local schools and playgrounds, where children discovered environments and ecologies through play. The constructive, intuitive, and egalitarian character of adventure play, in particular, attracted those CED faculty listed above. Cooper Marcus (1970a, 1970b) praised adventure playgrounds for being ‘lost landscapes of spontaneity’. Moore described them as ‘anarchy zones’ where ‘the ecology of play and the learning of ecology come together in a common setting’ (1974, 627). Nicholson saw a ‘natural evolution’ from adventure playgrounds, or what Colin Ward called ‘free societies in miniature’ (Ward 1961, 193), to community involvement and interaction in the ‘total process of design and planning’ (Nicholson 1971, 31). I now discuss in more detail how several CED courses promoted play as environmental design pedagogy.

Design 12 and after English artist Nicholson arrived at CED in 1965 and offered a lower division course, Design 12, in 1966, to provide ‘Three-​dimensional design experience in the use of machine tools’ (University of California 1966, 203). Design 12 ran for only one year, because of complaints from members of the art faculty. From 1967 to 1970, and with a growing awareness of ecology, Nicholson offered variants of Design 12 at other UC campuses (Davis, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz). Uniquely, Design 12 and its variants invited local schoolchildren to assess students’ projects by playing with them on UC campuses and in local schools, parks, playgrounds, and hospitals. CED enabled Nicholson, who had trained as a sculptor and archaeologist, to connect play to systems building and testing, and to efforts to build collaboratively in the social interest. For Design 12, students from architecture, design, and fine art worked in groups of three or four with those from the natural and

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engineering sciences, according to a schedule divided equally into the three parts of invention, construction, and testing (Nicholson 1967).When transported beyond the classroom, the discovery play fostered by their experimental toys and games taught players about human ecologies, or the complex systems by which people interact with their natural and built environments. Nicholson’s courses promoted environmental design from the bottom up, beginning with the youngest generation. What is more, Nicholson believed that these ‘miniature environments’ built by students offered ‘tremendous scope for research into animal-​machine systems, perhaps even plant-​animal-​machine systems, and their possible role in education’ (Nicholson 1970a, 5–​7). Nicholson engaged readily with Design Methods. He travelled to Berkeley upon invitation from Alexander, his friend from their studies at Cambridge. Alexander presented a collage by Nicholson in his essay ‘A City is not a Tree’, first published in 1965 (republished in 1967), in which he argued for a more complex semi-​ lattice structure to replace the tree in the design of urban systems. Nicholson’s collage visualized this structure and offered a diagram of a complexly interactive architecture (Alexander 1967a, 348). Here, following his move to the West Coast, Alexander supports a more ‘hand-​based thinking’ (Lystra 2017, 165)  to visualize design problems, and so departs further from the machinic logics and computer graphics he had developed with Serge Chermayeff at Harvard during the early 1960s (see Chapter  2 of this volume). In return, firstly, Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964) was required reading for Design 12 and the latter’s Systems Exercise drew closely from Alexander’s views on systemic part/​whole relations (see 1967b). Secondly, in 1971, just after Alexander had begun what became known as the Oregon Experiment (an early example of participatory design at the Eugene campus of the University of Oregon), Nicholson lauded the ‘pattern-​language’ developed at the Centre for Environmental Structure at Berkeley, also led by Alexander, for its use of ‘behavioural data … as a design determinant’ (Nicholson 1971, 31). As the Oregon Experiment appeared to demonstrate, this approach humanized environmental design through increased community involvement (see Alexander 1975). Nicholson rationalized his courses by reference to ‘behavioural data’ gathered by watching his and other children play with materials and by giving a principal planning and assessment role to children, understood as natural players who, if asked and listened to, would detail their requirements for play. Nicholson sought to reform design pedagogy through adventure play, because of the latter’s ‘natural evolution’ to community involvement in environmental design and planning. Although not teaching at UC Berkeley at the time, Nicholson saw the People’s Park, Berkeley, constructed in Spring of 1969, as an opportunity for this evolution to occur, despite the mismanagement of the situation by the University of California, whose land the Park reclaimed. From early April, the Park became a common cause for Berkeley students and residents, who attempted to renovate a 2.8-​acre plot in downtown Berkeley that the university had earmarked for sports fields and student housing. Van der Ryn was Chair of the Campus Committee on Housing and Environment and was involved closely with what became an

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FIGURE 4.1   Anon. Plan

of People’s Park, Berkeley, May 1969. Photograph: Simon Nicholson. Courtesy of the Estate of Simon Nicholson

‘experiment in collaborative design’ that was radically democratic, open, and a little like ‘getting cats to herd themselves’ (Van der Ryn 2005, 31). After the California Highway Patrol and National Guard violently suppressed the Park on 15 May, Van der Ryn became disillusioned and left for the country (of which more below). For his part, Nicholson noted that, although this experiment in collaborative design offered many opportunities for invention, it included ‘components [that] were extremely limited in their function’, especially its play equipment (shown in the bottom right of Figure 4.1), and what experiments there were disappeared behind the media coverage of the more spectacular politics of riots and demonstrations (1970a, 5–​7). He also criticized the University of California for having ‘missed a wonderful opportunity to offer temporary facilities to students to test both organic and inorganic components for community recreation and play, for unit credit’ (1970a, 5–​7). In sum, the Park needed more ‘loose parts’ if it was to be a collaboratively designed public space (see Nicholson 1971). Disputes over play and recreation provision in the Park continued into the early 1990s, when University of California began to build two volleyball courts on the open grass (Mitchell 1995). Nicholson’s comments on the People’s Park suggest that he saw his UC courses as behavioural planning experiments to be repeated across the parks and schools of the Bay Area and by those with no formal design education. In 1970, he published a small guide to parents on how to build environments labs for children (Nicholson, 1970c). At the same time, after the success of his courses developed as Visiting Lecturer on the University Extension at UC Davis from 1968 to 1971, where he

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had placed environmental design in the hands of ‘teachers, principals, and personnel from the state department of parks and recreation’ (Ruckle 1970), Nicholson returned to Berkeley for the Spring Quarter of 1970, this time to the Department of Education, to offer the course X396, titled ‘Invention and Creativity: Constructing New Environments for Children’. X396 aimed to transform the ‘total school environment’ through play with fluid materials, fire, temporary constructions, and ‘ecological variables including light and dark, space allocation, communication, colour, temperature, noise, wind, water, and other organisms such as plants and animals’ (Nicholson 1970b). For Nicholson, such play environments provided children with ‘total study of the ecosystem, i.e. man, his institutions, and his structural, chemical, etc. additions’ (1971, 34).

Environmental Yard However, it was Robin Moore, who joined Berkeley as Assistant Professor of Urban Design in 1969 and assisted Nicholson on courses such as X396, who most fully integrated study of ecosystems into a ludic pedagogy. In 1972 (after Nicholson returned to England to take up a position with the Open University where he established the course TAD292 Art and Environment, run by the Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology from 1976 to 1985), Moore began work with Herbert Wong, the principal of Washington Elementary School, Berkeley, to transform the School’s one-​and-​a-​half-​acre tarmac playground into what became known as the EnvironmentalYard. Moore and Wong sought to recapture the ecology of the locale and to develop a ‘process-​oriented’ project that involved the ‘total community’ and thereby would initiate a change in values and attitudes toward play provision and elementary education (Moore 1974, 622). ‘To ensure social relevance’ for the Yard, Moore recalled in 1986, ‘the programme of desired physical changes was generated by the community through a participatory process of surveys and workshops involving teaching staff, administrators, neighbourhood residents and children –​both those at the school … and those living around it’ (1986, 52). The Yard responded to demands for natural elements to replace existing play equipment and was supported by an initiative of the Berkeley Unified Schools District to extend the elementary curriculum into the playground (Office of Project Planning and Development, 1970). One of the three principal areas of the Yard was a Natural Resource Area (NRA). The others were the Asphalt and the Main Yard, which included more traditional play equipment. Tarmac was removed completely from the NRA to allow for natural growth that would better instruct children in the ecosystems of the Bay Area. The NRA also included ponds, a waterfall, a chaparral, meadows, a beach, a redwood grove, a vegetable patch, and several other biotic features, which distinguished its ‘behaviour-​environment ecosystems’ from the rest of the Yard (Figure 4.2). Moore used the Yard to study children’s responses to environmental diversity and to challenge the widespread provision of fixed play structures by demonstrating empirically ‘That children’s needs are much more diverse and can properly be met

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FIGURE 4.2   Robin

Moore, Behaviour-​environment ecosystems of the Environmental Yard (derived from May/​June 1977 behaviour mapping data). Published in Moore, Robin, 1986. ‘The Power of Nature: Orientation of Girls and Boys Toward Biotic and Abiotic Play Settings On A Reconstructed Schoolyard’. Children’s Environments Quarterly 3, no. 3 (Fall). Courtesy of Robin Moore

only by a much broader range of play settings –​especially ones containing natural features’ (Moore 1986, 52). From this pedagogical experiment, Moore concluded that ecologically balanced play environments, which include loose parts and diverse biotic features, were more socially balanced, as they stimulated social interaction and encouraged greater equity across sexes, ethnicities, abilities, and so on (1986, 68). In American Playgrounds: Revitalising Community Space, Susan Solomon adds that because the Yard was never locked it served ‘as a community-​initiated garden and open space’, and therefore succeeded where the People’s Park had failed (2005, 73). A few years later, Moore and Nicholson crossed paths again at the symposium Children, Nature, and the Urban Environment organized by the United States

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Department of Agriculture Forest Service at George Washington University in May 1975, where Moore presented a paper on the ecology of child development and restated his criteria for design with natural materials (1977). Nicholson did not present but collaborated with Roger Hart of the Environmental Psychology Programme at the Graduate Centre, City University of New York and two recent Harvard Graduate School of Design graduates, Ray Lorenzo and Mark Francis, on a project titled Our City. The project gathered information on how children from the local Stevens Elementary School cognitively mapped and used the urban environment. Its findings were presented to the conference to provide, in the words of Francis, ‘a real-​world grounding to some of the more theoretical discussions of the conference’ (email correspondence with author, 27 August 2016). Nicholson also took a more direct route to encourage ‘real-​world grounding’ with his Alternative Elevator Project, for which he placed soil and vegetation from the nearby Rock Creek Park in one of the elevators of the C H Marvin Centre at George Washington University, much to the dismay of the conference organizers. From there, Nicholson went on to work closely with Lorenzo on the Gruppo Futuro (Community Participation by Children in Futures) project at the Open University through the late 1970s and 1980s, where they worked closely with children to describe and visualize alternative futures in various media. Projects included repopulation of the countryside, bridging the generation gap, participatory theatre, and alternative modes of communication and transport. For Lorenzo and Nicholson, these projects indicated ‘the slow dissolution of the school as the fundamental centre for learning and “information”, and its replacement by the community. Learning thus becomes integrated with living, and theory with practice’ (Lorenzo and Nicholson 1980, 162; see also, Francis and Lorenzo 2006). Francis went on to become Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design at University of California, Davis, where he founded and directed the Centre for Design Research. Moore moved to the College of Design at North Carolina State University, where, in 2000, he established the Natural Learning Initiative. Recently, Moore (email correspondence with the author, 16 August 2017)  suggested that Nicholson’s integration of ‘art, science, pedagogical freedom, and child development’ continues in the Initiative.

Arch 284 As noted, Nicholson’s courses were of an ilk with other pedagogical experiments at CED, such as Van der Ryn’s ‘outlaw builder studios’. The first of these, Arch 284, begun in 1968, required elementary school children to use recycled materials for DIY constructions. Disillusioned after the failure of People’s Park, Van der Ryn and his family abandoned Berkeley for a small cabin in Inverness on Point Reyes Peninsula, 35 miles north along the Pacific coast (Van der Ryn 2005, 33–​34). His work on this cabin during the summer and autumn of 1969 prompted Van der Ryn to begin the best-​known outlaw builder studio, Arch 181, Making a Place in the Country, in 1972, co-​organized with his former student Jim Campe over ten weeks

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at a remote five-​acre site in Marin County. The class aimed to teach ‘the process of building a liveable situation in harmony with the setting and ourselves. A learning situation directly connected to life’s flows, survival, sharing skills’ (Campe 1972, 4; see also Farallones Design 1972). Prior to this, however, Van der Ryn expanded environmental design through Arch 284. Arch 181 and the ‘whole systems design’ of experiments such as the Energy Pavilion of 1973 and the Integral Urban House, begun in 1974 by what had become the Farallones Institute, had their roots in the pedagogy of Arch 284. During a visit to his children’s elementary school in the late 1960s, when many Californian schools first tried to integrate children of difference races, Van der Ryn was shocked to find a highly regulated and restricted environment and decided to organize a class to redesign school classrooms, based upon British Free Schools. Some local teachers agreed to be ‘guinea pigs for collaborative design and learning experiments’, which made the elementary curriculum more flexible and sought to engage the local community (Van der Ryn 2005, 35). Over the next 18 months, graduate students (including Campe) formed a team, the Odyssey School Initiative, dedicated to classroom redesign. They bought an old mail van and renamed it the Eagle, which allowed them to perform ‘one-​day makeovers in classrooms’ along the East Bay. Their slogan was ‘Trash can do it’ (Figure 4.3). The children salvaged recyclable or reusable materials such as cardboard, carpet, fabric, and wood, and then learned how to replace classroom furniture with partitions, stacks, dens, carrels, zomes, and extra wall spaces. The students also showed the children how to build geodesic domes, the basis for lightweight, inexpensive, and adaptable architecture at the time, and used inflatables inside and outside the school to produce playful learning environments (Figure 4.4). Van der Ryn remembers how Arch 284 offered alternative learning opportunities to schoolchildren. ‘We began with simple geometries and gradually evolved more complex geometrical shapes that also taught them about number series, geometry, measurement, and simple building and fabrication skills’ (2005, 36). The group then turned to playgrounds, where they built play structures from recycled materials, such as rubber tyres, although, Van der Ryn admits, without an awareness of their toxicity. He continues, We also were entranced with creating inflatable structures, ranging from the ENVIROM, a ring of inflatable vinyl pillows (another chemical no-​no of which I  wasn’t aware at the time), to a room-​size inflatable designed and fabricated by our friends, Ant Farm. 2005, 36 The activities of Arch 284 were recorded and interpreted in the Farallones Scrapbook:  Making Places, Changing Spaces in Schools, at Home and within Ourselves, compiled in 1969 after Van der Ryn’s move to Inverness. In it,  Van der Ryn criticized the school setting for separating work, play, and learning, and for its discipline, which continued outside the classroom and even beyond the campus.

FIGURE 4.3   Anon. Flyer

issued by Farallones Design showing Campe in the driver’s seat of ‘The Eagle’, Van der Ryn standing atop a garbage can, and a group of CED radical recyclers with their motto, ‘Trash Can Do It’. 1970. Photomontage. Environmental Design Archives Exhibitions, accessed 4 March 2018, http://​exhibits. ced.berkeley.edu/​items/​show/​1646. Source: Campe Collection. Courtesy of Jim Campe

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FIGURE 4.4   Jim

Campe, Campe with children at Castro Valley Elementary, CA, 1970. Environmental Design Archives Exhibitions, accessed 4 March 2018, http://​exhibits.ced. berkeley.edu/​items/​show/​1650. Source: Campe Collection. Courtesy of Jim Campe

He proposed a school better integrated with the natural rhythms of its environment: ‘Suppose a school was not punctuated with bells, periods, recesses each day. If school time were earth time ecology wouldn’t be just another course’ (Van der Ryn 1971, 13). Part-​manifesto, part-​toolkit, much like Ant Farm’s Inflatocookbook (1973, first published in 1970), the Scrapbook’s popularity meant, for Van der Ryn, that the group had ‘rediscovered the connections between the design of structures and their use by real people’ (2005, 37). Concerned that ‘natural cycles have been interrupted by an economy based on a throwaway mentality’, which imagined the ‘trash can as magic –​just toss things in it and they disappear’ (Van der Ryn 1971, 120), the Scrapbook promoted redesign of classrooms, playgrounds, and other learning environments to place children’s social groupings and activities at their centre and to encourage ecological responsibility from the bottom up. It included instructions for those architectural renovations listed above, advice on ‘personal ecology’ and how to source and use recyclable materials for toys and playground equipment, and, in the 1971 edition, a page from the Inflatocookbook showing kids how to make their ‘own bubble’ in three easy steps (Van der Ryn 1971, 116).

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The Scrapbook also encouraged teachers to ‘use principles of inflatables and pneumatics to serve as illustrations of other natural principles’, such as those of the cardiovascular system (1971, 117). A  couple of years before, critic Reyner Banham had praised the organic qualities of inflatable architectures. These self-​ regulating ‘wind-​bags’ tended to ‘behave like a living organism when roused’ and encouraged a ‘kind of direct-​ participation, real-​ space, real-​ time involvement-​ aesthetic’ (1968/​1999, 33). Similarly, Ant Farm lauded the organic and ludic qualities of inflatables as a challenge to conventional architecture. In the Inflatocookbook, these ‘Inflato-​experts’ wrote, The freedom and instability of an environment where the walls are constantly becoming the ceilings and the ceiling the door and the door is rolling around the ceiling somewhere releases a lot of energy that is usually confined by the xyz places of the normal box-​room. 1973, unpaginated In a cack-​handed but earnest attempt to advise on recycling, Ant Farm note that the best way to recycle polyethylene is to burn it, which releases its carbon back into the air, to be ‘absorbed by the earth’, and present inflatables as a ‘much better use for petroleum than burning it in an internal combustion engine’ (1973, unpaginated). As a result, we might share Van der Ryn’s doubt about the role of polyethylene in ecological design. Inflatables also exemplify those ‘cabin ecologies’, or closed ecosystems, common to space exploration and colonization and to eco-​activism through the 1960s and 1970s, which Peder Anker has criticized in detail (2010, 83–​112). Yet they also belong, together with the rudimentary and provisional architectures of the Environmental Yard or Nicholson’s various courses, to a moment when environmental design pedagogy aligned with bottom-​up environmentalism through play.

Conclusion Recent research studies the importance of ecological design activism and the growth of ‘citizen science and small-​scale pragmatic environmentalism’ in the Bay Area during the 1960s and 1970s (Kirk 2007, 94). Yet experimental CED courses rarely feature in these histories, perhaps because the bottom-​ up environmentalism advocated widely within the counterculture by the likes of the Whole Earth Catalog, first published by Stewart Brand in 1968, preferred the resourcefulness of self-​organizing individuals, supported by DIY architecture and design manuals, to top-​down regulation or education by government agencies and universities. Brand, like many others, remained steadfastly ‘against college’ (Brand 1997, 68) and advocated ‘Outlaw Areas’ in their place (Brand 1970; see Scott 2016). Nevertheless, as Greg Castillo notes, Van der Ryn’s outlaw builder studios brought countercultural ecology into the institution, and so ‘established strategic outposts that straddled inlaw and outlaw realms’ and produced underground publications such as Farallones

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Scrapbook and Outlaw Builder News (2015b, 91–​92). In a Progressive Architecture special issue of July 1970, titled ‘Advertisements for a Counter Culture’, Arch 284 was among those countercultural architectures previously presented at a conference organized by Van de Ryn at Freestone, California, in March of that year.The aim of this conference was ‘to learn to design new social forms, new building forms, that are in harmony with life … to build a floating university around the design of our lives’ (Van der Ryn, quoted in Wilson 1970, 70). At CED, Van der Ryn was not alone in this endeavour, as I have shown. Nicholson and Moore (along with Cooper Marcus, whose courses and projects are not discussed here) advocated bottom-​up or DIY environmentalism through experimental pedagogies and expanded curricula. Despite countercultural claims to the contrary, an institution such as the frequently maligned University of California could produce its own ‘design outlaws’ who collaborated with local constituencies to promote ecological awareness and social responsibility and offered alternative designs for sustainable buildings and environments. As noted, to study the experimental pedagogies of CED faculty during this period shows that ecological design developed through innovations in how design was taught and to whom it was taught, especially outside the classroom, with children, as much as through technological or infrastructural innovations. Many of these courses encouraged ecological awareness among schoolchildren beyond the studio and the classroom. To examine these courses is to study the history of design education ‘as if nature mattered’ (Fallan and Jørgensen 2017, 17). As the environmental crisis has brought ecological design to the forefront of academic and public debate, it is also important to historicize current design education and practice. Anker observes that although much of the present discussion on ecological design appears novel, it largely derives from debates and practices in the recent past. Because of this, ‘largely forgotten antecedents deserve notice among practitioners and students of design as sources of inspiration’ (2010, 1).There is still much to learn from how some CED faculty promoted collaborative design among schoolchildren together with ecological responsibility, in the understanding that without the former, the latter would fail. Such an environmental education could be a catalyst for a community to become more involved in the responsible design and planning of its environments. Central to this was a systems-​based design methodology that detached children’s play from expression and flow and placed it in the service of what Gert Biesta (2017) has called a ‘world-​centred’ education, where it might embed design in a world that is ‘both stubbornly real and infinitely vulnerable’ (Braddock and Irmscher 2009, 4).

References Alexander, C. (1964). Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Alexander, C. (1967a). ‘A City is not a Tree’. Ekistics 23(139): 344–​348. Republished from Alexander. 1965. Architectural Forum 122, nos. 1 and 2 (April/​May): 58–​62. Alexander, C. (1967b). ‘Systems Generating Systems’. Systemat: unpaginated.

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Alexander, C. (1975). The Oregon Experiment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lady Allen of Hurtwood (1968). Planning for Play. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Anker, P. (2010). From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Ant Farm (1973). Inflatocookbook. San Francisco: Ant Corps. Banham, R. (1968). ‘Monumental Wind-​Bags’. New Society 2(290) (April 1968): 569–​570. Republished in The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in ‘68, edited by Marc Dessauce. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999: 31–​33. Biesta, G. (2017). Letting Art Teach: Art Education After Joseph Beuys. Arnhem: Artez Press. Braddock, A.C. and C. Irmscher (2009). A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Brand, S. (1970). ‘The Outlaw Area’. Supplement to Whole Earth Catalog (January). Brand, S. (1997). ‘Sitting at the Counterculture’. In Design Outlaws on the Ecological Frontier, edited by C. Zelov and P. Cousineau. Philadelphia: Knossus: 68–​70. Campe, J. (1972). Syllabus for Architecture 181: Making a Place in the Country, Winter. Berkeley: College of Environmental Design, University of California. Castillo, G. (2015a). ‘Hippie Modernism: How Bay Area Design Radicals Tried to Save the Planet’. Places (October). https://​placesjournal.org/​article/​hippie-​modernism/​ Castillo, G. (2015b). ‘Counterculture Terroir: California’s Hippie Enterprise Zone’. In Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, edited by A. Blauvelt. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 87–​101. Cooper Marcus, C. (1970a). ‘Adventure Playground: Europe leads US in Reuniting its Children with “The Lost Landscape of Spontaneity”’. Landscape Architecture Quarterly 61(October): 18–​29,  88–​91. Cooper Marcus, C. (1970b). ‘Adventure Playgrounds: Creative Play in Urban Settings’. Planning and Design of the Recreation Environment, proceedings from the 1969 Park & Recreation Administrators Institute. Davis, CA: University of California, 6: 1–​40. Cooper Marcus, C. (2009). ‘Social Factors in Architecture, 1960–​2004’. In Design on the Edge: A Century of Teaching Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, 1903–​2003, edited by Lowell et al. Berkeley: College of Environmental Design, 141–​146. Dubberly, H. and P. Pangaro (2015).‘How Cybernetics Connects Computing, Counterculture, and Design’. In Hippie Modernism:The Struggle for Utopia, edited by A. Blauvelt. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 126–​141. Esherick, J. (1963).‘Problems of the Design of a Design System’. Conference on Design Methods, edited by J. Christopher Jones and D.J. Thornley. Papers presented at the conference on Systematic and Intuitive Methods In Engineering, Industrial Design, Architecture and Communications, London, September 1962. London: Pergamon Press. Fallan, K. and F.A. Jørgensen (2017). ‘Environmental Histories of Design: Towards a New Research Agenda’. Journal of Design History 30(2): 103–​121. Farallones Design (1972). ‘Making a Place in the Country’. Outlaw Building News 1, Spring. Francis, M. and R. Lorenzo (2006). ‘Children and City Design: Proactive Process and the ‘Renewal’ of Childhood’. Children and Their Environments: Learning, Using and Designing Spaces, edited by M. Blades and C. Spencer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 217–​237. Kirk, A. (2007). Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas. Lorenzo, R. and S. Nicholson (1980). ‘The Political Implications of Child Participation’. Ekistics 47(281) (March/​April): 160–​162. Lowell, W., E. Byrne, and B. Frederick-​Rothwell (eds.) (2009). Design on the Edge: A Century of Teaching Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, 1903–​2003. Berkeley, CA: College of Environmental Design.

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Lystra, M. (2017). ‘Drawing Natures: US Highway Location, Representational Techniques and the Rise of Ecological Design’. Journal of Design History 30(2): 157–​174. Martin, R. (2004). ‘Environment, c. 1973’. Grey Room 14(Winter): 78–​101. Mitchell, D. (1995). ‘The End of Public Space? People’s Park, Definitions of the Public, and Democracy’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85(1): 108–​133. Moore, R. (1974). ‘Anarchy Zone: Kids’ Needs and School Yards’. The School Review 82(4) (August): 621–​645. Moore, R. (1977). ‘The Environmental Design of Children-​Nature Relations: Some Strands of Applicative Theory’. Proceedings of the symposium-​f air Children, Nature, and the Urban Environment organized by the USDA Forest Service at George Washington University from 19 to 23 May 1975.  Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 207–​214. Moore, R. (1986). ‘The Power of Nature: Orientation of Girls and Boys Toward Biotic and Abiotic Play Settings On A Reconstructed Schoolyard’. Children’s Environments Quarterly 3(3) (Fall): 52–​69. Nicholson, S. (1967). Syllabus for Design 12, Spring Quarter. Berkeley, CA: College of Environmental Design, University of California. Nicholson, S. (1970a). ‘What Do Playgrounds Teach?’ Planning and Design of the Recreation Environment. Proceedings from the Park & Recreation Administrators Institute Conference, 9–​14 November 1969. Davis, CA: University of California, 5: 1–​12. Nicholson, S. (1970b). X396: Invention and Creativity: Constructing New Environments for Children. Berkeley: Department of Education, University of California. Copy available in the Hepworth Collection, Tate Gallery Archive 20132/​4/​5/​9/​2. Nicholson, S. (1970c).‘Give Your Child an Environments Lab’. Where: Information on Education 51(September): 149–​151. Nicholson, S. (1971). ‘How Not To Cheat Children: The Theory of Loose Parts’. Landscape Architecture 62: 30–​34. Office of Project Planning and Development, Berkeley Unified Schools District. (1970). The School Playground as an Outdoor Learning Environment: A Community Project to Extend the Elementary School Curriculum to the Outdoor Playground, Berkeley, CA. Rittel, H. (1971). ‘Some Principles for the Design of an Educational System for Design’. Journal of Architectural Education 25(1/​2) (Winter-​Spring): 16–​27. Rittel, H. (1972). ‘On the Planning Crisis: Systems Analysis of the “First and Second Generations”’. Bedriftsøkonomen 8: 390–​396. Ruckle, S. (1970). ‘Domain for Creative Play at Valley Oak Playground’. The Davis Enterprise, 17 July. Scott, F.D. (2016). Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/​Architectures of Counterinsurgency. New York: Zone Books. Solomon, S. (2005). American Playgrounds: Revitalising Community Space. Hanover: University Press of New England. Van der Ryn, S. (1971). Farallones Scrapbook: Making Places, Changing Spaces in Schools, at Home and within Ourselves. Austin, TX: Book People. Van der Ryn, S. (2005). Design for Life: The Architecture of Sim Van de Ryn. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith. Van der Ryn, S. and S. Cowan (1996). Ecological Design. Washington, DC: Island Press. University of California (1966). University of California, Berkeley, General Catalogue 1966–​ 1967 60(15) (July). Ward, C. (1961). ‘Adventure Playground: A Parable of Anarchy’. Anarchy 7 (September). Wilson, F. (1970). ‘Editorial’. Progressive Architecture 51(6) (July): 70.

PART 2

Ecotopian landscapes

5 A CITYLESS AND COUNTRYLESS WORLD The total appropriation of nature in Victorian utopias Nathaniel Robert Walker

Very few developments in the history of architectural design have had more of an impact on global environments than the sprawling automobile suburb, where high-​speed roadways, acres of asphalt parking lots, big-​box retail, and detached houses set in huge gardens consume natural habitats and agricultural lands at an unprecedented rate, and where energy-​ intensive cars are required for participation in life. Many analyses of the historical development of modern suburbs have traced their evolution back to the drawing boards of radical European and American architects such as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, who, it is commonly asserted, inherited their commitment to the dissolution of dense urbanism from Ebenezer Howard’s early-​twentieth-​century Garden City movement. ‘The most important thread of influence,’ wrote Jane Jacobs in 1961, ‘starts, more or less, with … Howard’, from whose writings the tenets of de-​centralization wove their way into ‘schools of planning and architecture’ and governments until they became ‘accepted as basic guides for dealing constructively with big cities’ (Jacobs 1961, 17–​ 21). Other historians have emphasized the broad appeal that rural or suburban life enjoyed beyond the boundaries of design discourse, promoted as it was by business interests such as streetcar operators and automobile manufacturers, or by influential early-​Victorian cultural critics such as homemaking authority Catherine Beecher and Transcendentalist poet Henry David Thoreau (Warner, Jr. 1978, Jackson 1985, Fishman 1987, Walker 2016). The latter case presents an interesting problem, however, for while Kenneth Jackson described Thoreau’s insistence that human wellbeing required ‘many acres of meadow’ as foundational to later suburban culture, ecologists and philosophers also cite Thoreau as a key early figure in the development of environmentalism (Jackson 1985, 68, and Worster 1994, 57–​112). The poet’s keen attention to ecological systems and critical appraisal of capitalism led him to intuit a future in which modern materialism pillaged the world with devastating natural effects (Oelschaeger

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2000, 4). A reader today might therefore ask: how did Thoreau imagine it would be possible to appropriate ‘many acres of meadow’ for every human being without destroying the landscapes he held so dear? Thoreau seems to have been aware of the tension between the human need for contact with nature and our tendency to devour it, as he attacked the latter in a public debate about the ideal future form and character of human habitation. This debate had begun many years before Thoreau took part in it, and it continued long afterward. It unfolded with special vigour in radical utopian literature. Victorian utopian visions have generally been neglected by historians of design, but they offer a great deal of insight into how evolving concepts of nature and modern hopes for science combined to fuel schemes for the appropriation of whole landscapes as sites and building material for a future of suburban bliss. The pages of these fantasies enable historians of design, architecture, and planning to pursue the thread of decentralization beyond the work of Ebenezer Howard, and to link it with Thoreau and others like him, helping to illuminate the apparent incongruities between the valorization of nature and calls for its total subordination to human needs and desires. Visions along these lines are related to the American ‘middle landscape’ analysed by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden of 1964, and are also tied to the ‘Pastoral Cities’ discussed by James Machor in his 1987 book on American landscapes by the same name. As it will be seen below, however, the debate taken up by Thoreau and Howard was not American in origin or extent, and most of its participants were committed to abolishing all physical remnants of the city. Indeed, a visceral hatred of modern urbanism served as the engine sustaining this discourse over many years, on multiple continents, and across many political lines. If the natural world was appropriated, refined, and consumed by the proper method –​and this was the problem on which the debate hinged –​its properties offered a restorative panacea that would dissolve the city and facilitate the realization of the most fundamental human hopes.The future would be grown as much as it was built, as the environment was subdued and sculpted into an endless landscape of luminous garden homes where happiness and virtue would flower as naturally and beautifully as the rose.

The nature of the natural Kjetil Fallan and Finn Arne Jørgensen have called for historians of design to fully dismantle the old conceptual binary placing culture and nature in opposition to one another, and to engage more thoughtfully with the ways that human practices of design and making are inextricable from natural places and processes (Fallan and Jørgensen 2017, 106). This requires critical engagement with how humanity has historically defined ‘nature’, which has long been ‘dressed and redressed continually in changing cultural garb’ (Oelschlaeger 2000, 3). Western utopian discourse reveals a linked pair of conceptions of nature that are ancient in pedigree but sustained their strength into the modern period: one is the nature of wilderness, which is majestic but also capricious and cruel, while the other is the nature of the

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garden, which is docile and generous (Giesecke and Jacobs 2012, 7–​9). Both were understood as having been present since the beginning of creation, as the Book of Genesis explained that after God made the world and populated it with living things, he ‘planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed’ (2:8).1 Eden was thus set apart from most of nature, and life within its perimeter was orderly and safe. When the first humans were thrown out of the garden for an act of rebellion, it became clear that most of nature was, on the contrary, full of ‘thorns and thistles’ (3:18). The biblical narrative of creation and corruption thus offered dual conceptions of nature as gentle garden and harsh wilderness. According to both Jewish and Christian biblical prophecies in books such as Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation, the tragic arc of human destiny would only be resolved when God and humanity were properly reconciled, resulting in a perfect city in the form of the New Jerusalem, and restoring humanity to the garden. Importantly, this restoration would not entail a re-​opening of Eden, but rather a transformation of the whole outer world, where the ‘wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad … and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose’ (Isaiah 35:1). The thematic conflict between wilderness and garden would end with the ascendancy of the latter. The several prophecies that point to such a future are often abstract, leaving many questions about the precise role of human agency in the divine gardening of the world, and making it unclear if the New Jerusalem was a literal city or a metaphor for something else, such as the church. Utopian visionaries would attempt to answer these questions in various ways, with pronounced tendencies among British and American authors towards emphasizing gardens over urbanism, and celebrating the human role in planting them. When modern utopian literature was born in 1516 with the publication of Utopia by Thomas More (1478–​1535), England was suffering major problems in the relationship between the countryside and the city. Powerful landowners were throwing tenant farmers off of their estates in order to convert their lands to sheep pasture, sending a flood of desperate poor into the streets of London. Describing this shift in Utopia, Thomas More wrote, ‘sheep, naturally mild and tractable, may now be said to devour men’ (More 1808, 24). For him, this was an affront against God’s plans for the planet, and he attacked the problem in his book, explaining that Utopians considered it ‘a very just warfare, the dispossession of others from soil which they leave idle and uncultivated’ (More 1808, 70). In keeping with their values, the Utopians put every inch of their territory to productive use. They also established laws to maintain population balance between their cities and the countryside, limiting urban growth and carefully managing fields and forests. Their attentive stewardship empowered the creation of new technologies expressing a deep mastery of nature. ‘They breed an infinity of chickens in a very curious manner,’ More wrote, as ‘a vast number of eggs are hatched together by means of an equable artificial warmth’ (More 1808, 58). Nature was given pride of place in the gardens that filled the courts of every urban block, and in their architecture, one found a steady development from found materials to refined, synthetic

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technology, including fireproof cement and glass (More 1808, 61). The island of Utopia was thus a great, well-​tended garden of unprecedented productivity, filled with sparkling cities that were, in turn, stuffed with gardens. There were no unexploited wildernesses on the island any more than there were chaotic or unkempt communities; all was designed, all was integrated, and all was perfect. This echoed the biblical prophecies of urban and rural harmony, in which culture and nature were simultaneously brought into full flowering by human virtue and divine mercy. It struck a deliberate contrast with the increasingly depopulated countryside and steadily swelling London of More’s day. Other utopian books published in the centuries that followed shared More’s ideals of a complete and harmonious amalgamation of culture and nature, and asserted the possibilities offered by the new natural science in achieving it (Tuveson 1949, Manuel and Manuel 1979, and Popkin 1992). Enduringly famous works such as City of the Sun of 1602, Christianopolis of 1619, and New Atlantis of 1626 described the scientific taming of nature and perfection of cities. In 1641, the English agricultural reformer and early natural scientist Gabriel Plattes (1600–​1644) described an ideal imaginary republic called Macaria, where ‘the whole Kingdome is become like to a fruitfull Garden’. The narrator was ‘imparadised in my minde, in thinking that England may bee made happy, with such expedition and facility’ (Plattes 1641 4, 13–​15). Plattes failed in his efforts to convert idle English lands to agricultural production, however, and found himself destitute on the streets of London, where he starved to death (Rogers 1884, 455). Meanwhile, the rural evictions continued, and displaced peasant families continued streaming into the capital. As Raymond Williams recounted, the elite passed many laws to halt the city’s growth, but they all failed (Williams 2016, 211). By the 1700s, it had become a favourite pastime of English poets and politicians to speak of London as a monster, an open sore, or a foul Babylon, urging their readers to retreat to the more virtuous environment of the countryside, even recommending the wild mountains of Wales and Scotland over the filthy metropolis (Johnson 1750, Tucker 1783, Cowper 1802). By the time the age of industry appeared on the horizon, English-​language utopian discourse had inherited two powerful thematic traditions on the question of environment. One of them, stretching from the Bible and through the works of influential writers such as Thomas More, asserted that whole landscapes should be brought to their divinely mandated status as orderly and productive gardens, summoning the lost paradise with a ‘perfect alliance of art and nature’ (Hunt 1987, 133). The other asserted that cities were artificial and corrupt. These two themes were combined in Victorian utopian literature, both in Britain and America, as many visionaries called for the total appropriation of nature as the site for an ideal, anti-​urban future.

Half room, half garden The year 1871 saw the publication of The Coming Race, the first English-​language science-​fiction novel to become an international bestseller. In it, popular writer

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Edward Bulwer-​Lytton (1803–​1873) synthesized the latest thinking on scientific themes such as evolution and electricity with the growing anti-​urban ethos. He described a highly advanced civilization thriving in a fruitful country deep beneath the surface of the earth. Its people dwelled in metallic houses powered by elevators and staffed by robots, in little towns kept flowery and airy by a law restricting their size to 4,000 families, as well as by the practice of surrounding every house with a garden.They generated a mysterious power called ‘vril’ by achieving ‘unity in natural energic agencies’, and used it to sculpt stone, obliterate pests, and achieve stunning agricultural and industrial productivity throughout their underground empire, as ‘every inch of its territory is cultivated to the utmost perfection of garden ground’ (Bulwer-​Lytton 1873, 11, 52–​53, 175). They even crafted their villas out of living plants, with a structure composed of trees, trained birds for ambient music, ‘flower-​ beds’ for seating, and a carpet of ‘soft deep lichen’ (Bulwer-​Lytton 1873, 217–​218). Its spaces were ‘half room, half garden’, offering a perfect fusion of design and nature. The great distances created by the dispersal of the population in its garden cottages and villas were mitigated by flying machines. This, the reader was told, was the advanced alternative to the barbarous age of industrial urbanism underway in Europe. The Coming Race thus echoed Thomas More’s call for a productive utopia of masterful gardeners, but abandoned the city to instead hold up the village and the villa as the ideal architectural vessels by which human destiny might be realized. Other popular utopian novels followed The Coming Race, and offered similar proposals on the subjects of nature and design. Another World was published in 1873 by the London-​based theatre manager Benjamin Lumley (1811–​1875), and it described a radiantly high-​tech utopia on Mars perfected by a benevolent dictator who set himself to ‘subjecting the workings of nature to the uses of man’ (Lumley 1873, 13). Lumley used a gendered, sexual language to explicate the Martian ‘progress of science’, as ‘Nature’ was ‘wooed by the lovers of her predilection’, and ‘seemed to lend herself eagerly to the advances of her votaries’ (Lumley 1873, 16). God had ordained the marriage of culture and nature, he wrote, and among their offspring were new types of plants such as a ‘cream-​lemon’, enhanced labours for sheep, and the ‘Star City’, a huge conglomeration of metallic spires and bejewelled minarets that glistened on the undulating surface of the planet (Lumley 1873, 220–​229, 215–​216, 35–​41). This city was large but not dense, as Lumley explained: ‘Gardens and verdure separate the houses from one another’, and their long, meandering roadways were designed to maximize privacy, giving them a character very much like rural villas (Lumley 1873, 37–​38). Chariots powered by both electricity and horses silently coursed through the sprawling fabric (Lumley 1873, 7).The imperial capital of Mars was thus a huge suburb, made accessible by the loving union of nature and design, and stitched together by vehicles that were a perfect expression of that union. The Scottish physician and amateur chemist Andrew Blair (1849–​1885) continued to develop the idea of an architecture born from the full submission of nature in his 1874 three-​volume science-​fiction epic Annals of the Twenty-​Ninth Century. Its technological rhapsody began when God instituted the prophesied millennium, creating a blissful world state centred on a renovated Constantinople, where pneumatic

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tubes and flying machines enabled its citizens to traverse enormous horizontal and vertical distances. ‘It is more a garden than a city,’ Blair explained. ‘Flora was the mason of Paradise, and is, therefore, well worthy to be wedded to architecture’ (Blair 1874, 11). Large belts of parkland separated each ring of buildings in the garden metropolis. All design was fulfilled through natural processes, as botanical designers coaxed ‘chairs, tables, doors, frames, planks, sofas, and couches’ from living plants (Blair 1874, 31). Gemstones were also synthesized for architectural use, together with unbreakable glass. Beyond the capital, the conquest of nature wrought even more miraculous feats of construction, as every animal on the planet was drafted into service: ‘Triumphant was the success by which the crustacea and molluscs, and all shelled animals were insensibly … taught the art of masonry’, while the ‘railways groaned under the weight of the snails, gastropoda, tortoises, and armadilloes’ (Blair 1874, 84–​85). Vast oceans were bridged, and wasteful mountains were levelled, until the world empire had ‘rendered the crust of the globe but one large piece of artificial typographical sculpture –​one large Eden’ (Blair 1874, 218). The reception in the British press of Blair’s frequently outrageous vision was considerably less enthusiastic than it had been for The Coming Race and Another World, but all three of these works had a great deal in common.The whole environment, all authors asserted, would be rendered universally benevolent and fruitful by the power of science, with all of its productive energies and valuable materials harnessed to human needs and desires.The call for a total appropriation of nature was made more urgent by another consistent theme, namely the distaste for dense urbanism. With compact, human-​scaled cities out of the question, the conquest of nature was given a territorial impulse that was wholly intolerant of limits. Utopian visionaries were compelled to invent mechanized transportation devices to facilitate the imperial reach of their bejeweled garden cities, robotic cottages, and flowerbed villas.

Not a waste corner British utopian literature of this period resonated with readers in the United States. The idea of a dispersed life of suburban bliss made possible by a technological conquest of nature had, indeed, long been a key ingredient of American utopias. In 1802, an immigrant named John Lithgow (d. 1834?) serialized a story entitled Equality. Described by Lyman Tower Sargent as the ‘first full American utopia’ (Sargent 1976, 278), it offered a future vision of the ‘regeneration’ of the world to its original idyllic state by human mastery over the ‘wonderful machine’ of nature (Lithgow 1947, 7–​8, 46–​51, 68).The landscape was purged of large, poisonous cities, and instead became like ‘a city spread over a large garden’, connected by railways (Lithgow 1947, 30). Lithgow did not achieve fame, but he enjoyed a correspondence with President Thomas Jefferson (Durey 1992, 676–​678), whose own hatred for cities was made clear on many occasions. The year 1833 brought the utopian manifesto The Paradise Within Reach of All Men, Without Labor, By Powers of Nature and Machinery, by German-​born engineer John Adolphus Etzler (1791–​1846?). He had immigrated to the United States with

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John Roebling, future builder of the Brooklyn Bridge. He promised to use solar, tidal, and wind power to transform the planet into a new Eden, where: [E]‌very thing desirable for human life may be had … in superabundance, without labor … where the whole face of nature is changed into the most beautiful form … where man may live in the most magnificent palaces … in the most delightful gardens … he may level mountains, sink valleys, create lakes, drain lakes … Etzler 1833, 1 Eztler insisted that with his science, ‘Any wilderness, even the most hideous and the most sterile, may be converted into the most fertile and delightful gardens’ (Etzler 1833, 67). Technology had made humanity ‘powerful like a god’, and now we had only to claim our rightful and total mastery over the earth (Etzler 1833, 47). Canals and roads would crisscross the land in a perfect grid, while mechanized vehicles hurtled along them at unprecedented speeds, dispersing the population throughout a network of richly appointed, large communal dwellings set in magnificent gardens. Those dwellings would be made of a revolutionary new concrete created by burning stone and clay with solar mirrors, and then cast into structural members to be transported and assembled on site in a modular fashion. Such processes would also be used to create and power the machines performing all hard labour (Etzler 1833, 64–​65). Steven Stoll recounted the long and ultimately disastrous efforts of Etzler to realize his paradise (Stoll 2008). Eventually, the engineer attracted the ire of Henry David Thoreau (1817–​1862). He accused Etzler of believing that if he could ‘reform nature and circumstances … man will be right’, but Thoreau countered that humanity should reform itself, ‘and then nature and circumstances will be right’ (Thoreau 1843, 451–​452). Science offered real progress, but one must be cautious, for even ‘the most wonderful inventions’ inevitably ‘insult nature’ (Thoreau 1843, 462). True human happiness was fuelled by solar power, but only in that ‘the sunshine falls on the path of the poet’. It was moral, not technological, improvement that could save humanity. On this, Thoreau and Etzler were irreconcilable, but they agreed with each other on a different point, and it was the same point that brought their thinking in line with that of Bulwer-​Lytton, Lumley, Blair, and Lithgow: the advancement of humanity would require a turn from the city and a full immersion in nature. Whether that nature was mowed by machines or sewn with wildflowers, whether it embosomed humble cottages or high-​tech palaces, and whether it was traversed by leisurely stroll or in mechanized vehicles, all of these visionaries made it clear that ‘many acres of meadow’ would be required to build a good and happy future. After British utopian novels of the 1870s erupted onto the scene, Americans answered with a flurry of new visions. One of the most popular came in 1883 from the pen of the Scottish immigrant and polymath John MacNie (1844–​1909). Entitled The Diothas, or a Far Look Ahead, it prophesied a clean, metallic New York City emptied of residences. Its people commuted back and forth between the urban

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business district and their forested suburban houses using railroads and powered tricycles. The entire landscape had been pulled into productive use, the narrator reported: ‘I was filled with surprise to see the high state of cultivation to which had been brought the whole country … not a waste corner, not a weed, was visible. Between field and garden there was no distinction’ (MacNie 1883, 85). This provided material wealth as well as aesthetic order and tranquillity, facilitating the perfect equality and contentment of the citizens of utopian America. The Diothas, it seems, helped inspire the most popular utopian novel of the nineteenth century, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000-​1887, published in 1888 (Bleiler 1990, 735, and Shurter 1973, 83, 169–​176). The years between them had been hard on the American metropolis. Cities like New York and Boston had for some time struggled with many of the issues plaguing British industrial cities, such as overcrowding, pollution, poverty, poor sanitation, and increasing conflict between the rich and the poor, which boiled over in Chicago’s shocking Haymarket Affair of 1886, when a dynamite attack on the police triggered a massive riot. Wealthier Americans were already beginning to retreat to railroad suburbs at this time, such as Frederick Law Olmsted’s Riverside, which slowly rose far to the west of the mess in central Chicago (Jackson 1985, 79–​86). Bellamy promised his readers that a peaceful socialist revolution would transform the American landscape, erasing large, dense cities and replacing them with a much more suburban composition in which buildings were ‘not in continuous blocks but set in larger or smaller enclosures’, and every ‘quarter contained large open squares filled with trees’ (Bellamy 1888, 52). His narrator went to sleep in an urban house in 1887, and awoke in the year 2000, in a garden. High-​tech transport systems such as pneumatic tubes distributed the fruits of his imaginary cooperative industrial economy across the dispersed population, making the earth ‘bloom like one garden’ of happiness and plenty (Bellamy 1888, 465). Bellamy’s 1897 sequel Equality went further. When the narrator soared over New England in a flying car, he noted: [M]‌ile after mile … the surface below presented the same parklike aspect that had marked the immediate environs of the city. Every natural feature appeared to have been idealized and all its latent meaning brought out by the loving skill of some consummate landscape artist, the works of man blending with the face of Nature in perfect harmony’. Bellamy 1898, 296 After asking, ‘How far does this park extend?’ he was told, ‘It extends to the Pacific Ocean’.The continent had been curated in the manner of New York’s Central Park or Boston’s Emerald Necklace, and made a perfect setting for a nation of high-​tech cottages filled with every product a virtuous socialist worker could desire. The fulfilment of social justice required the total exploitation of all available space and resources and could not tolerate any waste, either through misuse or neglect. The unleashed hand of total appropriation was also the generous and fair hand of plenty. Many of the utopian books that followed in the wake of Bellamy’s international success stayed true to the idea that humanity must gather up and dwell within the

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Olerich, diagram of utopian layout from A Cityless and Countryless World, American, 1893. Public domain/​Out of copyright FIGURE 5.1   Henry

whole of nature. The tellingly entitled novel A Cityless and Countryless World of 1893, by the farmer and inventor Henry Olerich (1851–​1927), prophesied a blissful future in which cities were forgotten and a continental grid of electric roadways distributed the population throughout the nation in large palaces spaced half a mile apart (Figure  5.1). Olerich’s utopia took place on Mars, but the red planet was spelled out as a surrogate for the future of Earth. Its happiness had been born out of a perfect unity between humanity and nature: ‘No one can tell precisely where the human leaves off and the animal begins’ (Olerich 1893, 47). Careful scientific study inaugurated a godlike domination of people over unintelligent matter. In bountiful, mechanized gardens, the ‘horticulturalist’ became the agent of ‘evolution’, presiding over the processes by which all matter and energy resolved into the fulfilment of human wills:  ‘Soil is assimilated into a potato, etc. The potato is eaten, digested, and built into a brain, and the brain is the organ of thought. So we find a relation existing between the whole course of nature; between star and planet; the body and the food we eat; the soil and our life … truth and happiness’ (Olerich 1893, 108, 127). With humanity positioned at the apex of nature, it was our mastery that ultimately gave meaning to all material and processes.

Accidental, unmeaning beauty A number of scholars have discussed the fact that Ebenezer Howard was driven to formulate his influential vision of the Garden City by his consumption of utopian literature, especially Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (Batchelor 1969

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and Fishman 1982, 32). There were other important links between the intangible worlds of science fiction and the tangible realm of urban and landscape design. Frank Lloyd Wright acknowledged the debt he owed to Bellamy in the ‘radical suburbanization’ of his famous Broadacre City, and handed out excerpts of Equality when promoting Broadacre to the public (Watson 2017, 647–​648). William Morris (1834–​1896), in defiance of Bellamy’s industrialism, published News from Nowhere in 1890, offering a vision of the future in which cities were happily gone and Britain had become ‘a garden, where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt’ (Morris 1910, 80). Playing the same role against Bellamy that Thoreau had played against Etzler, Morris insisted that the folly of the industrial age was ‘always looking upon … “nature”… as one thing, and mankind as another’, and trying to enslave the former to the latter (Morris 1910, 201). Also like Thoreau, Morris insisted that a happy future would require the population to ‘spread’, so that every person dwelled in villages or ‘scattered country houses’, with the inevitable effect that, ‘except in the wastes and forests and amongst the sand-​ hills … it is not easy to be out of sight of a house’. Any ‘pieces of wild nature’ that were kept, Morris explained, enjoyed their continued existence to the pleasure they offered to people (Morris 1910, 81–​82). Mechanized ‘force vehicles’ provided the transport inevitably required by such dispersal (Morris 1910, 182). Design was thus wedded to nature in a landscape of total dispersal, but even for Morris it was no marriage of equals: ‘as people always do when they have a sense of architectural power … they know that they can have what they want, and they won’t stand any nonsense from Nature in their dealings with her’ (Morris 1910, 81). Morris has been celebrated as a proto-​environmentalist, but it is clear that while he hoped to craft the environment according to an anti-​industrial and anti-​capitalist philosophy (Fallan and Jørgensen 2017, 108–​110), his anti-​urbanism still required him to place nature under the full dominion of humanity, and colonize it no less completely than would the visionaries he opposed. Also of great importance was the peerlessly popular author H.G. Wells (1866–​ 1946), who carried forth the utopian call to conquer and consume every inch of the planet to millions of readers, and had important allies in the design field, including former leaders of the Bauhaus (Anker 2005). One of his first publications, a serialized futuristic dystopia from 1897 entitled ‘A Story of the Days to Come’, contrasted the ‘swarming unhappy cities’ that had ‘swallowed up mankind’ with life in a secluded cottage, where young lovers ‘feast upon nature’ (Wells 1906, 230–​232, 218). As he made clear in works such as A Modern Utopia of 1905 and A Short History of the World of 1922 (Figure 5.2),Wells believed that technology would allow humanity to eschew cities for a planetary system of modernist villas accessed by mechanized transport: ‘Given wisdom, all mankind might live in … gardens’ (Wells 1922, 426). That this would entail the destruction of places like London and New York did not cause Wells to bat an eye; indeed, he lavished much narrative attention on the promising spectre of urban apocalypse, from the atomic holocaust of The World Set Free of 1914 to the aerial onslaught of The Shape of Things to Come of 1933.That his

A cityless and countryless world  85

ideal residential garden from A Short History of the World, British, 1922. Public domain/​Out of copyright FIGURE 5.2   H. G. Wells, an

global empire of scientific garden homes would erase or absorb every natural place on the planet was also of no concern. In his 1906 work The Future in America, he described in detail a powerful reverie that overcame him while he stared out over Niagara Falls and contemplated the foolishness of those who would preserve it:

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I fell into a day-​dream of the coming power of men, and how that power may be used by them … For surely the greatness of life is still to come, it is not in such accidents as mountains or the sea. I have seen the splendor of the mountains, sunrise and sunset among them, and the waste immensity of sky and sea. I am not blind because I can see beyond these glories.To me no other thing is credible than that all the natural beauty in the world is only so much material for the imagination and the mind, so many hints and suggestions for art and creation. Whatever is, is but the lure and symbol towards what can be willed and done. Man lives to make –​in the end he must make, for there will be nothing else left for him to do … I, at least, can forgive the loss of all the accidental, unmeaning beauty that is going for the sake of the beauty of fine order and intention that will come … And so to me it seems altogether well that all the forth and hurry of Niagara at last, all of it, dying into hungry canals of intake, should rise again in light and power, in ordered and equipped and proud and beautiful humanity. Wells 1906,  54–​57 And thus, in assuming the status of gods, humanity would reclaim Eden on its own terms, giving final and full meaning to the world, drafting every mountain and valley, every tree and flower, every bird and beast, every ray of sunlight and drop of water, to the campaign to fashion every wilderness into a garden, and fill it with cottages and wonderful machines. Everything was material for design, and every place was a site for design, and nature was otherwise insignificant. It is important to remember that the core issue motivating many of these utopian visionaries, from Thomas More to H.G. Wells, was the poverty of their fellow human beings. Biblical stories and prophecies suggested that life on earth had not always been so hard, and that it need not continue to be so. In the 1800s, utopian discourse reached a critical mass in Britain and America, with visions of scientific progress formulated to address these longstanding issues. Those visions were inflected, however, with a major problem:  hatred for the city. With calls for dispersal partnered to the idea that all of nature should be appropriated and put to use  –​regardless of whether that use was material or aesthetic  –​most Victorian reformers in the UK and the USA failed to imagine a mutually beneficial relationship between human communities and natural environments, in which people were understood as one part of a larger natural system that humans did not create and should respect for its richness and complexity. Instead, they called for a productive planet of never-​ending suburbanism unsullied by wildernesses, the ecological value of which they did not comprehend, and full of whirring machines, the ecological effects of which they did not anticipate. Today, many people see the storms gathering on the horizon, and long for healthy, unbroken forests and vibrant, dense cities with the same aching soreness that made their grandparents groan for the garden. If we do not reimagine nature in a more sensitive manner and design our communities in hopeful humility, carefully and lovingly containing ourselves, we may soon wake up to a truly, and terribly, ‘Cityless and Countryless World’.

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Note 1 All biblical references are taken from the King James edition most likely to have been read by Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic: The Holy Bible 1769.

References Anker, P. (2005). ‘The Bauhaus of Nature’, Modernism/​Modernity 12(2): 229–​251. Batchelor, P. (1969). ‘The Origin of the Garden City Concept of Urban Form’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 28(3): 184–​200. Bellamy, E. (1888). Looking Backward 2000–​1887. Boston: Ticknor and Company. Blair, A. (1874). Annals of the Twenty-​Ninth Century; or, the Autobiography of the Tenth President of the World-​Republic. London: Samuel Tinsley. Bleiler, E.F. (1990). Science Fiction:The Early Years. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press. Bulwer-​Lytton, E. (1873). The Coming Race. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauschnitz. Cowper, W. (1802). The Task: A Poem. Boston: E. Lincoln. Duany, A., E. Plater-​Zyberk and J. Speck (2010). Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: North Point Press. Durey, M. (1992). ‘John Lithgow’s Lithconia: The Making and Meaning of America’s First ‘Utopian Socialist’ Tract’. The William and Mary Quarterly 49(4): 675–​694. Etzler, J.A. (1833). The Paradise Within Reach of All Men,Without Labor, By Powers of Nature and Machinery. Pittsburgh: Etzler and Reinhold. Fallan, K., and F.A. Jørgensen (2017). ‘Environmental Histories of Design: Towards a New Research Agenda’, Journal of Design History 30(2): 103–​121. Fishman, R. (1982). Urban Utopias of the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fishman, R. (1987). Bourgeois Utopias:The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books. Giesecke, A. and N. Jacobs (2012). ‘Nature, Utopia, and the Garden’ in A. Giesecke and N. Jacobs, eds, Earth Perfect? Nature, Utopia and the Garden. London: Black Dog Publishing,  ,6–​17. Hunt, J.D. (1987). ‘Gardens in Utopia: Utopias in the Garden,’ in D. Baker-​Smith and C.C. Barfoot, (eds.), Between Dream and Nature: Essays on Utopia and Dystopia. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 114–​138. The Holy Bible (1769). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York:Vintage Books. Jackson, K. (1985). Crabgrass Frontier:The Suburbanization of the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, S. (1750). London: A Poem, 5th ed., London: E. Cave. Kunstler, J.H. (1993). The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-​Made Landscapes. New York: Touchstone. Lithgow, J. (1947). Equality; A History of Lithconia. New York: The Prime Press. Lumley, B. (1873). Another World, Or, Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah. London: Samuel Tinsley. MacNie, J. (1883). The Diothas, or, a Far Look Ahead. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Manuel, F.E. and F.P. Manuel (1979). Utopian Thought In The Western World. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Mercier, L.S. (1772). Memoirs of The Year Two Thousand Five Hundred, vol. 2. Hooper, W. trans., Dublin: W. Wilson. Moore, D. (1856). The Age of Progress, Or, a Panorama of Time. New York: Sheldon, Blakeman, and Co.

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More, T. (1808). Utopia in A. Cayley, (ed.), Memoirs of Sir Thomas More, with a New Translation of his Utopia, vol. 2. London: Cadell and Davis. Morris, W. (1910). News from Nowhere; or, and Epoch of Rest. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Oelschlaeger, M. (2000). ‘The Environment and the 21st Century: A Thoreauvian Interlude’, The Concord Saunterer 8: 3–​14. Olerich, H. (1893). A Cityless and Countryless World. Chicago: W.B. Conkey Co. Plattes, G. (1641). A Description of the Famous Kingdom of Macaria. London: Francis Constable. Popkin, R.H. (1992). The Third Force in Seventeenth-​Century Thought. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Rogers, J.E.T. (1884). Six Centuries of Work and Wages: The History of English Labor, vol. 1. London: W. Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Sargent, L.T. (1976). ‘Themes in Utopian Fiction in English before Wells’, Science Fiction Studies 3(3): 275–​282. Sedell, J.A.D. (2011). ‘Millennialism, Science, and Colonialism in Andrew Blair’s Annals of the Twenty-​Ninth Century’. Unpublished MA thesis Department of English, Montana State University. Shurter, R.L. (1973). The Utopian Novel in America, 1865–​1900. New York: AMS Press. Thoreau, H.D. (1843). ‘Paradise (to be) Regained’ United States Magazine and Democratic Review 8(65): 451–​463. Tucker, J. (1783). Four Letters on Important National Subjects. Gloucester: R. Raikes. Tuveson, E.L. (1949). Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Walker, N.R. (2016). ‘American Crossroads: General Motors’ Midcentury Campaign to Promote Modernist Urban Design in Hometown, U.S.A.’ Buildings and Landscapes 23(2): 89–​115. Warner, Jr., S.B. (1978). Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–​ 1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Watson, J.M. (2017). ‘Topographies of the Future: Urban and Suburban Visions in Edward Bellamy’s Utopian Fiction’ Planning Perspectives 32(4): 639–​649. Wells, H.G. (1906). ‘A Story of the Days to Come’ in Wells, H.G. Tales of Space Time. London: Macmillan and Co., 165–​324. Wells, H.G. (1922). A Short History of the World. New York: The Macmillan Company. Williams, R. (2016). The Country and the City. London:Vintage Classics. Worster, D. (1994). Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideology. Cambridge: The Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge.

6 CLEAN AND DISCIPLINED The garden city in Singapore Jesse O’Neill

The history of the garden city in Singapore and Malaysia hinges on a speech delivered on 11 May 1967. The speaker that morning was the Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, who explained the moral imperative of garbage disposal to staff at the Cleansing Department. After cleaning the old city, he said, they would make it beautiful with trees and shrubbery, and he named this ambition for landscape reform a ‘garden city’ (Lee 2012, 83). By August of the same year, Lee (2012, 177) was stating the plan with greater conviction: Singapore’s garden city would be ‘the greenest and cleanest’. Long after Ebenezer Howard’s peaceful path to real reform, the garden city was inaugurated as state policy in Singapore. In the early twentieth century, the English garden city movement was quick to spread internationally, first through Europe and North America, and then globally across the European empires (Bigon 2016; Freestone 1989). Throughout the British Empire, including Malaya and Singapore, garden city ideas were embedded in town planning and health reform policies. But Prime Minister Lee’s speech in 1967 severed the term from those earlier colonial uses, as he claimed the garden city as something inherent to new national aspirations. What started as a global design concept was renovated to become a local instrument that might shape the physical and social landscape and support postcolonial civic development. It is a common tactic to see design in Singapore as a product of top-​down state functions (cf. Huppatz 2018, 141–​147; Chan 2011), and the garden city is no different, as government agencies effectively turned the design of the environment into a rhetorical device that would guide national discourse for decades.

Postcolonial ambition On that day in 1967, it is unlikely that Lee was thinking specifically of Ebenezer Howard or any other early theorist of the garden city, but his words were

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nevertheless loaded with that association and reveal indirect connections. The garden city was introduced to Malaya in the 1920s by Charles Reade, the first Government Town Planner in Kuala Lumpur, and secretary of the British Garden Cities and Town Planning Association (Goh 1988). By that time, the movement had largely shed Howard’s original ideas of reforming land ownership and citizen-​led political change, and mostly presented schemes for greenery, open space, and quality housing (Freestone 1989, 216). The garden city had become a model for the aesthetic techniques of suburbia. Reade’s (1912; 1913) own writing emphasized formal organization and hygienic conditions above all else. So Lee’s choice of words, which invoked the garden city as a means to speak of public health and beautification, was therefore –​whether or not he understood it this way –​quite consistent with the movement’s earlier realizations. But in the Malayan context, there was more to the term than just this. In Malaysia, the garden city was a motif employed to sell new residential schemes and guide municipal improvements, and by the 1960s it had become code for Western progress and modern lifestyle. In 1962, a year before Malaysia’s political independence, the outgoing Commissioner of the Federal Capital, A.D. York, expressed an optimistic vision for Malaysia’s future, where Kuala Lumpur would become ‘the most up-​to-​date city in southeast Asia’ (Straits Times 1962, 11). To describe this vision, he called on the image of the garden city, by which he meant the beauty of nature alongside modern amenities and technologies. In 1968, Kuching also proposed to fill its streets with trees and colourful flowers, despite having no hope for success (Straits Times 1968c, 8). Their need to import foreign plants made the idea expensive, and Kuching was a poor city. That Kuching would declare such intentions, even when they were beyond financial reach, shows that in politics the garden city was more about making aspirational statements than any detailed planning. Its connotations of thoughtful design, comfort, and physical improvement spoke of developed living conditions and economic viability. This is what the Malaysian cities really wanted, and this is why they chose to name their ambitions that way.The garden city’s image of peaceful order and natural landscapes provided a graspable expression of the desire for self-​improvement. And although some limited planting schemes had already begun in Singapore in the early 1960s (Barnard 2016, 238), the decision in 1967 to finally call this a garden city has to be read against the backdrop of this rhetoric of development, which existed across the region. Lee was utilizing a well-​recognized language that sought to create impressions of modernization and economic growth, and considering Singapore’s situation at the time, such interests are unsurprising. In 1967, the country was in a tenuous position. A 1962 United Nations report had stated that Singapore would be unable to survive on its own (Turnbull 2009, 299), yet this was its position after being expelled from the Malaysian union in 1965, barely two years after independence. For the first time, the island city was its own country, with an uncertain relationship to Malaysia and still timid after the heightened military tension with Indonesia during the Konfrontasi of 1963 to 1966. The language of crisis that existed in Singaporean politics at the time is often overemphasized, and largely served to secure greater

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power for the political elite of the People’s Action Party, but it is also true that the security provided by Britain’s military was slowly disappearing, that independence had made the country’s strong economy uncertain, and that there were grave problems regarding labour and living conditions. Overlapping these issues was the matter of coming to terms with what it meant to be Singaporean, given that this was not really a way in which the people who lived there had thought of themselves before (Kong and Yeoh 2003, 29). Part of the purpose in using the old language of garden city planning was therefore to invent Singapore as a physically and economically secure nation. For Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh (2003, 4), this invention of Singapore was achieved through the rapid creation of new cultural discourses, structuring new ‘sentimental’ nationalized landscapes of religion, ethnicity, and housing. But the garden city was also one of these discourses, a colonial leftover that could be adapted to guide the nation’s character and literally define its landscape.

The cleansing machine The first part of Lee’s garden city plan was state-​led, and required establishing the official mechanisms of order and cleanliness. This involved the cleaning staff who first heard the policy in May 1967, and concerned provisions of waste management and landscaping. The initial step was to remove garbage from the streets and design public litter bins. In September 1967, refuse vans drove through residential areas, ringing their bells and drawing people from their homes in the first of many public clean-​ups (Straits Times 1967b, 4). As waste collection became increasingly regular, the project continued by establishing a Trees and Plants Unit within the Public Works Department. By October, they had expanded state nurseries and planted 9,000 new trees along roadways and canals (Straits Times 1967e, 10). In 1968, official responsibility for the garden city fell to Health Minister Chua Sian Chin, who emphasized nature as providing a path to hygiene (Straits Times 1968b, 8). Under Chua’s instruction, the state’s mechanisms grew through public education programmes and community events. That year, the ‘Keep Singapore Clean’ campaign began to teach communities about the need for cleanliness, planting schemes continued, and new policies discouraging littering and public urination were introduced. This initial clean up set expectations for the larger developments to come (Figure 6.1). Lee’s (2012, 77)  ‘cleansing machine’ advanced during the 1970s through the Public Works Department, and later the Parks and Recreation Department. Administrative systems for the garden city were implemented, organizing Singapore into curated planning regions. Parks and Recreation established departments for horticultural research, civic decoration, and management of the Botanic Gardens. These sat alongside their Design Unit, which employed local landscape architects from the School of Ornamental Horticulture, as well as expatriates on secondment from Japan, like Ren Matsui, who designed some of Singapore’s most important city gardens in the early 1980s (Lim 1980b, 4). By 1980, the state systems of design

FIGURE 6.1   ‘A

Clean Round-​up for Our Singapore’, 1978. Ministry of the Environment Collection, courtesy of National Archives of Singapore

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and gardening were maintaining over half a million public trees and three million shrubs, and had designed new major parks across the island (Straits Times 1980b, 9). The overall project was about creating an attractive and ordered city, free of general mess and adorned with plants. Through its initial successes, Singapore’s garden city scheme had become much larger and more ambitious than any previous plans in the region. Although many colonial developments across Malaya had called themselves garden cities, what they really amounted to was little more than tidy new suburbs built at the edges of older untamed cities. This included the 1923 Wah Garden City in Singapore, the 1933 Garden City in Malacca, the 1947 Merrywood plans for Kuala Lumpur, and the 1956 Miri development in Sarawak. These, and developments like them, were all somewhere between ten and 100 acres in size, accommodating anywhere from two dozen to several hundred ‘European style’ modern homes (Singapore Free Press 1923, 53; Straits Times 1947, 7; Straits Times 1956, 5). Under colonial administrators, the aspirational reform of the garden city hardly moved beyond single estates. But for an independent Singapore, the plan expanded the garden city to the scale of a small nation. Ebenezer Howard’s (1902, 20, 30)  original plans had called for a garden city of 6,000 acres and 32,000 people –​but now Singapore planned one that comprised some 145,000 acres and a population of at least two million. Such a dramatic change of scale was achieved through the politics of land ownership. In 1966, new laws allowed the government to cheaply acquire private land for public use (Turnbull 2009, 317). This meant that the state had all the land it needed to see through its environmental reform, allowing a rapid urban expansion through the Housing and Development Board. Restrictions of land ownership had been a great limitation for colonial planners, as recognized by Charles Reade (1921, 165). What he found on arriving in Kuala Lumpur –​which reflected the situation across Malaya –​was land owned in irregular plots by irregular groups of people, each with their own interests. Land was variously owned by British concerns, by Malays, Indians, Chinese, and other communities, which made difficult any plan for terrain to be communally pooled for totalizing redevelopment. Garden cities require land ownership, and in Singapore the state was now the owner, meaning that the entire nation could be rebuilt through the official mechanisms of the garden city.

Invested in gardening Even at its inception, Singapore’s garden city policy was understood not to be just the work of state departments, but as a series of values to be instilled in citizens.The policy was an ‘attack on the rubbish creators’ (Lee 2012, 79), that is, the residents of Singapore. State cleaning and planting could only be effective if it was respected and maintained by the public, therefore the other side of Lee’s garden city was a plan to shape public attitudes. In effect, remaking the environment required a remaking of community values. Public involvement began with the state education campaigns about civic hygiene, and quickly extended to other events. From 1968, 184 community centres

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were put in competition with each other to create the most beautiful gardens (Straits Times 1967a, 7). Then, public awards were used to motivate people into tidying their environment (Straits Times 1969, 11), as competitions extended to include cleaning and gardening at residential blocks (Straits Times 1967c, 5). This had the effect of informally collectivizing neighbours into a cleaning and beautification workforce that alleviated strains on the Cleansing Department. The public were also increasingly involved in planting public trees and gardens through the founding of a national Tree Planting Day in 1971, which prompted residents, school groups, and social clubs to support the efforts of the Trees and Plants Unit. And to maintain the results of this work, a kind of neighbourhood watch for ecological vandalism encouraged people to report anyone seen damaging city plants (Straits Times 1967e, 10). Gradually, Singapore’s garden city plan was made the concern of its people. It was their responsibility to grow gardens, keep streets clean, and change old behaviours to fit new national ambitions (Figure 6.2). These official planting days and competitions gave people reasons to garden, and necessitated a wider public knowledge of gardening. Policy-​makers argued that basic botanical information should be taught in schools, and that it was a key responsibility of teachers to instil a love of nature in their pupils (Straits Times 1971, 12). In 1971, the Ministry of Law started publishing gardening books to this end, and tax incentives were later given for personal gardens that were seen as contributing to the national plan (Business Times 1977, 12). People maintained

FIGURE 6.2   School

children taking part in community gardening on Tree Planting Day, 1973. Ministry of Information and the Arts Collection, courtesy of National Archives of Singapore

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community gardens in housing estates or in the public corridors outside their flats, and gardening became a national hobby. This was the strategy of investing citizens in public works (Lee 2012, 85). Had the state simply planted trees along roadsides, it would be the work of someone else. If the people planted those trees themselves on Tree Planting Day, they would be theirs. If they cleaned the streets themselves, it was thought, further littering would become a personal affront. Gardening would create a morality among the people, echoing Ebenezer Howard’s (1902, 17–​18) own claims that a city among nature would make people better. The government’s view was that the people of Singapore needed to develop a ‘keener sense of responsibility’ in order to enhance the state’s economy and labour output (Straits Times 1968b, 8), and this is why the people were told to tend their gardens. It was hoped that this would shape a national character that was ‘rugged’, hard working, and persevering (Hudson 2013, 18). Remaking the landscape through city parks and pretty flowers was therefore a means to reshape people. It was not so much the aesthetics of the garden that appealed to Singapore’s pragmatic government as it was the ethics of gardening, and the hope that a popular investment in the garden might turn people from foreigners in their own country into a responsible collective citizenry. After all, it was recognized at the time of launching the garden city campaign that laying flowerbeds down median strips of major roads was not simply about beautification, but was also a practical means to prevent jaywalking –​ or, the use of plants to regulate vehicular and pedestrian traffic (Straits Times 1967d, 7). Ordering the natural and urban environment provided the means to restructure public behaviour.

Garden city values As the cleanliness of the garden city became entrenched in public discourse, its popular meanings expanded beyond greenery to include any aspect of city life that the state or the public wanted to restrict. The garden city quickly became a prominent topic in newspapers, with letter writers telling readers what other things should be curbed by the plan: traffic, bad smells, diesel fumes from buses (Straits Times 1968a, 12; New Nation 1972, 8; New Nation 1975, 8). Journalists restated government proposals and added their own concerns: getting rid of hippies, creating a lively arts culture, and building playgrounds (Straits Times 1967a, 7; Yeo 1971, 9; Straits Times 1972a, 19). And the state continued its campaigns for behavioural reform, instructing people not to spit in public, to throw their garbage away, and to be courteous (Loong 1971, 12). The notion of cleanliness, or the absence of dirt, began to take on meanings more aligned to the ideas of Mary Douglas (2003, 3), where ‘pollutions are used as analogies for expressing a general view of the social order’. Cleanliness in the garden city was an absence of the matter, behaviours, and beliefs that were imagined as out of place within Singapore’s desired new social system. As Kong and Yeoh (2003, 32) argue, the state at this time began a programme of cleaning up social mess –​all those unwanted customs and beliefs that they sought to get rid of in order

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to create their new citizenship. It was a broad scheme aiming to eradicate ‘unsuitable’ Western cultural practices and confirm regional values and traditional ethnic moralities (Wee 2007, 34; Hong and Huang 2008, 96). This would remove disrespect for the country, political radicalism and dissent, a lack of courtesy, laziness, and anything that countered the broader aspirations for a peaceful, clean, hard-​working, middle-​class urban environment within the garden city of Singapore. The language of the garden city had turned from one of natural imagery representing Western modernization into a broad instrument for control, allowing a state-​sponsored removal of physical, social, and moral pollutants. The dangerous idea in this is that an environmental concept of nature extends to politics and society, where dissent or fringe youth groups can be modelled as unnatural, and thus requiring removal. In this context, the physical presence of public gardens and flowerbeds acted as a veneer, creating an image of the state, as well as outward signs of citizenship and engagement. The presence of city gardens implied an absence of contrarians and anti-​social activities. Wherever the plants were neat and the trees were tended, the hand of the state was present through its citizens, nothing out of its desired place. The purpose of the garden city as a means of ridding Singapore of unwanted influences that challenged paternalistic planning was evident from the beginning, though this point is often overlooked. While the Prime Minister’s speech of May 1967 is widely recognized as the launch of the garden city policy, the actual focus of that speech is rarely considered. Lee’s primary purpose that day was to explain working conditions to public cleaners, and note the state’s success in dismantling trade unions, which Lee (2012, 76) claimed encouraged corruption and inefficiency. The government had already positioned itself against any form of trade unionism that was independent of state control (Fernandez and Loh 2008, 220–​221), and the first national parliament in December 1965 began measures to create a more disciplined workforce, limit strikes, and encourage stable environments for employers and investors (Turnbull 2009, 310). The speech in 1967 told public cleaners that for success they needed to conform to the state’s expectations of their work, and that if they fell behind they would be punished. Lee spoke of the need for efficiency, and the need for cleanliness to improve the country’s morale. He laid out his plan for the mechanisms of tidiness, where his audience that day would ‘provide the proper physical means for control’ (Lee 2012, 78). And he spoke of the need to condition the public –​saying that those who ‘cannot be persuaded and educated into doing the right thing must be disciplined’ (Lee 2012, 79). By adding to these disciplinary measures some ‘fountains, greenery, trees at circuses and other places,’ he said, ‘we could make this a garden city within a matter of three years’ (Lee 2012, 83).That one line is the actual extent of his reference to the garden city that day. The greater concern was with public order and control. ‘We will develop this very tightly organized, highly disciplined society, educate our young and maintain standards, imbue them with a series of social responsibility and group discipline’ (Lee 2012, 83). The state’s concern with the beauty of nature was an outward expression of a much deeper project of national and social engineering. The garden city was

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something to be cultivated within citizens, encouraging their collectivization, changing their values and activities, and demanding a level of civic vigilance. By establishing expectations, and by encouraging engagement with public works, the primary aim of the garden city was to condition a sense of duty and national identity. This was perhaps the most politicized use of the garden city since Howard’s original scheme at the end of the nineteenth century, though one of a much more authoritarian nature.

Touring the garden Through state efforts, the garden city programme was popularly adopted, and by incorporating those earlier discourses of development it continued to express an optimistic ambition for improvement and stability. By the early 1970s, Singapore’s position was far less tenuous.The government, led by Lee, was virtually uncontested and genuinely popular, the economy was expanding, unemployment was negligible, and living standards improving (Turnbull 2009, 312–​313). The garden city, as a public discourse invented by the state, was becoming internalized in citizens’ conception of themselves, and started to be used increasingly in shaping the country’s international image. As the Ministry of Health and the Public Works Department continued their work on the garden city, another agency, the Singapore Tourism Promotion Board, began contributing their own picture of Singapore’s modern ‘garden attractions’ (Yeoh et al. 2001, 4). The garden city turned into a way of visualizing Singapore for the outside world. At Expo ‘70 in Osaka, Singapore was portrayed to great success as a garden paradise in order to attract tourists and investors (Straits Times 1970, 4). Among the state’s many ambitions was to turn the country into a tourist hub for the region. To attract first world tourists they needed to provide first world conveniences, and the image of the garden city helped in this. Indeed, some elements of this plan had pre-​dated the official policy, as in 1965 the Minister for Law and National Development, E.W. Barker, had commented that general improvements to public parks would foster an impression of economic stability (Straits Times 1965, 11). That year, Barker had the central business district of Raffles Place turned into a ‘pleasure garden’ of flowers and fountains. Underneath the garden was Singapore’s first underground carpark, confirming the connection between the garden and infrastructural modernity (Figure 6.3). For the Tourism Promotion Board, the garden city reflected the techno-​futurism of Singapore as a global city. The Board’s chairman even chastized local artists for continuing to portray Singapore through the rural lens of village lifestyle (Straits Times 1972b, 18). Instead, he wanted modernization:  paintings of high-​ r ise buildings towering above urban tree lines, where the city was both a beautiful garden and a global centre of commerce. In this guise, it was essential for the garden city to continue its older meanings of modernization, where the image of the garden acts as a container for everything that might capture the attention (or allay the fears) of wealthy travellers (cf.Yeoh et al. 2001, 7).

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FIGURE 6.3  View

of Raffles Place, after construction of an underground carpark and rooftop ‘pleasure garden’, 1966. Ministry of Information and the Arts Collection, courtesy of National Archives of Singapore

A small campaign from 1982 represents the touristic garden city perfectly. It was launched just after the opening of the new Changi airport, a modern, high-​tech terminal where tourists were greeted with gardens and fountains that would reinforce the country’s advertised image. The campaign was a promotional postcard, showing a butterfly landing on the flower of a red ginger plant. But such specific instances of the natural world were not really the point. What mattered was the way the garden could become an all-​encompassing vessel for the city: ‘While most countries have a park in the city, Singapore has a city in the park’ the postcard read. While other cities have beautiful gardens, nowhere else is the garden so omnipresent, so integral to the very conditions of national life (Figure 6.4). The back of the postcard was printed with a simulated letter, extolling the pleasures of this garden. Hello! Arrived safely in Singapore. Breezed through the spectacular new Changi Airport. Talk about efficiency. Singapore’s described as ‘2nd busiest port in the world’, ‘3rd leading oil trading centre’, and ‘a modern city state’. It’s much more with lush greenery everywhere (fields of colourful orchids), and it’s so incredibly clean. Found a rich blend of cultures, and the food –​ wow! Shopping’s great, reasonable prices and such a wide range. Loved exploring the quaint old places while enjoying living standards like home.

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FIGURE 6.4   Singapore Tourism

Promotion Board postcard: ‘While most countries have a park in the city, Singapore has a city in the park’, 1982. Author’s collection

The garden city is efficient, it’s a commercial hub, it’s modern, comfortable, multicultural, and the shopping is fabulous.This image is everything that William Gibson (1993) would later famously deride about the country in his article for Wired, which defined so many international attitudes to Singapore and was banned by the Singaporean government. In many ways, Gibson’s impression of sterility and authoritarianism were all products of the garden city. But Gibson’s account was overstated. There was always more vitality, more dirt still uncleaned. He was overtaken by the rhetoric, and by the fact that the garden city was more an aspirational public discourse than a real place. What connects all the uses of the garden city in modern Singapore –​whether the tourist campaigns, the government’s efforts to shape national character, or even the colonial language of residential development  –​is that they are all images. The garden city was a vehicle for Singapore to express what it wanted to be.The physical planting of trees and gardens, the tangible results of this discourse, served only as an impression that the ambitions of the day –​whatever they happened to be –​were becoming real.

Conclusion In 1967, Singapore was promised a garden city within three years, but instead this language shaped planning, national identity, and international promotion for decades. In the 1980s, a new phase of the plan was announced:  the country

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was ‘going colour’ (Lim 1980a, 8). There would be more colourful flowers, sweet fragrances, and fruit-​bearing trees on city streets. Around that time, though, the scale of real change became recognizable. By one account, the tropical ‘wilderness’ of Mount Faber, a popular attraction, had been replaced by a more controlled and inviting planned parkland (Straits Times 1980a, 1); a natural environment replaced by its simulation. The artificial nature of the garden city’s products were being noticed, as an image displacing the real. Colonial administrators had brought the garden city movement to Malaya in the 1920s, where it became the aspirational language of Western lifestyle, hygiene, public order, and development. By the 1960s it also embraced new public amenities, modernization, and economic vitality. In its first decades, the garden city spread British values and lifestyle ambitions among the Malayan middle classes, and implied the Empire’s role in facilitating local reform. But from 1967 the idea of the garden city in Singapore was reshaped. The state made the old language of development and progress their own, turning it into a more widely encompassing, ambitious, and eventually a more successful programme than had ever been achieved before. The garden city was brought into the service of creating a new national system. It was used to improve living conditions, mould behaviours, establish physical order and control, and construct images of security and enjoyment. The incorporation of nature into the urban environment became an instrument –​a rhetorical image, and a wider public discourse –​that helped to invent a nation and a national population. In Singapore, therefore, the garden city was ultimately a tool of political capital.

Postscript Take one ounce each of light rum, Galliano, and lemon juice. Take four ounces of apricot nectar, and three quarters of an ounce of green sugar syrup. Put them together with cracked ice and shake well. Pour this into a twelve ounce glass and garnish with a red cherry, mint leaves, lemon, a Vanda Tan Chay Yan orchid, and a miniature figurine of the Tourist Board’s iconic Merlion. The cocktail is called a ‘Garden City’, and was sold at the bar of the Shangri-​La Hotel in 1981, a building that the New Nation (Mahbubani 1980, 21) once called the epitome of the garden city in Singapore. This is what the garden city turned into after its adoption as state policy. Far from being strictly a method of urban planning, it was an image of relaxed lifestyle, and an idea of everything that was good about city life. In Singapore, the language of the garden city was so pervasive that it could be used to define any experience.

References Barnard, T.P. (2016). Nature’s Colony: Empire, Nation and the Environment in the Singapore Botanic Gardens. Singapore: NUS Press. Bigon, L. (2016). ‘Introduction’. In Garden Cities and Colonial Planning: Transnationality and Urban Ideas in Africa and Palestine, edited by L. Bigon and Y. Katz. 1–​32. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Business Times. (1977). ‘Income Tax Deductions for Garden’. Business Times, 28 January. Chan, L.K. (2011). ‘Visualising Multi-​Racialism in Singapore: Graphic Design as a Tool for Ideology and Policy in Nation Building’. Design Issues 27(1): 63–​69. Douglas, M. (2003). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London & New York: Routledge. Fernandez, M. and L.K. Seng (2008). ‘The Left-​wing Trade Unions in Singapore, 1945–​ 1970’. In Paths Not Taken: Political Pluralism in Post-​war Singapore, edited by M.D. Barr and C.A. Trocki, 206–​226. Singapore: NUS Press. Freestone, R. (1989). Model Communities:The Garden City Movement in Australia. Melbourne: Nelson. Gibson, W. (1993). ‘Disneyland With the Death Penalty’. Wired. Accessed 2 March 2018. https://​www.wired.com/​1993/​04/​g ibson-​2/​ Goh Ban , L. (1988). ‘Import of Urban Planning into Malaysia’. Planning History 10(1): 7–​12. Hong, L. and H. Jianli (2008). The Scripting of a National History: Singapore and Its Pasts. Singapore: NUS Press. Howard, E. (1902). Garden Cities of Tomorrow. London: Swan Sonnenschen & Co. Hudson, C. (2013). Beyond the Singapore Girl: Discourses of Gender and Nation in Singapore. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Huppatz, D.J. (2018). Modern Asian Design. London & New York: Bloomsbury. Kong, L., and B.S.A. Yeoh (2003). The Politics of Landscapes in Singapore: Construction of ‘Nation’. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Lee K.Y. (2012). The Papers of Lee KuanYew: Speeches, Interviews and Dialogues, vol. 4. Singapore: Cengage Learning. Lim, P-​L. (1980a). ‘Behind the Colour Curtain’. The Straits Times,Weekender, 5 October 1980. Lim, P-​L. (1980b). ‘Everywhere You Turn Your Eyes Will Meet Dazzling Displays of Nature’s Colours’. The Straits Times,Weekender, 12 October 1980. Loong, R. (1971). ‘Campaign for Gracious Living Gains Ground’. The Straits Times, 1 August 1971. Mahbubani, G. (1980). ‘Shaping the Future City’. New Nation, 7 December 1980. New Nation (1972). ‘Smells in a Garden City’. New Nation,10 January 1972. New Nation (1975). ‘Gas Masks in Eden’. New Nation, 2 April 1975. Reade, C.C. (1912). ‘Town Planning in Australasia: Problems and Progress in the Far Pacific’. The Town Planning Review 3(1): 4–​10. Reade, C.C. (1913). ‘A Defence of the Garden City Movement’. The Town Planning Review 4(3): 245–​251. Reade, C.C. (1921).‘Town Planning in British Malaya’. The Town Planning Review 9(3): 162–​165. Singapore Free Press (1923). ‘Wah Garden City’. The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 24 January 1923. Straits Times (1947). ‘$2 Million Garden City Planned’. The Straits Times, 9 October 1947. Straits Times (1956). ‘Garden City Planned for 500 People’. The Straits Times, 10 June 1956. Straits Times (1962). ‘S-​E Asia’s Best City –​In Plans for K.L.’. The Straits Times, 3 April 1962. Straits Times (1965). ‘State Policy Also to Improve Parks and Gardens’. The Straits Times, 27 November 1965. Straits Times (1967a). ‘Making S’pore the Top Garden City…’ The Straits Times, 25 August 1967. Straits Times (1967b). ‘Ringing of Bells Means ‘Bring Out Your Rubbish’ for the Refuse Van’. The Straits Times, 9 September 1967. Straits Times (1967c). ‘Estate’s Clean-​up Drive’. The Straits Times, 9 September 1967. Straits Times (1967d). ‘Transforming S’pore into a ‘Garden City’’. The Straits Times, 20 October 1967.

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Straits Times (1967e).‘Trees and Shrubs for a Garden City’. The Straits Times, 26 October 1967. Straits Times (1968a). Untitled Letter. The Straits Times, 3 February 1968. Straits Times (1968b). ‘The Garden City’. The Straits Times, 20 April 1968. Straits Times (1968c). ‘Plan to Turn Kuching into a Garden City’. The Straits Times, 6 July 1968. Straits Times (1969). ‘For a Happier Life in a Crowded Society…’ The Straits Times, 30 August 1969. Straits Times (1970). ‘Why Trees Instead of Factories at Expo’. The Straits Times, 7 May 1970. Straits Times (1971). ‘Teachers Urged to Instil Love for Nature in Students’. The Straits Times, 24 November 1971. Straits Times (1972a). Untitled Letter. The Straits Times, 14 February 1972. Straits Times (1972b). ‘Paint Singapore as a Garden City, Artists Urged’. Straits Times, 13 August 1972. Straits Times (1980a). ‘Nature Tamed’. Straits Times, 13 September 1980. Straits Times (1980b). ‘The 1,189 Men and Women Who See That All is in Trim’. The Straits Times, 5 October 1980. Turnbull, C.M. (2009). A History of Modern Singapore 1819–​2005. Singapore: NUS Press. Wee, C.J.W.-​L. (2007). The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Yeo C.C.R. (1971). ‘Garden City’. New Nation. 30 January 1971. Yeoh, B.S.A., T.E. Ser, J. Wang, and T. Wong. (2001). ‘Tourism in Singapore: An Overview of Policies and Issues’. In Tourism Management and Policy, edited by T.E. Ser, B.S.A.Yeoh and J. Wang, 3–​15. Singapore: World Scientific.

7 DESERTIFICATION, OR DESIGNING NEW WORLDS IN THE DUST Fattori Fraser

‘Out here, there is another way to be’, writes Ursula Le Guin, the late science-​ fiction writer and long-​time high-​desert dweller, ‘/​Something is always moving, running free’ (Le Guin 2010, 15).The American desert is a site of critical, designerly and ecological reverence. It is also a site essential to the establishment of the Great American Project at large. For many of us, our initial encounter with the American desert plays out as follows. Flying overnight from New York to Los Angeles, the passenger first beholds the desert. Blackness on the map, America slips into a void. This perceived absence invites all manner of fear and excitement of what lies below. Our primary reaction to the desert, from afar, is an aesthetic one. On the ground and in daylight, with its extreme aridity the desert appears inhospitable, but at once such apparent lifelessness makes it ripe for imposition. These are the spaces of the ‘in between’, that sit outside the city-​sprawl environs of Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. But these are not spaces of ‘nothingness’, as the overnight passenger might presume –​they are systematized and rearranged on local, national and global scales. These types of spaces fill the desert ‘void’.The darkest town in America –​Gerlach, Nevada –​boasts a welcome sign declaring: Population wanted.1 The desert is ripe. For over 200  years the American desert has fostered the intrigue of critics, activists, and artists ranging from Jean Baudrillard, to D.H. Lawrence, and from Ansel Adams to J. Robert Oppenheimer. In our collective imagination of the desert, it is these names and narratives that may spring to mind for their extolling and promotion of its cultural and environmental lure.2 Less familiar, however, is the narrative perspective of women and non-​Anglo-​American writers, artists, and designers in the desert. In this chapter I choose to focus on and weave together these narratives under the collective heading of speculative place-​making. In their very execution and deployment they design alternative worlds.

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These groups and individuals selected the desert as the site of their place-​making, for its environmental qualities that translate into aesthetic and political qualities. The American desert demonstrates the political relation between periphery and centre. The Great American Project ultimately rests on the systematic suppression of certain undesirable locations  –​we see this enacted similarly in sites such as Guantanamo, the Marshall Islands, Guam and Standing Rock. Such locations are siphoned by the government specifically for their unique interplay between the human and the non-​human, and their teetering on extremity. The extreme environment configures certain sites as ‘invisible’, beyond civic law, and so the beings within it are rendered ineligible for the same protective rights and justices.3 Often regarded as expansive and unsurmountable, these sites are in fact containers for the centre’s undesirable practices and ideologies. The desert is another marginalized body. It is important to consider, in the context of American land ownership, that huge swathes of desert land are federally owned  –​for example, 85 per cent of Nevada is under the control of the Federal Bureau of Land Management  –​and that is highly unusual for a nation founded on principles of private ownership and the homestead (Vincent, Hanson and Bjelopera 2017). Such seemingly remote sites are central to American domestic policy, and so the usage of desert land becomes a question of space and power. How do we fashion geographies and topographies? How do we construct absence and presence, and how do we enact cultural amnesia and environmental annihilation? These questions are answered by, and in, the desert. The desert is not the inverse of the urban, but nor is it simply a metaphor for our present state of destitution; rather, it is a unique construction of space. The swamping of the desert from either coast –​and now from its own cities within (Phoenix, Arizona is one of the fastest growing cities in the United States)  –​ is an example of the human relationship to nonhuman subjects, concretized in nuclear waste isolation sites, gravel pits, speedways, and strip malls that cut into the landscape. The primary aim of this chapter, therefore, is to interrogate the cultural framing of land prior to place-​ making, or designing, and the processes and interactions that follow. The desert is a site in which simulation and experimentation thrives. But the dominant ideology of the desert rests on the foundation of anthropocentric, colonial, and patriarchal myths –​textually inscribed at first, enacted second. This narrative sets up binaries of culture/nature (‘the desert is full of dead stuff ’), human/​nonhuman (‘the desert is empty’), male/​female (‘the desert is man’s frontier’), artificial/​ natural (‘the desert is wild’), binaries that refute complexity as they attempt to organize and hierarchize the environment. This mythic construction ushers the imposition of design, art, and technological objects onto desert space. Resting on these binaries is Michael Heizer’s land artwork Double Negative, a 50-​feet deep trench cut out of the Nevada desert on the Mormon Mesa.4 Here the earth is imagined as rocks to be moved at the divine will of mankind, geologic histories and temporalities are annihilated into the abyss. Land is perceived as a blank canvas –​rather than a site of active and competing subjectivities –​to be reconfigured into pure textuality. The flattening

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of land and mass into Euclidean geometry is also evident in the Public Land Survey System (1785) and the United States Geological Survey (1879), both of which provided the rationale for colonization of the American West. By reducing desert land to a grid, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) cartographically and systematically eliminated the presence of indigenous communities, riverbeds, ranches, flora, fauna, fossils, and petroglyphs. Fashioning land as empty facilitated the pioneer trails out West, and the Homestead and Desert Land Acts that promised to deliver Edenic plenitude from ‘nothingness’. We might therefore say that the settlement of the American desert was a fundamentally Modernist project, resting on what David Nye coined, the notion of ‘the American technological sublime’  –​the central configuration of American selfhood and nation-​ building (Nye 1994, 37). I  submit that the same mentality that produced the vertical magnificence of the Chicago skyscraper and the Hoover Dam produced the horizontal settlement of the American West that continues today. That mentality is predicated on the Burkean sublime of landscape, mixed with a simultaneous awe and dread of technology. The desert is a mythic space imparted upon actual space. The top-​down imposition of values on desert sites rests on centuries of myth-​making, retrenching ideology, and design practice across generations. Political theorist Chiara Bottici argues that myth-​making is not just a speech practice, but a concrete act of crafting and producing new worlds:  ‘Political myths’, she contends, ‘are mapping devices through which we look at the world’ (Bottici 2016, n.p.). The idea of myth as prosthesis is key to the undoing of their domination and hegemony. If myth ‘grants significance to the political conditions and experiences of a [certain] social group’, then its performative potential can be harnessed for alternative configurations of narrative and production (Bottici 2016, n.p.). Speculative place-​making rests not on the textual knowledge of land, but on the embodied knowledge of land. This intersectional, queer, and feminist praxis of ecological reading refutes binarization, revels in the messiness of nature, and forges symbiotic relationships –​in short, it enacts what Donna Haraway calls ‘tentacular thinking’ (Haraway 2016, 3). These design moments of negotiation, adaptation, and co-​optation are the tools by which new practices develop. As outliers  –​buried, historically suppressed myths of their own –​they can recognize subjugated voices and displace dominant ideologies.Their interpretation of space re-​mythologizes the desert land, and the examples of such alternative sites are prosthetic inasmuch as they provide a new lens through which to regard not only desert environments, or extreme environments, but ecologies in general.The American desert, with its confluence of human subjectivity, technology, and ecology, provides us with a means of thinking through, rather than simply about, the environment.This ‘thinking through’ allows us to consider designing beyond imposition upon and within environments, and towards designing with environments.5 The secondary aim of this chapter is to offer examples of speculative place-​making (in contrast to top-​down colonization) within the desert, in order to explore the ways in which land and bodies can intersect to produce symbiotic communities.

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In this study, I cannot ignore my indebtedness to the literature and to the extensive knowledge systems of indigenous Americans (particularly of the Diné, Paiute, Shoshone, and Hopi Nations) in informing my methodology –​much of which has been erroneously Anglicized into the disciplines of ‘flat ontology’ and ‘ecological thought’. Equally, I recognize that my illiteracy and ignorance to the full extent of their embodied and recorded knowledge cannot be overstated. My ethnography is laced with personal undertones and impressions from the numerous desert trips I have taken over the years. To withdraw from this would be a disservice to the chapter’s essential mode, its deliberate attentiveness to the inter-​subjectivities of the self within an ecology. During his 1988 tour through America, Jean Baudrillard proclaimed, of the desert, ‘it is here that we should look for the ideal type of the end of our culture’ (Baudrillard 1988, 63). But contrary to Baudrillard’s interpretation, true immersion in the desert delivers evidence of cultures of resiliency, adaptation, and communion. The sublime instantaneity of the bomb, in its unimaginable finality, has been replaced with the very real threat of ongoing nuclear degradation and environmental collapse. As we teeter on the brink of a new Cold War, to regard the desert as a site of decadence and destitution would be to ignore the complexity of its components and their future-​casting potentiality. Just as the nature of existential threats have altered, we must begin to re-​interpret, reassess, and re-​engage with land as processual and complex, to start designing societies, of multi-​species-​intelligence, in the dust.

The perpetually unravelling container The town of Winnemucca, Nevada receives 275,000 tonnes of California’s garbage per year. The desert town shoulders that which the urban and suburban no longer desire (Carlton 2009). Out of sight, out of mind is a fiction in the desert, space is not infinite and land is not stable. A 440-​acre landfill site at Sunrise, Nevada, after a rainstorm in 1998, spread waste across the desert and contaminated the primary drinking water sources for Southern Nevada, Southern California, and Arizona. The desert moves, land mass slips and belches out its pestilence. Crossing geographies and temporalities, the periphery comes back to haunt the centre. In a site as agriculturally unforgiving as the desert, the confluence of artifice and nature prompts a striking production. The desert is an overflowing container, much like the slippages of the unconscious into reality. What goes on within the desert container cannot be stifled, much like the Winnemucca garbage or the 2014 nuclear waste spillage in Carlsbad, New Mexico (Zuckerman 2014). The physicality and the metaphor of the sandbox has been extolled by childhood developmental psychologists as a contained space where children test out, imitate, and simulate behaviours and relationships that they will take beyond the box into adulthood (Piaget 1962). To the American imagination, the desert provides an identical arena in which to develop and simulate the mechanisms and products that will be taken into non-​desert sites.

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A simulation is the production or imitation of an experience, or an event in anticipation of, but with no direct action towards, a definitive end. Simulation is practiced extensively within the desert. If, as Hannah Arendt claimed, ‘the modern world began with the first atomic explosion’, then modernity was born in the American desert  –​a simulated end ad infinitum (Arendt 1959, 6). The practice-​ zone, or materiality, of simulation depends on this tabula rasa for the production of a controlled environment. It also depends on remoteness or removal from a human population –​unless, of course, the population is a part of the simulation. When unpopulated physical spaces are unavailable, the simulation renders existing populations expendable, subsuming them into its mechanism. And whilst no geography is completely uninterrupted, besides perhaps a cybernetic one (materialized in the 16 x 8’ PowerWall simulator at Los Alamos), the sheer ‘generality’ of the desert expanse, with its repetition and extreme remoteness, comes very close. The most widely recognized simulation, within the desert, is that of nuclear weapons testing –​an activity that shifted the planetary ontological state towards destruction. The detonations of nuclear atomic weapons congregated around two central locations in the United States, Los Alamos, New Mexico, and the Nevada Test Site, both isolated within the American desert. And whilst the height of their activity was in the mid-​century, both sites are far from having been decommissioned. The Nevada Test Site (NTS) is in a new phase of expansion, having secured the neighbouring Groom Lake. Similarly, the nuclear economy extends further beyond the American desert than ever before, as waste disposal sites are built and lost to accidents and system failures at an alarming rate. These are simulations, once physical but now increasingly cyber, predicated on the myth of having no real-​world effect (Masco 2004). They rest, not on existing space, but on the construction of an ‘other space’, one of separation, abstraction, and Euclidean geometry. The first step to reaching this state is de-​territorialization, a term coined by sociologist Valerie Kuletz as ‘the loss of commitment by modern nation-​states to particular lands and regions’, an abandonment of the local and the historical (1998, 123).This myth of containment, tied to myth of artificiality, involves extensive contamination. A very material presence and afterlife of objects is best apprehended in the ‘endlessness’ of nuclear waste, a scale previously unimaginable to human timeframes. Only with adequate human control (almost exclusively white, male, and middle-​class) can landscape be officially designated ‘beautiful’ or ‘useful’. Any prior state indicates a sexual politics where land is designated as ‘Fallen’ and so in need of redemption. Two desert landscapes, the National Parks and Nuclear Test sites, suffered a re-​ordering of their ecosystem by federal authorities to produce this blank slate. The proximity between these two sites is often overwhelming.

‘Un-​natural’  bodies Whilst they seem at disparate ends of the ecological spectrum, the geographies of the national park system and nuclear testing grounds were in fact selected according to the same rationale: deemed ‘worthless’ because no minerals could be extracted from

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them. Each site becomes prone to projection and, once groups are able to enact upon those projections, the simulation occurs. The National Park and Wilderness Refuge systems provided a controlled environment in which the new (white) nation could ‘democratically’ experience Nature at the turn of the previous century, and essentially simulate and rehearse an eco-​utopian worldview within strict confines of population control. The nuclear test site, similarly, was a space for military and scientific personnel to rehearse destruction, in the name of protection of an urban/​sub-​urban public. John Wills notes how both nuclear and national park sites were ‘inherently modern constructions’, accompanied by a fundamentally destructive logic (2001, 452). Art historian Peter Bacon Hales described the Manhattan Engineer District as psychologically ‘somewhere between an army base and a utopian social experiment’, blurring the political lines between the National Park and Nuclear Test Site (1999, 3). In the case of the National Park System, deer culling at Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico, bison culling at the Grand Canyon, Arizona, and burro culling in Death Valley, California, demonstrate the desert ecosystem perceived as threatening yet disposable and thus rendered incapable of self-​regulation. In reality, however, few national parks can lay claim to an ‘untouched’ and controlled nature, as radiation from nuclear fallout at the Nevada Test Site is present at Zion National Park, Utah; Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah; and the Grand Canyon, Arizona.These examples show that simulations get messy; no practice can be executed in true isolation. At the Nevada Test Site a more nefarious, premeditated killing took place. It is estimated that 4,500 sheep died on surrounding ranch-​land as a result of radiation burns from a dirty test on 24 March 1953. Richard Misrach reports the incident in his photo-​series, Desert Cantos (1987): ‘Ewes began dropping their lambs prematurely –​stunted, woolless, legless, potbellied. Soon full-​g rown sheep started dying in large numbers with the same symptoms  –​ running sores with large pustules, and hardened hooves. Horses and cattle were found dead with beta burns’. Animals were subsumed into the simulation exercise, because their existence in downwind areas could not be controlled or eliminated. Simulation, whilst it desires empty, abstracted space, depends on the rendering of bodies that exist within the matrix of dispensable test subjects. The military has attempted to subsume this messiness into its simulation. Decommissioned military and nuclear sites over time, often by virtue of the absence of human activity, allow for the regeneration or establishment of new or different ecosystems. In nuclear storage sites, certain flora and fauna are utilized as ‘indicator species’. At Yucca Mountain officials presently monitor the long-​tailed pocket mouse and desert tortoise as early warning signs of environmental danger. The animals are thereby absorbed into the statistical model, as they come to signify risk in relation to human technology. The ‘canary in the coal mine’ for the atomic age. One proposal from the 1981 Human Interference Task Force discussed using cats as indicator species around sites of nuclear waste, thousands of years into the future. In order to deter human interference or excavation at nuclear sites, Françoise Bastide and Paolo Fabbri suggested genetically engineering cats to glow green in the presence of radiation. As language and signs evolve, mutate and perish, Ray Cats would, presumably, still prompt hesitation and fear into future generations

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(Kielty 2014). The simulation of the atomic test, therefore, can no longer uphold the myth of abstraction and non-​intervention when nonhuman actors become engaged, even instrumentalized, on a geological timescale. The mutilation of animals plays a role in another mainstream desert narrative that coincides spatially with the Nevada Test Site: Area 51. Stories of extraterrestrial sightings around the Nevada military bases are the most copious expressions of the desert uncanny, yet widely ignored by sociologists. The confluence of they, the government and they, the aliens, anthropologist Susan Lepselter points out, exhibits a push-​pull relationship of knowledge and its accessibility to the desert resident or traveller. Stories of ‘abduction’, the exchange of test subjects and global pacts, come forth ‘in the shadow of something that is hidden’ (2005). Lepselter highlights a linearity of persistent trauma through the (post-​)nuclear age to resultant narratives of invasion and invisible threat. Jumbled narratives and distorted evidence from Area 51 locals (in towns such as Rachel, Nevada, home of the Little A’Le’Inn), Lepselter notes, contain fragments of half-​forgotten fragments of other twentieth-​ century atrocities:  human experiments by the Nazis, the CIA, Tuskeegee, colonialist invasions, and slavery (2012). Area 51:  another desert site standing in for ‘America’, this time as a substitute for fragmented histories of trauma that were in fact happening on American soil, but sublimated to the realm of the paranormal. The construction of the extraterrestrial in the desert produces a simulated environment in the mind of the desert inhabitant/​abductee, to play out mythic fantasies and horrors of the revelation of government conspiracies. It is estimated that one third of Americans believe that extraterrestrials have visited or are currently visiting earth –​the suspicion of such hidden knowledge is often wrapped up with other contemporary conspiracy theories, such as the New World Order, chemtrails, and FEMA camps (Andersen 2017). The pervasiveness of the alien and the UFO in post-​Cold War culture has been little discussed in academic texts, but its metamorphosing role as the stand-​in for current paranoia and institutional distrust ought not be underestimated. The alien symbolizes the dissolution of formerly clear distinctions; in our current period of environmental degradation, it also indicates an outlet for optimism. In contrast to the fearful alien culture of the previous century, the present eco-​anxiety of the annihilation of our own existence as a species is remedied in the synecdoche of the alien, life beyond our own planetary ecosystem. The desert provides the perfect stage for these theatrics of space, whether they be supersonic bright lights over Area 51, observed from the Extraterrestrial Highway (Route 375, NV) or beneath the earth, such as in the bittersweet discovery of the E.T. Atari video game burial in the New Mexico desert, uncovered by a team of punk media archaeologists (Caraher, W., Guins, R., Reinhard, A., Rothaus, R., and Weber, B. 2014).

Radical futures, cities in dust The generality and expanse of the desert has also lead to positive simulations and experimentations. The desert is a site for potentiality that has prompted many quests for utopia in the American heartland.6 The countercultural element of the desert

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cannot be ignored, for it is on these groups that many of our mainstream cognisances rest –​particularly our more watered-​down bohemian forays into the desert such as Coachella and Burning Man festivals. Catrin Gersdorf, writing on the Taos Art Colony of the early twentieth century, cites the desert as a space for enacting ‘alternative ways of imagining America’, specifically towards new gender relations (2009, 239). Taos, New Mexico came to be dominated by female artists, writers, and patrons, including Mary Hunter Austin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Mabel Dodge Luhan who established the colony as a matrix of critique against modern, metropolitan America with all its patriarchal and elitist values.7 Whilst utopian communes often rest on the perception of space as uninhabited, uninhibited, the writer Mary Hunter Austin was a vocal advocate of indigenous American rights, and her 1903 piece ‘Shoshone Land’ situates native knowledge as fundamental to bringing the nation into the consciousness of a new century.This queering of gender identities persists in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (which for the most part does a rather poor job at portraying female characters). In the final scene the former Mrs McBain, whose husband and family have been slaughtered by gunmen, re-​establishes the railway development at Sweetwater, now solely her own plot within the desert. She is last pictured delivering water to railway workers, surveying her land. With all the central male characters who once raped and intimidated her either dead or moved onto new towns, McBain’s final scene depicts a new foundation of place-​making (both domestic and territorial) without masculine approbation. In the late twentieth century, facing oppression and condemnation in the cities, post-​Stonewall queer communities took a distinctly anti-​urban turn. Perhaps the best example of this is the lesbian separatist movement of the 1970s. As Catriona Sandilands comments, in her sociological survey of South Oregon women’s lands, these extreme environments enabled ‘marginalized communities [to be] involved in crafting new cultures of nature against the dominant social and ecological relations of late capitalism’ (2002, 132). Sandilands refutes critiques of women’s land as escapism, or exercising utopian ideology, women’s land gave means to working-​class women to become stakeholders in land and its protection (a predominantly middle-​class preserve) by pooling together financial resources. Given the cheapness and breadth of desert land (still acquirable through the Desert Land Act of 1877), the Arizona desert harboured its own women’s land, Adobeland in the Tuscon Mountains, that is still active today. Reconstituting relations to ecology and capitalist modes of production, rather than reinforcing an essentialist ecofeminist dogma, the separatist communities complicated the maxim of the ‘natural’ (connoting strict gender roles and heterosexuality) prompting the (de)naturalization of the desert. Though separatist colonies tended to keep a low profile, to this day many members refusing interviews and external visitations, the desert as a potential queer utopia took its hold in popular culture. Most starkly, Cris Williamson’s album cover for The Changer and the Changed (1974) shows an overall-​clad Williamson standing proudly amongst Joshua trees in the Mojave. Contemporary performance artists Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, subverting queer stereotypes, conceptualized the project ‘Lesbian National Parks Services’. Complete with uniforms, guide books, documentaries

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and youth programmes, Dempsey and Millan not only riff on deconstructing essentialist notions, but also disassemble masculinist notions of ‘conquering’ within extreme landscapes and disrupt nuclear, heteronormative propaganda of American leisure space. Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise (1991), nurturing the non-​sexual, yet exceptionally carnal, relationship between the two female protagonists, chooses the American desert in which to situate a narrative about female liberation. In a similar vein, British musician Kate Nash chooses the American desert as a site to stage her theatrical, riot grrrl femininity. In her music video for My Little Alien, she serenades her dog, Stella, in the Nevada and California deserts –​from trailer park to ocotillo patch –​evoking the interspecies kinship and ‘significant otherness’ of Donna Haraway and Cayenne (Nash 2016; Haraway 2015). These artistic projects and land use experimentations act as simulations for groups who do not have access to imparting such visions in an urban or suburban locale.8

Desertification, drifting sands Michel Serres, speaking of the opening of the Northwest Passage due to ice-​ thinning, describes climate change as a ‘thermal exciter’, moving across a landscape it creates new relationships for people and politics (2007, 191). Though it may be a climatographically inverse environment, the desert is also host to a similar remodelling, taking place through a process understood as Desertification. Swathes of rural, suburban, and urban space are being rendered unliveable as resources diminish, through reduced rainfall, and land-​use drivers, such as extensive livestock and mass agriculture, leach nutrients from the soil (Peters et  al. 2013). Former arid grassland, that once sustained deep biodiversity, is becoming expansive desert.The desert landscape encroaches and its sands cannot be stifled.The shifting of the desert spaces has opened up new industries, emptying out others, and prompting local groups to improvise and experiment. Facing the bleakest of futures, we witness the desertification of the American West opening up capital for industries that profit and gamble on environmental unsustainability and collapse. As a final note, one cannot, and should not, ignore the growing militarization of the desert. Recognizing the mobilization and mechanization of land, the Arizona-​ advocacy group No More Deaths accused US Border Patrol of ‘using the desert as a weapon’ to kill thousands of migrants (Carroll 2016). As the prototypes for the 45th President’s border wall stand silently erect at Otay Mesa (Figure  7.1), they call out to another profane attempt to draw lines in the dust: the ‘tombstone’ slab of William Mulholland’s St. Francis Dam (Figure 7.2) –​a relic on the edge of the desert, touching the Los Angeles basin on the threshold.9 These two structures –​at once concrete design realities and symbolic design gestures –​are morbid reminders of our own efforts to draw lines in the dust, as monuments to old world myths with which we try to reassure ourselves. Serres goes on to suggest that spaces formerly seen as peripheral will become crucial to the possibility of knowledge in our future unstable times. If we can

FIGURE 7.1   Mexico-​US

Border wall prototype, Cadell Construction, Montgomery, Alabama, 2017. Photo by Mani Albrecht. United States Department of Defense. Public domain

FIGURE 7.2  The

remains of the St. Francis Dam, Los Angeles County, 1928, following the flooding of the dam. Also visible is the San Francisquito Fault. United States Geological Survey, United States Department of the Interior. Public domain

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turn our critical eye towards the desert, and other extreme spaces, we can also envisage potential sites of communion and multi-​species connection. As the desert encroaches, perhaps we can learn to live through the desert and carry forth its agency as designers. ‘Anxieties must change, concern must find an altered field’, Le Guin continues in ‘Desert Lessons’ ‘/​before my eye can read the warning in the dust’ (2010, 101). The desert blinks back.

Notes 1 Gerlach sits in Northwest Nevada, one of the sites with the least light pollution in the United States, as catalogued by NASA and the Light Pollution Science and Technology Institute. 2 The desert writings of Reyner Banham, as in Scenes in America Deserta (MIT Press 1982), and the paintings and collages of David Hockney deserve a mention here for their impact on my writing and road-​tripping. The Englishman’s reading of the desert is a ripe topic; however, for this chapter, I chose to focus on the writings of women. 3 For more on the politics of Other spaces, I  recommend the reader consult Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’: see Agamben 2016. 4 For more on the role and positioning of the desert in Modernist art, see Nardelli 2014. 5 In addition to Donna Haraway (2015), such themes of making kin in turbulent times proliferate in Tsing 2015. 6 Frank Lloyd Wright’s San Marcos and Ocatillo developments, Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic Dome and Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti projects all similarly express the utopian potential of the desert. I have, however, avoided discussion of these projects, for they adopt more masculinist, colonialist impositions of space and instead turn the reader’s attention to less frequently regarded sites of experimentation. 7 For more information see Poling-​Kempes 2015. 8 See also Herring 2007. 9 The deadly collapse of midnight 12 March 1928 that killed 431 people in the Saint Francis Canyon.

References Agamben, G. (2016). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by D. Heller-​ Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Andersen, K. (2017). Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-​year History. New York: Random House. Arendt, H. (1959). The Human Condition. New York: Doubleday. Baudrillard, J. (1988). Translated from the French by C. Turner. America. London:Verso. Bottici, C. (2016). ‘Myth’. In: Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon Vol. 1, No. 3.5 (Fall Issue). Accessed 22 May 2018. https://​www.politicalconcepts.org/​myth-​chiara-​bottici/​ Caraher, W., R. Guins, A. Reinhard, R. Rothaus, and B. Weber (2014). ‘Why We Dug Atari’. The Atlantic. 7 August. Accessed 27 March 2018. www.theatlantic.com/​technology/​ archive/​2014/​08/​why-​we-​dug-​atari/​375702/​ Carlton, J. (2009). ‘Trash Loses Luster in Nevada’. Wall Street Journal, 6 November. Accessed 1 May 2017. www.wsj.com/​articles/​SB125746256106132125

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Carroll, R. (2016). ‘US Border Patrol Uses Desert as ‘weapon’ to Kill Thousands of Migrants, Report Says.’ The Guardian. 7 December 2016. www.theguardian.com/​us-​news/​2016/​ dec/​07/​report-​us-​border-​patrol-​desert-​weapon-​immigrants-​mexico. Gersdorf, C. (2009). The Poetics and Politics of the Desert: Landscape and the Construction of America. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hales, P. (1999). Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Haraway, D.J. (2015). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, D.J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Herring, S. (2007). ‘Out of the Closets, into the Woods: RFD, Country Women, and the Post-​ Stonewall Emergence of Queer Anti-​Urbanism’, American Quarterly 59(2): 341–​372. Kielty, M. (2014). Ten Thousand Years. 99% Invisible. [Podcast.] 12 May. Kuletz, V. (1998). The Tainted Desert: Environmental Ruin in the American West. New  York: Routledge. Le Guin, U.K. (2010). Out Here: Poems and Images from Steens Mountain Country. Astoria, OR: Raven Studios. Lepselter, S. (2005). ‘Why Rachel Isn’t Buried at Her Grave: Ghosts, UFOs and a Place in the West’. In: Histories of the Future, edited by S. Harding and D. Rosenberg, 257–​280. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lepselter, S. (2012). ‘The Resonance of Captivity’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(2): 84–​104. Masco, J. (2004).‘Nuclear Technoaesthetics: Sensory politics from Trinity to the Virtual Bomb in Los Alamos’. American Ethnologist 31(3): 349–​373. Misrach, R. (1987). ‘Dead Animals #001’, chromogenic colour print, 1987. Desert Cantos. Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Nardelli, M. (2014). ‘No End to the End:The Desert as Eschatology in Late Modernity’. Tate Papers no. 22 (Fall 2014). Accessed 22 May 2018. www.tate.org.uk/​research/​publications/​ tate-​papers/​22/​no-​end-​to-​the-​end-​the-​desert-​as-​eschatology-​in-​late-​modernity Nash, K. (2016). Kate Nash –​My Little Alien. [Video,Youtube]. 14 November 2016. Nye, D. (1994). American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Once Upon a Time in the West. [Film] Directed by Sergio Leone. 1968. Peters, D.P.C., B.T. Bestelmeyer , K.M. Havstad, A. Rango, S.R. Archer et  al. (2013). ‘Desertification of Rangelands’. In Climate Vulnerability: Understanding and Addressing Threats to Essential Resources, vol. 4, edited by R.A. Pielke. Oxford: Academic Press, pp. 239–​258. Accessed 22 May 2018. https://​www.sciencedirect.com/​science/​article/​pii/​ B9780123847034004263 Piaget, J. (1962). Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. Translated from the French by C. Gattegno. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. Poling-​Kempes, L. (2015). Ladies of the Canyons: A League of Extraordinary Women and Their Adventures in the American Southwest. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Sandilands, C. (2002). ‘Lesbian Separatist Communities and the Experience of Nature: Toward a Queer Ecology’. Organization and Environment 15(2): 131–​163. Serres, M. (2007). The Parasite, translated from the French by L.R. Schehr. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Thelma and Louise. [Film] Directed by Ridley Scott. 1991. Tsing, A.L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Vincent, C.H., L.A. Hanson, and J.P. Bjelopera (2017). U.S. Congress. Congressional Research Service. Federal Land Ownership: Overview and Data. Wills, J. (2001). ‘ “Welcome to the Atomic Park”: American Nuclear Landscapes and the “Unnaturally Natural” ’. Environment and History 7(4): 449–​472. Zuckerman, L. (2014). ‘Elevated Radiation Found in Air near New Mexico Nuclear Waste Site’. Scientific American, 20 February. Accessed 22 May 2018. www.scientificamerican. com/​article/​elevated-​radiation-​found-​in-​air-​near-​new-​mexico-​nuclear-​waste-​site/​

8 ‘THERE’S A WORLD GOING ON UNDERGROUND’ Ecotopian realism in subterranean design Even Smith Wergeland

In this chapter I  explore the relationship between the technological history and the cultural history of the underground, using subterranean design as the binding theme. The basis of my exploration is scholarly work that blends technical considerations with philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural perspectives on life below ground. My contribution is a response to the current call for a more diverse investigation of the underground and especially the encouragement to look deeper into the history of subterranean design (Perrault 2016, 7–​9). The empirical material is gathered from the portfolio of the Norwegian engineering company Fortification AS, who built a series of combined sports halls and bomb shelters during the Cold War. The main case in question is Holmlia Sports Hall and Swimming Pool in Oslo (Figure 8.1) –​colloquially known as Holmlia Pool (Holmlia bad) –​a subterranean building heavily informed by the security parameters of the nuclear race. I approach this ‘architecture of fear’ (Ellin 1996) in light of Paul Virilio’s theories about the wider societal impacts of the Cold War (1994; 2006; 2012). In voicing a profound worry about total planetary destruction, Virilio opens up a discussion on environmental issues, the survival of mankind and nature itself, which must sustain the threat of technology in order to survive. This comes with a double-​edged meaning, since one type of technology can be the antidote to another, such as the heavily technologized subterranean bomb shelter I am analysing in this text. There is also a pragmatic aspect to consider, linked to the energy performance and spatial capacity of subterranean complexes. Even such practical matters are steeped in myth, I argue, by relating the Fortification AS legacy to the ecotopian realism of the Italian architect Paolo Soleri, who is closely associated with the term arcology (Soleri 1969). Soleri propagated a design practice that could lessen the impact of human habitation on any given eco-​system, preparing the ground for a self-​sustainable design.This mixture of floating utopianism and urgent realism is not just typical for Soleri’s output, as Larry Busbea sees it, but a cue to ‘acknowledge that the post-​war

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FIGURE 8.1   A

plan and section drawing of Holmlia Swimming Pool and Sports Hall. Drawing by Jan Anton Rygh. Courtesy of Fortification AS

design logos was in fact a mythos of man-​environment interaction’ (Busbea 2013, 791). This view supports one of my main arguments, namely that the mythological dimension of subterranean facilities –​cultural narratives of both doom and salvation –​must be considered alongside the technical dimension, as previously outlined by Rosalind Williams (2008). Busbea’s and Williams’s line of argument, especially the idea of a convergence of myth and reality, is the backbone of my analytical approach.

A nuclear-​age hobbit hole Holmlia, a residential area in the southern part of Oslo, is home to one of the most unusual sports halls in Norway. Few would know it, though. Holmlia Pool can be quite unassuming at first glance by either of the two entrances:  off-​white concrete slabs, sliding steel grids, and signage in conventional fonts –​very municipal in style. ‘Holmlia multipurpose hall and pool’, the entrance sign reads, as if there was nothing more to say about the building. But for those who have the opportunity to delve further into the matter, there is a lot to unravel. If you are able to locate it, that is. Holmlia Pool is hewn into the local rock –​a hidden geographical spot that adds to the mysteries inside. Today’s version of the building would not necessarily give away too many clues. Gone are the original welcome signs (Figure 8.2) –​much more colourful than the new ones –​and most of the special features are undetectable for ordinary visitors.

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FIGURE 8.2   Jan Anton

Rygh depicted outside the eastern entrance to Holmlia Pool in August 2014. Photo by Tove Solbakken. Courtesy of Byantikvaren i Oslo

To the attentive eye, however, there are still some traces of the nuclear-​age origins. Massive steel locks at each entrance, for instance, conjuring up images of space-​age movies and the Cold War arms race. It may perhaps seem a bit far-​fetched to drop these references at the apparently ordinary-​looking Holmlia Pool. But even before the unusual characteristics are unveiled, I would claim that there is something about underground spaces in general that make the mind go wandering into metaphoric and poetic territory. This peculiarity is explored in books like The Life Below the Ground (1987) by Wendy Lesser and The Subterranean Kingdom (1981) by Nigel Pennick, where fact is blended with fantasy in interesting ways.What is missing from these studies, though, is a convincing investigation of the imaginative potential of seemingly mundane buildings like Holmlia Pool. The fantastical tends to be fantastic, but can that also be true of a municipal sports hall? The planning and construction of Holmlia Pool was led by the two Norwegian engineers Jan Anton Rygh and Per Ivar Wethe from Fortification AS, of which Rygh was the CEO. They devised a sports facility which could also provide a blast resistant and gas tight civil defence shelter for about 7,000 people (Rygh 1985, 1). It was not your average bomb shelter, however. Every aspect of the building was designed to withstand nuclear attacks. This is why Holmlia Pool features an extra room for emergency power, electrical installations for both peacetime operation and wartime operation, fallout gas filters, blast resistant valves and doors, and an emergency electricity generator that will automatically come into operation when external power supply fails (ibid., 3) –​most unexpected features indeed for a Norwegian sports building. The facility has never come under attack, but inside there is a threat that never sleeps. The slumbering anti-​nuclear machinery, waiting to be called into action by

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alarm bells of bygone days, is a Cold War memento. Stu Campbell, best known for his books on gardening and alternative house design, once used the term ‘Space-​age Hobbit holes’ (Campbell 1980, 4) to describe the underground house of the future. Holmlia pool could be described as a Nuclear-​age Hobbit Hole –​a space which conflates the treat of utter destruction and carefree everyday life. It is a past manifestation of an ongoing quest to explore the underground; a quest which always comes in new guises, while old questions of security, anxiety, progress, and sustainability continue to resonate.

The view from below Even though the Cold War threat affected Norwegian society, it was still pretty radical for the Oslo municipality to invest money in a subterranean sports facility in the late 1970s. It is only very recently that we can talk about a subterranean urban design discourse with mainstream reach. The French architect Dominique Perrault has introduced the important term groundscape, which he defines as a particular kind of urban substance that ‘implies that we must go beyond the surface of what is visible’ (Perrault 2016, 181). The view from below is as important as the established view from above, in other words. Although Perrault finds this attitude in historical architectural and planning practice, he nevertheless claims that recent generations of architects have been hampered by a ‘cultural refusal to acknowledge the existence of the zone below ground’ (ibid., 7). Had Perrault been looking more closely at disciplines outside architecture, his verdict may have been different. The efforts of Fortification AS from the 1970s through to the early 1990s grew out of a much larger international discourse on subterranean design, driven by a cross-​fertilization of engineering and other technical professions. As highlighted in Below Ground Level (von Meijenfeldt 2003), the subterranean discourse of the recent past is now re-​emerging in contemporary architecture with a distinct climate perspective (ibid., 44–​49). This development is linked to ‘Pioneer of the underground’ John Carmody, who talks about a shift in focus from finding solutions to urban space shortages to sustainable building below ground. Fittingly, the research centre run by Carmody and his colleague Raymond Sterling at the University of Minnesota since the 1970s has changed its name from the Underground Space Center to the Center for Sustainable Building Research (ibid., 230–​233). This development underscores two things: that environmental concerns were already brewing in subterranean design in the 1970s and that today’s explorations of urban ecologies obviously lean on existing insights. In a time of growing environmental worry, ecological design, architecture, and urbanism need to pay more attention to dull necessities above and below ground (Teicher 1998). Holmlia Pool is an interesting antecedent of this approach, as part of the early wave of subterranean design for everyday life with a possible sustainable outcome. But the underground world is much more than mundane urban necessities. By contrast, it can host spectacular designs like intricate metro stations, mile-​long underwater tunnels, and impressively deep mines. Williams uses the mine as a

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contrasting image of the underground world, in both fiction and reality. Mining has been very beneficial for humankind, but it has also been ‘an enterprise of dubious morality, comparable to mutilation and violation’ (Williams 2008, 24). Similar polar opposites are found in the imaginary underworlds of fiction literature. On the one hand, narratives of fantastic subterranean possibilities in the writings of Ludvig Holberg, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells. On the other hand, the underground hells of Lord Byron and John Keats (ibid., 7–​16). This lasting perception of the underground as a place of either doom or salvation appears in many films too, for instance Twelve Monkeys (1995), The Matrix Trilogy (1999–​2003), and City of Ember (2008). While humanity has survived, the survivors find themselves in various states of degeneration. The general message is that humans do not voluntarily want to dwell below ground –​we only do so in times of major disasters.

Pioneers of the underground Nevertheless, though, we continue to look downwards with great curiosity. Hidden rooms, mythic worlds, and undiscovered paths never cease to trigger the imagination. Williams explains this by showing how science has informed fiction and vice versa over the years. Authors like Edgar Allen Poe adopted ideas from scientific publications, and scientists found inspiration in fictional stories of courageous voyages (ibid., 12–​13). A similar vein of creative exchange can be detected in subterranean architectural design (von Meijenfeldt 2003, 12–​23), not to mention Paolo Soleri’s output, where scientific perspectives morph with spiritual, mythological, and philosophical concepts in architectural drawings that make them virtually inseparable (Soleri 1981). Soleri was critical about what he saw as an increasing rationalization of the ‘environmental game’ at the start of the 1970s, led by energy experts, politicians, planners, and other ‘analyst-​experts’ (Soleri 1973, 6). Technical competence could never be enough, he argued, hoping for an urban design where ‘the rationalizing ends and the aesthetic process takes over in full legitimacy and uniqueness’ (ibid., 36). Good quality in design must always prevail, as must cultural visions that can bridge ‘the gap between the nuts and bolts fanatic and the spiritualist not to mention the “mystic”, the inspired, the possessed’ (ibid., 2). This critique is transferable to the subterranean design movement of the 1970s, which had more technological, rational, and practical trademarks than mythical, aesthetic, and cultural.When Carmody and Sterling launched the Underground Space Center, traditional ‘nuts and bolts’ disciplines like geology, engineering, and construction were still dominant. But, with the formation of International Tunnelling and Underground Space Association (1974) and the American Underground Association (1976), individuals outside the engineering and construction fields were permitted as members for the first time. A multi-​disciplinary interest in all things underground was beginning to take shape (Sterling 2015). The journal Underground Space (1976  –​1985) became an important vehicle for broadening the horizon. Two Norwegian engineers, Rygh and Einar Broch

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published a co-​authored article in one of the first issues (Broch and Rygh 1976). Their work is still cited today (Goel, Singh and Zaoh 2012, 101)  and originally had an impact on two levels: Firstly, it introduced Norwegian rock excavation as a prominent underground expertise. Secondly, it made a strong argument about the cavern typology as the most reliable and flexible subterranean design concept of all. This included caverns for entertainment and recreation in an urban environment –​ a statement on intent that foreshadowed the idea of Holmlia Pool as a progressive urban space. The early phase of the international underground scene culminated with the establishment of an international Earth Sheltered Building Conference in 1983 which extended the range of subject matters, from ‘hard’ technological issues to ‘soft’ environmental issues (Carmody and Sterling 1993, iv-​v). In its prime, Underground Space published papers by a variety of authors, thus covering precisely the kind of cultural and ecological mutations within subterranean design that Perrault is addressing in Groundscapes (2016). The Norwegian cavern typology was established within this expansive mode as a model that could tackle the growing complexity of subterranean design. In 1993 Sterling and Carmody launched Underground Space Design (1993), a summary of their overarching principles and a critique of established planning methods: ‘Traditional planning techniques have focused on two-​dimensional representations of regions and urban areas. This is generally adequate for surface and aboveground construction but it is not adequate for the complex three-​dimensional geology and structures often found underground’ (Sterling and Carmody 1993, 10). In contrast to this conventional approach, they wanted to inspire an economically sound practice by exploiting cheaper spaces and make surface land available for other uses (ibid., 8). When someone opens a hole in the city, the opportunity should be used wisely, was their message. Interestingly, Sterling and Carmody turned to utopian proposals, such as a Geo-​ Grid concept for Tokyo developed by Shimizu Corporation in the early 1990s (ibid., 23), to visualize the opportunities at hand. There are clear traces of ecotopianism in this proposal, which takes sub-​surface utilization to a radical level in order to improve Tokyo’s above-​ground congestion problems. By using an old planning trick –​the grid system –​in reverse, the vision was to provide a large area of Tokyo with liveable conditions below ground, serviced by solar technology for energy supplies. Sterling and Carmody juxtaposed the ecotopian examples with a realistic approach that included negative aspects of underground space design, such as initial costs, operating costs, and environmental degradation over time (ibid., 24–​44). Their biggest worry was human conditions: fear of the dark, claustrophobia, and disorientation. ‘Continuing concern over placing people underground indicates that some of the historic images of dark, damp environments linger in our minds even though modern technology has overcome many of these concerns’ (ibid., 39). This reflection accurately sums up the need to address cultural as well as the technological aspects when dealing with subterranean design. And, as Busbea draws from Soleri, it underscores ‘the need for cultural as well as instrumental

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sophistication’ (Busbea 2013, 791) if a sustainable design discourse is ever going to succeed.

The architecture of fear Fear-​ inducing fortification technology has been a huge part of Paul Virilio’s writings on human culture over the past decades. There is a dividing line in the history of humanity, according to Virilio, before and after nuclear warfare. From the post-​war period onwards we live with the threat of a total war that exceeds the limitations of ordinary terrestrial frameworks. The impact is not just physical but also psychological: ‘The danger of the nuclear weapon, and of the arms system it implies, is thus not so much that it will explode, but that it exists and is imploding in our minds’ (Virilio 2006, 166). This leads to a permanent ‘state of emergency’ (ibid. 147–​167), a critical state which evolves into a critical space, instantaneously present and instantly threatening (Virilio 2012, 173). How does one even begin to plan and design under such dire circumstances? ‘The Second World War (1939–​45) led to the total war’, wrote Rygh in retrospect (2007), echoing Virilio. In 1977 he published a guide to nuclear-​war survival (Rygh 1977), detailing the harsh realities of the atom age and the redeeming techniques of subterranean fortification (Figure 8.3). At least the engineers knew very well what they were dealing with, having learned from the American fallout shelters of the 1950s and 1960s (Monteyne 2011). These shelters had a double spatial nature to them in that they belonged to a programme for national security with a domestic solution (Lichtman 2006, 39–​42). Despite these efforts to instil family comfort and security, the shelters eventually fell under criticism for being naïve, inadequate and misleading as the scale of the nuclear threat dawned on American citizens (ibid., 51–​52). As Williams has noted, we can be as skilled and rational as we want, but nuclear warfare is frightening to a scale that the human psyche struggles to handle (2008, 190). In the 1970s, the cultural fear of collateral damage merged with a renewed quest for human survival.

Unconventional facilities in rock The Norwegian fortification engineers of the postwar period were thrust into a professional life where the fear of nuclear technology had to be mitigated by anti-​nuclear technology. Both Rygh and Wethe had backgrounds from the construction department of the Norwegian Armed Forces. Rygh completed a degree in fortification studies in the US in 1967 from the US Naval Civil Engineering Laboratories, specializing in defence construction engineering, structure dynamics, and radiation shielding (Rygh 2007). Soon after his return from the US he formed Fortification AS. This company transformed the atom age zeitgeist into matter by completing a total of 11 ‘unconventional facilities in rock’ (Rygh 2003, 47). Norwegian municipalities that went for the sports hall and shelter combination got 50 per cent of

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FIGURE 8.3   ‘Protection

from nuclear weapons’. An illustration from the book Tilfluktsrom i praksis: krigskatastrofe og beskyttelsesteknikk (1977). Graphics by the Norwegian Armed Forces. Courtesy of Jan Anton Rygh

the costs covered by the Norwegian Civil Defence (ibid.) so it must have been a tempting offer, despite the radical nature of the concept. It began with Odda Sports Hall in 1972, the first ever handball hall of international standard built in rock. Technical improvements were made for each step and new constellations were tested, for example, the shooting range and bowling alley at Vassøyholtet in Skedsmo municipality, completed in 1979. The company’s best-​known achievement is the Gjøvik Olympic Mountain Hall (Figure 8.4), which was used during the 1994 Winter Olympics at Lillehammer. This is the world’s largest spectator hall in rock even today and was, at the time of its conception, a major challenge both in terms of planning, pre-​calculations, structural complexity, and construction process. Fortification AS were faced with the task of convincing the authorities ahead of the contractual negotiations and were later credited for the efforts by a panel of international experts: ‘As is typical for when one is extending the limits of experience and technology, the initial scepticism that had to be overcome was formidable’ (Barton et al. 1994, 618). Gjøvik

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FIGURE 8.4   An

illustration of the Gjøvik Olympic Mountain Hall and surrounding area, made by Bjørn Holthe for the 1994 Olympic Winter Games. Courtesy of Atelier Holthe

Olympic Mountain Hall is one of the most advanced building projects ever undertaken in Norway, made possible by the spending spree and inherit grandeur of the Olympic Games. The Olympic Mountain Hall was Fortification’s biggest project but Holmlia Pool was not far behind. Upon its opening, it was the largest underground sports centre in the world (Martin 1990, 20). Holmlia was ideal for the purpose –​a neighbourhood planned for 15,000 people built from scratch in a rough, hilly landscape. Excavation and blasting was carried out from September 1979 to September 1980, and the building was inaugurated on 12 September 1983. The total cost was NOK 53.7 million, in compliance with the budget estimations (Rygh 1999, 7.14). Holmlia Pool was built not only for impact protection, but also for long-​time survival, which explains the triple light circuits and the machinery that is only going to be activated in case of a nuclear assault.The sleeping machinery resides in several rooms including a large engine room –​the building’s ‘second heart’ (Figure 8.5). None of these machines have ever been used apart from regular maintenance work. Their extraordinary presence lingers in the background of an otherwise mundane environment, as if the lurking disaster is consciously disguised by an architecture of the ordinary. The more exciting aspects of the interior are largely lost on regular visitors, however, who tend to describe Holmlia Pool as pretty average.The swimming pool foyer is particularly prone to lukewarm reviews (Harstad 2000) due to its sparse furnishing, dim lighting, and lack of service facilities. In that sense, it exemplifies some of the negative aspects listed in Underground Space Design –​it is challenging

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FIGURE 8.5  The

sleeping anti-​nuclear machinery of Holmlia Pool. Photo by Tove Solbakken. Courtesy of Byantikvaren i Oslo

to design exciting and liveable spaces below ground. Moreover, the facility has been accused of being poorly maintained and ventilated (Mellingsæter 2015; Oslo byråd 2017a). But such complaints are quite common in regards to older buildings, simply because maintenance has not been taken seriously enough. This is a common dilemma for all kinds of architecture, as thoroughly exposed by Hilary Sample (2016), not just for subterranean sports facilities. Holmlia Pool may have its challenges, but it is not beyond redemption. While the previous political administration in Oslo wanted to close it down, the current has guaranteed budget money for rehabilitation (Oslo byråd 2017b).

Ecotopian realism Today, maintenance issues are typically weighted against sustainability standards when older buildings are assessed. Could Holmlia Pool possibly pass a contemporary sustainability test? There are diverging answers to that question depending on the perspective but Sterling and Carmody argue it can, and list energy conservation,

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higher urban densities above ground and protection of green land as the most obvious benefits (Sterling and Carmody 1993, 18–​20). This principle is especially desirable in cities with high land prices, such as Oslo, which is why a building like Holmlia Pool makes sense beyond its anti-​nuclear function. Calculation is another issue. ‘A common problem is that underground solutions often cost more than surface solutions but their environmental benefits do not receive economic evaluations’, say Sterling and Carmody (1993, 16), thereby outlining another potential positive effect. The fact that Holmlia Pool was completed on budget –​unlike many of today’s public sports arenas –​should count as a plus.The municipal department in Oslo, which is in charge of sports facilities has a different verdict: ‘It is unfavourable seen from a building perspective to have a swimming pool inside a mountain. In the long term, one should consider to move the pool out of its current whereabouts’ (Oslo byråd 2017a, 41). This claim is not backed by further accessible information, however, so it is difficult to assess its credibility. Previous assessments have concluded positively on behalf of the cavern typology, which has been known to have a solid sustainable performativity compared to other sports arenas, documented through extensive empirical research (Dørum 1983; Rygh 1985; Martin 1990; Barton et al. 1994). These reports are quite unison when it comes to the estimation of thermal conditions, energy consumption and peak energy use. They find that buildings like Holmlia Pool have an annual energy consumption of 69 per cent and an energy requirement of only 41 per cent in comparison with conventional sports halls. The energy use is also more stable throughout the year –​convenient in a city of cold winters like Oslo –​and more positive value is added through large storage capacity, less gas emissions and less alterations of above-​g round terrain (Barton et al. 1994, 640). While these data are beginning to get old –​and must be viewed critically, since they partly emerge from engineering companies with a commercial agenda –​key actors have kept defending them (Rygh 2013). One could also look beyond energy data and talk about sustainability in terms of nature preservation above ground. Holmlia Pool has definitely fared more gently with the local fauna and flora than a regular sports hall. But critics can say that destruction of the natural environment can be equally bad below ground, only more invisible and indirect, and more prone to negative outcome in the long run if the malfunctions are not dealt with quickly enough (National Research Council 2013, 20–​23). The final word is probably not said about Holmlia Pool in regards to this intricate matter. But one thing is certain: the building cannot be understood from a technical perspective alone, it must be studied as a cultural artefact, a child of total war, born in the age of mutually assured destruction and moulded by an ecotopian vision of design resulting from increased environmentalist concerns paired with the peculiar techno-​agnosticism, or -​ambivalence, described above. Rygh’s anti-​ nuclear solutions may have been slightly more pragmatic than Paolo Soleri’s visually astounding arcologies but they were driven by a similar desire for solving the seemingly unsolvable –​planetary destruction. Seen in this light, Holmlia Pool is as ecotopian as it is realistic; far out and hands-​on at the same time.

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Furthermore, as an unusual item from the recent historical past, it should be credited as an important example of subterranean experimentation. Its technological machinery may be out of time but its relevance remains strong –​we also live in a time of fear, albeit with different connotations, and the need for subsurface utilization has never been more urgent. The legacy of Holmlia Pool thus serves as a reminder of Carmody’s vision of a shift in focus, from finding solutions to urban space shortages to sustainable building below ground. Now that we are witnessing a subterranean design field working on two fronts –​improving existing buildings and infrastructures and inventing new ones –​the value of pilot projects should not be underestimated, even if they divide opinions.

References Barton, N., T.L. By, P. Chryssanthakis, L. Tunbridge, J. Kristiansen, F. Løset, R.K. Bhasin, H. Westerdahl, and G. Vik (1994). ‘Predicted and Measured Performance of the 62 m Span Norwegian Olympic Ice Hockey Cavern at Gjøvik’, in International Journal of Rock Mechanics and Mining Sciences, 31(6): 617–​641. Broch, E. and J.A. Rygh (1976). ‘Permanent Underground Openings in Norway –​Design Approach and Some Examples’, in Underground Space Design, 1(2): 87–​100. Busbea, L. (2013). ‘Paolo Soleri and the Aesthetics of Irreversibility’, in The Journal of Architecture, 18(6); 781–​808. Campbell, S. (1980). The Underground House Book. Charlotte, VT: Garden Way Publishing. Dørum, M. (1983). ‘Energy Savings in Oil Stores, Cold Stores and Sports Halls in Rock’, paper at the 1983 International Tunneling Association conference. Ellin, N. (1996). Architecture of Fear. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Goel, R.K., B. Singh and J. Zhao (2012). Underground Infrastructures: Planning, Design and Construction. Oxford: Butterworth-​Heinemann. Harstad, H. (2000). ‘Holmlia bad  –​Oslo’, schmell.no (http://​schmell.no/​swim/​testholm. html). Last accessed on 4 January 2018. Lesser, W. (1987). The Life Below the Ground: A Study of the Subterranean in Literature and History. Boston: Faber and Faber. Lichtman, S.A. (2006). ‘Do-​It-​Yourself Security: Safety, Gender, and the Home Fallout Shelter in Cold War America’, in Journal of Design History, 19(1): 39–​55. Martin, D. (1990). ‘Norwegian Underground Sports Halls Double as Air Raid Shelters’, in Grønhaug, A., M.G. Johnsen and J. Hope, Norwegian Tunnels & Tunnelling. Oslo: Norwegian Tunnelling Society (Originally published in Tunnels & Tunnelling, November 1983). Meijenfeldt, E. von et al. (2003). Below Ground Level: Creating New Spaces for Contemporary Architecture. Basel, Berlin, Boston: Birkhäuser. Mellingsæter, H. (2015). ‘Disse Oslo-​ badene kan bli lagt ned’, aftenposten.no (www. aftenposten.no/​osloby/​i/​GmK6/​Disse-​Oslo-​badene-​kan-​bli-​lagt-​ned). Last accessed on 4 January 2018. Monteyne, D. (2011). Fallout Shelter: Designing for the Civil Defense in the Cold War. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. National Research Council (2013). Underground Engineering for Sustainable Urban Development. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Oslo byråd. (2017a). ‘Behovsplan for idrett og friluftsliv 2017–​2027’. Oslo: Oslo kommune. Oslo byråd. (2017b).‘Budsjett 2018, økonomiplan 2018–​2021, tilleggsinnstillingen (byrådssak 227/​17)’. Oslo: Oslo kommune.

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Pennick, N. (1981). The Subterranean Kingdom: A Survey of Man-​made Structures Beneath the Earth. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Turnstone  Press. Perrault, D. (2016). Groundscapes –​ Other Topographies. Orléans: Editions HYX. Rygh, J.A. (1977). Tilfluktsrom i praksis: krigskatastrofe og beskyttelsesteknikk. Oslo: Ingeniørforlaget AS. Rygh, J.A. (1985). ‘Holmlia Sportshall and Swimming Pool in Rock, Oslo, Norway’. Oslo: Fortifikasjon AS. Rygh, J.A. (1990). ‘Sports Halls, Swimming Pools and Similar Installations in Rock in Norway’, in Sinha, R.S., Proceedings from the International Symposium on Unique Underground Structures (12–​15 June 1990). Denver, CO: CSM Press, 1–​18. Rygh, J.A. (1999). ‘Publikumshaller i fjell gjennom 25 år’, paper at the 1999 NFF conference. Rygh, J.A. (2003). ‘25 Years of Experience with Sport Facilities in Rock in Norway’, in Saveur, J. (ed.). (Re)claiming the Underground Space: Proceedings of the ITA World Tunnelling Congress 2003, 12–​17 April 2003, Amsterdam: International Tunnelling Association,  47–​53. Rygh, J.A. (2007). ‘Forsvarets fortifikatører i sivil tjeneste i 25 år 1966–​1994’, nff.no (http://​ nff.no/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2014/​01/​Fotifikasjon-​25_​aar_​fjellanlegg_​J_​A_​Rygh_​ 070727.pdf). Last accessed 30 December 2017. Rygh, J.A. (2013). ‘Miljøvennlige publikumshaller i bergrom –​en oversikt over anlegg’, private note January 2013. Sample, H. (2016). Maintenance Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Soleri, P. (1969). Arcology:The City in the Image of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Soleri, P. (1973). The Bridge Between Matter and Spirit is Matter Becoming Spirit. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Soleri, P. (1981). Fragments: A Selection from the Sketchbooks of Paolo Soleri. San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers. Sterling, R. (2015). ‘The Emergence of Underground Space Use Planning and Design (editorial to article collection The Emergence of Underground Space Use Planning and Design)’, in Underground Space (www.journals.elsevier.com/​tunnelling-​and-​underground-​space-​ technology/​article-​collections/​the-​emergence-​of-​underground-​space-​use-​planning-​ and-​design). Last accessed on 17 December 2017. Sterling, R. and J. Carmody (1993). Underground Space Design: A Guide to Subsurface Utilization and Design for People in Underground Spaces. New York:Van Nostrand Reinhold. Teicher, J. (ed.) (1998). The Structure of the Ordinary: Form and Control in the Built Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Virilio, P. (1994). Bunker Archaeology. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Virilio, P. (2006). Speed and Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Virilio, P. (2012). Lost Dimension. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Williams, R. (2008). Notes on the Underground:An Essay on Technology, Society and the Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

PART 3

Design in the garden

9 CONTESTED DEVELOPMENT ICSID’s design aid and environmental policy in the 1970s Tania Messell

Whilst environmental problems have induced bilateral, transnational, and international cooperation since the early twentieth century, the postwar period witnessed the widespread recognition of the transnational character of environmental degradation amongst citizens and policy makers (Meyer and Kaiser 2017, 3–​4). As Arturo Escobar notes, the concept of ‘global problems’, gaining currency during the 1970s, disseminated ‘a distinctive vision of the world as a [fragile] global system where all parts [were] interrelated, thus demanding management on a planetary scale’ (1996, 328). By 1972 the Club of Rome Limits to Growth report and the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm alerted states of the globe’s limited carrying capacity, advocated global cooperation to meet these challenges, and helped move the environment to the centre of international political debates. However, at a time when tense discussions on resource management and pollution control took place between the Global South and industrialized North, the Stockholm Conference shed light on the fragmented state of world politics around the issues of development and sustainability. The event’s association of sustainability with technological innovation marginalized from the debate the communities regarded as negating this process. On the other hand, delegates from developing countries condemned the conference as stemming from the developed countries’ desire to impose on the poor countries the costs of dealing with the environmental destruction in order to retain an economic edge over them, and advocated the right to choose their path towards development (Milton 1996; Kaiser and Meyer 2017). As this chapter will show, environmental politics also shaped international design discourse in the 1970s, revealing conflicting visions of the profession’s environmental responsibility within the ranks of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID). ICSID was founded in London in 1957 by designers from Europe and the United States as a cooperative body for national societies, to raise the professional

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status of designers and to establish international standards for the profession. Whilst concerns for the environment remained peripheral to the organization’s activities in Western industrialized countries throughout the 1970s, the promotion of ecologically sound practices and technology constituted a corner stone of ICSID’s policies towards developing countries. In the latter, ICSID advocated ecologically responsible practices alongside increased industrialization, a discourse which resulted from the council’s close ties with industry and collaboration with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) throughout the decade. However, diverging visions on the contribution of industrial design in developing countries emerged in the same period, and ICSID’s Western ethnocentrism and predominantly paternalistic approach to developing countries resulted in growing discontent –​especially in Latin American design circles. These tensions came to the fore at the first Interdesign event held in Latin America, a two-​week workshop organized in 1978 in the town of Cuetzalan, west from Mexico City during which an international roster of designers were invited to develop agrarian and food equipment for the local Nahua ethnic group.The organizers of Interdesign ’78 drew inspiration from the ‘Appropriate Technology’ movement, which, emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, inspired thinkers and designers to solve social inequality through low-​tech, affordable, and ecologically sound technologies. The workshop therefore aimed to conceive equipment that was to operate with sun and wind energy. However, while the event epitomized ICSID and UNIDO’s policies towards developing nations, the designs developed were to a large extent irreconcilable with local economic, technological, and cultural realities, and Interdesign ’78 rapidly became a stage for intense environmental politics. As the majority of Latin American participants recognized during the workshop, the prescribed use of appropriate technology, and the solutions devised during the workshop were maladapted to local conditions. They therefore advocated that design solutions aimed at rural communities and resource management needed to be pursued without the intervention of international organizations. These critiques subsequently resulted in the establishment of the Asociación Latinoamericana de Diseño (Latin American Design Association, ALADI) in 1980. For ALADI’s founders, design approaches and institutional infrastructures that answered the diversity and specificities of the Latin American context were crucial in achieving the region’s economic and cultural independence. At a time when the field of design history has set out to expand its geographical reach, Kjetil Fallan has advocated the necessity to examine ‘how sustainability has been envisioned and visualised in the history of design since the 1960s, and how these visions have varied between different (sub)discourses’ (2014, 24). As Marco Armiero and Lise Sedrez note, environmentalism is an all-​ encompassing word, which covers diverse conceptions of nature and society (2014, 7).The field of environmental history has since the 2000s witnessed an increase of studies that embrace global and world perspectives (Armiero and Sedrez 2004; Simmons 2008; Burke III and Pomeranz 2009). Predating these, work by Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez Alier has critically examined heterogeneous understandings of nature and society across the socio-​economic and geographical spectrum, through which they

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have highlighted the inherent frailty of international environmental standards (Guha and Alier 1997). Scholars have similarly challenged the widespread concept of ‘sustainable development’, which by preserving the gospel of Western economic and scientific evolutionism prevents more radical routes to environmental protection (Hove 2004).Within this scholarship, Escobar has become a fierce advocate of the designer’s capacity to reinforce a ‘pluriversal’ vision of society, in which diverse visions of nature, culture, the individual and community exist side by side (2012). Drawing on this body of work, this chapter argues that the study of the production and promotion of environmental precepts by international organizations such as ICSID offers unique insights into transnational encounters of international agencies, expert networks, and local design circles, whose diverse understandings of design, technology, and natural resources shed light on the position of design in global environmental politics. Based on archival investigation and oral history interviews, it furthermore contends that studying the meeting of international environmental precepts with local agents, and the uncovering of a pluralistic history of environmentalism can contribute the geographical expansion of environmental histories of design. This chapter first maps the role environmental concerns were ascribed within ICSID in the 1970s, and the extent to which these were entangled in the organization’s policies towards developing countries, which it drafted in close cooperation with UNIDO. It subsequently proceeds by examining the diverging expectations towards Interdesign ’78 by the two organizations as well as the Mexican organizers. The concluding section discusses how the Latin American participants received ICSID and UNIDO’s policies, and how the conflict paved the way for the foundation of ALADI. It must be noted that the terminology ‘developing country’ will be used throughout the text since ICSID used the term to describe nations on their way to industrialization, which highlights the binary understanding ICSID nurtured towards these nations, where the organization mainly regarded its contribution through a developmentalist lens.

ICSID, development, and sustainability During the 1970s, ICSID increasingly set out to reposition design amongst complex problems such as user rights, large-​scale industrial projects, and technological change –​all of which brought into question the social contribution of industrial design. Within this climate, the dangers of pollution, resource conservation, and the designer’s responsibility towards the natural environment were also increasingly discussed within ICSID. During the 1970s, several of ICSID’s Council Members –​ including the Indian National Institute of Design (NID), the Soviet All-​Union Research Institute of Industrial (Design Vsesoyuzny Nauchno-​ Issledovatelskiy Institut  Teknicheskoy Estetiki, VNIITE), the Internationales Design Zentrum Berlin  (International Design Centre, IDZ), and the Japan Industrial Designers Association (JIDA)  –​shared an interest in environmental issues, a tendency that reverberated on the topics selected by congress hosts. During ICSID’s biannual congresses in Kyoto in 1973, in Moscow in 1975 and in Dublin in 1977 speakers

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and delegates expressed ecological concerns. However, whilst the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Council Members several times encouraged ICSID to establish a Working Group and instigate activities that considered the designer’s role towards the natural environment, the issue remained peripheral to ICSID’s activities.This situation could have resulted from ICSID’s repeated attempts to gain legitimacy in industry, and its continuous promotion of industrial design as a vital element for economic growth in parallel to its human-​centred activities. Moreover, at a time when, as Victor Margolin writes, seminal texts on the designer’s responsibility towards the environment had not yet significantly impacted everyday design practices (1998, 84), mixed feelings towards this topic prevailed amongst ICSID’s members. This ambivalence came to light during ICSID’s Xth General Assembly and Congress, in Dublin in 1977. During the event, the programme management officer of UNEP, John Haines, admonished designers to act on environment protection and preventative policy and products designed to have a minimum impact on environment (ICSID 1977). However, a decreasing trust in ICSID’s capacity to represent the economic, cultural, and political diversity of its members, and of its executive power had developed within the council. As a result, half of its members signed a Manifesto that protested against ICSID’s claims ‘to possess a recipe for solving world-​problems’ (ICSID 1977, 9). Wary of ICSID’s attempt to establish itself as do-​good organization, the signatories advocated a return to local professional concerns, including a move away from grappling with environmental issues. Even if environmental concerns were withheld from ICSID’s general policy, the topic resurfaced as a key component of one of its more specialized target strategies:  design for development. At a time when the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth advocated recycling and waste restrictions through the production of durable and easily repaired consumer goods (Kaiser and Meyer 2017, 5), and appropriate design methods for developing countries were debated within ICSID, environmental concerns gained importance within the council’s initiatives specifically geared towards these nations. In 1970 the council established the Working Group IV Developing Countries, and in close collaboration with UNIDO, held seminars, produced reports, and planned the dispatching of ‘experts’ to developing countries to alleviate problems in the latter (ICSID, 1971–​1974). As reflected in Working Group IV’s meetings and in the discourse of its first Coordinator, the German designer Gui Bonsiepe,Working Group IV advocated design methods that took into account environmental impact and resource management during its early years. Bonsiepe was commissioned by ICSID in 1973 to write a report for UNIDO, titled ‘Development through Design’ (Bonsiepe 1973). The text, which highlighted the potential of design as a tool for development, underlined that ‘the restricted resources of dependant countries required a rational approach which guaranteed their optimal utilisation’, whist these countries needed to pay attention to ecological aspects in their industrialization process (1973). The remaining members of the Working Group IV shared this view, and on the occasion of a meeting of the commission in 1975 added that designers in developing countries needed to employ re-​usable materials and products, and to conceive environmentally compatible technologies (ICSID 1975, 9).

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However, the benefits of appropriate technology and craft were not entirely endorsed by Working Group IV. Alison Clarke has highlighted how ICSID’s promotion of grass roots design was associated with disguised Cold War diplomacy and Western development initiatives in the late 1970s (2016). An ambiguous position towards design methods and technology could also be found within the Working Group IV. As Papanek recalled in an interview, the Working Group IV included individuals who endorsed UNIDO’s policies and privileged a ‘high-​tech bias of design expansionism’ (1983).Thus by 1975 Bonsiepe and its members rejected craft design in favour of ‘craft based industry’ such as industrially produced chinaware and textiles (ICSID 1975, 6). Moreover, as Bonsiepe underlined in his report to UNIDO, craft industry was not to become a priority, since ‘Industrialisation is precisely a way of overcoming arts and crafts manufacturing methods’ and remaining on that level led to ‘a self-​inflicted cut-​off from development possibilities’ (1973). Finally, whilst Working Group IV believed that designers should use local raw materials and existing or affordable technology (ICSID 1975, 8), it continued to promote design as an instrument of industrialization, which ultimately preserved a Western capitalist model (ICSID 1975, 9). A similar ambivalence existed within UNIDO. The organization’s aims had since 1967 been to further industrial development in developing countries through the joint promotion of engineering and design expertise (ICSID 1969), and, since its General Conference in Lima in 1975, had set out to increase the industrial output of developing countries from 7 per cent to 25 per cent by 2000 (Osmańczyk 2003, 1325). Thus, whilst UNIDO advocated the use of alternative, environmentally compatible technologies in developing countries, the agency also promoted the benefits of industrial technology and knowledge transfer, and the contribution of design towards industrialization and technological innovation (UNIDO 1975). UNIDO’s and ICSID’s ambivalent positions towards the environment and design in developing countries remained in place by 1979. In 1977 ICSID and UNIDO signed a Memorandum of Understanding to jointly ‘alert developing countries to the advantage of including industrial design in their planning process’ (Balaram 2005, 56). It was followed by a conference in Ahmedabad in 1979, which resulted in the drafting of the Ahmedabad Declaration by the two organizations to accelerate design promotion in developing countries. However, whilst the text promoted the use of wider ‘indigenous skills, materials and traditions’ and advocated the protection of natural resources, it stressed the profession’s need to absorb ‘the extraordinary power that science and technology can make available to it’ (ICSID and UNIDO 1979). The document was explicitly indebted to UNIDO’s Lima Declaration of 1975 (ICSID and UNIDO 1979), and whilst ICSID and UNIDO’s cooperation was to ‘stimulate the decrease of dependence from imported technologies and create more favourable conditions for a growing self-​reliance’, both organizations were presented as brokers of technology transfers (UNIDO 1977). The spectre of interventionism and technological advancement thus loomed over the 1978 Interdesign workshop in Mexico, during which diverging understandings of design for Latin American rural communities met (Figure 9.1).

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FIGURE 9.1   ‘Ahmedabad

Declaration on Industrial Design for Development, ICSID, UNIDO, 1979’. ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​06/​4/​4

Interdesign ‘78 Initiated by ICSID’s member societies and co-​organized with ICSID from 1971, Interdesigns were a series of two-​ week long workshops during which topics that ranged from winter sports to design for the disabled were examined by an

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international roster of designers.The events were promoted as educational initiatives, but these encounters also aimed at exporting design expertise, as their participants were to ‘offer their time and professional services voluntarily’ to the host country, as the Austrian designer and former ICSID President Carl Auböck noted (1979, 1). Latin America constituted a central field for ICSID’s interventions throughout the 1960s and 1970s, during which the council multiplied its attempts to introduce design methods that would contribute to the region’s modernization (Messell 2016). Interdesign ’78 similarly constituted a central means to facilitate the export of design know-​how and to contribute to UNIDO’s programmes of assistance in the region. Indeed, the workshop in Mexico constituted the first collaborative event following the recent cooperation agreement between ICSID and the United Nations agency, and ICSID considered its success essential for the future of their joint venture. The workshop thus needed to achieve concrete results and to reflect ICSID’s wider initiatives towards developing countries. As Auböck later reported, the event should stimulate international cooperation on a ‘theme relevant to the needs’ of Mexico, and of developing countries more widely (1979, 5).Thus, ICSID’s Executive Board successfully suggested that two of the participating designers to be sponsored by UNIDO should be recruited from India since that country –​so they argued –​had similar conditions as Mexico and the results could easily be transferred there. Moreover, in order for the workshop to produce appropriate designs, ICSID set out to include only the highest calibre of designers. In terms of legacy, it was hoped that Interdesign ’78 would lead to the establishment of a Study Centre in Mexico, facilitating further development of the outcomes and stimulating technology transfer more broadly. As it turned out, though, the workshop organizers failed to meet ICSID and UNIDO’s expectations. The expert gathering was initially planned by the Mexican Design Centre, who, having selected the theme ‘Business for Craft’, aimed at gathering experts to draft a series of guidelines for helping developing countries to increase their craft export, including through design alterations.The change of government in Mexico in 1976, however, forced the Design Centre to close its doors in 1977 due to a lack of official funding.The planning of the event was thus passed on to the Colegio de Diseñadores Industriales y Gráficos de México (Mexican Society of Industrial and Graphic Designers, CODIGRAM), whose members decided to change the theme to design and alternative energy sources for rural communities. As its coordinator, Juan Gómez Gallardo Latapí, shared in an interview, sustainable energy sources were gaining visibility in Mexico at the time (2015, pers. comm., 2 June). The Mexican government had developed an alternative energy policy and CODIGRAM was moreover closely connected with the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where studies on design and alternative energy sources were taking place. Dependency theory was furthermore gaining importance in Latin America during this period, and growing interest in economic sovereignty, peasant movements, and the 1973 oil crisis, made for a context receptive to ideas about appropriate technology (Fressoli and Around 2015, 4). As the Mexican organizers noted, rather than relying on capital goods and conventional energy sources, the

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FIGURE 9.2  The

theme of renewable energy was most potently conveyed through the representation of a helix on the event’s documents. Interdesign logotype, 1978. ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​05/​5/​1

development of alternative energy sources and simpler, more affordable technologies would be a more viable way to solve the ‘unequal development of many countries’, and for the country to reach autonomy in the face of scarce energy resources (Martin Juez 1978) (Figure 9.2). ICSID and UNIDO nevertheless regarded the topic selected by CODIGRAM as unfit for Mexican design circles. Whilst UNIDO had withheld funding, and insisted that the workshop examined industrial craft methods, further deliberations took place between UNIDO, ICSID, and the organizers of Interdesign ’78.  As ICSID Vice-​President Mary Mullin noted in 1978, the new theme reflected how the designers had ‘not yet realized, nor had their training permitted them to be able to understand the major contribution good design could make in maximising the talent in their country and use it as a basis for industrial development’ (February 1978). According to Gallardo Latapí, ICSID also reacted with ‘bewilderment’ to the new theme, since it would imply the use of simple technologies. Interdesign workshops had been conceived as events during which participants were to ‘work on real cases, and the Cuetzalan indigenous community had very specific problems, so they [ICSID] saw them as a community that necessitated rudimentary designs for objects that could be made by the indigenous’ (Gallardo Latapí 2015, pers. comm., 2 June). UNIDO, on the other hand, expressed dismay at the lack of heavy industry involved in the event –​whilst acknowledging that the theme reflected the ‘young’ and utopian character of the organizers, recalls one of them, José Antonio Martínez (2015, pers. comm., 30 Apr.). UNIDO thus similarly to ICSID regarded the topic as ‘inappropriate’ for the country’s design activities, a view shared by the Mexican sponsoring bodies, who all operated in the science and industry sectors (Gallardo Latapí 2015, pers. comm., 2 June) (Figures 9.3 and 9.4). Interdesign ’78 moreover witnessed a series of shortcomings due to the diverse expectations of the organizers and the participants and to the solutions devised. Five groups were formed, and each was invited to develop designs for a DIY greenhouse; a biomass digester (which converts waste into bio-​fertilizers for example);

FIGURE 9.3   Sketches

of the DIY greenhouse developed by Group 1. Carl Auböck, ‘ICSID UNIDO Interdesign Mexico 1978’, Annex, 1978. ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​05/​5

FIGURE 9.4   Interdesign

participants devising design solutions and prototypes. Carl Auböck, ‘ICSID UNIDO Interdesign Mexico 1978’, Annex, 1978. ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​05/​5

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a solar powered drier for products such as coffee and grain; and wind-​powered pumps for water transfer and electricity supply. The fifth group was invited to draft a report on Technology Transfer and on the Implementation of Design Innovation (Auböck 1979, 11–​12). As the assigned technical expert, Auböck, later reported, the less experienced designers struggled to offer concrete proposals, whilst the most seasoned participants experienced difficulties in adapting their approaches to the conditions of the Nahua community. Auböck therefore concluded that the theme was too complex to be treated in such a short period (1979, 21), and indeed, there is no evidence that any of the projects got an ‘afterlife’ like the Interdesign format intended. ICSID’s paternalistic approach was palpable at the workshop as well, which was closely monitored by Western design experts. Whilst Auböck was the technical expert, the British design consultant John Ballyn, who since 1973 provided designs and production technology to craft producers internationally, was assigned with overseeing the drafting of the report on technology and innovation transfers, possibly as a remnant of the initial Interdesign theme. Moreover, Walter Dorwin Teague Jr. was appointed as the ICSID coordinator of the event due to his training as an engineer and his experience with solar energy use in architecture and sailboat design. As Mullin noted before Interdesign ’78, Mexican design organizations were young and inexperienced, which necessitated closer guidance (March 1978). ICSID President Yuri Soloviev on the other hand believed that Dorwin Teague Jr.’s assistance was essential since the subject was ‘very complicated especially for designers who do not have much experience in this specific field’ (1978). Frustration concerning design capacities was also expressed by the organizers and the participants. As Dorwin Teague Jr. reported, most of the projects had stranded since ‘sophisticated equipment [had been] handled with primitive materials, tools and experience’, whilst the participants condemned the introductory sessions as ‘naïve’ and ‘too elementary’ (1978). Finally, whereas the projects were aimed at the Nahua community, its members were not invited to participate in the workshop, further deepening the gap between the solutions devised and the Nahuas’ realities (Figure 9.5). At a time when late in the 1960s ‘social design’ experiments had laid the ground for methodologies later designated as ‘participatory design’ (Lie 2016), and ‘anthropological-​style discourse, with its focus on localized meanings, ritual context and human-​centred methodologies began to be embraced within strands of the main-​stream design professions’ (Clarke 2016, 47), the absence of collaboration also appeared to be out of touch with the event’s human-​centred orientation.

Diverging views Faced with the international community’s lack of understanding of the diverse rural conditions in Latin America and ICSID’s neo-​colonial agenda, some of the Latin American participants laid the foundations for ALADI during the event. ALADI’s members rejected Western interventions in Latin America’s modernization process (Buitrago and Da Costa Braga 2014). According to one of its founders, Columbian designer Rómulo Polo, ICSID’s intervention in the region’s design initiatives

FIGURE 9.5   Interdesign

participants further developing design solutions and prototypes. Carl Auböck, ‘ICSID UNIDO Interdesign Mexico 1978’, Annex, 1978. ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​05/​5

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resulted  either in little benefits, or in policies reflecting Western conditions (2015, pers. comm., 18 June). Some of the Latin American attendees, who originated from Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Paraguay, and El Salvador, consequently drafted a document, which, drawing from dependency theory, challenged the ideological and political foundations of the workshop. The statement pronounced that Interdesign ’78 revealed an immense contradiction in its approach to energy problems for communities whose members ‘already relied on the use of renewable natural resources’. The signatories moreover viewed the solutions devised as maladapted for communities in which acute poverty prevented the introduction of alternative technology (Polo 1980). As they declared, the ‘utopian’ character of the designs ‘highlighted that the problems of developed centres are not the same as in the marginalized areas’, and the skewed approaches of some international organizations, with regard to the realities of developing countries (Polo 1980). Thus, whilst the social role of design was fully acknowledged by the group, some of its members wanted to ‘help as they saw it, and not as imposed’ (Polo 2015, pers. comm., 18 June). The group therefore set out to establish an association that would foster community and information exchanges amongst Latin American designers to cater for the diverse conditions of Latin American countries, which they named ALADI (Polo 1980). Three of the participants, the Brazilian designer José Abramowitz, the Argentinian engineer and design promoter Basilio Uribe, and Polo, consequently met during ICSID’s Ahmedabad meeting in 1979, where ALADI’s objectives were deliberated. A later meeting took place during ICSID’s congress in Mexico City in 1979, where ICSID’s objectives in Latin America were once again condemned during a parallel event (Messell 2016). ALADI was subsequently founded in 1980, after which it spurred long-​standing exchanges amongst Latin American designers until 1993, when shifting personal dynamics and generational differences put the initiative on hold (Buitrago 2010, 69). Whilst ALADI did not become a member of ICSID, the establishment of the Latin American association echoed wider critiques against the Council’s centralized structure and the widespread formation of regional design organizations within its ranks. Members of these groups favoured autonomous regional and local design practices over cooperation coordinated from the ‘Centre’, and their appeal pressured ICSID’s Executive Board to recognize the diverse expectations of its members, and the necessity for regional cooperation. Thus, environmental politics, entwined with development concerns, played a crucial role in ICSID’s encounter with Latin American design circles. By fostering an organized movement that rejected ICSID and UNIDO’s international policies at the very moment when these organizations officialized their initiatives towards the region, Interdesign ’78 brought to the forefront the political implications of imposed environmental precepts, and carved a path for institutional self-​determination.

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated that environmental concerns held a central place in ICSID’s development initiatives in the 1970s.Through a close examination of ICSID

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and UNIDO’s policies in the 1970s, it revealed that the spectre of industrialization and technology transfer loomed over the promotion of appropriate technology and cultural traditions. The case of Interdesign ’78 in turn highlighted how ICSID and UNIDO’s attempts to disseminate their policies was met with attempts at preserving local diversity and technological autonomy within wider attempts at gaining technological, economic, and cultural independence in Latin America. By bringing forth the negotiations that pervaded ICSID’s encounter with Latin American designers, this chapter has therefore underlined the central contribution studies of international design organizations can offer to the construction of an inclusive design historical map of environmental imaginaries and imperatives. Moreover, at a time when ICSID has aligned its aims with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), drafted by 169 Member States in 2015, and a discourse of economic growth pervades the council’s advocacy of sustainable practices, it is crucial to discuss the organization’s longstanding failure in moving beyond a capitalist model and a Western-​centric bias. As Escobar notes, ‘To accomplish this goal, we need to start thinking about human practice in terms of ontological design, or the design of other worlds and knowledges’ (2012, 73).

References Armiero, M. and L. Sedrez (ed.) (2014). A History of Environmentalism: Local Struggles, Global Histories, London/​New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Auböck, C. (1979). ‘ICSID UNIDO Interdesign Mexico 1978’ ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archive, ICD/​05/​05. Balaram, S. (2005). ‘Design in India: The Importance of the Ahmedabad Declaration’. Design Issues, 25, 54–​79. Bonsiepe, G. (1973). ‘Development through Design, working paper prepared for UNIDO at the request of ICSID’, UNIDO/​ITD.8o, Vienna. Buitrago, J. (2010). ‘La profesionalización académica del Diseño Industrial en Colombia. Reflexiones en función de la construcción del objeto de estudio’ Actas de Diseño, 9: 64–​71. Buitrago, J. and M. da Costa Braga (2014). ‘Algunas hipótesis sobre su configuración (1980–​ 1995)’, Revista Nexus Comunicación, 15: 158–​171. Burke III, E. and K. Pomeranz, (ed.) (2009). The Environment and World History Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Clarke, A. (2016). ‘Design for Development, ICSID and UNIDO:The Anthropological Turn in 1970s Design’ Journal of Design History, 29 (1): 43–​57. Dorwin Teague Jr., W. (1978). ‘Interdesign ’78 Mexico Report’ ICSID Archive, December 3, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​05/​5/​1. Escobar, A. (1996). ‘Construction Nature: Elements for a Post-​Structuralist Political Ecology’ Futures, 28(4): 325–​343. Escobar, A. (2012). ‘Notes on the Ontology of Design’ draft circulated for the panel ‘Design for the Real World: But which World?’, American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, 13–​18 November 2012. Fallan, K. (2014). ‘Our Common Future: Joining Forces for Histories of Sustainable Design’ Technoscienza: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies, 5(2): 15–​32.

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Fressoli, M. and E. Around (2015). ‘Technology for Autonomy and Resistance: The Appropriate Technology Movement in South America’, STEPS Working Paper 87, Brighton: STEPS Centre. Gómez Gallardo Latapí, J. (2015, 2 June). Personal interview. Guha, R. and J.M. Alier (1997). Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South. London: Earthscan. Hove, H. (2004). ‘Critiquing Sustainable Development: A Meaningful Way of Mediating the Development Impasse?’ Undercurrent, 1(1): 48–​54. ICSID (1969). Minutes Executive Board meeting with Nikolai Grigoriev, ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, DES/​ICD/​04/​1. ICSID (1971–​1974). Minutes Executive Board Meetings, ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, DES/​ICD/​04/​2. ICSID (1975). ‘Design for Industrialisation: Report of the Consensus of opinion of an Expert Group Meeting’, 29 September 29, ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​06/​4/​1/​4,  p.9. ICSID (1977). Minutes General Assembly, Dublin, September 23–​ 24, ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​03/​9/​16. ICSID, UNIDO (1979). ‘Ahmedabad Declaration on Industrial Design for Development, ICSID, UNIDO’, ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​06/ ​4/​4. Kaiser, W. and J.-​H. Meyer (ed.) (2017). International Organizations and Environmental Protection: Conservation and Globalization in the Twentieth Century, New York/​Oxford: Berghahn. Lie, I.K. (2016). ‘ “Make Us More Useful to Society!”: The Scandinavian Design Students’ Organization (SDO) and Socially Responsible Design, 1967–​1973’, Design and Culture, 8(3): 327–​361. Margolin, V. (1998). ‘Design for a Sustainable World’, Design Issues, 14(2): 83–​92. Martin Juez, F. (1978). Interdesign presentation, ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​05/​5/​1. Martínez, J.A. (2015, 30 April). Personal interview. Messell, T. (2016). ‘International Norms and Local Design Research: ICSID and the Promotion of Industrial Design in Latin America, 1970–​1979’, Proceedings of Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference, Brighton, UK, 27–​30 June 2016. Milton, K. (1996). Environmentalism and Cultural Theory: Exploring the Role of Anthropology in Environmental Discourse, London/​New York: Routledge. Mullin, M. (February 1978). Correspondence with Song Leng Leang (UNIDO), ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​05/​5/​1. Mullin, M. (March 1978). Resumé of telephone conversation with Yoshio Nishimoto. ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​05/​5/​1. Osmańczyk, E.J. (2003). Encyclopedia of the United Nations and International Agreements: G to M, Oxon: Taylor & Francis. Papanek, V. (1983). ‘For the Southern Half of the Globe’, Design Studies, 4(1): 61–​64. Polo, R. (1980). ‘Interdiseño 78,  Valle de Bravo, México: Documento de Intención’, La Carrera 3 Del Diseño, 17–​18. Translation by the author. Polo, R. (2015, 18 June). Personal interview. Simmons, I.G. (2008). Global Environmental History: 10,000 BC to AD 2000: 10,000 BC to AD 2000, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Soloviev, Y. (1978). Correspondance with Walter Dorwin Teague Jr., August 23, ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​05/​5/​1.

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UNIDO (1975). ‘Basic Guidelines for Policy of Industrial Design in Developing Countries’, 17 March, ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​06/​4/​1/​4. UNIDO (1977). ‘Meeting with Non-​Governmental Organisations Having Consultative Status with UNIDO on Co-​operation Between These Organisations and UNIDO’, ICSID Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives, ICD/​12/​2/​3.

10 POWER IN THE LANDSCAPE Regenerating the Scottish Highlands after the Second World War Frances Robertson

Environmental conservation became subject to legislation in postwar Britain when the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949 (Sheail 1984, 29) framed nature as a valuable shared resource. In this view, natural wild landscapes could contribute to social reconstruction through offering scenic amenity and places for healthy recreation.Within Britain, Scotland’s world-​famous mountainous regions might at first glance appear to offer an ideal expanse of natural countryside in which to experiment new forms of social amenity, allied with technological progress. However, the celebrated natural beauty of the Highlands had come into being through a history of cultural conflict and territorial dispute. This chapter examines cultural, political, and material elements contributing to the insertion of hydro-​ electric power schemes into the Scottish Highlands after the Second World War, the result of the wartime Hydro-​Electric Development (Scotland) Act of 1943. While this initiative was seen by modernizing central planners as an urgent corrective to the long standing decline of this ‘semi-​derelict region’ (Kirby 1946, 1), described as a land in a ‘coma’ from which it might never recover (Highland Herald (HH) 12 June 1947, 3) at the same time there was pressure to maintain the artificial wilderness of the Highlands as a ‘cultural museum’ (Burnett 2010) that was in the social imaginary a potent focus for how various local and national communities imagined themselves. Although design elements such as the site, buildings, and landscape architecture of specific hydro projects such as the Glen Moriston and Glen Affric schemes will be discussed, they will not be considered in isolation. Instead, they will be addressed as additional design elements inserted into an already designed environment, making reference to the pre-​existing historical processes of making and unmaking the Highland landscape as a wilderness area (Maver 2000). The result, as I argue, was that these major engineering projects of modernization took on a monumental elegiac cast as expressions of the ‘Celtic’ culture being debated in the Highland region in the period of postwar reconstruction.

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In the testimonies of various voices seeking to shape this real ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991) at local and national levels we can see an imbrication of design processes of planning, mediation, and installation of these significant engineering interventions into natural, human, and geomorphological landscapes. The sustainability of hydro electric power schemes, at first glance so clean in comparison to fossil fuel power sources, are nevertheless subject to question due to their impacts on living landscapes and human communities (Kallhoff 2017; Kaika 2005; Gandy 1997).The Highland landscape was particularly charged with significance as a perceived wild natural region; after the Second World War it was increasingly also considered as a common amenity subject to public consultation during planning proposals. Thus, in the case of the Highland schemes discussed in this chapter we see that most argument was couched in terms of stemming human population decline, social justice, and access to the land. Researchers in other areas of history and cultural theory have already opened up new approaches to the examination of the ‘material powers’ at work in water flows across natural/​designed environments (Bennett and Joyce 2010; Cosgrove and Petts 1990); this chapter will consider how these insights can inform and expand current debates within design history.

Designing and shaping the wilderness By the end of the Second World War, depopulation, absentee landlords, and lack of economic investment had maintained the Highland region as an artificial wilderness for well over a century, the results of repeated assaults on Highland culture first as pacification after the Jacobite rebellions and second due to the Clearances of ‘uneconomic’ crofting tenants by modernizing landlords through the nineteenth century. The rugged Highland landscape of mountains, streams, and forests is often described as ‘unspoilt’ with few signs of man’s presence in houses, roads, fences, fields or factories.This empty and dramatically mountainous landscape gained enormous cultural value throughout the nineteenth century, first through the novels of Sir Walter Scott, and then, in a touristic feedback process, through landscape paintings, guides, and tourist experiences of favoured sites of amenity (Smith 1988, 92–​93; Gold and Gold 1995, 1–​4; Morrison 2003, 47–​48). However, this apparently untouched wilderness is highly managed and controlled. The land is used for large-​scale sheep and deer ranching or for the raising of game birds such as grouse for elite shooting parties –​all these resulted in a cropped, deforested, and depleted biosphere that has been maintained from the late nineteenth century through to the present, in part due to patterns of unequal land ownership (McKenna 2013; Wightman 1997). Throughout this period, well-​intentioned efforts, such as the 1884 Crofters’ Act, sought to defend crofters in their unequal relationship with landowners, but the reality in the late 1940s was that there were many small unprofitable units maintained by demoralized, isolated crofting families who depended on welfare payments to keep afloat (Harvie 1977, 178). Overall in the twentieth century Scotland’s economy was weak, in both the industrial Central Belt and in the neglected Highlands (Harvie 1977, 113; Lorimer 2000, 403–​31). In the Highlands,

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Gaelic speaking communities lost voice and memory through the general official use of English as the language of education, work, and commerce, while population fell through continued emigration, hastened by wartime service (Burnett 2010: 45). With reference to previous hydro-​electric developments in Scotland before the Second World War there are two examples that must be noted (Hannah 1979). First, although the Highland schemes that followed the Act of 1943 were discussed and received as a new and ‘unprecedented opportunity for large-​scale planning’ (Association of Scientific Workers 1943, 75) there had been one earlier initiative that gained national attention at the start of the twentieth century.The British Aluminium Company (BACo), founded in 1894, developed hydro-​electric aluminium smelting operations in the Western Highlands and at overseas plants in Norway, Canada and Guyana in the first half of the twentieth century (Perchard 2012, 25–​28). Their first plant opened in Foyers on Loch Ness in 1896, harnessing power from an already renowned tourist site, the Falls of Foyers, a roaring torrent that to its many admiring viewers was an epitome of the sublime forces of Nature. BACo’s plans to take over this beauty spot for industrial use prompted public debate with letters to the Times of London from such campaigning bodies as the newly formed National Trust for Places of Historic Interest and Natural Beauty, founded in 1895, and supported by such vocal critics as John Ruskin or the Duke of Westminster (Perchard 2012, 191–​195). That debate to some extent established a framework for later discussions, establishing terms in which scenic beauty was pitched against economic regeneration. As a result, more nuanced concerns about environmental and human health dangers from pollution were sidelined (Perchard 2012, 201). We might note also BACo’s strategy of ‘conservative modernisation’, with an emphasis on order and tradition through their support for Highland Gaelic cultural events (Perchard 2012, 247)  that echoed with the ways in which the later Highland schemes were put forward. In addition, and well south of the Highlands in the agricultural Galloway region by the border with England, a hydro-​electricity generating scheme was constructed along the Dee and Doon river systems in 1931–​1936, a large capital investment that had only become profitable due to the recent creation of a British Central Electricity Board (CEB) in 1926 with executive powers to construct and operate a national grid and to centralize power generation (Hudson and Hunter 1938: 7; Hannah 1979: 100–​104). Electricity was an exportable national product in this context. In marked contrast to the styles later developed in the postwar Highland projects, architects on this scheme designed streamlined and functionalist avant-​garde forms, with blocky, factory-​like white turbine halls (McKean 1987: 6–​ 7; Robertson 2014) asserting an aggressive command over the rivers on which they stood. In more mainstream urban environments of the period in Scottish cities of the central industrial areas we see a similar streamlined and functionalist modernism in buildings devoted to consumerism and leisure in department stores, cinemas or exhibitions such as the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow of 1938 (McKean 1987: 6–​7). This period also saw new notions of Scottish identity that fused left-​wing, progressive international modernism with nationalism, as for example in the journalism of the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, writing as C.M. Grieve, who aggressively promoted

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a constructivist-​style ‘machine aesthetic’ rooted in engineering prowess with his vision of the artist-​engineer (Normand 2000, 76–​78). All these cultural factors from the pre-​war schemes of national and local identity, national interest (not at all the same thing) and modernization were re-​worked and re-​made in the postwar debates centred on the Highland hydro schemes.

Re-​articulations of longstanding conflict In the local politics of the Highlands immediately after the Second World War there were conflicting, disorganized, and non-​specialist views on reconstruction and regeneration. The most urgent problem was depopulation and lack of employment. Many young workers from the Highlands, who had perhaps received technical training during the war on military or industrial service as engineers or nurses were actively being solicited as skilled immigrants by British Commonwealth nations such as Australia, Canada or South Africa (HH 14 August 1947, 2; 8 January 1948, 2). There was potential for newcomers to come in to the area to address labour shortages and stem population loss. For example DPs (Displaced Persons –​wartime refugees from Europe) were suggested as a means to ‘repopulate the glens’ (HH 26 June 1947, 3; 3 July 1947, 1) or as potential farm servants (HH 12 June 1947, 3), but often this conflicted with a narrow Gaelic parochialism. There were bigoted attitudes to any incomers, not just foreign DPs, but also to Scots and English people from outside the region, reviled by local crofters as ‘the scum of the industrial midlands of England and Scotland’ (quoted in Burnett 2010: 58). Who then was entitled to speak and act in the region? Beyond local debate, we also hear more centralized powerful voices. Hydro schemes were a vast capital investment reflecting the bureaucratic power of central government planning, a type of power structure developed as a response to the two world wars (see also Fallan and Jørgensen 2017: 111). Indeed, hydro schemes and electrification projects have often been prompted by catastrophes such as war; we see this after the First World War with the foundation of the National Grid and Central Electricity Board in Britain 1926, or with the Tennessee Valley Authority in the United States in the 1930s in response to the collapse of agricultural regions during the Depression, and of course with the new hydro schemes in the postwar reconstruction era after WW2 (Hughes 1983, 285–​323). Established vested interests in Britain, however, opposed hydro investment. For example, the Mining Association of Great Britain promoted coal and feared hydro power as a rival (Maver 2000: 369). Powerful landowners and wealthy bourgeois summer visitors who arrived for hunting or more artistic pursuits fought to keep the pristine nature that was their business. Back in the metropolis, privileged writers and artists had access to persuasive channels of communication and lobbying (Lorimer 2000: 403–​411). On the side of opposition to any kinds of change in the Highlands, there were some unexpected alliances of the extremely wealthy and dispossessed, and an exceptionally uncomfortable mixture of resentment and grievance. For example, there was the lobbying power of Gaelic movements amongst the urban

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diaspora of economic migrants working in Lowland Scotland, embittered exiles maintaining the image of the true highlander as a Gael and a crofter. The problem of the Highlands as a ‘cultural museum’ came in part from the power of interested groups outside –​who all wanted the region to be kept in ‘cold storage’ –​against the moment, if and when, they might return (Burnett 2010, 40; 58; Maver 2000, 370). The static and seemingly untouched landscape came to be one of the major icons of the true Highland identity –​as indeed, increasingly, this Highlands image also came to stand as the touristic icon of Scotland in general (Gold and Gold 1995; Morrison 2003).

Nature, standing reserves, and infrastructures I use the shorthand word ‘hydro’ because this became a familiar term in Scottish daily life and conversation, referring to the local energy provider (to use a current market-​ oriented phrase) and important local employer the North of Scotland Hydro-​Electricity Board (NoSHEB). Like other hydro schemes around the world the works did by necessity involve water control and supply. But in Scotland, with a notoriously damp climate and rain-​fed agriculture, hydro really meant ‘electricity’ –​ electricity for home and work use or to feed into the National Grid, the nationwide ‘networks of power’ that in Thomas Hughes’s phrase are symptomatic of ‘modern human societies’ (Hughes 1983:  1). ‘Hydro’ in daily life and speech also signified employment opportunities, such as labouring work on civil engineering projects and infrastructure.The labouring work was extensive, with tunnelling, dam construction, and other works of water diversion alongside the work involved in building more conventional structures such as the turbine halls that remained as markers in the landscape after completion. When the Hydro-​Electric Act of 1943 was passed at the height of the War, the then Secretary of State also approved two associated planning groups, the Fisheries Committee and the Amenity Committee (Berry 1956, 25) to consider wider environmental impacts on the useful wild species (salmon and trout) and the scenic beauty of the Highlands. Framed in these terms, environmental discussions and enquiry seem to be focused on certain immediate human-​centred concerns. Indeed, we see these interests also represented in the language of a group that we might expect to represent ‘wildlife’ more generally after the war, Nature Conservancy Scotland. In an evaluation of the impact on nature conservation of the post-​war hydro schemes in Scotland, the Director John Berry did certainly consider the ‘drastic interference’ threatened across wide tracts of countryside by: water diversion works; associated changes from acid to alkaline balance in soil and water; and changes in speed of water flow in streams and lakes, all of which would have profound effects on local ecosystems (Berry 1956, 23–​24). However, his discussions concluded with a defence of those useful changes in the hydro-​engineered environment that would benefit salmon and trout at the expense of those ‘vermin’ of wild water, migratory eels, or such ‘coarse’ predatory fish as perch and pike (Berry 1956, 33–​36). Salmon and trout were wild animals but were important species in the economic calculations of the landowners who rented out fishing rights.

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At the expense of labouring the obvious, Scottish hydro schemes appear to fit exactly into Heidegger’s notion of enframing the earth as a resource for use that was put forward in his essay ‘The question concerning technology’ where he described the way in which nature was now treated as a ‘standing reserve’ (Heidegger 1977 [1956], 17–​18). In particular, his comments on the hydro-​schemes on the River Rhine, as ‘a power supplier deriving from the essence of the power stations’ and as a Romantic landscape ‘on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry’ (Heidegger 1977, 16) certainly echo with the preoccupations of his time and with the task of postwar reconstruction conceived as regional regeneration in the Highlands.The apparent emptiness of the denuded and depopulated glens appeared as an opportunity to technologically minded postwar planners who hoped to see new electro-​chemical, electro-​metallurgical, and light industries supporting well-​designed new towns of substantial population. As the Scottish Area Committee of the Association of Scientific Workers put it in a 1943 report –​ Highland Power –​looking forward to postwar utilization of hydro-​electricity, the region had all the ‘inviting characteristics of a blank canvas’ (Association of Scientific Workers 1943, 77). Previous developments such as BACo’s aluminium smelting plants and worker accommodation at Kinlochleven were dismissed as ‘slums’ (Association of Scientific Workers 1943, 56–​60), the product of narrow-​minded unregulated private enterprise. The reason why the postwar hydro schemes could be discussed and viewed as something entirely new was due to their regenerative function as, it was hoped, one of the ‘greatest sociological experiments in history’ that might stand alongside the Tennessee Valley Authority, established in the Depression era United States in 1933, or the spectacular modernization projects projected by the wartime British ally, the USSR (Association of Scientific Workers 1943, 77). As might be inferred from these examples, the influential Association of Scientific Workers was a trade union for technical and academic staff, with strong commitment to shaping public debate whose President at this time was the left-​leaning research physicist Professor Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett, FRS (Association of Scientific Workers 1943, 2). In terms of design elements, we have the land itself, we have the systems and networks, and we also have, at individual level, the designed structures themselves –​ the stuff of more object-​oriented design history. The hydro schemes help us to think across these levels of analysis and link up ‘style’ talk with broader environmental and social future discussions. Indeed, the nature of the Highland landscape, as a made and controlled environment masquerading as virgin land, means we have to make those links at all levels. My own previous approaches to research on this region have been focused mainly on landscape as an ideological construct where power structures are displayed or enacted in accord with the investigations of writers such as Hechter on the ‘celtic fringe’ of Britain (1975), or in more general critical terms, the contributions of W.J.T. Mitchell (2002), Cosgrove and Daniels (1998), or David E. Nye (2000). In terms of designed structures and engineering, infrastructural works in the Highlands from at least since the canal and road projects of Thomas Telford in the early nineteenth century (Robertson 2019; Rackwitz

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2007) have both fostered tourism and worked alongside ideological representations of the Highlands in art and popular culture. Beyond such imposing structural interventions as the engineered designs for buildings, roads, harbours, canals or dams, however, we should also consider the designs built into legislation, patterns of ownership, land use, and cultivation.

Celtic culture Having noted the progressive version of Scots nationalism in the 1930s and its machine aesthetic, we must equally recognize that many of these moderns also cultivated a form of Celtic Revivalism in support of independence agitation. Certain forms and motifs associated with Celtic art in the postwar period came to symbolize Highland culture through the promotion of handmade craft items for tourist consumption. One prominent figure in promoting this particular strand of visual Celticism was George Bain who had worked as an art teacher in schools and evening classes in the interwar decades promoting Celtic Art, and specifically techniques of so-​called ‘knotwork’ or interlace as a national style first in pamphlets then in the book Celtic Art: The Methods of Construction (Bain 1977 [1951]; Normand 157–​159; George Bain Collection online). Bain established a Celtic art study centre at Drumnadrochit in 1949 and his version of Celtic art was promoted frequently in the Highland Herald and at regional trade fairs as a spur to local craft (HH 12 June 1947, 2; 21 August 1947; Help for the Highlands 1953, 15). Celtic knotwork did not, unlike tartan, conjure contemporary and angry realities of recent Highland history of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, taking the viewers on an imaginary journey back to centuries before any possibility of Assman’s notion of ‘communicative memory’ (Assman 1995, 125–​133; Rackwitz 2007, 229–​231; Mackechnie 2008–​9). Instead it evoked an ancient and virtuous world on the fringes of the collapsing Roman Empire, defending learning in the Dark Ages, thus gaining power as an ahistorical consoling myth. Perceptions of the Celtic Highlands were supported by the enormous number of ancient sites remaining in the area that were heavily protected by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), established in 1908 and energized by archaeological interest and growing tourism. These myths fed into official policies, so despite concerns about depopulation, the Highlands were treated as a ‘cultural museum’ (Burnett 2010:  36), ‘traditional occupations’ were given priority by economic planners.

Hydro schemes and architectural traditionalism The economic initiative after the Second World War of the NoSHEB hydro schemes gave rise to dams, worker camps, and power stations that functioned in the landscape as signs of modernization and investment. These hydro schemes in the Highlands were promoted by the left wing Labour government, elected after the war (Harvie 1977, 178; Payne 1988); indeed without this support it is unlikely this

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state-​funded intervention would have happened. While opposition came from a very diverse conglomeration of interests, as already noted, the Scottish Labour Party worked hard to stress the cultural benefits of electrification as modernization; as its Plan for Post-​War Scotland proclaimed, if the Highlander had ‘electric light, radio and a garage; had it been in reasonable reach of a cinema and a good dance band’ then he would not leave the region (Plan 1941 23, quoted in Burnett 2010, 42). A major inspiration for the Highland hydro schemes as a regional reviver was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) –​an ‘adventure in planning’ promoted in a short, illustrated wartime publication of the same name by Julian Huxley in Britain purposely to propagandize schemes such as NoSHEB.The TVA had deliberately included an entire regional infrastructure of industry, farming, transport, and tourism in which the TVA’s hydro dams provided a central focus for visitors, with their combination of crafted landscapes of forest and roaring waters with the most austere and geometrical modern architecture and engineering, and hailed as part of a new and democratic aesthetic order: ‘the modern eye can appreciate more easily the beauty in machinery than it can in the fine arts’ (Huxley 1943; Robertson 2014). In contrast to TVA, and despite the high aims of central planners such as Arthur Kirby (1946) and technocrats such as the Association of Scientific Workers (1943), in Highland Scotland the hydro schemes had no guaranteed attached infrastructure built in and were just about the only economic and cultural edifices on the horizon, thus gaining an increased monumental function as markers of an important moment. Observing the aesthetic of austere simplicity endorsed by the Imperial War Graves Commission after the First World War (Stamp 1977, 10), I argue that the Highland hydro structures functioned as a collective memorial after the Second World War first because of their position as significant landmarks in a charged landscape, and second, because like other war memorials they act to close debate. Other hydro projects had already been invested with monumental functions, for example the TVA dams were promoted as straightforward modernist monuments, while elsewhere, notably at the Marathon Dam constructed for the city of Athens, we see instead a deliberate invocation of ancient history in alliance with modernity. In her book City of flows (2005) Maria Kaika describes how, in Athens, a scheme to bring water to the city was conflated with an archaeological project of excavating and restoring the city’s ancient aqueduct (Kaika 2005: 80; 128). Thus, dams and hydro projects were not merely monumental in scale, but in function also. In the postwar era architects were expanding the scope and scale of their constructive projects  –​designing at the scale of the landscape rather than the individual building. In part this was promoted by the enlarged landscape view of the wartime aerial bomber (Duempelmann 2013), but also by the new profession of landscape architect and new conceptions of monumentality in architecture, strongly infused by a modernist respect for abstract functional structures and a stronger rapprochement between architects and engineers. In an edition of the Architectural Review dedicated to the ‘search for a new monumentality’ one contributor, William Holford remarked on the insight offered by Paul Nash’s painting The Battle of Britain (Nash 1941, Imperial War Museum) of the expressive power and new importance

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of the aerial view: ‘from a great height we become conscious of geographic rather than architectural truths … Tennessee Valley and Greater London enter the range of the monument’ (Paulsson et al. 1948, 125). We see this alliance of architecture, engineering, and landscape considerations in Sylvia Crowe’s landscape architectural practice as she describes it in The Landscape of Power (Crowe 1958). The heightened democratic and levelling spirit promoted by the postwar Labour government encouraged the idea of beneficial memorials for example through greater access to ‘the land’, marked by the establishment of the National Land Fund in 1946 (Stamp 1977) intended to promote recreational and cultural enjoyment of the British countryside, followed by legislative support in the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949. The Highland landscape was particularly charged with significance as a wild ‘natural’ region because after the Second World War it was increasingly also considered as a common ‘amenity’ subject to public consultation during planning proposals. Planners and the public were on guard against hydro power as ‘industrial encroachment on the countryside’ (Lea 1968: 239). Several areas lost their designated status as areas of outstanding natural beauty (see W.H. Murray Highland Landscape 1962, cited in Lea 1968: 246). These concerns are directly addressed in Sylvia Crowe’s landscape consultancy work for postwar hydro schemes in the Highlands that aimed to respect the landscape in various ways (Crowe 1958, X) with power stations (as in Glenmoriston, see Figures 10.1 and 10.2) being sited underground, with water supply pipes buried or disguised by planting. Instead of the interwar industrial modernism for hydro architecture the favoured architectural style was a ‘Traditionalist’ Scottish modernism with the power stations in the Highlands designed by James Shearer celebrated by architectural historian Miles Glendinning as the ‘climax of the traditionalist movement’ (Glendinning 1997, 2). Shearer, the architect of Fasnakyle power station rejected Modernist excitement at the display of industrial power. Instead he emphasized the concealment of power beneath the serenity of elevated landscape, hailing the ‘stillness of the place, over which only the clouds now move … no visitor walking in the quiet forecourt at Fasnakyle has any inkling he is crossing three eight-​feet diameter pipes containing water with an explosive pressure of four hundred and fifty feet of head’ (Glendinning 1997, 7). The locally quarried rough stone facing of the turbine hall at Fasnakyle, reminiscent of sixteenth or seventeenth century Scottish fortifications, was embellished with Hew Lorimer’s sculptural Celtic beasts, and use of locally quarried rubble for the stations (MacInnes et al. 1997:103; Canmore Fasnakyle online images). The hydro-​electric power schemes in the Scottish Highlands function as ‘sites of memory’ (Nora 1996); a recognition of past troubles, but also as markers of oblivion and repression. Although the immediate impetus for the schemes was postwar reconstruction, this was in tension with conservation of a natural scenic area. Over all there loomed the unresolved conflict still present to the minds of most commentators of the long drawn out collapse of ‘Celtic’ or ‘Gaelic’ culture in the north and west of Scotland, and the dispossession of indigenous populations. Monumental markers in the Highland landscape rest in man-​made structures such

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FIGURE 10.1   North

of Scotland Hydro-​Electric Board Moriston Project Contract No. 50, No. 150 Ceannacroc Generating Station. Tailrace Tunnel. View of portal from bridge deck 2/​7/​56. This project record photograph shows the way in which a vernacular or traditional style of stonework facing was inserted so as to blend in to the natural living rock face. Copyright SSE plc Corporate Archive, with permission

as buildings and ancient sites, and in designated natural forms, such as mountains and waters. Hydro schemes are monumental markers of time and change, and of public consensus, capturing both stasis with vast immovable forms of dams and turbine houses, and temporality with the flow of the water and energy. They also take on a more sinister aspect of the war memorial, folding together and repressing continuing conflict in an ultimately depressing design solution that recognized and reinforced the unequal power structures in the landscape. From the present, looking back, large scale hydro electric power schemes are now recognized to have an unacceptably high environmental impact on ecospheres and water basins (Kallhoff 2017) and, in contrast to the wartime enthusiasm we saw for the central planners of the USSR, they are now judged guilty by association with dictatorial regimes of all stripes (Frolova 2010). If the Highland hydro schemes have escaped the charge of forceful eviction of local populations that blight projects in other parts of the world, this is only because local populations had already been dispersed beforehand. Although the Highland landscape was charged with significance as a wild ‘natural’ region to be defended by conservative interests it was increasingly also considered as a common democratically accessible national ‘amenity’ for urban populations.The design solution, favouring scenic beauty and the appearance

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FIGURE 10.2   North

of Scotland Hydro-​Electric Board Moriston Project Contract No. 50, No. 179 Ceannacroc Tunnel. Ceannacroc Generating Station.View of Machine Chamber from South West showing 16MW alternator 3/​12/​56. This project record photograph shows that underground structures were straightforwardly technical and functional, with few deliberate decorative or stylistic additions. Copyright SSE plc Corporate Archive, with permission

of tradition, now appears as a depressing and cautious recognition and reinforcement of the unequal power structures in the land. In relation to current debates in environmental ethics and policy, we see that almost all the assumptions made in the postwar years by everyone concerned in the hydro schemes, either for or against, used anthropocentric arguments about clean energy, recreation areas, visual amenity (Kawall 2017: 15). Arguments for intervention and construction were couched in terms of stemming human population decline, social justice, and access to the land, although in actual terms many expectations and promises remained unfulfilled. While many recent writers dwell in similar terms to those of Heidegger on the nihilistic despair of the era of the artificial established after the Second World War (Dilnot 2015: 166–​167), one solution to the questions raised in this chapter seems to suggest we take social justice seriously, for the sake of the natural environment. As Holmes Rolston III –​evaluating the term ‘anthopocene’ –​also advocates, if we are concerned about the impact of environmental change on the poor, it would be better to fight for more equitable distribution of wealth, in order to emphasize environmental justice (Rolston 2017, 70). In the Highlands –​a depleted biosphere, artificially maintained by the practices that favour the ‘empty landscape’, we can

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see a local environment where social justice might also favour greater natural and human diversity –​that would in turn lead to very different buildings and structures.

References Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London:Verso. Assman, J. (1995). ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, New German Critique 65: 125–​133. Association of Scientific Workers (1943). Highland Power: A Report on the Utilisation of the Hydro-​Electric Power Envisaged in the Hydro-​Electric Development (Scotland) Act. Glasgow: William Maclellan. . Bain, G. (1977 [1951]). Celtic Art:The Methods of Construction. London: Constable. Bennett, T. and P. Joyce (eds.) (2010). Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn. London: Routledge. Berry, J. (1956). ‘Hydro-​ electric Developments and Nature Conservation in Scotland’ Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow LXXVII(III): 23–​36. Birksted, J., (ed.) (2000). Landscapes of Memory and Experience. London and New York: Spon Press. Burnett, J. (2010). ‘The Highlands and Islands of Scotland as a ‘Cultural Museum’, 1900–​ 2000’, Immigrants and Minorities 20(1): 35–​70. Canmore online site of RCAHMS: ‘View of Fasnakyle Power Station with detail of carving in Pictish-​style designed by Hew Lorimer’ SC 1590246 Collection Tom and Sybil Gray (http://​canmore.org.uk/​collection/​1590246)Accessed 27 February 2018. Cosgrove, D.E. and S. Daniels (eds.) (1998). The Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cosgrove, D.E. and G. Petts (1990). Water, Engineering and Landscape: Water Control and Landscape Transformation in the Modern Period. London and New York: Belhaven Press. Crowe, S. (1958). The Landscape of Power. London: The Architectural Press. Dilnot, C. (2015). ‘History, Design, Futures: Contending with what we have Made’ in T. Fry, C. Dilnot and S.C. Stewart, Design and the Question of History. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 161–​271. Duempelmann, S. (2013). ‘The Art and Science of Invisible Landscapes: Camouflage for War and Peace’, in G.A. Boyd and D. Linehan (eds.) Ordnance: War + Architecture & Space. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 117–​135. Fallan, K. and F.A. Jørgensen (2017). ‘Environmental Histories of Design: Towards a New Research Agenda’, Journal of Design History 30(2): 103–​121. Frolova, M. (2010).‘Landscapes,Water Policy and the Evolution of Discourses on Hydropower in Spain’, Landscape Research 35(2): 235–​257. Gandy, M.  (1997).  ‘The Making of a Regulatory Crisis: Restructuring New  York City's Water Supply’, Transactions; Institute of British Geographers  22(3): 338–​358. ‘George Bain Collection’ at Groam House Museum (http://​www.groamhouse.org.uk/​ index.asp?pageid=36914) Accessed 26 February 2018 Glendinning, M. (1997). Rebuilding Scotland: the Postwar Vision, 1945–​1975. East Linton: Tuckwell. Gold, J.R. and M.M. Gold (1995). Imagining Scotland:Tradition, Representation and Promotion of Scottish Tourism since 1750. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Hannah, L. (1979). Electricity before Nationalisation: a Study of the Development of the Electricity Supply in Britain to 1948. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harvie, C. (1977). Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics, 1707–​1977. London: George Allen & Unwin.

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Hechter, M. (1975). Internal Colonialism: the Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–​1966. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Heidegger, M. (1977 [1956]). ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans W. Lovitt. New  York: Harper Perennial,  3–​35. Help for the Highlands (1953). HMSO, Department of Secretary of State for Scotland and the Forestry Commission. Hudson, W. and J.K. Hunter (1938). ‘The Constructional Works’, The Galloway Hydro-​Electric Development. Reprint of papers presented to the Institution of Civil Engineers, 22nd February, 1938. London: Institution of Civil Engineers, 6–​42. Hughes, T.P. (1983). Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–​1930. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press. Huxley, J. (1943). TVA: an Adventure in Planning. Cheam, Surrey: The Architectural Press, (War Address). Kaika, M. (2005). City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City. London: Routledge. Kallhoff, A. (2017). ‘Water Ethics: Toward Ecological Cooperation’, in S.M. Gardiner and A. Thompson, (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 416–​426. Kawall, J. (2017). ‘A History of Environmental Ethics’, in S.M. Gardiner, and A. Thompson, (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press,  13–​26. Kirby, A.H.M. (1946). The Rebirth of the Scottish Highlands. Reprint pamphlet from Town and country planning Summer 1946. Lea, K.J. (1968). ‘Hydro-​electric Power Developments and the Landscape in the Highlands of Scotland’ The Scottish Geographical Magazine 84(3): 239–​247. Lorimer, H. (2000). ‘Guns, Game and the Grandee: The Cultural Politics of Deerstalking in the Scottish Highlands’, Cultural Geographies (Ecumene) 7(4): 403–​411. Luckin, B. (1990). Questions of Power: Electricity and Environment in Inter-​ War Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press. MacInnes, R., M. Glendinning and A. MacKechnie (1997). Building a Nation: the Story of Scotland’s Architecture. Edinburgh: Canongate. Mackechnie, A. (2008–​9). ‘Carn air a’Mhonadh: Gaeldom’s monuments –​Cairns, Crosses, and Celticism’ Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History 13: 22–​32. Maver, I. (2000). ‘Water Resources and Scottish Identity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century: Purity, Regeneration and Landscape’, in J.A.A. Jones, K. Gilman, A. Jigorel and J. Griffin, (eds.) Water in the Celtic World: Managing Resources for the 21st Century. Wallingford: British Hydrological Society, , 367–​374. McKean, C. (1987). The Scottish Thirties: An Architectural Introduction. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. McKenna, K. (2013). ‘Scotland has the Most Inequitable Land Ownership in the West.Why?’ The Observer, Saturday 10 August 2013. (http://​www.theguardian.com/​uk-​news/​2013/​ aug/​10/​scotland-​land-​r ights) 26 February 2018. Mitchell, W.J.T. (2002). Landscape and Power, second edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morrison, J. (2003). Painting the Nation: Identity and Nationalism in Scottish Painting, 1800–​ 1920. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mumford, L. (1949). ‘Monumentalism, Symbolism and Style’, Architectural Review 105(628), April 1949: 173–​180. Nash, P. (1941). The Battle of Britain. Painting image © IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 1550) (https://​www.iwm.org.uk/​collections/​item/​object/​20102) Accessed 25 February 2018.

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Nora, P. (1996). Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past,Volume I: Conflicts and Divisions. New York: Columbia University Press. Normand, T. (2000). The Modern Scot: Modernism and Nationalism in Scottish Art 1928–​1955. Aldershot: Ashgate. Nye, D.E. (2000). Technologies of Landscape: from Reaping to Recycling. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Otter, C. (2010). ‘Locating Matter: The Place of Materiality in Urban History’, in T. Bennett and P. Joyce, (eds.) Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn. Oxford: Routledge,  38–​59. Paulsson, G., H.-​R. Hitchcock, W. Holford, S. Giedion, W. Gropius, L. Costa, and A. Roth (1948). ‘In Search of a New Monumentality’ (Symposium) Architectural Review 104(624): 117–​128. Payne, P.L. (1988). The Hydro: a Study of the Development of the Major Hydro-​Electric Schemes Undertaken by the North of Scotland Hydro-​Electric Board. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Perchard, A. (2012). Aluminiumville: Government, Global Business and the Scottish Highlands. Lancaster: Crucible Books. Plan for Post-​War Scotland (1941). Scottish Labour Party. Rackwitz, M. (2007). Travels to Terra Incognita: the Scottish Highlands and Hebrides in Early Modern Travellers’ Accounts c. 1600 to 1800. Munster: Waxmann. RCAHMS Archives (https://​scotlandsplaces.gov.uk/​digital-​volumes/​rcahms-​archives) Accessed 27 February 2018. Rolston, H., III (2017). ‘The Anthropocene! Beyond the Natural?’ in S.M. Gardiner and A. Thompson, (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 62–​73. Robertson, F. (2014). ‘Electric Pastorale’ The Drouth 47: 44–​49. Robertson, F. (2019). ‘Thomas Telford’s Tour in the Highlands: Shaping the Wild Landscape through Word and Image’, in K. Williams, S. Aymes, J. Baetens and C. Murray (eds.), Art and Science in Word and Image: Exploration and Discovery. Leiden: Brill. Sheail, J. (1984). ‘Nature Reserves, National Parks, and Post-​War Reconstruction in Britain’, Environmental Conservation 11(1): 29–​34. Smith, S. (1988). Horatio McCulloch 1805–​ 1867. Glasgow: Glasgow Museums and Art Galleries. Stamp, G. (1977). Silent Cities: An Exhibition of the Memorial and Cemetery Architecture of the Great War. London: Royal Institute of British Architects. Wightman, A.D. (1997). Who Owns Scotland? Edinburgh: Canongate.

11 DESIGN FOR THE GARDEN Questioning gardening as environmentalism Jette Lykke Jensen

Human life is full of metaphorical gardens: the Garden of Eden, the secret gardens of our childhood stories –​we may even think of planet Earth as a global garden in which all earthly creatures live. In this chapter, however, I invite you on an excursion into the unmetaphorical garden; the contemporary domestic garden, proposing that we consider the materiality of the garden as a topos for exploring human-​ nature relations. So, we enter a domestic, often enclosed, garden  –​adjacent to a house –​which most likely did not result from the visions of landscape architects. Rather, the garden under scrutiny here is probably designed, implemented, and maintained by the owner. In the ordinary garden, we encounter nature –​plants, flowers, trees, and wildlife  –​in a direct, yet distinctly ‘designed’ manner. In our mundane interaction with nature, tools, machines, and other gardening products play a central role. Accordingly, this chapter investigates how gardening is, by means of design, both making and unmaking the environment.The aim is to contribute to the understanding of our contemporary relationship with nature and advance the discussions of a potential remaking of our environment.

Stepping out into the garden Despite the widespread occurrence of gardens, their central role in relation to the home, and the scale of gardening as an activity, ordinary gardens, and everyday gardening remains understudied by scholars of design and material culture (Tilley 2009; Chevalier 2004). Accepting the challenge to address the environmental agenda in design history, I suggest that focusing on the material culture of gardening is relevant as a case study (Fallan and Jørgensen 2017). In recent years, scholars have explored the domestic garden from diverse perspectives including environmental studies, cultural geography, and social sciences (Freeman et al. 2012; Head and Muir 2006; Beumer and Martens 2015; Bhatti and Church 2004). This study is inspired

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by three interrelated perspectives within such critical examinations of the private garden. Firstly, I consider the garden as a significant place to investigate human-​nature relations since most people in the Western world today have the most immediate and sustained experience with nature within their own (back) yard (Clayton 2007; Beumer and Martens 2015; Bhatti and Church 2004). Studying gardens provides us with the opportunity of investigating the somewhat abstract human-​nature relations while drawing attention to the specific nature and form of such interactions (Power 2005). This study addresses gardening as a specific way of cultivating nature which is reflected, mediated, and shaped by material objects. Another relevant perspective, consistent with a design cultural approach, is thinking of the garden as a site of production, mediation and consumption, and developing understandings which encompass the ecological and socio-​ cultural aspects of domestic gardens (Julier 2014; Askew and McGuirk 2004; Jenkins 1994). Individual garden owners are regarded as central actors in the production of landscapes; as we quite literally, at a micro-​level, produce an environment through consumption in the garden (Robbins and Sharp 2003). On a broader scale, the garden as a cultural landscape can have implications for biodiversity and ecology (Power 2005; Kurz and Baudains 2012; Beumer and Martens 2015). While recognizing individual consumers as important agents, this study acknowledges that the environmental decisions of gardeners are embedded in larger social, political, and economic processes (Robbins and Sharp 2003). In particular, the garden industry and media is considered a highly influential context to human agency in the garden, and the developments in production and consumption are seen to have contributed to a ‘commodification of nature’ (Bhatti and Church 2004). Finally, the garden is coming into focus as a space for action on environmental issues. Scholars are proposing that gardening can provide a remedy for an increasingly threatened nature and engage people in ‘planetary stewardship’ (Franklin 2002; Nassauer 2011; Bhatti 1999). Certainly, the garden is a place that can yield greater understanding of biological and ecological processes. However, gardening can also include engagements with nature causing environmental problems, e.g. the use of glyphosate herbicide, associated with the materialization of nature-​under-​ control (Bhatti, 1999; Dawson 1990). As I consequence, I consider the garden as an area of transformative potential as well as concern (Head and Muir 2006). Recent scholarship has investigated the garden ‘as an ecology of interrelated and connected thoughts, spaces, activities and symbols’ (Francis and Hester 1990). My approach in encompassing the complexity of the garden draws on actor network theory (Latour 1992; 1999; Callon 1999). This means emphasizing the inherent hybridity of the garden in terms of the mutually constitutive dynamics between nature, culture, and technology (Latour 1993; Pritchard 2014). Thinking of the garden as a network of heterogeneous actors facilitates an engagement with the material presence of both living actors and non-​living actors and acknowledges the active and performing agency of non-​humans in the garden.Within this framework I consider gardening as embodied engagement involving processes of collaboration,

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negotiation, challenge, and competition (Power 2005; Hitchings 2003; Callon 1999). Although gender questions certainly imbue gardens and gardening, this aspect will not be specifically addressed in my examinations of human agency (Bhatti and Church 2000). Instead, the primary objective is to follow the things; in terms of different products designed for gardening, and by tracing their engagements to explore the human-​nature encounters (Latour 1993). My focus on objects as agents involves an understanding of things as operating in interconnected and dynamic networks of people, practices, and ideologies (Julier 2014; Fallan 2010; Atzmon and Boradkar 2017; Shove et  al. 2007). In studying the artefacts of the garden, I think of agency as built up by constellations of things, or interrelated complexes of stuff (Shove et  al. 2007; Tonkinwise 2017). Accordingly, I  adopt an extended understanding of the ‘hybrid’ proposed by Shove et al., and argue that gardening confounds any simple one-​person, one-​tool interpretation of hybridity (Shove et al. 2007; Latour 1993). By looking at the garden through the lens of the ‘agency of assemblages’, the aim is to explore how design mediates between the potentially contrasting demands and needs, of humans and plants (Bennett 2010).

The material culture of gardening Because gardens as material entities are by nature unstable and the changing everyday practices in the garden are rarely documented, I base this case study on the Danish gardening magazine Haven, or The Garden. Haven has been published continuously since 1901 by The Danish Garden Association. Until the 1960s it was the only Danish magazine on gardens but since then the range of media dedicated to gardens and gardening has expanded significantly. Given the time span, Haven is a consistent and rich source on gardening products, consumption and environmental discourses  –​ even if the information it contains hovers between ‘prescription and practice’ (Lees-​ Maffei 2014). From a close reading of issues from the 1950s until 2016, I have selected different gardening products for analysis. The 1950s is chosen as the starting point because it laid the foundation, quite literally, for many of the gardens and practices of today.The aim of this study is not a chronological account of the history of gardening and design. Rather, this exploration revolves around examples of things considered central in the interaction with nature in gardens and pointing to some of the various gardening practices and attitudes throughout half a century. In the mid-​1950s the magazine expanded its readership from farmers and professional gardeners to the new and growing generation of home owners with a garden in Denmark. Since the mid-​century the access to gardens increased in the Western world and today dwellings with a garden often constitute the majority of all housing (Ravn 2000; Bhatti and Church 2001). A key factor in this development is the changes in housing tenure patterns from the 1950s onwards (Ravn 2011; Bhatti and Church 2001). In a Danish context, government loans in the late 1940s enabled the working and middle classes to own a house with a garden and the following decades saw an explosion in the building of single-​family houses. Furthermore, the number of garden owners grew with the building of townhouses

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or municipal houses with gardens. In particular, the extensive amount of suburban houses built in the 1960s made ‘the house with a garden’ a popular housing type in Denmark. Today approximately 60 per cent of housing in Denmark are dwellings with a garden (Ravn 2000). The growth in the provision of gardens was accompanied by growth in the garden industry and increase in the production of gardening equipment. Since the 1950s we have seen the rise of the garden centre followed by mass discount and home improvement stores becoming key actors in garden retailing. DIY retailers have, in particular, been seen as responsible for the promotion of the ‘containerised’ low-​maintenance garden (Ravn 2011; Bhatti and Church 2001). Such contextual factors along with a complex array of economic and social processes form the background for my reading. From the multitude of products represented in Haven, I focus on four different types of objects: the sprayer, the hand tool, the lawnmower, and the composter.

The garden sprayer: a weapon in the war on weed The sprayer, a device used to spray a liquid, is a product occurring often in the magazine particularly in the 1950s and 1960s.This product is represented in both adverts for different sprayers and as part of the representations of the different herbicides for whose application the sprayers are used. The introduction of the sprayer is an example, like many other gardening products, of an adaption of a product originally developed for the agricultural industry and commercial horticulture. Different versions are observed throughout the volumes of the magazine, but a common feature is their design as portable units, e.g. in the form of a backpack sprayer. Initially sprayers were produced in brass because this material could resist, and would not affect, the chemicals used for spraying, but plastic gradually took over as the material of choice (Figure 11.1). A sprayer typically consists of a container, a pressure hose, and a spreader and enables the gardener to disperse a variety of liquid chemicals with the correct degree of atomization onto e.g. fruit trees, bushes, and roses. Thereby the sprayer –​ and its contents –​participates in an action, often termed a ‘war’, on undesirable elements of nature. It points to the behaviour of limiting and ideally exterminating all pests, diseases, and weed by means of applying chemicals. The widespread use of chemicals, e.g. DDT, in the 1950s and 1960s is apparent in the numerous adverts and manuals for seasonal spraying, emphasizing its labour-​saving and yield-​ enhancing benefits. The intensive use of different chemicals is further indicated by the intense marketing of chemicals and of the powder blower as an alternative, or supplement, to the sprayer. This ensemble of objects encourages a programme of action which is obviously in conflict with, or an attempt to constrain, the actions of nature. It reveals attitudes and human agency vis-​à-​vis nature dominated by a desire for control and a utilitarian focus on produce. As an artefact, the sprayer reflects that the practices in the mid-​century domestic garden are still greatly influenced by the cultivation practices and ideals of rationality and order of ‘the farm garden’. However, subsequent

newgenrtpdf

of a review of garden sprayers for the private garden, by Helge Petersen, featured in Haven, 1969. Published by permission of Magasinet Haven, Haveselskabet FIGURE 11.1   Extract

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articles in the magazine reflect an emerging awareness of the damaging effects of such gardening practices. In connection to these changes in the environmental discourse and the stricter regulations on the use of chemicals, the occurrence of garden sprayers gradually becomes less frequent in the magazine. Instead alternatives emerge e.g. in the form of a range of so-​called biological herbicides. Nonetheless, garden sprayers, as well as environmentally harmful substances, are still available and used in combat in contemporary gardens.

Vegetal apartheid: the monocultural lawn The lawn mower is indispensable for maintaining the velvety lawn which from the 1960s onwards becomes an ever more important element in the modern garden. Accompanying the building boom in the 1960s, the lawn is construed as essential in the domestic and increasingly recreational garden. The rise of the lawn as the dominant component of the outdoor living area happened at the expense of the kitchen garden and to some extent also flower beds. The preference for the lawn is arguably part of an emerging need from the mid-​century onwards for a low-​maintenance garden in response to changing work patterns within the family. Therefore, in the age of lawn mowers; motorized and later robotic, the discourse on grass lawns promotes the lawn as less labour-​intensive. However, the well-​kept lawn which became somewhat of an obsession for homeowners, also requires work –​not to mention the enrolment of a range of non-​human actors including lawn rollers, sprinklers, and weed control products. The ideal so heavily promoted in Denmark of a perfect, dense and green lawn covering the garden like a carpet is based on the so-​called English lawn. The 1960s saw a remarkable interest in successfully establishing a lawn with the optimal mixture of lawn grass seed, lawn fertilizers, and watering. Numerous articles address the issues of its maintenance described as requiring a pertinacious effort in terms of rolling the lawn to smooth it, aerating the lawn and frequently cutting the grass. Although growth is of central concern, limiting or controlling the grass is perhaps even more so, and the right lawnmower becomes an important ally to the gardener. Different fuel-​based power mowers had been introduced, yet they were still an expensive purchase for most new homeowners. As a consequence, adverts predominantly show manual lawnmowers promoted with an emphasis on their efficiency in grass cutting, due to the cylindrical blade system, and their ease of use is highlighted by depictions of slim, modern women. As lawns expanded and spending power increased in parallel in the ensuing decades, power mowers –​petrol-​based, electrical or battery-​driven, with either cylinder or rotary cutting systems –​became the norm. The power mowers and –​more recently –​lawn tractors displayed in Haven are portrayed as enablers of an even, fine cutting of the grass and as making lawn mowing a ‘pleasurable’ and quickly executed activity. From the mid-​1990s different cutting systems including mulching are featured and various brands promote their lawn mowers as a ‘greener’ option. The advent of the robotic lawnmower at the turn of the millennium similarly invoked an environmental imperative –​even if this

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for Gardena robotic lawnmower featured in Haven, 2016. The headline reads: ‘Your new best friend’. Published by permission of Gardena, Husqvarna Danmark FIGURE 11.2   Advert

was overshadowed by the emphasis on how this autonomously working ‘new best friend’ of humans frees up time for relaxation (Figure 11.2). Nowadays the ideal of the uniform green lawn is challenged in two rather distinct ways. One is the trend for extensive use of pebbles or paving, reducing both labour and nature in the garden to a bare minimum. The contrasting alternative is the emergent tendency to create ‘wilder’ areas; letting the grass grow higher

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or replacing the lawn with a flower meadow thereby ‘maximizing’ biodiversity. Suggesting a predilection for ‘wilderness’, the meadow still requires some maintenance, notably through the re-​appropriation of the traditional scythe, as power mowers do not allow longer grass or plants. Although the ideal of the velvety lawn is being challenged by a ‘wilder’ alternative, the monocultural lawn remains a persistent standard upheld by a majority of garden owners and the innovation and distribution of lawn care products. The aesthetic preference for a smooth green lawn involves an ongoing battle against the unwelcome intruders, such as dandelions and moss, which has spawned yet further tactics and weapons. To a great extent the lawn, assisted by a large network of actors, has succeeded in becoming indispensable in the Danish domestic garden and eliminating almost any competition in terms of alternative landscapes.Thereby the lawn can be seen as one of the most crucial allies to modern man in the processes of controlling or domesticating nature by which the residential landscape has taken its present day form.

Garden tools for making and growing Haven continuously features adverts, guides, and articles on the wide range of manual tools which are central to the cultivation of the garden. The product category of hand tools is basically divided into short handled and long handled tools:  all of which traditionally consist of a steel head or a blade and a wooden shaft and/​or handle. The specific design of the steel head or blade of a given tool defines the functionality and thereby the possible interactions between human-​tool and soil and plants. A specific tool is part of a series of actions; weeding, aerating, and processing the soil, tilling and planting. These series of actions which make up gardening thereby involve a whole range of tools which can be analysed in relation to the notions of ‘making’ and ‘growing’ (Ingold 2011; Ingold and Hallam 2014). The idea of making entails designing a garden so that it better serves human purposes, enrolling both living and non-​living things in order to optimize human experience. Growing, on the other hand, entails the enrolment of the gardener in assisting and nurturing nature by establishing conditions for growth (Figure 11.3). The short-​handled tools afford the gardener to be physically close to the soil and plants –​that is, in direct involvement with the elements of nature. In the 1950s and 1960s adverts for small hand tools such as weeding forks emphasized their abilities to ‘clean up’ the garden without damaging the plants. However, the rhetoric around small hand tools gradually changed from the functionalist ethic of appropriateness for the task to a stronger emphasis on how the tools allow for a gentler interaction with nature with a view to assisting growth. It points to a perception of gardening as growing in which the gardener contributes through the use of tools by eliminating competition from weeds.This shift is associated with changing practices in the growing of vegetables in particular, from sustenance to leisure or lifestyle. When using long-​handled tools the contact with soil and plants is less intimate, but they allow the gardener to work in an up-​r ight position and to apply more bodily force to the action. This capacity of long-​handled tools, such as the scuffle hoe, to

FIGURE 11.3   Advert

for manual tools produced by Lysbro (now Fiskars) featured in Haven, 1982. The headline reads: ‘Lysbro –​the best for the soil. Both beneath and above the surface of the soil’. Published by permission of Fiskars Denmark

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perform certain actions more efficiently is often highlighted in advertisements. The rhetoric predominantly portrays gardening as ‘work’ and focuses on the activity of producing a garden. However, in relation to the emerging environmentalism reflected in the magazine from the 1970s onwards, both short-​and long-​handled tools represent a way to avoid chemicals and to nurture nature.What emerges when following hand tools through the modern history of gardening, though, is their ‘multiplicity’ in terms of having multiple meanings and embeddedness in variegated practices and environmental attitudes (Pritchard 2014).

Garden waste: treasure or trash? Environmentalism surfaces in Haven from the beginning of the 1970s onwards through a sustained interest in recycling and composting. The practices of using vegetable waste to improve the soil, especially for growing crops, was most likely familiar to gardeners before this period. However, what is significant in the 1970s is the introduction of compost bins or containers; open or closed, enabling the dual purpose of speeding up natural processes and putting garden waste in order. An advert from 1972 for an open compost container, made of wire mesh, emphasizes that the bin provides ‘vitamins’ to plants and makes it easy to keep the garden tidy. In the mid-​1970s the different compost bins are introduced to Danish consumers and these inventions promise a faster production as enclosing the organic material, often in PVC-​based containers, generates more heat. Such compost bins are designed with access to a lower portion of the decomposing matter, thereby an amount can be removed easily and without disturbing the rest of compost contained therein. The idea of containers as enablers characterizes the mediation of composters: bins are helpers in a vital process of transforming garden waste into nutrient-​r ich compost benefiting both human and soil, plants and insects (Figure 11.4). Products for compost do not discriminate between the different types of gardening waste  –​be it from the natural growth, wittering, and decay of plants, or from the human ordering of nature; the trimming, pruning, and cutting down of bushes and trees. Besides containers for the decomposing process, the magazine featured an increasing number of compost grinders, or shredder chippers, enabling the transformation of larger garden waste into a desirable and manageable matter.This processing of garden waste was not motivated by the ethos of recycling alone, but also by ideals of tidiness and practicality. This ambivalence is reflected also in the magazine’s editorial matter, discussing whether containers advance the composting processes or are primarily a way to avoid ‘untidy’ compost heaps (Kiel 1989; Sørensen 2009). Thus, things such as the compost bin, the closed models in particular, and the compost grinder reflect a human will-​to-​order and ways of dealing with ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas 1966). Haven also pointed to alternative practices of handling waste: represented by adverts for bins etc. for burning of garden rubbish and articles mentioning gardeners disposing of their garden waste at recycling centres. Finally, the issue of waste, or unwanted matter, in the garden is reflected in the many products for amassing foliage: ranging from various lawn rakes to the powered leaf vacuumers or blowers.This practice of cleaning up leafage

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bin made by Rotocrop Ltd and advertised in Haven from the mid-​1970s. Designed by Clifford Wilson, it was one of nine products recognized in the Contract and Consumer goods category of the 1975 Design Council Awards. Published by permission of Design Council Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives FIGURE 11.4   Compost

is arguably part of various human actions such as cosseting to the growth of the lawn and nurturing of plants and micro-​organisms. However, the need for efficient and thorough removal of leaves seen in the last decades, seems to be a response to an escalating ideal of the garden as an ordered entity.

Negotiations with nature: from private to global concerns Gardening may have been portrayed and perceived as an innocent everyday activity and a haven from the public world, but as this study reflects, gardens are increasingly being considered as inextricably linked with global environmental issues (Bhatti 1999;

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Knudsen 2015). As domestic gardens constitute a major component in the landscape of many countries, awareness is growing of the urgency of gardening. Preferences for certain designs of gardens, including the extensive use of terraced areas, have been shown to pose challenges when faced with the flooding problems related to global climate change. Another pressing global issue, on which our practices in the domestic garden have an influence, is the loss of biodiversity and the related ‘bee crisis’ with wide-​ranging consequences for both flora and fauna –​including humans. In light of such environmental problems, what does the future of gardening hold in terms of practices and products? Can we imagine gardening products being increasingly designed not for us to utilize nature but to benefit nature? A present-​day example of a design solution attempting to enhance biodiversity in the garden is the insect hotel. Ironically, then, the nature that design has to some degree helped exorcise from the garden is now invited back in by means of design. Although highlighting the critical role of things in our interactions with a domesticated nature, this chapter is not intended as a tale of the ‘detrimental environmental effects’ of design (Pritchard 2014). Rather it has demonstrated the complex dynamics of the place and role of designed objects in the human-​nature relationship continually enacted in the garden. By using ANT as a conceptual backdrop, this study has examined the reciprocal dynamics between environmental ideologies, everyday practices, and the production and consumption of various garden tools. The study has revealed that the production, mediation, and consumption of garden products appear to be driven primarily by taking human agency into account. This is reflected in the plentitude of products enrolled in the combat against unwanted elements of nature and the challenge of keeping nature under control. On the other hand, however, other findings point to an emerging collaborative agency involving products which create potential benefits for both humans and our countless vegetal and animal ‘companion species’ inhabiting the garden (Haraway 2003). Following the objects has pointed to the ambiguity of gardening practices today: placed somewhere in between a return to traditional techniques and tools and the convenience of advanced technologies. This study shows how garden appliances influence the making and growing of the garden as an environment while reflecting that ‘We moderns find ourselves drawn to what is convenient. Things that offer convenient ways of doing things are not neutral tools, but attractors’ (Tonkinwise 2017, 54). What the future holds in terms of the design, production, and consumption of ‘attractors’, which may enable a sustainable remaking of both domestic and global environments remains to be seen.

References Askew, L.E., and P.M. McGuirk (2004). ‘Watering the Suburbs: Distinction, Conformity and the Suburban Garden’. Australian Geographer 35 (1):17–​37. Atzmon, L., and P. Boradkar (2017). Encountering Things: Design and Theories of Things. London: Bloomsbury. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Beumer, C., and P. Martens (2015). ‘Biodiversity in My (Back) Yard: Towards a Framework for Citizen Engagement in Exploring Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in Residential Gardens’. Sustainability Science 10(1):87–​100. Bhatti, M. (1999). ‘The Meaning of Gardens in an Age of Risk’. In Ideal Homes? Social Change and Domestic Life, edited by T. Chapman and J.L. Hockey, 181–​193. London: Routledge. Bhatti, M., and A. Church (2000). ‘ “I never promised you a rose garden”: gender, leisure and home-​making’. Leisure Studies 19(3):183–​197. Bhatti, M., and A. Church (2001). ‘Cultivating Natures: Homes and Gardens in Late Modernity’. Sociology 35(2):365–​383. Bhatti, M., and A. Church (2004). ‘Home, the Culture of Nature and Meanings of Gardens in Late Modernity’. Housing Studies 19(1):37–​51. Callon, M. (1999). ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation’. In The Science Studies Reader, edited by M. Biagioli, 67–​83. New York: Routledge. Chevalier, S. (2004).‘From Woollen Carpet to Grass Carpet’. Material Culture: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences. Vol. 3: Pt. 1 1:83. Clayton, S. (2007). ‘Domesticated Nature: Motivations for Gardening and Perceptions of Environmental Impact’. Journal of Environmental Psychology 27(3):215–​224. Dawson, J.H. (1990), ‘Dodder (Cuscuta spp.) Control in Newly Seeded Alfalfa (Medicago sativa) with Glyphosate’, Weed Technology 4(4): 880-​885. Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Oxford: Routledge & K. Paul. Fallan, K. (2010). Design History: Understanding Theory and Method. New York: Berg Publishers. Fallan, K, and F.A. Jørgensen (2017). ‘Environmental Histories of Design: Towards a New Research Agenda’. Journal of Design History 30(2):103–​121. Francis, M., and R.T. Hester (1990). The Meaning of Gardens: Idea, Place, and Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Franklin, A. (2002). Nature and Social Theory. London: Sage. Freeman, C., K.J.M. Dickinson, S. Porter, and Y. van Heezik (2012). ‘ “My Garden is an Expression of Me”: Exploring Householders’ Relationships With Their Gardens’. Journal of Environmental Psychology 32(2):135–​143. Haraway, D.J. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago, IL; [Great Britain]: Prickly Paradigm; Bristol: University Presses Marketing. Head, L., and P. Muir (2006). ‘Suburban Life and the Boundaries of Nature: Resilience and Rupture in Australian Backyard Gardens’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31(4):505–​524. Hitchings, R. (2003). ‘People, Plants and Performance: On Actor Network Theory and the Material Pleasures of the Private Garden’. Social & Cultural Geography 4(1):99–​114. Ingold, T. (2011). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Reissue with a new preface. London: Routledge. Ingold, T., and E. Hallam (2014). ‘Making and Growing: An Introduction’. In Making and Growing: Anthropological Studies of Organisms and Artefacts, edited by E. Hallam and T. Ingold, 1–​24. London: Routledge. Jenkins, V.S. (1994). The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession. Washington, DC; London: Smithsonian Institution. Julier, G. (2014). The Culture of Design. 3 ed. Los Angeles: SAGE. Kiel, E. (1989). ‘Kompostbunken løser et affaldsproblem.’ Haven, 334–​335. Knudsen, K.E. (2015). ‘Havens nødvendighed.’ Aktuel Forskning Ved Institut for Litteratur, Kulturog Medier, https://​static.sdu.dk/​mediafiles/​4/​6/​5/​%7B465A01E1-​83AE-​4C2A-​ 9C86-​ECECAC3A45A9%7D5%20Karin.pdf Accessed 28 February 2018.

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Kurz,T., and C. Baudains (2012).‘Biodiversity in the FrontYard:An Investigation of Landscape Preference in a Domestic Urban Context’. Environment and Behavior 44(2):166–​196. Latour, B. (1992). ‘Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’. In Shaping Technology/​Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, edited by W.E. Bijker and J. Law, 225–​259. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press. Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. New York; London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Latour, B. (1999). ‘On Recalling ANT.’ In Actor Network Theory and After, edited by J. Law and J. Hassard, 16–​25. Oxford: Blackwell. Lees-​Maffei, G. (2014). Design at Home: Domestic Advice Books in Britain and the USA since 1945. London: Routledge. Nassauer, J.I. (2011). ‘Care and Stewardship: From Home to Planet.’ Landscape and Urban Planning 100(4):321–​323. Power, E.R. (2005). ‘Human–​nature Relations in Suburban Gardens.’ Australian Geographer 36(1):39–​53. Pritchard, S.B. (2014). ‘Toward an Environmental History of Technology’. In The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, edited by A.C. Isenberg, 227–​258. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ravn, H. (2000). Havetid: den almindelige danske have  –​kulturhistorisk set. Rudkøbing: Langelands Museum. Ravn, H. (2011). Gulerødder, græs eller granit: Danske parcelhushaver 1950–​2008. Rudkøbing: Øhavsmuseet Langeland. Robbins, P., and J.T. Sharp (2003). ‘Producing and Consuming Chemicals: The Moral Economy of the American Lawn’. Economic Geography 79(4):425–​451. Shove, E., M. Watson, M. Hand, and J. Ingram (2007). The Design of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Sørensen, A.H. (2009). ‘Kompostbeholdere’. Haven,  50–​51. Tilley, C. (2009). ‘What Gardens Mean’. In Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches, edited by P. Vannini, 171–​292. New York: Peter Lang. Tonkinwise, C. (2017). ‘The Practically Living Weight of Convenient Things.’ In Encountering Things, edited by L. Atzmon and P. Boradkar, 47–​58. London: Bloomsbury.

12 PERMANENCE AND MAGIC Super-​natural metaphors of stainless steel Nicolas P. Maffei

Despite its origin in natural elements –​chromium, nickel, and iron –​stainless steel was promoted by the steel industry as a technologically advanced and even super-​ natural material. It can be considered super-​natural in at least two ways. Firstly, trade discourse emphasized its resistance to the forces of nature, to ageing, especially rusting, and broadcasted its persistent shininess. Secondly, it was presented as magical. While its original promotion was primarily functional –​‘non-​rusting’ was a phrase commonly used in many of the earliest advertisements and industry news articles for stainless steel after 1915 –​in the decades after the Second World War a more consumerist emphasis led to super-​natural language of miraculous shine and hygiene. Thus, a rhetoric of stainless steel can be identified, which emphasizes logic on the one hand and wonder on the other. The symbolic meanings stainless steel has accrued are unique because of the wider socio-​cultural contexts within which they are understood. The shiny metal is rooted in the histories of iron and steel, materials which, despite their strength and longevity, ultimately fall victim to arguably the most fundamental force of nature, entropy, in the form of rust. This chapter investigates the way in which stainless steel, as a gleaming, rust-​resisting material, has been understood metaphorically as countering nature and has become associated with magic, not just the ‘magic’ of easy cleaning promoted in post-​war advertisements of domestic goods, but also its origins in early technical knowledge of metallurgy associated with alchemy and pre-​enlightenment thought. Towards the end of the 1950s a steel industry survey revealed that the American public considered steel to be heavy, rusty, and dark.Therefore, it was in the interest of the steel companies to promote bright modern metals (Maffei 2013). This resulted in an institution-​wide marketing campaign, the ‘Gleam of Stainless Steel’, which began in 1959, was aimed at the domestic market and promoted stainless steel as a gleaming, stylish household metal. However, these connotations, while solidifying some metaphorical meanings of stainless steel, limited others related to its technical

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properties, including its strength, heat tolerance, hygienic qualities, permanence and sustainability, reducing a complex understanding of the gleaming substance to a few easily digestible tropes for popular consumption. Focusing on stainless steel in post-​Second World War consumerist America this chapter investigates the non-​rusting metal as a super-​natural material, exploring its resistance to natural processes of decay. While the chapter concentrates on themes of durability and ephemerality, it also explores the metaphors related to nature in promotional and trade writing. The American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) archives from the Hagley Library, Delaware are used to explore how the initial and subsequent language used to discuss and promote stainless steel in the trade and popular press helped shape cultural meanings of the material. This chapter provides an opportunity to discuss a single material and suggest its place within a unique category of ‘super-​natural’ materials that seem to counter nature.

Nature and steel: the power of metaphor Postmodern philosophy argues that only socially constructed narratives exist (Smith 1989). Accordingly, those who construct and disseminate narratives define the dominant language and discourse. The stories, myths, and symbols associated with stainless steel have largely been written and developed by steel manufacturers, the steel trade press and steel marketers. These groups have used metaphors that imbue the nickel alloy with qualities that counter the powerful processes of nature: stainless steel resists rusts, it is immune to discoloration, and it is ageless and permanent. Of course, nature has its own metaphorical lexicon with its own culturally derived and deeply embedded meanings. In their influential book Metaphors We Live By (1980) Lakoff and Johnson argue that the metaphors employed in our everyday communication shape not only the way we think, but how we behave. In their study natural metaphors are consistently used to illustrate their discussions, evidencing the way in which the concept of nature is deeply embedded in language and thought. Perhaps most relevant to this chapter is Lakoff and Johnson’s discussion of the human tendency to perceive boundaries between things: between one’s body and the natural world and between natural spaces.You are either in the woods or out of the woods, in the clearing or out of the clearing, etc. Even if there is no physical natural boundary, we impose one (30). Of course, the innate human tendency to separate oneself from the natural world limits empathy towards the environment:  if we are not part of nature, then we don’t need to look after it. But it may also encourage an inside-​outside conceptualization of stainless steel: it shines and is impenetrable. It defies nature through resisting rust. It is magical: so, it is not of our world. The qualities of stainless steel may appeal to us because they are separate from us. In his exploration of the use of metaphor in the popular discourse on nature, Jelinski (2005) notes that when a newspaper exclaims that ‘mother nature’ is responsible for a weather event the journalist is relying on a simple, narrow, and dangerously common sense understanding of the world. Likewise, an idiomatic phrase

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such as the ‘balance of nature’ ‘metaphorizes’ nature as existing in equilibrium rather than emphasizing ‘disequilibria, chaos and hence unpredictability’ (Jelinski 2005, 272). Such simplification has the potential to lead to cultural, social, and scientific misconceptions about nature. Metaphors can reinforce dogma and a dualistic understanding of the world. They have the power to deny the unfathomable complexity of earth’s systems and its unknowable algorithms and eradicate opportunities to marvel at nature’s mystery (Jelinski 2005, 285). Jelinski’s observations are a reminder that metaphors, despite their use in simplifying complex concepts, are never neutral, whether discussing nature or steel. But they also reveal a tendency to see the natural as either logical and knowable or mysterious and miraculous.

A rhetorics of modern materials While no scholarly cultural histories of stainless steel exist, a number of academic studies of steel (Misa 1995; Fry and Willis 2015), its competitors (e.g. aluminium [Nichols 2000; Schatzberg 1999; Schnapp 2001; Sheller 2014; Zimring 2017] and plastics [Meikle 1995]) and of other materials associated with modernity (e.g. rayon [Schnapp 1997] and concrete [Forty 2012]) have contributed to a growing field of materials history. These single material studies are typically cultural and historical investigations ranging from modernity and modernism and to spirituality and magic. Jeffrey Schnapp has published widely on the metaphorical meanings of modern materials including aluminium, glass, and rayon, focusing in particular on Italian modernism during Fascist rule, in their socio-​cultural and historic context, examining as he puts it ‘the politics and symbolism of industrial materials’ (2001, 245). In ‘The Fabric of Modern Times’ (1997) Schnapp recognizes the metaphorical power of modern materials, exploring the narratives unique to rayon in Fascist Italy. He mentions the era’s ‘spiritual’ and ‘supernatural’ materials, including stainless steel, considering them uniquely modern. Schnapp argues that artists and designers endowed materials with spirit in an era of diminished spirituality. Like tempered glass, reinforced concrete, aluminum, stainless steel, and plastics, artificial textiles belong to a privileged family of modern materials. ‘Privileged’ because theirs is a happy, often utopistic, even miraculous materiality, not unlike a secularized version of the Christian theology of glorified bodies according to which the chains that bind matter and human bodies to the corrosive effects of time are shed through activation of a higher potentiality that was thought to lie dormant within the material world … Schnapp 1997, 191 The discovery of materials that seemed to defy the laws of nature  –​of natural corrosion and human decay associated with mortality –​must have seemed truly miraculous and lent a magical aura to the unique narrative of modern materials.

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Of these materials aluminium has perhaps the most in common with stainless steel. Shiny, rustless, and popular in consumer goods in the post-​war years, in the US it was feared within the stainless steel industry as an aggressive rival. However, outside of North America stainless was seen as an emergent rival to aluminium, for example in the kitchen goods industry in 1960s Norway (Fallan 2013). In Aluminum Dreams:  The Making of Light Modernity (2014) Sheller explores the metal as an emblem and instrument of modernity, identifying its qualities of speed, lightness, luminosity, and flight. She suggests that a particular ‘rhetorics’ has developed within discourses on modern materials. They are presented as either ersatz or miraculous. Schatzberg, who has written on aluminium, presents the material as either scientifically revolutionary, e.g. a ‘miracle metal’, or a ‘flimsy substitute’. Sheller notes that the historian of plastics, Meikle, discusses the material through a rhetoric of scientific invention of a seemingly immortal “magic” material that would transform the world, and the more mundane positioning in which plastic is merely a cheap imitation or substitute for other materials, vulnerable to being rejected as “artificial” rather than celebrated as a product of chemistry. Sheller 2014, 8 In the postwar years a similar dichotomy existed within nickel-​based steels, e.g. chromed surfaces versus stainless goods, where chromed objects, such as car bumpers, toasters, etc. were criticized by advocates of modernism as superficial and dishonest, while stainless steel, whether Scandinavian bowls or Italian cutlery with their material depth and elemental purity, were understood as functional and honest. The American design author and curator Edgar Kaufmann Jr. presented chromed goods as anti-​modernist in his influential article ‘Borax –​or the chromium-​plated calf ’ (1948). Likewise, during this period the stainless steel trade press developed its own dualistic rhetorics, publishing dozens of articles on its stylish use in consumer goods, including toasters and car bumpers, as well as its hygienic applications in scientific, medical, and food industry equipment. The rhetorics of modern materials can be reduced to a binaristic discourse of the logic of science versus the irrationality of consumerist lifestyle. This conceptual framework is employed in Sparke’s study of the domestication of aluminium in the US, 1900–​1939, in Aluminum by Design (Sparke, 2000). Sparke explores how the silvery metal shifted in meaning over time from an ‘artifact [that was] necessary on rational grounds to one linked to the nonrational areas of life –​beauty, desire, display, consumption, leisure, status, modernity and individual identity’ –​a shift Sparke argues paralleled that of the modern housewife from ‘scientist to consumer’ (Sparke 138). While Sparke focuses on the first decades of the twentieth century she notes that after the Second World War the idea that aluminium cooking utensils spread disease gained ground. The material in the domestic context increasingly lost its appeal while, as Sparke notes, stainless steel ‘usurped aluminum’s position to a significant extent’ (138).

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While the rhetorics of materials is largely binaristic, Fry and Willis in their book Steel: A Design, Cultural and Ecological History (2015) offer a conception of metal that is relational, investigating interactions rather than oppositions between the natural and the artificial, the logical and the miraculous. In developing this concept, they refer to the ‘ecologies of steel’, defining ecologies as ‘systems relationally connected’. Iron participates in an ecology through its existence as a material that transforms the natural into the artificial, seeming to erase the boundaries between the two, ‘breaking down the natural/​artificial’ boundary (3). Developing this notion of interaction and overlap, the authors explain that iron is usually deemed inanimate and artificial. Yet iron is the core of our planet; it makes up some 4 percent of its crust, and is also part of the very lifeblood of all red-​blooded animals. Iron is a bridge between the inert and the organic; it is an active element that links natural and unnatural ecologies. Fry and Willis 2015, 3 Fry and Willis further develop their relational exploration on steel in their discussion of its kinship with magic. The association of magic with steel has a long and unique lineage. Fry and Willis note that the historical knowledge of metals preceded that of science and originated in ‘narrative mythology and magic’. This was later developed through alchemy, a more ‘relational’ system of knowing than those offered by Enlightenment thought, where philosophy and science separated and specialization dominated (Fry and Willis 2015, 69–​70). In the metals press in the postwar years stainless steel was commonly described as a speciality metal and was often held up as a trail blazer and beacon for the industry: a technologically sophisticated alloy that opened new markets and helped to diversify what was often perceived as a one-​dimensional and old-​fashioned product, steel. Fry and Willis point to some commonalities between ancient magic and science, including the ‘quest for magical materials with supra-​qualities’ (70). A similar quest was evident in the steel industry and is expressed in the metaphors employed in the promotional language of stainless after its invention in the first decades of the twentieth century and into the 1950s and 1960s where its seemingly magical, nature-​denying qualities of permanence and shine were constantly promoted.

A non-​rusting steel: the origin of stainless The story of the origins of stainless steel in England –​its rhetorics and metaphors –​ precede those of rayon in Fascist Italy. They begin with Harry Brearley, the British pioneer of stainless steel. Having produced stainless steel on 20 August 1913, Brearley is often credited with its invention, despite the fact that nearly a dozen others from across Europe and the US had experimented with steel alloys of chrome, nickel, and carbon, describing it and patenting it (Waldman 2015, 60). From its inception in 1915 the English-​speaking press called it ‘no-​rusting steel’ and ‘stainless steel’ and commonly referred to its origin in Sheffield, England at Thomas Firth

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and Son, Ltd. Other countries such as Germany (Krupp) were credited soon after. Most early reports highlighted its use in cutlery. A New York Times article of 1915 claimed that Firth’s had created a steel that was immune to the degradation of natural forces (Rogers 1915). An article of 1920 in the same paper described the everlasting qualities of stainless steel, writing that it has the ‘perpetual appearance of burnished steel’ (Anon. 1920). A  1915 advertisement proclaimed the nature-​ resisting qualities of stainless cutlery as ‘absolutely impervious to the action of both rust and stain through contact with either salt of fresh water, all sorts of food acids, and even strong undiluted acids of radical and violent kinds’ (Anon. 1915). Brearley, in a discussion of the popular association of steel with rust, provided an unspoken reminder of the unique nature-​resisting qualities of stainless steel. The rusting of iron and steel is accepted, like the force of gravity, without question; it is the one property of iron universally recognised. People who have no notion of its tensile strength, or its atomic weight, know that it rusts. n.d. Brearley quote in Waldman, 2015: 58, location 1040 This quote suggests that during Brearley’s era steel was predominately associated with the natural processes of decay –​with entropy: steel rusts. The comparison to gravity is equally apposite: rust like gravity is an inescapable and fundamental force of nature. Such connotations helped to establish the natural language for the subsequent discourses around stainless, or rustless, steel. To understand stainless steel as a nature-​resisting material, the relevant natural forces must first be understood. Centuries before the invention of rustless or stainless steel rust in all its natural and cultural manifestations was understood as an accepted condition of nature and of humankind: decay affected both materials and morals. The earliest entry for rust in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), referring to the oxidation and decay of metal, is c 1225, thereafter referring to gold, silver, brass swords, and later aluminium. Entries after 1400 refer to the metaphorical meanings of rust as moral and intellectual decay, sometimes rhyming rust with lust (as Chaucer does in the Canterbury Tales c 1405). The notion of rust as degeneration through lack of use or idleness appears after 1605 and can be associated with the notion of entropy –​the 2nd law of thermodynamics –​where systems lacking energy naturally progress from order to disorder and where energy is more easily lost than gained. The OED finds examples from 1759 of rust used to describe the natural blight of cereal or other crops. So, over time rust has been strongly linked to the degradation of nature, metals, and human character.

Stainless as a post-​Second World War modern metal The image of a dark and rusting steel industry was one that was countered in America in the decades after the Second World War. In 1955, while consumerism blossomed and Life magazine first used the term ‘throwaway living’, the US steel industry began to research the public’s perception of metals in order to rebrand the

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FIGURE 12.1   Steelmark

with the word ‘Steel’. Original design by Lippincott and Marguiles 1958. Courtesy of Hagley Museum and Library

industry with a modern image (Anon. 1955). A major consumer survey conducted by New York design consultancy Lippincott and Margulies showed that steel was widely viewed as dark, rusty, and old fashioned. In an effort to change this perception the American Iron and Steel Institute, the powerful metals trade body, promoted stainless steel across the industry as a shiny, light, bright, and modern material (Maffei 2013). In response to this survey in 1958 the ‘Steelmark’ logo (Figure  12.1) was developed by Lippincott and Marguiles who had been hired to rid the industry of its old-​fashioned image of bridge and railway builders and offer a contemporary identity as America entered the Cold War, the Space Age, and a period of increased consumerism. The symbol and its description by Lippincott and Marguiles are suggestive of nature in its emphasis on the qualities of light and air, but also permanence in its use of the hypocycloid, and the agency’s description of it as a ‘diamond’ shape. They referred to the shape as ‘concave-​sided “diamonds” ’ and developed a new slogan for modern steel that provided positive associations with nature and modernity, pronouncing in their in-​house branding and corporate identity publication, Design Sense, that it ‘lightens, brightens and widens’ with corresponding natural colours:  ‘yellow for “lightens”  –​orange for “brightens”, horizon blue, suggesting sky and water, for “widens” ’, noting that the star-​like symbol suggested ‘luminosity, modernity, brightness and airiness’ (Anon. 1961:  9). The Steelmark can be associated with contemporary mid-​ century design which rejected the grid, embraced the organic while suggesting the possibility of space flight and the atom. Even the parabolic curves implied the orbit of planets and space craft, perhaps unknowingly linking the symbol to gravity upon which orbit is determined. Arguably, the contemporary style of the period was typified most by the parabolic curves found in such mid-​century designs as George Nelson’s logo of 1946 for the Herman Miller furniture company and Eero Saarinen’s towering stainless steel-​clad Gateway Arch for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, St. Louis

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FIGURE 12.2   Gateway Arch

for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, St. Louis, completed 1964. Designed by Eero Saarinen. Photograph by Bev Sykes, 2005, CC-​BY-​2.0

(completed 1964) (Figure 12.2). Saarinen said he chose the parabolic-​like catenary curve because he considered it ‘pure’, ‘dynamic’, and ‘timeless’ and that he chose stainless steel because of its ‘permanence’ and because it ‘belong[ed] to our time’ (Saarinen 1968, 22). The steel industry in its promotion of the stain-​resisting alloy emphasized its physical properties: shininess, durability, and hygienic qualities as well as its stylishness, novelty, and even a kind of domestic ‘magic’. In a steel industry sales pamphlet of 1956 the copy-​writer waxed lyrical about the cookware that provided ‘stove to table magic’ and ‘bright and shining’ cutlery that was almost indestructible, relying on metaphors and symbols established in the first decades of the twentieth century by Brearley and others while adding a consumerist twist that emphasized modern domestic living (CSSP 1956). The focus of much stainless steel promotion was at the domestic market and was consistent with the marketing of modern materials, e.g. plastics, aluminium, etc. as extraordinary. In his study of mid-​century plastics Meikle writes of the ‘damp cloth utopianism’ (Meikle 1995, 173) employed in the postwar years by plastics firms in their attempt to sell easily cleanable plastic goods. A predecessor of such damp cloth rhetoric is found in a 1917 article on the emergence of stainless steel in the home: ‘[k]‌nives made of it have not to be [sic] cleaned in the old dirty way; they merely have to be wiped’ (Anon. 1917). Such apparent

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resistance to the laws of nature suggests a domestic magic made possible through materials born of modern science. The launch of the ‘Gleam of Stainless Steel’ marketing campaign in 1959 introduced American consumers to the first nation-​wide promotion of stainless steel as a modern-​consumer-​oriented material for domestic use. The campaign encompassed store displays at major department stores, including bridal gift ‘forever shops’, underlining the metal’s association with permanence and style, as well as luminous colour advertisements in mass-​circulation magazines, along with a flood of radio commercials. By 1963 the American Metal Market, a leading trade journal for the steel industry, boasted that the 1963 campaign had reached over 15 million women through print ads and that radios spots would be ‘beamed’ to more than 15 million homes every day (Anon. 1963b, 15). Individual steel manufacturers, such as Republic Steel, joined in the promotion, making use of the marketing themes of ‘modern taste’, and ‘carefree luxury’ in their promotion of everything from toasters and fruit bowls to teapots and cutlery. Copy for such ads appeared in the New Yorker and described these goods as ‘heirlooms for moderns’ that are ‘easy to wipe clean’ with ‘never-​stain sparkle’ and ‘carefree permanence’ (Anon. 1963a, 23).

Stainless steel and sustainability Much of this chapter has focused on the metaphorical meaning of steel: its perception as a nature-​resisting material, a meaning that counters nature. But, how can its symbolism:  its rhetorics, narratives, myths, and metaphors be used to support nature? Can stainless steel be considered truly sustainable? To what extent does it circumvent the throwaway ethic of consumerism? In the seminal sustainability manifesto, Cradle to Cradle, chemist Michael Braungart and architect William McDonough (2002) described the impact of rampant consumerism combined with the throw-​away ethic: Imagine what you would come upon today at a typical landfill: old furniture, upholstery, carpets, televisions, clothing, shoes, telephones, computers, complex products, and plastic packaging, as well as organic materials like diapers, paper, wood and food wastes … They are the ultimate products of an industrial system that is designed on a linear, one-​way cradle to grave model. Braungart and McDonough 2002, 27 To give a sense of the scale of this problem, they note that ‘90 percent of materials extracted to make durable goods in the United States become waste almost immediately’ (27). Here material durability –​the resistance to nature –​is identified as a problem rather than a benefit. Thus, the authors are interested in materials that do not resist nature but return to it. In their study Fry and Willis outline the steel industry’s activities which have a substantial environmental impact, including extraction, processing, and distribution (Willis and Fry 2015). But, counter-​intuitively stainless steel’s ability to resist nature has the potential to make it more sustainable.

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Its durability, along with its considered application by designers, helps it to circumvent obsolescence. Braungart and McDonough also accept that goods must give ‘pleasure and delight’ (173). To what extent stainless steel achieves this goal is subjective. However, the marketing for stainless (e.g. the ‘Gleam’ campaign), and some of the progressive designs which have employed it (e.g. Saarinen’s St. Louis Gateway Arch) associated the gleaming metal with modernity, progress, and a kind of vigorous optimism. Stainless steel is sustainable due to its material permanence and durability and is widely used in decorative, often heirloom, goods, as well as more prosaic products such as cutlery that can last a lifetime. Sustainable design expert, Jonathan Chapman, argues that ‘emotionally durable design’ that uses appropriate product semantics (26) encourages relationships with the user in order to avoid ephemerality and disposability and is an important way of engaging in sustainability. While Braungart, McDonough, and Chapman are recent advocates of sustainable design, the steel industry had been addressing such issues as early as the 1970s, in the wake of the nascent environmental movement and the first Earth Day (1970). In 1971 at ‘America Two Hundred Years Later’, an invited seminar organized by the American Iron and Steel Institute, with talks by eco-​architect Paolo Soleri and futurist Alvin Toffler, prominent designer, Jay Doblin, proclaimed the ‘next step’ in industrial design was to ‘cease overdesigning products’, and create ‘lasting’ goods of permanence. The stainless steel producers in the audience may have found satisfaction in Doblin’s message, knowing their products were both materially and perhaps emotionally enduring (Anon. 1971, n.p.).

Conclusion Investigating the metaphorical meanings of a material through its written and visual discourse whether at its inception, in advertising, in the trade press or its branding, has numerous benefits. It provides a lens through which to understand current historical events and debates, from themes of modernity to discourses around nature. It also provides insight and inspiration for designers, allowing an avenue of design exploration of the metaphor of materials. In the introduction to their book Lakoff and Johnson illustrate the power of metaphor in a discussion of the concept of argument as war. Outlining multiple phrases from ordinary speech that use this metaphor: ‘Your claims are indefensible’; ‘I demolished his argument’; ‘He attacked my weak points’, etc. They note that as a society we could have chosen the metaphor of dance when describing an argument. But the militaristic metaphor has taken root. Thus, we consider the person we are arguing with as an opponent, ‘we gain and lose ground’, etc. (5). Stainless steel’s domestic magic and resistance to natural forces can be seen as inherent metaphors with untapped communicative power. However, they can also be seen as constraining, limiting our understanding of a complex material. Through this lens the seemingly mundane characteristics of preservation and protection can be associated with powerful human drives related to life and death. With this perspective in mind designers and scholars can harness and amplify

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the metaphorical potential of materials while remaining wary of the limiting danger of metaphor. Perhaps permanence as a material symbol would have had appeal in an increasingly consumerist society with its emphasis on stylistic obsolescence, throw-​away products and environmental degradation. A stainless steel product could provide a sense of stability: a sense that constant change could be countered.

References Anon. (1915). ‘The Dawn of a New Domestic Era: Less Work with Stainless Cutlery’, advertisement for Gibson & Paterson, Ltd, Wanganui Chronicle, Issue 20416, 23 July, p. 3. Anon. (1917). ‘Stainless Steel for Cutlery’, Thames Star, LVIII(10339): 7, 10 March. Anon. (1920). ‘Uses of Stainless Steel: It is Now to be Employed in Making of Kitchen Utensils’, New York Times, 17 March, E22. Anon. (1955). ‘Throwaway Living: Disposable Items Cut Down Household Chores’, Life 39: 43–​44. Anon. (1961). Design Sense, no. 12. Anon. (1963a). ‘All Year Long: Republic Promotes the Values of Stainless Steel Products’, American Metal Market, 15 April, 23. Anon. (1963b). ‘“Stainless Steel” Theme To Millions’, American Metal Market, 15 April, 15. Anon. (1971). ‘Architect Soleri, Author Toffler Speak at Design in Steel Seminar’, no author, page no. or date, c. April–​May, ACC 1631, AISI Vertical Files, Box 81, Folder ‘Marketing –​Sales Promotion’. AISI papers, Hagley. Braungart, M. and W. McDonough (2002) (reprint 2009). Cradle to Cradle: Re-​Making the Way We Make Things, London:Vintage Books. Chapman, J. (2005). Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences, and Empathy.London: Earthscan. Committee of Stainless Steel Producers (CSSP) (c 1956). AISI, New York, n.d. c. ‘What to Remember about STAINLESS STEEL’, pamphlet, ACC 1631, AISI,  Vert. Files, Box 124, Folder, ‘Stainless Steel 5’, AISI papers, Hagley. Fallan, K. (2013).‘Culture by Design: Co-​Constructing Material and Meaning’, in K. Aukrust (ed.), Assigning Cultural Values, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, pp. 135–​163. Fallan, K. and F.A. Jørgensen (2013). ‘Environmental Histories of Design: Towards a New Research Agenda’, Journal of Design History 30(2): 103–​121. Forty, A. (2012). Concrete and Culture: A Material History. London: Reaktion. Fry, T. and A.-​M. Willis (2015). Steel: A Design, Cultural and Ecological History. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Hine, T. (1986). Populuxe. New York: Knopf. Jelinski, D.E. (2005). ‘There is No Mother Nature –​There is No Balance of Nature: Culture, Ecology and Conservation’, Human Ecology 33(2): 271–​288. Kaufmann, Jr. E. (1948). ‘Borax, or the Chrome-​ plated Calf ’, Architectural Review 104: August,  88–​93. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Maffei, N.P. (2013). ‘Selling Gleam: Making Steel Modern in Post-​war America’, Journal of Design History 26(3): 304–​320. Meikle, J.L. (1995). American Plastic: A Cultural History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Misa,T. (1995). A Nation of Steel:The Making of Modern America, 1865–​1925. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Rogers, F.E. (1915). ‘Non-​rusting Steel in England’, New York Times, 8 September. Saarinen, A.B. (1968). Eero Saarinen and His Work. New Haven:Yale University Press. Schatzberg, E. (1999). Wings of Wood, Wings of Metal: Culture and Technical Choice in American Airplane Materials, 1914–​1945. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schnapp, J.T. (1997). ‘The Fabric of Modern Times’, Critical Inquiry 24(1): 191–​245. Schnapp, J.T. (2001). ‘The Romance of Caffeine and Aluminum,’ Critical Inquiry 28(1): 244–​269. Schnapp, J.T. (2008). ‘The People’s Glass House’, South Central Review 25(3): 45–​56. Sheller, M. (2014). Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smith, H. (1989). Beyond the Post-​Modern Mind. Wheaton, IL: Quest. Sparke, P. (2000). ‘Cookware to Cocktail Shakers: The Domestication of Aluminum in the United States, 1900–1939’, in S. Nichols (ed.), Aluminum by Design. Pittsburgh/​New York: Carnegie Museum of Art/​Harry N. Abrams, pp. 112–139. Waldman, J. (2015). Rust:The Longest War. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Zimring, C.A. (2017). Aluminum Upcycled: Sustainable Design in Historical Perspective, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

PART 4

Design as ecology

13 FORMS OF HUMAN ENVIRONMENT (1970) Italian design responds to the global crisis Elena Formia

In September 1970, the First International Biennial of Global Design Methodology opened in Rimini. In an 11-​day long event, the design élite met, debated, and presented their research to the general public under the title Le forme dell’ambiente umano (Forms of Human Environment). Its location was unusual on the geopolitical map of Italian design at that time: it took place at an expo centre in Rimini, a small city on the Adriatic Sea, strongly influenced by the nearby Bologna with its historic university;Venice, a place of reference for architectural schools; and the Republic of San Marino. Temporally, the Biennial outlined the transition between the alleged ‘crisis’ in Italian industrial design of the early 1960s (Fallan 2009), its partial evolution in the social contestations of 1968 and the second wave of radical design of the mid-​1970s (Rossi 2014) that ran parallel with the oil embargo of 1973. This was the period which saw the consolidation of designers’ relationships with the industrial sector and, at the same time, the emergence of a reflection about the professional identity and responsibility towards society (Dalla Mura 2018). As a microhistory (Riccini 2013), this event is almost unknown to the history of Italian design, relegated to the margins of dominant narratives. However, when given further attention, many of the Biennial’s achievements uniquely provide key insight into macro-​scale issues of the time. The Biennial was more than an exhibition. Scientific and educational aims coexisted in a large-​ scale project, organized through displays, research reports, roundtables, conferences, film projections, and performances. As in Italo Calvino’s 1969 novel Il castello dei destini incrociati (The Castle of Crossed Destinies), the occasion gave voice to a plurality of figures questioning design instruments, strategies, results, working systems, and responsibilities, limited neither thematically nor geographically. The event was intrinsically multidisciplinary and international, gathering together scholars from across the world and forms of study that were previously little considered in relation to design. On one end were the emerging topics of

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cybernetics and systems theory, and on the other contributions from social sciences like future studies, semiotics, and anthropology. Above all, as the title announced, the Biennial contained traces of the ways in which, and with which tools, Italian design cultures noted emerging issues in the local environmental movement, proposing a political and ideological interpretation of social and economic processes. Three different perspectives help to interpret the peculiarity of this event. The first is prospective, emphasizing the role of design disciplines in managing future-​ oriented thought. During this unique period, the worlds of design and environmentalism each proposed alternative plans for society, for a future with increased focus on human relationship and on sustainable lifestyles and ideology. In Italy, this coincided with the emergence of future studies, linked to the foundation of the Club of Rome in 1968 by industrialist Aurelio Peccei and Scottish scientist Alexander King: the informal and non-​political group of international scholars, business leaders, intellectuals that was responsible for the report The Limits to Growth (1972). This field was inherently interdisciplinary, engaging such figures as sociologist Eleonora Barbieri Masini; mathematician Bruno De Finetti; chemist, ecologist and commodity economics professor Giorgio Nebbia and futurist Pietro Ferraro. The second perspective is instrumental. As the history of environmentalism outlines, to imagine a sustainable future in the ‘season of movements’ means to denounce, criticize, inform, create knowledge and methodologies, and educate the public on new behaviours. It means to transform the ideology of the future and relative forms of utopian and dystopian thinking into a shared and material practice. It means to give shape to the ‘crisis’, identify its paradoxes and propose a political narrative. The third perspective is processual. The Biennial itself represented a new way of looking at design disciplines. In the mid-​1960s design reached a mature evolutionary phase: industrialized society recognized its value from a practical standpoint, while, through a grand-​scale discussion of methods, impacts, and potentialities, it was legitimized culturally as a science. At the same time, design was one of the first disciplines to notice the necessity to re-​formulate the paradigm of ‘wellbeing’ assumed by consumer society and to question modernist principles.With its formal criticism, it realized and anticipated social critique and gained the right to arbitrate the socio-​cultural revolution of the time. This chapter investigates the role of the Rimini Biennial through these different perspectives. The articulated structure of the event was emblematic of a turn toward viewing design as an organizational scheme, a tool, or a process, rather than merely the conception and creation of objects and, therefore, towards an ecological approach to design. Secondarily, this approach did not emerge in Italy uniquely from the anti-​capitalist counterculture, but from a socially and politically engaged professional environment still steeped in commercial design practices. In order to highlight the latter point, the chapter focuses on a single event within the Biennial’s program: the exhibition Aggressività e violenza dell’uomo nei confronti dell’ambiente (Man’s Aggression and Violence toward the Environment), curated by the Art Directors Club of Milan, then directed by Giancarlo Iliprandi, with works by a heterogeneous group of

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professionals. It presents a case study of graphic design’s engagement with deeper issues of ecology and environmental degradation as an expression of a visual culture of the global ‘crisis’. However, this exhibition will not be interpreted according to the canonical narrative of Italian anti-​design, with its attitude of opposition, but will be related to the broader idea of design as ecology in itself. This chapter also underlines methodological issues pertaining to the nature of sources in design historical research, especially concerning the history of sustainability and design (Fallan 2014; Lie 2017). On 20 January 2016, the Research Centre that organized the event officially closed, and its history is poorly documented. A  few local narratives celebrate its activities (Cardellini and Faenza 2005), yet ignore its critical and theoretical background and innovative approach to design culture. This is also due to the fact that the Biennial was, as the nomenclature implies, conceived as a recurring event, but remained a unique instance. Several debates and initiatives developed during the Biennial subsequently dispersed and re-​emerged in multiple other contexts. Like an underground river, its influence rose sporadically, losing the solidity of the collective event and its global dimension.Without a permanent archive, the Centre’s documentation is mostly available through its publication series Strutture Ambientali (Environmental Structures). The series, further explored below, documents the premise, development, and implications of this event, taking the shape of an exhibition catalogue and assembled with a profound theoretical apparatus (Figure 13.1).

Anticipating a design ecology through displays in Forms of Human Environment The First International Biennial of Global Design Methodology, Forms of Human Environment, opened on 20 September 1970 at the Rimini Fiera expo centre. The primary organizer of the event was the newly formed Pio Manzù International Research Centre,1 a non-​governmental institution in consultative status with the United Nations. It was founded in Verucchio (near Rimini) on the initiative of the artist, painter, and cultural promoter Gerardo Filiberto Dasi (1924–​2014), under the aegis of the then Minister of Finance Luigi Preti, who acted as something of an honorary President of the event. The Pio Manzù Centre was directed by a managing committee of international calibre, including, among others, art critics Giulio Carlo Argan (who was the coordinator of works), Umbro Apollonio, and Gillo Dorfles; professor of sociology Franco Ferrarotti, who had previously collaborated with the industrialist Adriano Olivetti; philosopher Luciano Anceschi; theorist, designer and educator Tomás Maldonado; and designer Bruno Munari. As described in the committee’s introductory texts to the Biennial, the Convegni Internazionali Artisti, Critici e Studiosi d’Arte (International Conferences of Artists, Critics, and Art Scholars), previously organized in Rimini by the same group,2 still represented the interpretative background of the event. However, while earlier conferences were expressed primarily through art, aesthetics, and formal theory, the Biennial focused solely on design and its role in multiple contextual dualities:  nature and artifice, mankind and environment

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to the First International Biennial of Global Design Methodology, entitled Le forme dell’ambiente umano (Forms of Human Environment) (Strutture Ambientali, no. 4–​5, 1970, front cover). The event occupied an area of 5,000 square metres of Rimini Fiera expo centre; exhibit project by Kuniko Watanuki and Renzo Sancisi. Right: Eighteenth edition of the Convegno Internazionale di Teoria e Metodologia della Forma (International Conference of Formal Theory and Methodology), September 1969, for the preparation of the Biennial (Strutture Ambientali, no. 2, 1970, p. 50). Courtesy of Cappelli Editore FIGURE 13.1   Guide

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(Dorfles 1970), costs and benefits of industrial growth (Ferrarotti 1970), conservation and degradation and passive habits versus active opposition (Apollonio 1970). Above all, the event aimed to portray the motivations, theoretical and non, for the emergence of a new ecological approach to design (Argan 1970). Its themes indeed reached beyond the bounds of graphic design, product design, architecture, and urban design: the idea was to offer a multidisciplinary vision based on ‘a model of environment descending from one of man and society, anchored to history and immersed in its own growth’ (Strutture Ambientali 1970, 69).3 The theoretical and functional contribution of the Biennial was thus strengthened by its process-​oriented character and by the fact that it was organized as a cultural experiment, a multidisciplinary lab, and a plural system of labour. This concept was a project in its own right. It demonstrated a systemic struggle towards synthesis, expressed in the graphic representations of the Guida Programmatica (Programme Guide) published in the periodical series on ‘techniques and materials’ of Strutture Ambientali, the Centre’s most significant mediating instrument that debuted in 1969 and which constitutes the main source in reconstructing this history. The formal scheme used to present the overall organization (Figure  13.2) spoke clearly: ‘The Biennial will be divided into one didactic section (on design

FIGURE 13.2   Formal

scheme of the Biennial as represented in the catalogue of the event (Strutture Ambientali, no. 4–​5, 1970, pp. 62–​63). The main parts were made up of operational (displays and exhibitions) and didactic (theory and methodology of design) sections, linked by a connecting section for roundtables, conferences, talks, and workshops. Courtesy of Cappelli Editore

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theory and methodology), and one that is functional, in other words, a section of demonstrations. A fluid, connective area shall operate between the two, made up of roundtables, lectures, the work of public organizations […] and debates’ (Strutture Ambientali 1970, 59).This organizational structure therefore did not possess the static nature of an exhibition but availed itself of a ‘dynamic’ approach. Presupposing the event’s future recurrence, the objective was to realize and integrate simultaneously methodological, operative (via demonstration through research and various other projects), didactic, and informative aims. With these goals, the Biennial was articulated through 16 display areas, conceived as ‘collection spaces’ of industrial or artistic products, technological installations, research results, or editorial products. The selected means of expression included film and television, photography and slides, graphics, designs, and strategies for publishing.The exhibitions were accompanied by a dense programme of roundtables, lectures, and testimonies, boasting such influential speakers as Fernando Belaúnde Terry, planner of Peru’s Grande Carretera Marginal; Japanese architect Kenzo Tange; Konrad Wachsmann, director of the Building Institute of the University of Southern California; Roger Caillois, director of the UNESCO’s Department of Culture; and Erwin K. Baumgarten, director of the United Nations Information Centre, who spoke about UN research, anticipating the contents that would be presented in Stockholm for the 1972 UN Conference on Human Environment. Only partial documentation remains of the Biennial’s roundtables,4 but it is possible to reconstruct the setup and contents of its exhibition spaces. Most displays involved the combined work of three interdisciplinary research groups, which had been established in 1968 on the Pio Manzù Centre’s initiative, centred on ‘Free Time and Environmental Structures’, ‘Regional Planning as Equilibrium of Self-​ Management in the Ecological System between Mankind and Environment’, and ‘Organization and Communication in Operational Space’. The three thematic groups worked in parallel to interpret concepts of ‘environment’ and address the overall theme of the event: the re-​design of the conditions and modes of interaction between mankind and space –​on individual and collective, private and public, natural and artificial scales –​and thus, that of humans’ actions, ambitions, and needs in themselves. In order to prepare exhibitions for the 1970 Biennial, international research groups operating between Milan, Turin, Rome, Bologna, Zagreb, Frankfurt, Paris, and London were created and given a year to produce and share documents. The complexity of the process generated an environment of inevitable irregularity, where cultures of design were simultaneously applied to technological, urban, communicative, industrial, experimental, and artistic objects. Research in the area dedicated to ‘Free Time’, or the individual space, were conducted by an international group coordinated by the German designer Herbert Ohl, along with the composer and conductor Bruno Maderna and the support of the American company Univac –​Universal Automatic Computer. The group showed the implications of computer technology in managing individual free time, conceiving meta-​artefacts for ‘self-​organized free time’ that facilitated new types

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of human-​environment relationships. The Univac 1108 computer, or ‘electronic elaborator’, interacted with the public about hobbies of interest, while another computer played music and a ‘mechanized museum’ by Ohl involved the audience in an immersive space (Figure  13.3). This section, and the presence of Ohl and Maldonado in the organizing committee, demonstrated the influence of the HfG Ulm on Italian professionals, especially for its research on cybernetic principles, systems thinking, and artificial intelligence.5 Thanks to installations by Munari, the Italian group working on ‘Regional Planning’, or the collective space, led by architect and professor at the Turin Polytechnic Leonardo Mosso, offered a system of self-​organization and co-​planning of territories (Figure  13.3). This began with gathering feedback from the local community, including inhabitants and vulnerable groups such as children. Mosso envisioned a new ‘eco-​social’ model, filtered through the semiotic, anthropological, and ecological literature of the day. This model encouraged direct popular participation in the management and production of spatial organization, mediated by interactive technology. Pursuing an approach to planning no longer based on power, Mosso sought to create relationships encouraging the collective alleviation of alienation through a form of self-​management. The third group, ‘Organization and Communication in Operative Space’, or the viewing space, was coordinated by philosopher, futurologist, and cybernetics scholar Silvio Ceccato, who exhibited research on language in advertising as a signalling process. The topic was especially current in Italy due to the growing influence of semiotics, which would find academic establishment in Bologna, much due to Umberto Eco’s pioneering studies. Within this area, the exhibition by Adalberto Cencetti on the function of the art director illustrated the ‘segnic environment’: the role of mental models and of perception in constructing individual and plural cultural environments. Other exhibitions ran parallel to the three main research areas. The Building Institute of Los Angeles presented, for example, the didactic activities of Konrad Wachsmann on innovative building systems. Ohl also presented the work ‘Ring Unit Construction System’, a low-​cost prefabricated module used for housing in Germany and Peru. The Italian Centre on Ergonomic Design considered the human factor in complex systems design. The Situationist artist Gianni Emilio Simonetti prepared an installation on the concept of ecology with the title, ‘Small Survival Projects’ (‘Progetti Minimi di Sopravvivenza’). Within the impressive line-​up of figures in contemporary architecture and design, installations, and exhibit spaces that were present at the Biennial, there is one exhibition of special interest. It was related to the main research area of ‘Communication’, with a focus on advertising, and used the expertise of graphic design as a means of critique and denunciation. The title itself was emblematic: Man’s Aggression and Violence Toward the Environment.The display was curated by the Art Directors Club of Milan, under the direction of Giancarlo Iliprandi, a leading character in the Italian design scene at the time. He was born in 1925 in Milan and, during the Second World War, received an eclectic education between the Faculty of Medicine and

FIGURE 13.3  Top: Exhibition

by the group coordinated by Herbert Ohl on ‘Free Time and Environmental Structures’, with the Univac 1108 computer and the spheres used to explain the ‘mechanized museum’. Bottom: Display by Bruno Munari of the group ‘Regional Planning as Equilibrium of Self-​Management in the Ecological System between Mankind and Environment’, coordinated by Leonardo Mosso. The modular structures were used as support for the projection of videos and slides documenting a possible answer to the ‘ecological catastrophe’. According to Mosso, this outlined a ‘processual’ and ‘systemic’ research on new design tools and services created by the communities for the communities (Strutture Ambientali, no. 6, 1970, pp. 50–​51, 56–​57). Courtesy of Cappelli Editore

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the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, where he earned a degree in painting in 1949 and scenography in 1953. At the end of the 1960s, he had already reached a solid professional maturity in many fields. He was a graphic designer, illustrator, photographer, art director, product designer, disciplinary and professional activist, professor, and member of design associations. He was also on the editorial boards of such design magazines as Casabella, Abitare, and IN. Argomenti e Immagini di Design. He assumed a programmatic position in defining the role of advertising in contemporary Italian society while he was the art director of the important furniture companies Arflex and RB Rossana.The existence of printed material about this exhibition provides a concrete witness to the growing awareness of design culture surrounding ecological topics and signifies the plurality of voices present at the Biennial.

A new syntax: graphic design’s engagement with environmental issues The exhibition Man’s Aggression and Violence Toward the Environment represented an initial testament to the role of Italian graphic design in developing a communication of social utility (Figure 13.4). As Iliprandi himself would remember in an anthology of essays, originally published between 1971 and 1972 in the magazine Le Arti, ‘Comunicazione di utilità sociale’ (‘Communication of social utility’) was conceived as an effort to use the techniques and language of graphic design for non-​commercial purposes, focusing instead on issues such as civic engagement and public education (Iliprandi 2009, 125). Not restricted to environmentalism alone, this new type of graphic design practice covered themes and developed services relating to public administration and everyday bureaucracy such as urban design, urban furniture, and landscape protection, which had a tangible impact on communities and on general collectivity. Iliprandi’s small exhibition showed works by some of the major protagonists of Italian graphic design. Their work was already recognized internationally: several figures had been highlighted at an exhibition in 1960 curated by Max Huber, Ten designers from Milan, held at the Composing Room’s Gallery 303 in New  York, and in the 1967 exhibition, Today’s Italian Publicity and Graphic Design, at the Reed House in London.6 The arrangement of the designers’ work within Man’s Aggression… was quite simple. Visual materials, sketches, and posters were hung on the walls in two rows, while decontextualized objects were displayed at the centre of the space, reconstructing an automobile accident. Entitled Week End, the installation showed a series of partially destroyed cars, further warped by merciless lighting alternations, lending tangibility to one of the themes, centring on condemnation of widespread human habits and behaviours (Figure 13.4). Topics illustrated in the posters firstly demonstrated the necessity to push toward a new public ecological awareness (Formia 2017). Water, air, and sound pollution were all thematized in the works of Daniele Baroni, Marco Bergamaschi, Egidio Bonfante, Giovanni Brunazzi, Leonardo Mattioli, and Giuseppe Valieri, among others (Figure  13.5). Designers

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exhibition organized by the Art Directors Club Milano, Aggressività e violenza dell’uomo nei confronti dell’ambiente (Man’s Aggression and Violence toward the Environment) (Strutture Ambientali, no. 6, 1970, pp. 62–​63, 94–​95). Top: Entrance with the installation Week End. Courtesy of Cappelli Editore FIGURE 13.4  The

used a condemnatory visual language in their exhibited posters, aiming to stimulate the changes in attitude they deemed necessary to improve humans’ relationship with natural and social environments. Their topics were similar to those of journalistic surveys and environmentally-​centred communication that would later be written by representatives of Italian political ecology movement and published in specialized magazines such as Denunciamo, Sapere, and Se (1971–​1973). Another key topic in the exhibition was that of non-​violence. Iliprandi declared it in the face of both the natural environment and cultural heritage:  the magnified hand of a statue, whose signs of degradation were rendered macroscopic,

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left to right: Egidio Bonfante, Produco con licenza di uccidere (I produce with a license to kill); Ilio Negri, No alla civiltà se questa è civilta. L’ignoranza uccide (No to Civilization, if this is Civilization. Ignorance Kills); Giancarlo Iliprandi, No alla violenza nei centri storici (No violence in historical centres). The posters were included in the exhibition Man’s Aggression and Violence toward the Environment curated by Iliprandi (Art Directors Club Milano). Courtesy of, respectively, Paola Bonfante/​Archivio Storico Olivetti, Ivrea; Archivio Ilio Negri, Aiap Museo della grafica/​CDPG, Milano; Giancarlo Illiprandi, Archivo privato, Milano FIGURE 13.5   From

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said ‘enough’ to ‘violence in historical centres’ (Figure 13.5). Mimmo Castellano entitled his poster G come Giustizia. L come Libertà (J for Justice. L for Liberty), where he quoted a paragraph of the detective novel A Private Venus by the Italian writer Giorgio Scerbanenco (1966), evoking the protagonist’s obsession for truth amid immobilism and backwardness in Italian society and his critique of a city, Milan, as a privileged space for crime and injustice. Ilio Negri signed a series of posters with the title, No to Civilization, if this is Civilization, composed of a set of monotone prints placed above graphic and visual representations of Ignorance Kills, the Iconoclastic Kills, Noise Kills, Phytocide Kills, Eroticism Kills,Violence Kills, Disorder Kills, Air Kills, Drugs Kill, Thoughtlessness Kills, the Street Kills, Hunger Kills (Figure 13.5). Iliprandi (1971, 46) offered contextual commentary, writing: ‘We reject civilization, if this is civilization. One in which we find ourselves inserted, or even integrated, as we are accused of being. This civilization of murky waters and smoke-​filled atmosphere, of printed sex and ignorant schooling, of muted green and the object-​g ift, of widespread hunger and glorified noise, of violence as solution and tenderness as poverty’. He evoked common radical concepts of ‘great refusal’ in terms of a ‘great utopia’, ‘an operation of denunciation’ against the lack of operative solutions, ‘an awakening of desire’ that had never been calmed, offered to a society devoid of fantasy. Finally, Ex-​Voto by Pino Tovaglia and Teresita Hangeldian Camagni recites, ‘Ex-​voto  –​ex-​voto past, present, future  –​ex-​voto each day, each moment  –​to thank God, Devil, Man –​to still be capable of living’. These materials testify to the emerging idea of social responsibility in public communication, an idea that was fostered by a number of professionals with day jobs in the communication sector for businesses, institutions or other organizations, as well as in graphics and printing. They were responsible for the creation of the ‘industrial style’ (Vinti 2007) for companies such as Pirelli, Finmeccanica, Fiat, and Olivetti from the end of the Second World War into the economic boom of the 1960s, while imbuing their work with political and civil engagement. Reflections on the canonical role of communication and visual design in the Italian professional sphere were theorized by this group on the pages of specialized magazines such as Linea Grafica or within institutions such as the Italian Association of Advertising Artists (Aiap –​Associazione Italiana Artisti Pubblicitari), anticipating concepts later developed in the anthology Il Mestiere del Grafico (The Graphic Profession) by Albe Steiner. It was therefore not a matter of underground media or of mere opposition to the status quo, but a first attempt to demonstrate a new, balanced role of communication when Pubblicità-​Progresso, an association dedicated to moral, civil, and educational community issues through advertising, launched its first campaign in 1971 (Finessi 2015, 233). Similarly, from its inception in 1966,The Art Directors Club of Milan encouraged studying and experimenting with the meaning, role, processes, methodology, and impact of advertising. As director of this association, Iliprandi called for innovation in the social role of communication design, incorporating the visual syntax of counterculture and the underground into the system of production. In an article published in Casabella, he explained that:

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for advertising, it must be seen as part of the socioeconomic fabric to which we belong, whether we like or not. It is late to protest against this ‘fait accompli’, in the hope that it changes spontaneously. It is more important to act from inside the system and to try to modify its structure, beginning by deviating the greatest sources of social harm. Iliprandi 1969, 68 In other words, he believed that the role of information was completely different from that of propaganda: informing requires awareness of the responsibilities and constraints of communication (Piazza 2013, 15). Recent historiography (Vinti 2012, Galluzzo 2013, Piazza 2013) agrees that at the end of the 1960s, the onset of crisis in capitalist society coincided in Italian history with a growing split between graphic designers and advertising agencies. In addition, thanks especially to the contributions of radical design groups, this period saw the attention of Italian graphics shift to the figure of the consumer.These newly independent practitioners criticized the interference of commercial messages in an urban context and called for greater social responsibility in advertising. This meant, however, neither a complete denial of advertising in itself nor an outright refusal of the relationship between industry and graphics upon which the fortune of agencies, freelancers, and other professionals had been built (following on in the tradition of Italian historical avant-​gardes). It was possibly, rather, a reaction to the crisis of the domestic graphic design profession in the face of an American-​inspired agency model (Heller 1995). Taking a peculiar approach, unique from displays in other countries such as the US, the exhibition curated by the Art Directors Club created a convergence between the language of professional graphic design and the discourse of radical design groups. On one hand, it abandoned forms of underground communication that in Italy, albeit without the same structure as American activism, facilitated interesting experiments, such as the magazines edited by Austrian-​born architect Ettore Sottsass Jr. and his wife, writer and translator Fernanda Pivano (Pianeta Fresco was the major example). On the other hand, it marked a turning point for the history of Italian design in highlighting the role of research and experimentation in dialogue with both the industrial sector and the broader community (Gunetti and Oropallo 2011).

Design as ecology: commenting on the biennial from inside and outside the box Despite its complex and impressive organization, the Biennial did not prevail. From 1971, the activity of the Centre consisted of roundtables on global topics such as environment, economy, energy, religion, and human rights. This continued until the foundation of its Giornate Internazionali di Studio (International Study Days, 1973–​2014), which progressively assumed a political position close to the contemporary evolution of the Italian Socialist party. The magazine Strutture Ambientali

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continued to document the debate, maintaining its original format. Nevertheless, the 1970 Biennial represents an important case study for reflection on the emergence of ecological awareness in design disciplines. The call for an ecological approach to design was, in this context, nurtured by other forms of humanistic study (psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and political science). In Italy this was especially linked to the growth of semiotic interest in design and consumption. The value of semiotics as an instrument for analysing systems and practices of signification and communication was highlighted by the Biennal’s Programme Commission Coordinator Ezio Gianotti. The event’s descriptive production scheme states: ‘The Biennial is not an exhibition of objects, even though some objects do appear, as they are not “things”, but “signs”: signs and “semiotic objects”, which together in context form a certain system of signification’ (Strutture Ambientali 1970, 69). Indeed, this premise confirmed the necessity of an ecological approach to design: interests seemed to focus primarily on describing the design of procedure, process, system, and their successive developments, more than that of a final product. It is difficult to evaluate the exact impact of the Biennial. The many different reactions demonstrated, on one end, how diffuse its audience was and, on the other, how difficult it was to express a thorough assessment of the event. This is likely due to the fact that it was itself intrinsically processual and did not follow the canonical layout of an exhibition. In September 1970, Stefano Reggiani, journalist for the national newspaper La Stampa, visited the exhibition, commenting: ‘What is the Rimini Biennial? It was supposed to be a leading international design festival, and then it changed its name, with a broader, more erudite definition […] Design is every form of artifice that surrounds us’ (Reggiani 1970, 7). Design was acquiring an important position, as the success in media demonstrated, but the implications of its contribution to environmental theory are not cited in the media’s reaction. The general press seemed mostly impressed by matters of the progressive role of artificial intelligence, computers, and technological apparatuses in daily life. The local newspaper Il Resto del Carlino was even critical about the ‘cybertopia’ of many of the installations, questioning the positive role of ‘machines’ in developing the human environment (Ruggeri 1970, 3). The specialized press expressed a deeper understanding of the project. Casabella, the Biennial’s official media partner, and its guest alongside the British Architectural Review in an exhibit of editorial tools for aiding the environment, offered a critical reading with the manifesto ‘Design at the Service of Man’, elaborated by the magazine’s editor Alessandro Mendini. He lauded the Biennial for its processual focus, defined as intrinsically experimental, but at the same time visualized the risk of excessive theoretical character and loss of contact with reality. He then offered a solution that would afterward characterize a large portion of design activity within avant-​garde and radical design movements, summarized in the formula ‘the group as design alternative’ (Mendini 1970, 6).

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The experimental magazine IN. Argomenti e Immagini di Design decontextualized a portion of the debate, introducing a specific interpretative formula. IN’s first issue in 1971 was devoted to the theme of ‘Utopia’, featuring contributions by major design professionals on a national and international level, such as Hans Hollein, and experts in the fields of art, literature, cinema, theatre, and cybernetics. Both Iliprandi and Ceccato presented the research exhibited in Rimini at this new venue. Ceccato’s essay, ‘Utopia, Futurologia e Scienza. L’utopia e l’Uomo del Futuro’ (‘Utopia, Future Studies, Science: Utopia and the Man of the Future’), illustrated links with the field of future studies –​a field that experienced a boom late 1960s Italy, with the magazine Futuribili (1967–​1974), directed by Piero Ferraro, as its main mediating channel.7 Interestingly, Futuribili’s review of the Biennial seems the most accurate, highlighting, as this chapter has shown, the complex  –​sometimes even contradictory –​perception within Italian design culture of its role in mediating the environmental ‘crisis’. In narrating the Biennial, Futuribili emphasized how the event had demonstrated that design had acquired a mediating position of great responsibility: it became in itself an ecology, conferred the right to stand between humans and the world, to materialize relations between nature and artifice, to deal with the processes of conveying meaning to the environment, and to give shape to theoretical and political speculation (Donnini 1971). The year after the Biennial, Gui Bonsiepe published, in the same magazine, the essay ‘Ecologia e progettazione industriale’ (‘Ecology and Industrial Design’). He constructed a lucid and solid analysis of the ecological implications of design, posing to the professional community an important challenge: ‘If we are able to realize a radical reform of the methods and contents of technical and scientific disciplines, in the future this affirmation may be justified: “survival thanks to design, rather than catastrophe caused by design” ’ (Bonsiepe 1971, 36).

Notes 1 The name of the Centre reveals its direct connection with design cultures: Pio Manzù (pseudonym of Pio Manzoni, son of the sculptor Giacomo Manzoni) was an Italian product designer trained at the Hochschule für Gestaltung of Ulm who was professionally involved with important companies such as Fiat, Kartell, and Flos. He died in 1969 while designing the new Fiat 127 model. As reported in the catalogue, he contributed to the Centre’s project development.This is how the Biennial came to host the first retrospective exhibition on his career. 2 The Art Biennial of the Republic of San Marino was inaugurated in 1956 and had enjoyed great success in the 1960s, paralleling the International Conferences of Artists, Critics, and Art Scholars of Rimini. The editions between 1959 and 1968 of Rimini’s Convegni have already been widely recognized for having highlighted the conceptual turn of international avant-​garde fine art practice. 3 All quotations from Italian sources are translated by Megan Bredeson. 4 Excluding the texts gathered in the volumes of Strutture Ambientali, published in 1970, other testimonials may be found in numbers 350-​331 of Casabella, July-​August 1970 and in the typewritten document with handwritten notes, New Ecology: Regional Planning as

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an Equilibrium of Self-​Management in the Ecological System between Man and Environment (setup Bruno Munari, structure Leonardo Mosso), date 1970, conserved in the Central Architectural Library at the Politecnico di Torino. 5 Ohl was the Ulm School’s last Rector, succeeding Maldonando in 1966. Maldonado began a strong collaboration with Italy in 1967, when he was member of the jury for the Compasso d’Oro prize; between 1967 and 1969 he coordinated the corporate image of La Rinascente-​Upim. In 1969 he moved permanently, his perspective enriched by prior stays in the United States, and soon afterward entered the Italian academic world professionally. In the same year as the Biennial, he published La speranza progettuale: ambiente e società (Design, Nature and Revolution: Toward a Critical Ecology), a brief but dense, speculative, and thereafter frequently cited portrait of the environmental crisis. 6 The Reed House exhibition showed more than 600 works by nearly 90 designers, well summarized in the poster by Franco Grignani, Today’s Italian Publicity and Graphic Design. 7 Futuribili was established by the Gruppo Futuribili Italia in 1967 within the Institute of Applied Economics Research (IREA). It called several international scholars to contribute to its methodological framework, including Bertrand De Jouvenel, Jacques Delors,Yujiro Hayashi, and Robert Jungk. Their texts were alternated with work from experts in other fields of research, such as environmentalism, ecology, cultural heritage, philosophy, ethics, politics, technology, design cultures, and cybernetics.

References Apollonio, U. (1970). ‘Il futuro probabile’. Strutture Ambientali, 4–​5: 8–​9. Argan, G.C. (1970). ‘Dal design all’ecologia generale’. Strutture Ambientali, 4–​5: 9–​14. Bonsiepe, G. (1971). ‘Ecologia e progettazione industriale’. Futuribili V, 39 (Ottobre): 25–​36. Calvino, I. (1969). Tarocchi: il mazzo visconteo di Bergamo e New  York (Il castello dei destini incrociati). Parma: Franco Maria Ricci. Cardellini, S., and L. Faenza (2005). Rimini una storia lunga. Rimini: Guaraldi. Ceccato, S. (1971). ‘Utopia, Futurologia e Scienza. L’utopia e l’Uomo del Futuro’. IN. Argomenti e immagini di design II, 1 (Gennaio-​Febbraio): 74–​77. Dalla Mura, M. (2018). ‘1964–​1972. Affermazione, critica, crisi’. In Storie. Il design italiano, 188–​191. Verona: Mondadori Electa. Donnini, R. (1971). ‘Le forme dell’ambiente umano’. Futuribili V, 32 (Marzo): 49–​59. Dorfles, G. (1970). ‘Natura e artificio’. Strutture Ambientali, 4–​5 (1970): 14–​15. Fallan, K. (2009). ‘Heresy and Heroics: The Debate On The Alleged “Crisis” In Italian Industrial Design Around 1960’. Modern Italy 13(3): 257–​274. Fallan, K. (2014). ‘Our Common Future. Joining Forces for Histories of Sustainable Design’. Tecnoscienza. Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies 5(2): 15–​32. Ferrarotti, F. (1970). ‘Appunti su “le forme dell’ambiente umano” ’. Strutture Ambientali, 4–​5: 15–​19. Finessi, B. (2015). ‘Giancarlo Iliprandi’. In Il design italiano oltre le crisi. Autarchia, Austerità, Autoproduzione, 233. Mantova: Corraini. Formia, E. (2017).‘Mediating an Ecological Awareness in Italy: SharedVisions of Sustainability Between the Environmental Movement and Radical Design Cultures (1970–​1976)’. Journal of Design History 30(2): 192–​211. Galluzzo, M. (2013). ‘Il “pre design” e il mercato rionale: il gruppo exhibition design.’ A/​I/​ S/​Design Storia e Ricerche, 2 (Ottobre): 1–​18. Gunetti, L., and G. Oropallo (2011). ‘The city as a white page: the encounter of typography and urban space in Italian late modernism.’ Paper presented at the Design History

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Society Annual Conference Design Activism and Social Change, 7–​10 September 2011, Barcelona. www.historiadeldisseny.org/​congres/​pdf/​12%20Gunetti,%20Luciana%20et%20 Oropallo,%20Gabriele%20THE%20CITY%20AS%20A%20WHITE%20PAGE%20 THE%20ENCOUNTER%20OF%20TYPOGRAPHY%20AND%20URBAN%20 SPACE%20IN%20ITALIAN%20LATE%20MODERNISM.pdf Heller, S. (1995). ‘Advertising Mother of Graphic Design’. Eye 5, 17 (Summer): 112. Iliprandi, G. (1969). ‘Pubblicità infedele.’ Casabella XXIII, 339–​ 340 (Agosto-​ Settembre): 68–​69. Iliprandi, G. (1971).Without title. IN. Argomenti e Immagini di Design II,1 (Gennaio-​Febbraio): 46. Iliprandi, G. (2009). Una grammatica ritrovata. Milano: Lupetti. Lie, I.K. (2017). ‘Ephemeral Voices and Precarious Documents: Fixing Oral History and Grey Literature to the Design Historical Record’. A/​I/​S/​Design Storia e Ricerche, 10 (December): 1–​21. Maldonado, T. (1970). La speranza progettuale: ambiente e società. Torino: Einaudi. Mendini, A. (1970). ‘Il gruppo come alternativa progettuale.’ Casabella XXXIV, 350–​351 (Luglio-​Agosto): 6–​7. Piazza, M. (2013).‘La grafica per il “made in Italy” ’. A/​I/​S/​Design Storia e Ricerche, 1 (Marzo): 1–​22. Reggiani, S. (1970). ‘Il computer si diverte’. La Stampa, 22 settembre, 7. Riccini, R. (2013). ‘Costellazioni’. A/​I/​S/​Design Storia e Ricerche, 1 (Marzo): 1–​3. Rossi, C. (2014). ‘Crafting a Design Counterculture:The Pastoral and the Primitive in Italian Radical Design, 1972–​1976’. In Made in Italy. Rethinking a Century of Italian Design, edited by G. Lees-​Maffei and K. Fallan, 145–​160. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Ruggeri, G. (1970). ‘Scusi, signor computer che cosa mi consiglia?’ Il Resto del Carlino, 5 settembre, 3. Steiner, A. (1978). Il mestiere del grafico. Torino: Einaudi. Vinti, C. (2007). Gli anni dello stile industriale 1948–​1965. Venezia: Marsilio. Vinti, C. (2012). ‘Grafica e pubblicità in Italia (1933–​1970)’. In TDM 5: Grafica Italiana, 217–​ 258. Mantova: Corraini.

14 ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN PEDAGOGY IN LENINGRAD IN THE 1980S Yulia Karpova

In the first half of the 1960s, Soviet decorative art and design were predominantly characterized by techno-​optimism. Industrial design, officially recognized as a profession in 1962 under the labels ‘technical aesthetics’ (theory and methodology) and ‘artistic engineering’ (practice) was to become an aid to science and technology in boosting Soviet economy and creating modern consumer culture, thus securing Soviet soft power in the Cold War competition. Design professionals considered nature primarily as a theme for décor of traditional commodities or as the background for spectacular modernist buildings and complexes. Even though from mid-​1960s decorative artists became increasingly critical of modernist uniformity, and industrial designers paid greater attention to the diversity of consumer groups, environmental concerns remained beyond the discourse on material culture –​at the same time as Soviet economic organs considered the nascent environmental movement an obstacle to economic progress (Coumel 2013). However, the rise of environmental awareness and activism in the Brezhnev era (1964–​1982) would affect also the minds of design professionals. Finally, Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost created the basis for the idea of environmental design. The notion of glasnost meant increased openness in political institutions and public discussions, which allowed a greater role for social movements in decision-​making concerning nature protection. If hitherto nature protection activities in the USSR had been concentrated in professional scientific societies, Gorbachev’s perestroika ‘triggered environmental awareness and activism’ and gave way to various formal and informal environment protection initiatives (Pidzhakov 1994 66–​87; Josephson et  al. 2013, 254–​284). This chapter highlights tensions and contradictions of late Soviet design environmentalism by considering the case of the design studio run by Vladimir Kirpichev at the Vera Mukhina School of Art and Industry in Leningrad from 1978, which developed into the Department of Environmental Design in 1990. After providing an overview of environmental design in the late Soviet Russia and

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particularly Leningrad, I will analyse the specific visions of environmental design pedagogy, presented in Kirpichev’s texts and his students’ projects. Finally, I  will consider how socio-​political circumstances in the early 1990s challenged these late Soviet visions.

Visions of environment in the 1970s In response to a proposal by a group of specialists in art and engineering, the Soviet government institutionalized design profession in 1962 by establishing the All-​Union Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics (VNIITE).The Institute was dedicated to setting the guidelines for design theory and practice as well as monitoring design work nationwide. From the late 1960s, VNIITE was increasingly recognizing that thinking in terms of separate objects is inadequate for socially responsible design. Inspired by systems theory and the writings of the Ulm School theorists Tomás Maldonado, Gui Bonsiepe, and Abraham Moles, Soviet designers developed the notion of environment (sreda) as a totality of rationally arranged objects and material structures (Margolin 1988; Busbea 2009). As a team of Leningrad designers argued in 1973, a singular object is the measure of an environment’s order, and a designer’s task is to define the qualities of objects, evaluate them in terms of compatibility, select compatible objects and harmonize them. The result would be an ‘object ensemble’ with distinct ‘functional, technological and aesthetic characteristics’; next, on a meta-​structural level, such ensembles would integrate to constitute a diverse and harmonious environment (Razrabotka 1973). In such vision, a designer occupied the position of a rational observer and actor, external to the environment in question. Similarly, VNIITE-​affiliated architect Alexander Riabushin viewed the environment as an ‘object-​spatial unity’ and a necessary framework for optimizing the interrelations between planning, design, and industry across the USSR and thus overcoming the chaotic production of poor-​quality, undesired commodities (Rabushin 1973). Riabushin argued that a Soviet designer had the power to organize an integral, well-​balanced environment, echoing the 1920s avant-​gardist idea of an artist as organizer of production and everyday life (Kushner 1923, Tarabukin 1923, Arvatov 1926). This vision of environment as a projection of human actions and creative aspirations is essentially anthropocentric and far from ecological considerations. However, Riabushin’s vision was not rigid: it allowed room for flexibility and spontaneity in designing the environment, as a means to counter the alienation of humans from the world of commodities. These ideas progressed in the second half of the 1970s and resulted in a more complex vision of the environment. An important role in this development belongs to the Central Educational and Experimental Studio of the Artists’ Union that had been functioning since 1964 as an artistic alternative to VNIITE and its orientation to the practical tasks of planned economy. The studio, known by the name of Lake Senezh near Moscow where it was situated, aimed to foster collective creative work of designers, which its founders, philosopher Karl Kantor and designer Evgenii Rozenblium, presented as ‘the cultural self-​critique of industrial

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design’ (Programma 1968). In search of an alternative to the rigidity of conventional city planning, Rozenblium employed a group of young architects knowledgeable of the latest Western critiques of modernism (Cubbin 2016, 23; see also Cubbin 2018). They developed the ‘environmental approach’ to urban planning that one of them, Andrei Bokov, characterized as flexible in contrast to general Soviet approach to urban planning. The environmental approach was sensitive to a multiplicity of tangible and instantly changing situations and granted equal importance of the general and the particular. Its main method was ‘cultivation’ that relied on prognosis rather than a fixed plan, and therefore depended on ‘comprehension and visualization of the nature of each specific site –​the procedures very close to visual art’ (Bokov 1986, 7). The ‘environmental approach’ developed concurrently with the Soviet intelligentsia’s interest in historical legacy and preservationist activism. According to theorist Aleksandr Rappaport, it opened the opportunity both for detached admiration of an environment’s vibrancy, irreducible to a modernist plan, and for highlighting the social tensions and ecological problems (Rappaport 1986, 12).

‘Ecological consciousness’ in industrial design With the unfolding of Gorbachev’s glasnost policy, and especially after the Chernobyl disaster, industrial designers became eager to develop approaches and methods for mitigating, if not preventing, the perilous effects of Soviet industry. The release of the Brundtland report also served as a precedent for setting environment protection on the agenda of industrial design. In May 1988, the VNIITE bulletin Technical Aesthetics published a roundtable discussion ‘Ecological design: research and results’, that united experts from different disciplines. They proposed the notion ‘ecological design’ for revisiting ‘environment’. Philosopher Oleg Genisaretskii, affiliated with the Senezh studio, spoke of ‘ecological consciousness’  –​the awareness of environmental problems in practicing science and design and organizing everyday life. Most speakers recognized the designer’s role in increasing global pollution and warned about the lack of proper concern for the natural environment. In particular, ecologist E.  Bizunova criticized the ‘environmental approach’ as limited to specific territories and only creating the appearance of connecting buildings with the surrounding landscape. Discussing the ways out of this crisis, the speakers admitted that Soviet design education needed fundamental restructuring and that ecology should be not just an additional subject in the curriculum, but the core of the worldview of design students. The revision of design education needed to be based on moral principles and focus on sustainable solutions (Ekologicheskii dizain 1988). Victor Papanek, whose ideas were popular in Soviet design community, also participated in this roundtable, though not personally but through a letter to the editors, since he could not make it to Moscow. Papanek argued for ‘ecological methodology and concepts’ as the cornerstone for design education and specified biology, anthropology, cultural geography, and ethics as essential for the curricula in design institutions (Papanek

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1988).While the current state of Soviet design education was far from this proposed approach, certain attempts were already under way in Leningrad.

Student exercises in ‘environmental design’ Leningrad Higher School of Art and Industry (named after artist and designer Vera Mukhina) was one of the major Soviet centres for design education. Originally founded as a School of Technical Drawing in 1876 and closed in 1922, it was restored at the end of the Second World War by the initiative of the enthusiastic architect and designer Iosif Vaks. In 1963, Vaks headed the newly organized Department of Industrial Art and, together with his colleague Leonid Katonin, provided the model of design pedagogy for future generations: a studio with a degree of freedom from centrally imposed curricula, with the unity of students based on genuinely shared interests, and with a special role of the teacher’s charismatic personality. As an outcome of this model, several studios were formed within the Department of Industrial Art, each led by a pedagogue with his (there were, unfortunately, no female leaders) specific vision of design (Sidorenko and Val’kova 1990). One of these studios grew out of the research on closed living space for cosmonauts, conducted by faculty member Vladimir Kirpichev on commission from Vladimir Barmin, the designer of rocket launch complexes. Kirpichev’s fascination with the problem of habitation in closed environments and severe climatic conditions followed the research on ‘ecological colonization of space’ and the design of closed ecological systems on ‘Spaceship Earth’ that, as Peder Anker has demonstrated, preoccupied scientists and designers in the US from the early 1960s (Anker 2010, 83–​112). Evidently, the idea about space cabins as models for ecological designs on Earth reached the USSR through one of its major proponents, Buckminster Fuller, who visited the the VNIITE-​organized UNESCO symposium on art and technology in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1968 (Soloviev 1994, 152). Kirpichev saw cabin design as a subject for innovative teaching and involved several students in experimental projects (Protokoly 1982, 27; Kirpichev 2016). Gradually he developed a teaching methodology based on his vision of an environment as a space adaptable to diverse human needs. Kirpichev’s central notion was ‘environmental object’  –​a useful and habitable structure, often modular and mobile, minimally impacting the natural environment, and related to the ‘most diverse aspects of human life’ (Kirpichev 1988a, 8). Throughout the 1980s, the studio produced a number of such environmental objects:  compact capsules for lengthy space travel (‘habitable units with ecologically hermetic life support system’); systems of mobile modular dwellings and recreational complexes for reindeer breeders, hunters, and fishermen of the Arctic region, multimedia amusement parks; and the Vuoksa recreational park (Kirpichev 1990, 43). The topics emerged mainly out of Kirpichev’s personal research interests rather than commissions, and had educational rather than practical functions. In particular, the projects for the Northwestern regions of Russia –​from the Barents region to the North of Leningrad Oblast1 –​stemmed from the almost exoticizing vision

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of ‘the North’ as a land of unique nature, where human intervention, including tourism, should have minimal impact. For example, explaining his choice of the Vuoksa river as a location for experimental environmental objects, Kirpichev spoke of his penchant for northern nature as well as personal preference for vacationing there (Kirpichev 2018). I will dwell on the Vuoksa project in order to illustrate his pedagogical model. The studios at the Mukhina School were originally guided not by a specific problem or theme, but by their leaders’ professional interests. However, later they acquired clear thematic specificities (Sidorenko and Val’kova 1990, 9–​10). The studios’ leadership tended to be informal and flexible. In his articles from the 1980s, as well as in a recent interview, Kirpichev proclaimed a preference for horizontal connections between the instructor and the students, peer teaching and exchange of ideas. His usual practice was to include students from different years in the same project, where each sub-​g roup would be responsible for a certain part in accordance with its level of proficiency, while final year students would guide younger colleagues. Students could join specific studios from the third year, after completing a preliminary course that Vaks had modelled after the practice of Bauhaus and Vkhutemas. However, Kirpichev made the preliminary selection of studio members from applicants and freshmen of the Industrial Art Department through personal conversations, observation of students’ performance at initial studies and even partial involvment in the studio projects. In this manner, each participant would make a full path from an apprentice to a specialist. Though Kirpichev rarely cited the sources of his pedagogy, it is evident that he drew inspiration both from Walter Gropius and Victor Papanek. On the one hand, Kirpichev attached high importance to handicraft and the mastery of various materials, which, he argued, helped students synthesize their theoretical knowledge and practical skills and avoid the danger of dilletantism –​and here he cited Gropius’s statement about actual construction as a necessary educational activity. He viewed handicraft not as a self-​sufficient skill, but as an ‘experimental field for industrial production’, where students aqcuired ‘the sense of material’, realistic thinking, and, eventually, the ability to efficiently reach the goal. Handicraft was the priority for the youngest members of the workshop, third-​year students, whom Kirpichev trained to design and collectively produce signgular objects, considering a whole range of technical, economic and social factors. The topics for assignments had to be both relevant for contemporray social needs and interesting for all the group participants. An example is the design and construction of sailboats for tourism, conducted by third-​year students in the spring semester of 1986/​87 academic year. The work was organized in five stages. First, Kirpichev lectured about water tourism, the typology and construction schemes of tourist boats, using rich visual material and special literature. Second, students created 3D models of basic boat constructions to be used as visual aids. Third, each of 10 students designed a tourist boat of a certain type, and after four weeks these designs were presented and evaluated. In accordance with Kirpichev’s emphasis on collaboration, they were perceived as a common pool of ideas, from which the three best projects

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were selected by collective vote. Fourth, the students, divided into three teams, implemented the selected designs, and, fifth, tested them during the summer fieldwork, on the Vuoksa river (Finn.Vuoksi) in the northern part of Leningrad Oblast; they even completed a 28-​day cruise on one of the boats. As Kirpichev recently remarked, the sustainability of the project consisted in the reuse of old materials in construction (old skis disposed by Mukhina School’s Department of Physical Education) and in the assembly on site, where the details were delivered by electric multiple-​unit trains, that is, without the use of fossil fuel. In his report on this project, Kirpichev stated that it made students more confident in their abilities, and taught them to organize creative and efficient teams and to be more critical of their own professional work (Kirpichev 1988a, 9; 1990, 42; 2016). On the other hand, Kirpichev expected his students to be much more than inventive craftsmen:  he promoted an understanding of design as ‘multisided activity absorbing all the diverse knowledge of other theoretical and practical disciplines’ (Kirpichev 1990, 42). As is well known, in Design for the Real World, Papanek criticized the Bauhaus-​ inspired handicraft-​ centered teaching as anachronistic, infantile, and insuffucient for a socially responsible designer. Instead, Papanek argued, design students should focus on ‘computer sciences and electronics and plastics technology and cybernetics and bionics’ (Papanek 2005, 31). These disciplines were not taught at the Mukhina School in the 1980s. Neither were psychology and social sciences, which Papanek also considerered necessary. All Mukhina students got in addition to design-​specific subjects were general history, Marxist-​Leninist philosophy, and the subject called ‘world artistic history’, developed in the USSR in the 1960s for high schools and colleges as a shortcut to the history of visual and material culture of different world regions.2 Kirpichev believed that the whole Soviet system of design education was in need of reorganization, but had no power to change the curriculum even at his own department. All he could do was to set a special ‘creative atmposphere’ in his small studio. Citing Papanek’s credo from his letter to Technical Aesthetics –​ ‘think globally, act locally, plan discreetly’ –​Kirpichev argued that his studio acted locally while teaching the students to think globally. In accordance with this objective, the studio encouaraged self-​education, informal exchange of knowledge between older and younger students and between the students and himself, and prioritized collective work. The proclaimed collectivism was not about levelling the students, but, on the contrary, helping everyone develop his or her talents. In order to quickly solve a complex design problem, Kirpichev argued, one must be a genius and excel as a researcher, artist, organizer, inventor, and critic at once. Such specialists are rare; therefore it is more realistic to compose a ‘collective genius’ out of people with diverse strenghts. The studio aimed at accumulating experience of such collective work on complex environmental projects (Kirpichev 1990, 42). Similarly to Papanek, for whom a designer’s most important skill was ‘the ability to recognize, isolate, define, and solve problems’, Kirpichev characterized design activity as an ‘instant resolution of conflicts between present and future, society and nature, culture and technology, the original and the serial, logic and intuition’ –​in

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short, the search for balance, which requires a student to be not only knowledgeable and skillful, but also creative. However, he believed that such creativity cannot be formulated in terms of clear-​cut methodology: it is transmitted from the instructor to each student directly at practical sessions. At the same time, the studio’s pedagogy was not anti-​methodological:  its flexibility was based on what Kirpichev called ‘the role model of the subject of design activity’. This model included the following roles and respective orientations: • • • • •

scholar/​analyst/​erudite: informative-​cognitive orientation; artist/​stylist/​conceptualist: communicative (linguistic) orientation; organizer/​methodologist/​coordinator: methodological orientation; expert/​critic/​arguer: axiological orientation; generator of ideas/​inventor: creative orientation.

By performing one of the five role-​orientations according to their individual strengths, the students could see the insipient ‘environmental object’ from different sides, or highlight its different aspects. ‘Without dictating strict rules and algorithms, this model regulates [a student’s] ideas of creative work in design’, Kirpichev explained (Kirpichev 1990, 42–​43; Papanek 2005, 151). A rare chance to apply this model in practice came with the project of designing a recreational park for summer tourism in the area of the Vuoksa river. It was after coordinating this project in the 1986/​ 87 academic year that Kirpichev started presenting his studio in the press as ‘the first attempt to teach ecological design’. The central aim of the project was the ecologization of summer recreation in the river-​lake system Vuoksa, where the natural landscape was endangered by the increasing influx of tourists. After the three weeks of ‘design seminars’, where the 11 fifth-​year students brainstormed and proposed ideas for competition, the studio developed a concept of a recreational park made up of prefabricated installations. Kirpichev considered the national park as a ‘technology of recreation’ that allows the convergence between society and nature while precluding a harmful impact of the former upon the latter. At the same time, he described the park through a biological methaphor, as a ‘living organism, easily adaptable and responsive to changing conditions’. A  necessary requirement was the avoidance of highway construction. All the structures were to be composed of prefabricated standard modules of wood, metal, and tent canvas, fitting in standard shipping containers –​thus avoiding the environmental problems associated with long-​term construction sites (Kirpichev 1988b). The environmental objects making up the project were of three different categories, defined by functions, degrees of mobility, and terms of use. Type I meant transport vehicles with extended functions for habitation and entertainment. An example is the system of catamarans with sails and electric engines, designed by T.  Dubenskaia. All of them fit to a container module while varying in shapes and performing different functions: summer houses, retail trade stations, centres for consumer services, passenger and cargo vehicles (Figure 14.1).

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FIGURE 14.1  T. Dubenskaia, Model

of an environmental object of the first type for Vuoksa National Park, 1987. The model consists of a system of catamarans with sails and electric engines, serving a number of different functions. Courtesy of Moscow Design Museum

Type II included temporary constructions, operational in the tourist season and disassembled and stored in a special terminal for the rest of the year. Thus, E. Shaitarov proposed a floating entertainment centre made of collapsible modules and tents. Placing it on the water would allow recombining the sections depending on the needs of the tourists. Echoing a popular metaphor of the 1970s ‘environmental approach’, Shaitanov characterized this as the ‘architecture-​theater, where the props change depending on the play performed’. The centre was supposed to host film screenings, concerts, water festivals and carnivals, a library, and a disco (Figure 14.2). Finally, the buildings of the third type would remain in place the whole year around, but would be removed after five years to allow the recovery of the original landscape. This type can be illustrated by L. and G. Tkachuk’s design of an all-​year

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FIGURE 14.2   E. Shaitarov, Model

of an environmental object of the second type for Vuoksa National Park, 1987. Floating entertainment centre made of collapsible modules and tents. Courtesy of Moscow Design Museum

recreational complex, to be constructed from standard structural elements with slanting glass walls that were supposed to look like cliffs or waves and thus be visually integrated into the landscape.The rocky soil of Vuoksa region allowed building without foundation, which created the condition for flexibility and easy collapsibility of this construction.The complex presupposed ‘a complete set of services for vacationists’ (Figure 14.3). Except for the tourist boats, the project stopped at the level of paper models, in accordance with its pedagogical rather than practical and truly ecological purpose. The Vuoksa region was chosen not because of any preliminary agreement with the municipal authorities, but as a convenient location, reacheable by a three-​hour ride on electric suburban train (Kirpichev 2016).3 There, the younger students could test the boats, while the graduating students could explore the landscape without the obligation for actual construction. Even though Kirpichev promoted his studio as a leading force of Soviet ecological design, the burning ecological problems of the era, such as the growth of hazardous wastes or water and air pollution were

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FIGURE 14.3   G. and

L. Tkachuk, Model of an environmental object of the third type for Vuoksa National Park, 1987. All-​year recreational complex. Courtesy of Moscow Design Museum

barely on its agenda. It is therefore more accurate to describe the studio’s approach as using the environment as a framework for training design specialists –​skillful, thinking critically, but still focused on consumer needs.

Decentering the human? The Vuoksa project was not purely speculative:  evidently, Kirpichev considered it a demonstration of the studio’s potential for fulfilling commissions from Soviet institutions. Indeed, as he admitted in a recent conversation, he hoped to use the Vuoksa park findings in a 1990 municipal project for purifying a highly polluted territory of the Neva Bay (the Eastern part of the Finnish Bay) and building a large recreational and shopping complex there. The project, coordinated by the Architecture and Planning Board of the city council’s executive committee, was interdisciplinary: it

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included the hydrotechnical institute Girgoproekt, the House of Scientists and the Unions of Architects and Artists and a Union of Designers, founded only five years earlier and represented by Kirpichev, who involved some of his students. The work would be partially sponsored by the Canadian business of Cyrus Eaton Jr., the son of a prominent industrialist. As Kirpichev recalls, the concept was centered on the human relation to nature, culture, and health. Accordingly, the complex was supposed to include a botanical garden, a zoo, a sports complex, a health centre, the ‘museum of four elements’, and the museum of contemporary art. But none of these were to be realized: the new mayor of Leningrad (that now regained its original name, St Petersburg), Anatoly Sobchak, elected on 12 June 1991, was generally critical of the initiatives of his predecessor and discontinued this project (Kirpichev 2016). Meanwhile, Kirpichev’s studio grew into a Department of Environmental Design and continued working on conceptual projects of diverse habitable environments, which, however, could not be realized in the current situation of economic and political turmoil. Presumably, in such circumstances the students grew sceptical of the ability of a designer to resolve the tensions between people and nature, or between consumption and sustainability. The final section of this chapter considers an event that suggests a conceptual change in environmental design at the Mukhina School. In August 1992, Kirpichev and four of his students took part in the international educational workshop Interdesign ’92. This iteration of the seminar was devoted to ‘Ecologically affirmative design’ –​a timely topic two months after the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit. Interdesign ’92 was organized in San Jose, California, by the Industrial Designers Society of America, with the support of the WORLDESIGN foundation and the US Environmental Protection Agency. During the two weeks, 11 international teams of design educators (including Papanek) and students from seven countries explored the possibilities for environmentally affirmative design. Each country delegated one design school, so Kirpichev and his students, together with VNIITE designer Tatiana Samoilova (a 1962 Mukhina School graduate) represented the newly post-​Soviet Russia. Evidently, they had a special position in the discussion about the balance between economic needs and ecological concerns. Craig M.  Vogel, secretary/​treasurer at IDSA and one of the event’s organizers, remarked that ‘Russia is a victim of the worst elements of both developing and manufacturing countries’, and therefore resource management is an especially sharp issue there (International Interdesign 1992).4 Kirpichev participated in a team whose assignment was to consider the topic ‘Intervention’ –​evidently, in the sense of solving ecological problems through designers’ intervention in industrial and commercial processes. As he recollects, he focused on consumption and criticized the supermarket as an outdated, ecologically hazardous form of retail trade that should give way to mobile shops, driven by electric engines, which would allow selling minimally packaged products –​the reference to the good old village groceries (Kirpichev 2016). The team division intentionally separated all the participating teachers from their students, so that they were free from the usual mentoring and could use

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their knowledge and skills independently. Two of Kirpichev’s students, Svetlana Fedenko and Igor Kretinin, participated in a team of five, together with two US students and Peter Fossick, a faculty member at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Manchester Polytechnic, UK. The team worked on the topic ‘domestic metabolism’. Information about the team’s work is scarce, so it is difficult to pin down exactly what came of it. However, the Interdesign ’92 booklet includes Fedenko’s illustrations, which, most probably, were used in the team’s presentation. One of them suggests that ‘domestic metabolism’ referred to the balance of chemical processes necessary for the sustainability of the planet. In a quasi-​satirical way, Fedenko depicted humans not as powerful beings capable of resolving any problems by means of science and design, but as both the cause and a faceless victim of the ecological disaster. I suppose that her seemingly grim suggestion ‘Perhaps we should design a machine that eats man?’ [sic] can be read as a sarcastic metaphor on the currently predominant unsustainable patterns of designing (Figure 14.4). In another drawing, Fedenko visualized the process of human alienation from nature, where a human being appears as just an element in the global metabolism, and nature looking rather indifferent towards humans. However trivial these drawings may seem, they are striking in comparison to the Soviet narrative of triumphant humanity and the anthropocentrism of Kirpichev’s pedagogy. The fact that they were selected to illustrate the booklet’s cover and its articles suggests that Fedenko’s sad sarcasm resonated with the concerns of an international community of design educators. Further research on this event will show if and how these students of Kirpichev took a critical or affirmative stance on their educational background. Fifteen years later, Kirpichev’s vision of ecology seems to remain largely antropocentric. ‘We are not greens,’ he told me in a recent conversation, claiming that ecological design should be ‘more’ than environmenalism and proceed from the needs and desires of complex human personalities (Kirpichev 2016). This antropocentrism may be explained as a prolonged reaction to Soviet prioritization of economical goals over authentic human needs –​a reaction not radical enough to move beyond humanism towards post-​humanism.

Conclusion Kjetil Fallan argues that the history of visions of sustainablity is advantageous in cases when actual impact of design solutions is hard to evaluate (Fallan 2014, 25). Soviet design is one such case: extensive archival and oral history research is needed for evaluating designers’ actual impact on late soviet environmentalism, but the study of visions and concepts should be instrumental in understanding this impact –​or lack thereof. This survey of a specific late Soviet attempt to teach environmentally affirmative design leaves many questions about power relations within the Mukhina School and between different institutions, and about the story behind Kirpichev’s optimistic reports covering up all sorts of tensions and conflicts. These and related isseus will be key in further explorations of the design profession’s self-​criticism as an aspect of the decaying socialist modernity.

newgenrtpdf

Fedenko, drawing for the workshop Interdesign ’92. Courtesy of WORLDESIGN FOUNDATION, INNOVATION, Spring 1993; www.IDSA.org FIGURE 14.4   Svetlana

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Acknowledgements Research for this article was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-​Curie grant agreement No 700913. The author thanks Kjetil Fallan, Vladimir Kirpichev, and Alyona Sokolnikova for valuable information and suggestions for preparing the manuscript.

Notes 1 Oblast is a type of administrative division in Russia. 2 These were mostly Europe, but also Ancient Egypt, the Persian Empire, the Arab World, sometimes East Asia and the Americas; Russia was sometimes included, but sometimes covered in a separate course. 3 Kirpichev was well familiar with and favoured rural locality Losevo near Vuoksa due to his wife’s employment as an educator in one of the local children’s summer camps. 4 Interdesign is an international workshop, conducted yearly since 1971 by International Council of the Societies of Industrial Design. Soviet VNIITE took an active part in launching this initiative.The 1992 report was provided by courtesy of Vladimir Kirpichev.

References Anker, P. (2010). From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Arvatov, B. (1926). Iskusstvo I proizvodstvo. Sbornik statei. Moscow: Proletkul’t. Bokov, A. (1986). ‘Sredovoi podkhod 10 let spustia’. Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR 4: 6–​9. Busbea, L. (2009). ‘Metadesign: Object and Environment in France, c. 1970’. Design Issues 25(4): 103–​119. Coumel, L. (2013).‘A Failed Environmental Turn? Khrushchev’s Thaw and Nature Protection in Soviet Russia’. The Soviet and Post-​Soviet Review 40(2): 167–​189. Cubbin, T. (2016). ‘Postmodern Propaganda? Semiotics, Environment and the Historical Turn in Soviet Design 1972–​1985’. Journal of Design History 30(1), 16–​32. Cubbin, T. (2018). Soviet Critical Design: Senezh Studio and the Communist Surround. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ‘Ekologicheskii dizain: poiski, rezul’taty’. (1988). Tekhnicheskaia Estetika 5: 1–​8. Fallan, K. (2014). ‘Our Common Future. Joining Forces for Histories of Sustainable Design’. TECNOSCIENZA: Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies 5 (2): 15–​32. International Interdesign ’92: Ecologically Affirmative Industrial Design. A  report. (1993). Great Falls, VA: WORLDESIGN Foundation. Josephson, P., N. Dronin, A. Cherp, R. Mnatsakanian, D. Efremenko, and V. Larin (2013). An Environmental History of Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kirpichev, V. (1988a). ‘Svoi proekt –​svoimi rukami’, Tekhnicheskaia Estetika 4: 8–​9. Kirpichev, V. (1988b). ‘Proektiruia sredovye ob’’ekty’, Tekhnicheskaia Estetika 5: 13–​16. Kirpichev,  V. (1990). ‘Metodika proektnogo obucheniia v masterskoi ekologicheskogo dizaina’. In Leningradskaia shkola dizaina, edited by V.F. Sidorenko, 42–​ 47. Moscow: VNIITE. Kirpichev, V. (2016). Conversation with the author, 9 September, St Petersburg, Russia. Kirpichev, V. (2018). Conversation with the author, 28 March, St Petersburg, Russia.

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Kushner, B. (1923). ‘Organizatory proizvodstva’. LEF 3: 97–​103. Margolin, V. (1988). ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Design: The Product Environment and the New User’, Design Issues 4(1/​2): 59–​64. Papanek, V. (1988).‘Ekologicheskii dizain: poiski, rezul’taty’. Tekhnicheskaia Estetika 10: 16–​17. Papanek, V. (2005). Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, 2d revised edition. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press. Pidzhakov, A. Iu. (1994). Sovetskaia ekologicheskaia politika 1970-​kh—​nachala 1990-​kh godov. St. Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo Sankt-​Peterburgskogo Universiteta Ekonomiki i Finansov. ‘Programma kollokviuma ‘Ideeia I metod v khudozhestvennom proektirovanii’. (1968). In F.  2082, Soiuz Khudozhnikov SSSR, op. op.  2, ed. khr. 2209. Moscow: Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), 50–​53. ‘Protokoly zasedanii kafedry promyshlennogo iskusstva’. 1982. In F. 266, Leningradskoe Vysshee khudozhestvenno-​promyshlennoe uchilishche imeni V. I. Mukhinoi. op. 2, d. 275. St. Petersburg: Central State Archive of Literature and Art (TsGALI SPb). Rappaport, A. (1986). ‘Ne utopia li eto? K istorii “sredovogo videniia”’. Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR 4: 10–​13. ‘Razrabotka voprosov periodizatsii leningradskogo dizaina. Materialy stat’I v sbornik “Trudy VNIITE 9”’. 1973. In F. 146, LF VNIITE, op. 2–​1, d. 131. St Petersburg: Central State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation (TsGANTD SPb), 11–​12. Riabushin, A. (1973). ‘Sreda –​mera vsekh veshchei’, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR 10: 43–​46. Sidorenko, V.F. and N.P. Val’kova (1990).‘Problemy I protsess samoopredeleniia Leningradskoi shkoly dizaina’. In Leningradskaia shkola dizaina, edited by V.F. Sidorenko, 3–​12. Moscow: VNIITE. Soloviev, I. (1994). Moia zhizn’ v dizaine. Moscow: Soiuz dizainerov Rossii. Tarabukin, N. (1923). Ot mol’berta k mashine. Moscow: Rabotnik Prosveshcheniia.

15 THROWAWAY HOUSES Garbage housing and the politics of ownership Curt Gambetta

During an interview for the TV station of the Architectural Association (TVAA) in 1975, architect and critic Martin Pawley explained the origins of his decade-​ long project, Garbage Housing. Though the undertaking had matured into a fully-​fledged antidote to the housing crisis, Pawley conceded that it started as an exploration of the ambiguity of meaning produced by ‘combining a pejorative term “garbage” with a valued term “house” ’ (TVAA 1975). In saying this did Pawley mean that housing was akin to garbage, just a disposable object like any other consumer product? Or did he mean to imply that a house should be constructed out of throwaway materials? Or did Pawley mean to say that public housing was in a state of decline, like other sociologists and housing workers of the time (Cupers 2016)? Pawley mined the potential of the Garbage Housing project through a series of design studios, research programmes, books, and critical essays from the beginning of the 1970s until the early 1980s. The stated goal of his research was to address shortages of housing by transforming consumer waste into building materials for low-​cost construction. But Pawley also intended Garbage Housing to be a provocation to cultural and political norms. According to Pawley, the reuse of consumer waste for housing questioned the assumption made by housing policy that ‘value [is] the expression of a single use, and a single use the sum of a useful life’ (Pawley 1975a, 34). In place of a ‘single use’, Pawley proposed a concept of ‘secondary use’, imagining that consumer products and packaging could attain a second life as building materials or other uses. By elevating trash and denigrating housing, Pawley exposed the ideal of privately owned, permanently occupied housing. Like Archigram and other proponents of expendable architecture during the 1960s and 1970s, Pawley imagined the house as a throwaway object on a par with an car or even a box of Sugar Puffs cereal (Archigram 1999; Colomina 2007; Pawley 1975a; Steiner 2008). Garbage Housing

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embraced the consumer economy by integrating the manufacture of products and their reuse into a total system.The components of the garbage house were, in theory, indistinguishable from other consumer products and were thus easily disposed of and replaced, giving users more control over the construction and adaption of their houses. Secondary use harnessed the immense productivity of consumer industry, making secondary use products and building materials free and widely available to users (Pawley 1976). Rather than construct housing, Garbage Housing expanded ownership to new users by making building materials easy to acquire and use, and then scrap. In the 1970s, however, Pawley’s designs for mass production transformed into studies of ad hoc, labour-​intensive reuse of materials. Responsibility for Garbage Housing changed from a state sponsored industry to that of individual users. The impetus to change course was not merely technical. The political and economic backdrop to Garbage Housing transformed over the duration of his research, challenging presuppositions made by Pawley and his students about the production, use, and temporality of secondary use products. Though he conducted the majority of his research on the subject of garbage at American universities, Pawley’s work was also informed by debates among politicians, social scientists, and development experts about the expansion of private home ownership in Britain, as well as the global South during the 1970s (Pawley 1978). The shadow of the Conservative ideal of a ‘property owning democracy’ in Britain loomed over his critique of housing policy, as did the uncertain political fate of housing constructed by the state after the Second World War (Forrest and Murie 1988, 25). An examination of Garbage Housing sheds light on the sociopolitical motivations of early inquiries into architectural uses of waste materials such as bottles, sulfur, and commercial discards.The chapter focuses on techniques of assembly and construction in designs for three houses, at Cornell University (1973), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI, 1975–​1976) and Florida A&M University (FAMU, 1977–​79) respectively. In each instance, Pawley and his collaborators used the design and reuse of consumer waste in order to reimagine the political economy of housing.1 Like other research about alternative building technologies during the 1970s, Pawley kept Garbage Housing at arm’s length from overtly political struggles over housing and land (Pawley 1971a, 90).2 But while they shied away from political movements of the time, close scrutiny of Garbage Housing demonstrates that Pawley and his students grappled with new forms of governance and political rationality. The project’s transformation from a partially statesponsored program of housing in the early 1970s to a framework for individual skill building by the end of the decade signalled the retrenchment of the state from housing and the institutionalization of neoliberal norms of conduct. Still, Pawley imagined Garbage Housing as an experiment in the truest sense. As such, it was open to failure: Garbage Housing risked becoming single use. If not by design, the disposability of houses exposed the limits and contradictions of a property-owning democracy.

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System building Pawley initially conceived of Garbage Housing as an exercise in what he called ‘system thinking’ on a grand scale (Pawley 1971a, 90). Pawley’s overtures to systems thinking were at once technical and political. He proposed that the housing industry should be inserted ‘into the total complex of industrial production’, liberating housing construction and maintenance from overly specific and redundant architectural products (ibid., 90). Short of designing a house, or housing, the architect of Garbage Housing designed systems.3 In his design studio at Cornell University (1973), Pawley and his students imagined new uses for garbage, redesigned consumer products for secondary use, and, where necessary, designed joinery in order to translate of ordinary products into building materials. But systems thinking was also a reproach to political debates over the privatization of housing. In his 1971 essay, Pawley explained that a systems-​based approach to housing was designed in response to the battle being waged between market ideologues and the State in Britain. Pawley’s image of ‘housing as a total system’ replaced political struggles over housing with managerial dilemmas about resource utilization, repackaging social obligations such as housing and waste disposal as resources in need of management (ibid., 90). During a visit to Chile in 1972, Pawley encountered an example of systems-​ thinking at an unprecedented scale. The Unidad Popular government was in the process of shepherding the transition from capitalism to socialism, using cybernetic models of management to redistribute authority to workers and factories (Medina 2011). At the International Housing Conference in Santiago (1972), Pawley proposed that the Chilean state undertake a ‘highly visible, well-​advertised government programme’ to encourage the manufacture of secondary use products (Pawley 1975a, 117). Though the Allende government pursued the nationalization of manufacture, Pawley proposed that the system feed off consumer manufacturers in the West, such as Coca Cola. He insisted that their entry into a socialist market such as Chile should depend on their manufacture of secondary use products and subsidiary parts such as ‘clips, jointing devices, extension pieces, preformed blanks and so on’ (ibid., 117). A commitment to the Chilean market would then also be a commitment to its housing programme, resulting in a parasitic form of value such that ‘the price of a can of beans or a bottle of detergent’ was also ‘the price of a house’ (ibid., 117). After reaching an agreement with Allende’s Minister of Housing, Gonzalo Martner, Pawley commenced a study of prototypes for emergency housing with students at Cornell University in exchange for up to date information from the Chilean Ministry of Planning (ODEPLAN) about domestic production (Pawley 1975a, 92). Though the economic and political situation in Chile rapidly deteriorated soon after Pawley returned to Cornell, Pawley and 12 students proceeded to design three ‘shells’ constructed from products that they determined were available in Chile’s inflationary economy (Pawley 1975a, 92–​97; Perez de Arce 2015, 97).

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The shells took on familiar, iconic forms made from everyday waste. An icosahedral structure drew support from papier maché studs made out of stacked soft drink and beer cans that were wrapped in paper.Warren Lee and David Mantanari’s shell took the form of a Corbusian barrel vault, using cans as voussoirs sandwiched between cardboard panels (Pawley 1973, 783). Other forms recalled consumer products. John Zissovici, a student in the studio, has explained that the system for making studs out of stacked soda cans rolled in paper resembled a large cigarette roller (John Zissovici 2013, pers.comm., 8 August). Students also used the scale model for their system to roll cigarettes. Much like their cigarettes, Zissovici and his peers rolled structure: ‘It was like a stud wall but we rolled the studs’ (ibid.). The substance of cans and cardboard were unaltered, if deformed. Lydia Kallipoliti argues that substitutions of this kind represented a concern for ‘hard’ production methods in Pawley’s work, signalling a change in context and syntax rather than a ‘soft’ change in substance (Kallipoliti 2013, 256). Students transformed a bicycle into a skylight, for instance, merely by way of changing its context (Pawley 1975a, 95). Student Jeffrey Skorneck proposed a more outwardly visible change of context: a house made with the unused parts of a Citroën van (Figure 15.1). According to Pawley, the Citroën factory lay dormant due to the collapse of foreign credit lines in 1971, leaving a surplus of body parts and an unused production line (Pawley 1975a, 92). In response, Skorneck repurposed the factory to produce the materials for housing (Skorneck 1973). The strategy was a clear reference to precedents such as Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House (1928–​1945) and the British AIROH house (1945), both of which made use of aircraft manufacturing methods and production lines for the construction of housing (Pawley 1984). Pawley imagined that the priorities of the factory would shift in Skorneck’s project according to changing political-​economic circumstances, creating a symbiosis of first and secondary use economies (Pawley 1975a, 97–​98). Car manufacture, Pawley anticipated, might predominate after engines and transmissions were available again. The car served as both metaphor and paradigm for Pawley’s approach to housing. On the one hand, automotive manufacturing was a model for the industrial production. On the other hand, the car-​like qualities and functions of the house indexed the growing mobility of society at large. New conditions of ownership unshackled the individual from the lifestyle of a permanent home. As Pawley observed in Architecture Versus Housing, the purchase of a car did not require the purchase of a ‘stretch of road’ (Pawley 1971b, 110). Why, he asked, should the purchase a house be tied to the purchase of land? The scarcity of land in Britain and the rise of speculation and housing costs during the 1970s led Pawley to conclude that the capitalistic bond between housing and land should be severed completely. Pursuing the car analogy further, he imagined that the ‘rental or hire-​purchase of detachable [house] units … could undermine the principle of ownership altogether’, thereby ‘replacing the traditional idea of possession with a new one of temporary rights over things’ (ibid., 112). Skorneck’s 21-​page document of manufacturer’s and original assembly drawings was in this respect an ‘owner’s manual’ for the Fourgonnette house. He emphasized

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Automobile Body Components Housing, Citroen 2CV Fourgonnette, Jeffrey Skorneck, 1973. Source: Reprinted from Garbage Housing, Martin Pawley, pp. 90–​91. Copyright (1975) FIGURE 15.1   Drawings,

that the high tolerance of body components was amenable to rapid assembly and unskilled labour, assuring that the occupants of the house could dispose of and repossess the parts of the house –​and by extension the house itself –​with considerable ease (Skorneck 1973, 2–​3). Though the conversion of car parts to building materials required a repurposing of meaning and use, car body parts retained many of their qualities and functions. Skorneck carefully studied and reused manufacturer’s drawings of a 2CV Fourgonnette van, appropriating the Citroën’s panels for a roof, sheer wall, and the windows of the house. The interior assumed the quality of an oversized vehicle cabin, replete with bench seats and a low ceiling profile. Skorneck proposed that ‘support systems’ such as the headlamps and alternator be drawn from Citroën

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leftovers for use as lighting and ventilation, respectively (Skorneck 1973, 21). Shock absorbers from the van would also be used to separate floor framing from the foundation as protection from seismic volatility. Skorneck may have designed a house, but the Fourgonnette house was replete with the trappings of a car. In The Private Future, Pawley acknowledged that the car was an emblem of growing privatization of all aspects of life, writing that ‘the car is a social diving suit, an isolating personal environment … all cars are getaway cars’ (Pawley 1977, 59). But the Fourgonnette house was no fast escape.While the occupants controlled the architecture of the house, its assembly would have relied on the coordination of industry, the state and other intermediaries, a managerial role that Pawley granted to the architect. Construction depended on output from government factories and state-​led efforts to manage the social and technical tolerance of automotive parts, including the production of joinery and advertising aimed at bridging the gap in meaning between car and house. With the managerial role for the architect and architectural knowledge, the role of industry and socialist planning faded from Pawley’s research and teaching.

A pedagogy of reuse Because of the overthrow of the Allende government in 1973, Pawley was forced to wait until the latter half of the 1970s to construct more permanent, occupiable garbage houses, first at RPI and then at FAMU. On paper, the production and reuse of waste materials required the architect to coordinate between industry, governmental institutions, and resource recovery operations. In practice, students and faculty at RPI and FAMU were forced to make-​do with the discards of existing systems of production and consumption. Localized maintenance of building materials and ad hoc agreements about their procurement superseded the management of large-​ scale systems, challenging the protocols and politics of parts-​based manufacture and assembly. Time gained new meaning in their work, shifting from an overarching preoccupation with speed of production and assembly of parts to concerns about the ephemerality of low-​cost housing and the decay of cans, cardboard, and other waste materials over time. Indeed, Pawley’s approach to garbage housing changed after the 1973 Oil Crisis, as growth and other mantras of postwar development appeared increasingly ephemeral. Pawley and his students constructed a nominally habitable 600 square foot garbage house on the campus of RPI for Professor Dora Crouch during two terms and the summer in 1976 (Haviland RPI 1976; Pawley RPI 1976b), boasting that it cost a mere $501.70. Like the Cornell studio, the design process relied in large part on hands-​on, site-​based problem solving. Pawley rationalized the manual appropriation of consumer products as a ‘put up or shut up’ approach to architectural work (Pawley 1976a). But hands-​on study of materials and systems was also a reproach to dominant modes of housing production, demonstrating the role of ‘use’ in Pawley’s teaching methods and criticism. Like other critics of housing in the 1970s, Pawley argued that impersonal government redevelopment

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schemes and other efforts at consumer housing interrupted the individual’s biological and cultural attachment to property, hindering their ability to personalize and appropriate the environment around them (Cupers 2016; Habraken 1972, 12–​13; Pawley 1970, 132–​138). In The Time House, the essay accompanying his diploma project at the Architectural Association, Pawley contrasted a personal relationship with objects to prevailing functionalist doctrine, which, according to Pawley, demanded that an individual shed accumulated experience like a snake sheds it skin (Pawley 1970, 141–​142). Instead, ‘historical evidence seems to indicate that the design, use and retention of objects is an accumulative process like learning or growth’ (Pawley 1970, 141). Garbage Housing extended his critique to the reuse of consumer waste. Though consumer objects were also impersonal and mass produced, he imagined that their reuse allowed users to contextualize and personalize them to their own needs. Studio assignments approximated Pawley’s conception of housing as a process of continuous making and change (Pawley 1976a). Pawley always emphasized hands-​ on studies of materials over architectural drawings, placing the burden of proof on full scale mock-​ups (Lawrence Birch 2018, pers.comm., 24 April; Pawley RPI 1976a; John Zissovici 2013, pers.comm., 8 August). He also periodically assigned ‘sketch projects’ in between studies of materials and building. His definition of sketching was capacious, using drawing and blocks of information to situate concepts about reuse within a system of material flows. For instance, the first sketch assignment for the Dora Crouch house required students to demonstrate the feasibility of their ideas by showing ‘materials used, general construction methods, confirmation of sources and availability of materials used, outline cost implications and delineation of problem areas to be resolved during detailed design’ (Pawley RPI 1976e). Like the construction of physical prototypes, sketching was open-​ended and responsive to changes in waste materials, ranging from cost and availability to physical characteristics. By contrast, drawing would have interrupted an otherwise accumulative process of learning. The acquisition of materials for the Dora Crouch house further reinforced the role of individual, personal appropriation of mass produced objects, drawing on materials that were readily at hand (Pawley RPI 1976c). The frame of the house was comprised of columns and trusses made of 4-​inch cardboard tubing from a local newspaper company (Pawley 1982, 5). Cans sourced from a local manufacturer, campus food services, and generous local residents served as truss joinery and purlins for the cardboard tube structure and infill for walls (ibid., 5–​9). Further, the president of a regional rubber company offered the by-​products of automobile bushing manufacture after hearing about the project on a local radio show, donating 2-​foot-​by-​2-​foot sheets of neoprene that Pawley’s team used for roofing (ibid., 13). In the draft of an article submitted to Architect’s Journal, Pawley referred to it as a ‘roof good for 30,000 miles’, playing on ad slogans for the life cycle of car tyres (Pawley 1976d) (Figure 15.2). In marked distinction to Pawley’s initial plans for secondary use manufacturing in Chile, material procurement was forged off the cuff, reliant on equal parts serendipity and intention.

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FIGURE 15.2   ‘A

roof good for 30,000 miles’, showing the neoprene tiles of Dora Crouch House, 1976. Source: Private collection of Philippa Morrison and Oliver Pawley

Waste materials proved volatile. In an infelicitous encounter between smoking teenagers and tar sealant, the first paper tube frame went up in flames (Pawley 1982, 5). A second study of steel cans was destroyed by vandals (ibid., 5). The first roof, constructed out of cardboard tiles that were cut from old furniture boxes and infused with sulfur, was destroyed by a rainstorm (ibid., 13). Polyethylene panels were then used as an alternative, but these deteriorated under UV radiation. After initial completion of the house, the cans rusted, leaking water into the house and leaving rust streaking down the façade (ibid., 15). Using leftover sulphur, the students applied a sulphuric glaze over the cans, creating a waterproof layer that disguised the rusted surface (ibid., 17). Different heating times and temperatures created variable shades of yellow, leading to a camouflage-​like pattern on the exterior (ibid., 17). Design happened in stopgap measures and handshake agreements. All labour focused on sourcing and figuring out materials. Pawley relished the ad hoc quality of their work, describing a ‘strange exhilaration’ in the ‘absolute poverty’ of their situation (Pawley 1982, 16–​17). It suggested a different mode of production than his earlier propositions: ‘I myself had become convinced,’ he wrote, ‘despite all mistakes and exaggerations, that it was possible to develop a technology to build with wastes as they are, instead of processing them into special building materials at giant municipal facilities’ (ibid., 15).The sulphuric hues of its walls and neoprene nipples on its roof amounted to a weird, discomforting beauty (ibid., 19). Envisioned initially as a system of industrialized forms of assembly, his experiments turned out to be more

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unstable than anticipated, demanding in situ management of messy, unpredictable changes in the substance of waste material. If the assembly of interchangeable parts correlated to Pawley’s image of the architect as a technocratic intermediary, the bleeding, rusting amalgams of materials and ad hoc forms of assembly required another role for the architect and the potential occupant of a garbage house: incremental maintenance and upkeep. The final assignment for the class in October 1976 asked students to speculate on the long life of the house by creating a new design brief that included plans for weatherizing the house for the winter, improvements to the interior in order to make it more habitable and potential extensions to the home in the service of ‘increased longevity’ of the house (Pawley 1976a). Where design and maintenance started and stopped was unclear at best, given that much of the construction process involved ongoing weatherization of consumer and commercial waste.

The unfinished house During the early 1970s, Pawley argued that industrially manufactured, throwaway housing liberated home ownership from the vicissitudes of the real estate market and state control. Pawley wrote in 1971 that the components of a housing system could be ‘transplanted, renewed, repaired or updated like a human organ’ (Pawley 1971a, 90). As a result, he argued, the ‘house is never finished’ (ibid.). Pawley’s research changed during the late 1970s. As director of the Experimental Low-​Cost Construction Unit (EXCON, 1977–​1979) at FAMU, Pawley studied the design of services and incremental improvements to houses instead of designs for a housing system.Though the shift in Pawley’s research reflected growing consciousness about energetics after the Oil Crisis in 1973, it also represented changes in the political economy of housing. EXCON research operated under the assumption that home ownership for low income households in Florida was indefinitely deferred, due to state retrenchment from housing production and severe poverty. Was the unfinished quality of houses a route to ownership, as Pawley imagined, or evidence of its postponement? Pawley moved from RPI to FAMU in Tallahassee in 1977, after an invitation from Dean Richard Chalmers to direct a graduate-​level research programme in the newly formed architecture school (Michael Alfano 2018, pers.comm., 18 June).4 Though garbage remained important to Pawley’s pedagogy and research at FAMU, energy use took precedent in the form of a two-​year research project, Energy Efficient Technologies and Methodologies for Low-​Income Rural Housing in Florida (1977–​1979). From the onset, Pawley established the goal of the programme as improvement of existing housing stock. He stated in a grant application that EXCON research about low-​cost energy saving technologies aimed to determine the ‘economic possibility to finance improvements’ in the energy efficiency of dwellings (Pawley FAMU 1977). The programme commenced with a survey of energy ‘deficiencies’ in 320 houses in rural Leon and Gadsden counties, concluding that they lacked inoperable windows, control over air circulation,

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adequate insulation, and protection from infiltration of air (EXCON 1978, 17–​18). The survey, and the conclusions drawn from it, focused on the infrastructure of the home. Rather than propose significant, expensive renovations to rural houses, Pawley asked students to use survey data in order to develop a series of ‘energy kits’ and other basic infrastructure that resolved specific deficiencies but left the architecture of the existing houses largely intact. Energy kits, ducts, and pipes plugged into and encircled the existing structure of a shotgun house that was donated by Ms. Hora Buchan, a resident of Tallahassee (EXCON 1978, 18). Similar to research conducted at Cornell and RPI, prototypes in the Buchan House drew from a milieu of locally available discards, low-​cost building components, and simple tools. Once again, Pawley appropriated car parts for a new use (Figure 15.3). He observed that disused car hulks often sat outside

FIGURE 15.3  Filling

the Buchan House ‘auto collector’ with disused cans, 1978. Source: Private collection of Philippa Morrison and Oliver Pawley

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FIGURE 15.4   Space Addition

System (SAS), David Tod Hollister, 1979. Source: Private collection of Philippa Morrison and Oliver Pawley

dwellings that lacked space heating, sparking inspiration for a solar heat collector in winter months (EXCON 1978, 29). Pawley salvaged a 1970 Plymouth Arrow at no cost from a local scrap dealer, stripping the cabin of interior fittings and filling it with waste aluminium and steel cans, a fan and a duct that attached to the house (EXCON 1978, 28–​34). Another installation circulated air from inside the house through an underground duct made out of tyres and polyethylene in order to cool the interior (EXCON 1978, 97–​99). The upturned Plymouth and wormlike tyre duct reprised themes from the Fourgonnette and Dora Crouch houses, re-​ contextualizing car parts and discards. Only now, the car was not a building material. Energy kits such as the car collector modified the environmental conditions of the home but not its architecture. Like energy kits, EXCON thesis projects examined incremental improvements to the architecture of existing houses rather than designs for an industrial housing system. Student David Hollister, for instance, developed what he called a ‘Space Addition System’ (SAS) of rigid hulls that were constructed out of sealed, folded cardboard sourced from home appliance boxes (Hollister 1979) (Figure 15.4). Hollister constructed two small rooms that he affixed to the Buchan house, projecting the life span of the SAS to be a mere 5–​10 years (ibid., 27). He rationalized the expendability of cardboard by observing that many houses in the energy efficiency survey were nearing the end of their life, due to poor maintenance and intractable poverty (ibid., 27). Consequently, the structure bordered on disposable. The SAS could be attached and removed from a house, but cardboard was fixed in place by adhesives

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and waterproofing, meaning that the structure would have to be thrown away after use. Like the installation of services, the SAS was designed to achieve modest, temporary improvements in the comfort and cost of domestic life. In part, this was due to Hollister’s unease with restrictions imposed by state support. He concluded that state subsidies and other poverty alleviation programmes were unsuitable to existing socio-​economic realities of low income occupants in rural Tallahassee. Hollister observed that subsidies from the Federal Housing Administration relied on standards of construction and repair that were too costly for low income occupants, resulting in the demolition of houses or denial of funding (Hollister 1979, 25–​26). Further, grants and subsidies privileged the rehabilitation of homes for owners, rather than renters, overlooking the considerable number of renters in rural Tallahassee (ibid., 27). In response, Hollister designed the SAS to avoid subsidies altogether, limiting its cost to the minimal budget of a low income household. Together with the installation of energy kits and basic services on the Buchan house, Hollister proposed improvements that severed the house from infrastructural support, financial or otherwise. Support assumed other forms, however. Training and service formed the human material of EXCON inquiry. The last and final phase of Pawley’s research about energy efficiency at FAMU was comprised of an 18-​week job training programme of ‘economically disadvantaged persons’ from the community (Pawley FAMU 1977; EXCON 1979). The programme rehashed the pedagogy of the EXCON design studio, training students in the analysis of energy efficiency and the design and construction of energy kits. In part, the EXCON programme’s focus on service reflected growing concerns about educational opportunity in the United States during the late 1970s. EXCON research was funded by STAR (Service Through Application of Research), a state grant programme that prioritized energy and educational opportunities in the state of Florida (STAR 1977). FAMU, a historically black university, was itself situated at the crossroads of equal opportunity politics during the 1970s. The architecture school was founded in 1975 in response to Federal pressure on the State of Florida to desegregate higher education (Michael Alfano 2018, pers.comm., 18 June). Service animated all levels of FAMU pedagogy, ranging from a Masters level programme about government service to extension programmes such as the EXCON job training programme (ibid.). A FAMU poster from the late 1970s conveyed the school’s worldview: ‘today the scope of architectural services has broadened to include improvement of the quality of life itself ’ (FAMU 1979). Training programmes were designed to give occupants greater control over the housing process by building knowledge, not architecture. Was service all that remained of Garbage Housing? Constraints imposed by subsidies and grants restricted the scope of EXCON work to the study of temporary improvements to derelict houses. In response, Pawley and his students accepted that ownership remained out of reach to the majority of surveyed households. Given that their research stopped short of designing housing for economically disadvantaged, largely African American residents in Tallahassee, the programme’s focus on skill

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building and basic infrastructure may have reflected the architectural limits of waning efforts to redistribute wealth and opportunities in the United States. Garbage Housing prototypes at Cornell and RPI were unfinished by design; Pawley and his students imagined that occupants would continue to renew the walls and components of houses after they occupied them.5 But houses in rural Tallahassee verged on abandonment and finitude. Devoid of industry or state support for reuse, garbage itself risked lapsing into mere expendability. Had housing also become a one-​off use? The application of garbage to housing for economically disadvantaged communities of colour made EXCON research vulnerable to criticism that the use of ephemeral, abject building materials made people disposable, reinforcing their abandonment by the welfare state (Bauman 2003). In response to Hollister’s SAS, a planner in Tallahassee cautioned that elderly African American residents would refuse to live in ‘something made out of garbage’ (Hollister 1979, iv). Years earlier, the Chilean audience at the International Housing Conference baulked at Pawley’s proposal for secondary use housing, expressing dismay at the prospect of greater dependence of the Chilean market on American or European industry (Pawley 1975a, 89). The ambiguous meaning of Garbage Housing left open the possibility that the value of waste could be perceived as equal to that of housing. But when used in housing for disadvantaged social groups and contexts of structural inequity, garbage remained just that. In the eyes of potential occupants, bottles remained bottles, and bricks remained bricks. Pawley’s research about secondary use design claimed that occupants would redress the supposed failures of mass housing if given the material resources to build for themselves. Bottles and cans, not home plans, served as building blocks for social improvement. At the International Housing Conference in 1972, Pawley argued that self-​determination derived from consumption. He explained to the audience that Chile’s national housing programme ‘must emerge from the reality of the people’s pattern of consumption, from the investment of their own labour, and from the enthusiasm of their own ambition for betterment’ (Pawley 1975a, 116–​ 117). But, ironically, responsibility for Garbage Housing rested on the shoulders of those who were denied access to home ownership and the benefits of a consumer economy. By the late 1970s, incompletion of houses signified the inability of such occupants to possess their houses fully. Pawley’s advocacy of the cause of Garbage Housing bears striking resemblance to contemporary arguments for industry-​led production of reused and reusable consumer products (Braungart and McDonough 2002). But Garbage Housing and other architectural uses of waste during the 1960s and 1970s differed in motivation, subordinating moral and technical claims of environmental responsibility to the pursuit of housing. Research by Pawley, John Habraken, the Minimum Cost Housing Group and other architects threaded concepts about environmental stewardship with different approaches to the provision and maintenance of low-​income housing (MCHG 1977; Pawley 1975a, 26–​34; Wilson 1979). While it may be

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tempting to revisit Pawley’s proposition as a model for rethinking the consumer industry and sustainable design more broadly, his critique of home ownership is indispensable to understanding the role of waste materials and other alternative building technologies in designs for new structures of responsibility for housing during the 1960s and 1970s. That Garbage Housing included research about waste and energy use only underscored that Pawley imagined responsibility for housing as an extension of management of the environment at large.

Notes 1 Like Pawley, Buckminster Fuller envisioned a housing system based on industrial production and temporary ownership of housing components. Jonathan Massey writes that Buckminster Fuller’s proposal for a shelter subscription service ‘used design to rethink the political economy of housing’ (Massey 2012, 35). 2 For example, see the Minimum Cost Housing Group’s series ‘The Problem Is…’ (MCHG 1977). 3 My use of ‘system building’ is an allusion to Thomas P. Hughes’ analysis of the development of large technological systems (Hughes 1987). 4 Pawley conducted EXCON research with the assistance of FAMU professor Lawrence Birch, a former student of Pawley’s at RPI who went on to work at USAID. 5 The incompletion of Garbage Housing reflected similar approaches in international development work during this time, including ‘site and services’, ‘self-​help’, and ‘core housing’ models (Muzaffar 2007).

References TVAA (1975). housing at the a.a. [online] Available from https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=0xh_​UKoUcuk [Accessed 5 April 2018]. Archigram. (1999). Archigram. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. Bauman, Z. (2003). Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity. Braungart, M. and W. McDonough (2002). Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Colomina, B. (2007). Domesticity at War. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cupers, K. (2016). Human Territoriality and the Downfall of Public Housing. Public Culture, 29(1), 165–​190. (EXCON) (1978). Energy-​efficient Technologies and Methodologies for Low Income Rural Housing. Tallahassee, Experimental Low-​Cost Construction Unit, School of Architecture, Florida A&M University. (EXCON) (1979). Training Program in Low Cost Energy Efficient Technology: Final Report. Tallahassee, Experimental Low-​Cost Construction Unit, School of Architecture, Florida A&M University. Forrest, R. and A. Murie (1988). Selling the Welfare State: The Privatisation of Public Housing. London: Routledge. Habraken, J. (1972). Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing. New York: Praeger. Hughes, T. (1987). ‘The Evolution of Large Technological Systems’. In: W. Bijker, T. Hughes and T. Pinch, (eds.) The Social Construction of Technological Systems; New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 51–​82. Kallipoliti, L. (2013). ‘Mission Galactic Household: the resurgence of cosmological imagination in the architecture of the 1960s and 1970s’. PhD Diss., Princeton University.

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Massey, J. (2012). ‘Risk and Regulation in the Financial Architecture of American Houses’. In: Aggregate (eds.), Governing by Design, Architecture, Economy and Politics in the Twentieth Century. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 21–​46. MCHG (Minimum Cost Housing Group). (1977). Use It Again Sam; The Problem Is: No. 6. Montreal, MCHG. Medina, E. (2011). Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Muzaffar, I. (2007). ‘The Periphery Within: Modern Architecture and the Making of the Third World’. PhD Diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pawley, M. (1970). ‘The Time House, or Argument for an Existential Dwelling’. In: C. Jencks and G. Baird (eds.), Meaning in Architecture. New York: George Braziller, 120–​148. Pawley, M. (1971a). ‘Garbage Housing’. Architectural Design, 41(2), 86–​94. Pawley, M. (1971b). Architecture Versus Housing. New York: Praeger. Pawley, M. (1975a). Garbage Housing. London: The Architectural Press. Pawley, M. (1975b). ‘Garbage Housing USA: The Work of Mike Reynolds’. Architectural Design, 45(3), 169–​171. Pawley, M. (1976). ‘A Thousand Million Components’. The Architects’ Journal, (164): 699–​701. Pawley, M. (1977). The Private Future: Causes and Consequences of Community Collapse in the West. New York: Pocket Books. Pawley, M. (1978). Home Ownership. London: The Architectural Press. Pawley, M. (1982). Building for Tomorrow: Putting Waste to Work. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Pawley, M. (1984).‘The House That Said It All’, The Guardian, 3 December. Perez de Arce, R. (2015). ‘Immobile: Recycling the Citroën 2CV as Inhabitable Space’. Chile, 1973. Arq (89), 90–​99. Steiner, H. (2009). Beyond Archigram:The Structure of Circulation. New York: Routledge. Wilson, F. (1979). ‘Building with the Byproducts of Society’. AIA Journal, (68), 40–​49.

Archive References FAMU (1979). Designing Questions; Florida A&M School of Architecture [school poster] Private collection of Michael Alfano. Haviland, D. (RPI 1976). Memorandum: From David Haviland to Oliver Bonnert, April 13, 1976. [memorandum] Private collection of Philippa Morrison and Oliver Pawley. Hollister, D.T. (1979). The development of a low-​cost space addition system (SAS), constructed of waste corrugated cardboard and low cost materials for families in low income, rural housing of Leon County, Florida. [M.arch thesis book] Private collection of Curt Gambetta. Pawley, M. (RPI 1975a). Garbage Housing; Three Day Sketch Project, October 10, 1975. [course assignment] Private collection of Philippa Morrison and Oliver Pawley. Pawley, M. (RPI 1975b) Projected concentration for spring term 1976; Garbage Housing II, October 29, 1975. [course announcement] Private collection of Philippa Morrison and Oliver Pawley. Pawley, M. (RPI 1976a). Garbage Housing; One Week Design Project, 15 October 1976. [course assignment] Private collection of Philippa Morrison and Oliver Pawley. Pawley, M. (RPI 1976b). Interdepartmental Memorandum from Martin Pawley to Dean Patrick Quinn, 20 February 1976. [memorandum] Pawley, M. (RPI 1976c). Garbage Housing; 15 Week Design Project. [undated course assignment] Private collection of Philippa Morrison and Oliver Pawley. Pawley, M. (RPI 1976d). Garbage House Completed. [undated article submission]. Private collection of Philippa Morrison and Oliver Pawley.

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Pawley, M. (RPI 1976e) .Garbage Housing; 1/​14/​76. [term program outline and first assignment] Private collection of Philippa Morrison and Oliver Pawley. Pawley, M. (FAMU 1977). Energy-​efficient technologies and methodologies for low income rural housing in Florida (STAR 72–​132); A Star Program State Related Research Project Proposal. [grant application] Private collection of Philippa Morrison and Oliver Pawley. Skorneck, J. (1973). Automobile Body Components Housing, Citroen 2CV Fourgonnette, Architecture 110, Spring 1973. [design studio project documentation] Private collection of Philippa Morrison and Oliver Pawley. STAR (1977). Request for Proposals; Universities; STAR 77; General Information for STAR Proposal Submission. [RFP for grant] Private collection of Philippa Morrison and Oliver Pawley.

Interviews Alfano, M. (2018). personal interview (Florida A&M School of Architecture and EXCON program), 18 June. Birch, L. (2018). personal interview (RPI Garbage Housing research and EXCON program), 24 April. Zissovici, J. (2013). personal interview (Garbage Housing studio at Cornell University), 8 August.

16 THE UNMAKING OF AUTOPROGETTAZIONE Avinash Rajagopal and Vera Sacchetti

In 1974 I thought that if people were encouraged to build a table with their own hands, for example, they would be able to understand the thinking behind it. This is why I published the “Proposta per un’autoprogettazione”. (Mari 2002, np) For an utterly unassuming line of furniture, not commercially produced until 38 years after it was designed, the contentious and cantankerous Italian designer Enzo Mari’s experimental 1974 project Autoprogettazione has been extraordinarily influential. Ignored for many years before being revisited by numerous artists, designers, and architects, the pieces of furniture have acquired a cult status in the current millennium as an early example of DIY design. And as such, Autoprogettazione continues to influence designers experimenting with open source, digital fabrication, sustainability, and social design. In this chapter, we want to track the resurgence of Autoprogettazione and show how its newfound popularity might have inadvertently led to the unmaking of this design icon.

Autoprogettazione is conceived Following a decade of postwar economic boom, the upheaval in Italian design of the late 1960s and early 1970s generated both exciting new statements in furniture and multiple signs of disillusionment with the world of design (Lang and Menking 2003). The schizophrenia of the period was well captured in the seminal 1972 exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, curated by Emilio Ambasz, through the works of various Italian designers and groups, among them Archizoom, Superstudio, and Ettore Sottsass. In the Objects section, designs for Italian companies like Olivetti, Cassina, and Zanotti stood on pedestals, striking in their embrace of colour and form. In the Environments section, on the other hand, were

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proposals like Archizoom’s shipping container, empty but for a little girl’s voice; Sottsass’s rejection of the commercialization of the home in the form of a series of grey plastic closets; and Gae Aulenti’s fibreglass furniture inspired by the writer Jorge Luis Borges (Collard 2013). It would seem that these designers were negotiating between their professional careers –​still defined by client relationships with manufacturers –​and what they saw as their political or social role. In January 1973, a number of the designers represented in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape met in the Milan offices of the magazine Casabella to found one of the least understood and quixotic pedagogical experiments of the era (Borgonuovo and Franceschini 2019). Over three years, the designers conducted workshops and seminars as part of Global Tools, which they characterized as a non-​school. They sought to re-​create the links between craft and designed objects, often emphasizing construction methods and ‘poor’ materials that individuals could learn to employ themselves (Sabır and Wilk 2014) –​as opposed to the fabrication techniques and plastic materials they were exploiting in their own work at the time. A fixture of this milieu, the Milanese designer Enzo Mari had created and would continue to develop designs for several Italian manufacturers of the time, from Danese (16 Animali, 1957 and Perpetual Calendar, 1966), to Driade (the Sof-​sof chair, 1971), and Zanotta (Tonietta chair, 1985). With the launch and dissemination of Autoprogettazione, however, he would carve for himself an altogether different place in design history (Ambasz 1972). When Proposta per un’Autoprogettazione (as it was named in full) was unveiled at the Galleria Milano in 1974, it wasn’t an idea conceived in a vacuum. Autoprogettazione was a set of 18 rudimentary pieces of furniture –​tables, chairs, shelves, beds –​constructed of standard planks of pinewood held together with nails. But it wasn’t the furniture that Mari was selling. For about $2, visitors to the exhibition could purchase a detailed instruction manual that showed them how to build the furniture for themselves (Reif 1974, 41). Do-​it-​yourself (DIY) design was certainly having a cultural moment at this time, beyond the experiments of the Global Tools project and Italy itself. While the phenomenon of DIY itself was not new, at the dawn of the 1970s the movement came hand in hand with a renewed ecological awareness, boosted by the general economic downturn but also by a contemporary frustration with consumerism and its woes. As Martina Fineder, Thomas Geisler, and Sebastian Hackenschmidt noted in 2017, this was a time when ‘self-​determination, social participation and the idea of active involvement were important demands of a new young and critical generation who were facing the consequences of a stagnating economy’ (Fineder, Geisler and Hackenschmidt 2017, 73). In Europe as in the United States, a progressive discontent had been growing since the 1960s, voiced via publications such as journalist Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers (Packard 1960), which shed light on how the rapid growth of disposable consumer goods was degrading the environmental, financial, and spiritual character of American society. At the eve of the same decade, in The New York Times, critic Ada Louise Huxtable called for ‘a brand of

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“environmentalism” akin to the current “consumerism” ’, which in her view could only happen in ‘a nation sick to death of the kind of “progress” that exacts a terminal toll from the environment’ (Huxtable 1969, 28). For this nation  –​or mindset  –​to arise, publications such as the Whole Earth Catalog offered, between 1968 and 1972, ‘access to tools’. Published by Stewart Brand and his team in California, these oversized books collected the latest tools that Brand considered useful to the new counterculture, back-​to-​the-​land communities and professionals in the fields of technology, design, and architecture. The ideas of the designer R. Buckminster Fuller and the architect Frei Otto, Marshall McLuhan’s books, and the very first personal computers found frequent mention in the Catalog. With one foot in an earth-​bound conception of ecology, and another in the barely begun Internet revolution, the Catalog expressed Brand’s irrepressible belief in individual agency; as stated in the Fall 1969 edition, ‘we are as gods and might as well get used to it’ (Brand 1969). Between Stockholm, Valencia, Copenhagen, and Vienna, in 1973, James Hennessey and Victor Papanek published Nomadic Furniture, ‘a catalog of furniture you can build yourself easily, or buy or adapt […] All of it can be folded or knocked down, stacked, inflated or [ecologically responsibly] recycled or thrown away’ (Hennessey and Papanek 1973, 3). Including examples of furniture for seating, eating, storage, sleeping, and a dedicated section for babies and children, the book took as a starting point the condition of nomadism, which, according to Hennessey and Papanek, was the condition of present times. ‘Industry & academe,’ the authors pointed out, ‘the military and, most importantly, changing life-​styles among young people, tend to make us all more nomadic’ (Hennessey and Papanek 1973, 2). Hennessey and Papanek admitted Nomadic Furniture to be made in the vein of the Whole Earth Catalog, and hoped for it to help readers to ‘to do things that have a good fit between the way it works & the ways in which we find delight’ (Hennessey and Papanek 1973, 3). The book was to be followed by Nomadic Furniture 2, published the following year. In the introduction to the follow-​up, Hennessey and Papanek stated that while the design press had ignored their previous volume, they had ‘received nearly a thousand letters in less than six months from readers’ (Hennessey and Papanek 1974, 2), some of which included several proposals of their own that made their way into the second volume. Here, again, the sustainability aspect came into play, with the authors further advocating against what they call ‘a kleenex culture’. ‘We must learn to throw less away & make do with recycled older things,’ Hennessey and Papanek continued, indicating an acute awareness of scarcity, as well as an ecological mind-​set. ‘Because wood is scarce, will be scarcer & costs more’ (Hennessey and Papanek 1974, 4). Back in Milan, Mari made no explicit mention of environmental concerns or sustainability with Autoprogettazione, but the association might well have been made by his contemporaries. In his instruction manual, Mari declared how Autoprogettazione was ‘A project for making easy-​to-​assemble furniture using rough boards and nails’ with a critical edge: here was ‘an elementary technique to teach anyone to look at present

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production with a critical eye’ (Mari 1974). He added ‘anyone, apart from factories and traders, can use these designs to make them by themselves’, expressing hope ‘the idea will last into the future’ and asking ‘those who build the furniture, and in particular, variations of it, to send photos to his studio’. Over 5,000 people responded and sent Mari postcards with images of tables, chairs, and beds (Mari 2009).

The rebirth of Autoprogettazione In 2006, one of the original 1974 Autoprogettazione ­tables –​labelled as an EFFE table from the Metamobile series –​sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $14,400 (Sothebys 2006). This many-​thousand-​fold jump in value came about thanks to a confluence of many factors, some of which dating back to the mid-​twentieth century. Swedish furniture giant IKEA has conclusively proved that there is indeed a market for low-​cost, self-​assembled furniture. The company had started exploring the benefits of flat-​packing as early as 1956, and undertook a rapid programme of expansion throughout the 1980s, opening stores in the UK, USA, and Italy (Kristoffersson 2014). By the end of the next decade, it had 158 stores in 29 countries. Looking at the manufacturer from the lens of DIY, it could be argued that IKEA came closest to realizing Mari’s dream with Autoprogettazione –​introducing the joy of assembling furniture to millions around the world. Nevertheless, from the standpoint of sustainability, the major years of IKEA’s expansion were not driven by the ideal of minimizing ecological impact, with products often manufactured in cheap plastics or MDF, whereas Mari’s original intent for Autoprogettazione proposed the use of locally sourced wood. In 2002, the Italian publisher Edizioni Corraini republished Mari’s Proposta per un’Autoprogettazione under the more catchy (and critical) title Autoprogettazione? It was presented in Italian and English, reintroducing millennial audiences to what was by then a lost classic. Artists and designers interested in new ideas of DIY, craft resurgence, local production, and sustainability found that the project resonated with them, and proceeded to use the instructions in their own way. One wild interpretation was by the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who recreated the entire set in solid stainless steel in 2004 (Allen 2009a). Then, in 2008, as part of Turin’s World Design Capital celebrations, the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea held the first retrospective of Enzo Mari’s work. Writing in the International Herald Tribune, critic Alice Rawsthorn said the exhibition was ‘a timely reminder of what a gifted designer he is’ (Rawsthorn 2008). The stage for Autoprogettazione’s celebrity was set. In May 2008, inspired by Tiravanjia’s stainless steel rendering, art critic, and Mari enthusiast Greg Allen embarked on a project that he called Enzo Mari x Ikea Mashup. For his new home in Washington, DC, Allen decided to use Mari’s instruction manual for a table, but to source the wood from IKEA, because some of the wooden slats sold by the Swedish manufacturer as part of a bed kit roughly fit the dimensions that Mari specified.The result was a piece that brought together the popular notion of DIY, as represented by the flat-​pack retailer, and the high ideal

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of the empowered designer-​user, as imagined by Mari (Allen 2009b). It’s important to note that Mari himself isn’t a fan of IKEA. ‘I’ve bought objects from Ikea myself, they are very cheap,’ he told the writer Justin McGuirk in 2009. ‘But they are cheap because of the blood of the people,’ he added dramatically, speaking of the company’s exploitation of workers in developing countries (McGuirk 2009). Later in 2008, Professor Paul Pettigrew and his students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Department of Architecture took on Auto­ progettazione as an inspiration to fabricate new works. For Pettigrew, this was a possibility to transform ‘the published designs from site neutral to site specific’ (Pettigrew 2008). He further stated that ‘furniture can be produced by the masses, but does not have to be mass produced’. This meant an increased concern about the locally sourced aspect of the materials, contributing to the sustainability of the project as well as its longevity. The chairs produced by the students were made of a local urban cottonwood and poplar, square drive wood screws and tung oil, which, according to Pettigrew, allowed ‘the chairs to age more gracefully’. In 2009, the Architectural Association in London invited eight contemporary designers to create their own Mari-​inspired blueprints, for an exhibition called Autoprogettazione Revisited. Designers such as Martino Gamper participated:  his drawings, specifically, look a lot like Mari’s originals, but the resulting chair looks like a cheap fruit box with an asymmetrical back –​entirely different from Mari’s very pared-​down aesthetics. Already in these efforts, we see designers leveraging the project’s openness to create versions and interpretations that Mari himself might have, in his characteristic way, strongly opposed.

Autoprogettazione commercialized Shortly afterwards, in 2010, the Finnish furniture manufacturer Artek chose to commercially produce the Sedia 1 chair, perhaps the most iconic of the chairs in the Autoprogettazione series, as a celebration of the company’s 75th anniversary. ‘Enzo Mari is a designer, thinker and provocateur,’ the project announcement stated, adding he was ‘determined to develop mass-​produced objects without compromising his belief that the outcome should always be beautiful to look at and feel while being functional’. Considering Artek’s history, this seemed an audacious plan. But it was even more audacious for Mari’s project and for the designer himself, who in 1974 had stated how ‘anyone, apart from factories and traders, can use these designs to make them by themselves’ (Allen 2011). Nevertheless, Artek announced it would sell the chair as a set of pre-​cut pine wood boards –​sourced, as all of the wood used by the company, from certified Finnish forests –​, nails and assembling instructions.The presentation, which took place during the 2010 Salone del Mobile in Milan, was complemented by a short documentary.Titled ‘Enzo Mari for Artek:  Homage to Autoprogettazione’, the film showed Mari himself slowly assembling a Sedia 1, demonstrating all the steps of the process. The Artek relaunch put Autoprogettazione, and Sedia 1 in particular, back into the spotlight. The project’s iconic status and formal appeal struck a chord with

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the art world. In April 2011 at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Mari designed the exhibition system for Vaudon-​Vodun, African Voodoo Art from the Collection of Anne and Jacques Kerchache to echo Autoprogettazione, adding to the original set of pieces. A documentary video produced at the time reveals the main exhibition space, where a series of screens positioned in a circle (in an installation Mari calls ‘The Village’) are used as a backdrop to the artworks. In the event space, many individual Sedia 1 chairs face a projection screen; and a couple of long display cases, with or without a glass cover, complete the set. For inspiration, Mari had imagined he was Mr. Kerchache ‘arriving in Africa for the first time’ (Mari 2011a).The simple lines of Autoprogettazione seemed, in Mari’s and the Fondation Cartier’s mind, to fit into this clichéd view of an entire continent; and thus the exhibition design perpetuated stereotypes about Africa and so-​called ‘tribal’ art. Shortly afterwards, at Tanya Leighton Gallery in Berlin, from September to November 2011, Mari was celebrated with an exhibition titled The Intellectual Work:  Enzo Mari, where visitors could admire the designer’s collection of paperweights, displayed on top of paper stacks of various heights with unused and discarded proposals for design projects. ‘I am not only collecting paperweights, I  also use them,’ the designer declared to Monopol Magazin. ‘The exhibition is thus a manifesto of my intellectual work. And this is mainly about rejecting ideas’ (Mari 2011b). Lauding a more conceptual side of the designer, The Intellectual Work underlined the notion that Mari’s true oeuvre lay not in the objects but in the ideas behind them. In 2012, Italian design magazine Domus, then under the tenure of editor in chief Joseph Grima, launched the Autoprogettazione 2.0 competition, the results of which were to be exhibited at Salone del Mobile. ‘Autoprogettazione 2.0 is an invitation,’ the project announcement read, ‘to consider the potential of a diffused, localized manufacturing network combined with the self-​build ethos proposed by Mari for the future of furniture design’.The magazine described Autoprogettazione 2.0 as ‘an open-​ended process’ that sought ‘to leverage the combined intelligence and talent of the design community and collaborative, open-​source networks’. During that year’s Salone del Mobile, seven open-​source projects submitted to the competition were exhibited in a vaulted room at the Palazzo Clerici. Online, Domus made the files available for download, and encouraged any and every one to replicate these designs at home. Writing about the exhibition at DomusWeb, Loredana Mascheroni noted how ‘the free instruction booklets Mari distributed at the Galleria Milano have given way to SketchUp files downloaded from the Internet, and his planks and nails have been replaced by 2.0 designers with pantographs, circuit-​board milling machines, cutting plotters and 3D printers –​the ideal high-​ tech tools for constructing a furnishing collection for use in FabLabs worldwide, and that can even be made in the FabLabs themselves, triggering a process that fully exploits the design community’s intelligence and talent’ (Mascheroni 2012). Here, it wasn’t about commercialization, but about inspiration, and adding the digital layer to the same kind of thinking that had prompted Mari’s 1974 cri de coeur: if Mari had had the internet, what would have been the consequence of

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Autoprogrettazione? Grima and Autoprogettazione 2.0 seemed to imply that Mari had indeed foreseen the open-​source, decentralized production model that would inspire so many in the first decades of the twenty-​first century.

Autoprogettazione as a platform Later that year, Grima also used Autoprogettazione as the basis for the exhibition design of Adhocracy, ‘an exhibition about people who make things’ in the 2012 Istanbul Design Biennial, for which the authors of this chapter served as catalogue co-​editors. Adhocracy focused on projects and individuals subverting traditional industrial paradigms, encouraging decentralized, open-​source production all over the world, much like Mari 40 years beforehand. The exhibition’s spirit effectively brought to mind the same social impulses that had made Autoprogettazione possible. Here was an exhibition calling for decentralized production, a sustainable approach, self-​made custom objects, and open-​source as a necessary alternative to copyright culture. In Adhocracy, these were presented as urgent needs for our time. Not without its shortcomings, the exhibition’s survey included only examples from Western Europe and the United States, while aiming to showcase different kinds and scales of impact for open-​source thinking. Some examples came directly from the world of design, such as Jesse Howard’s Transparent Tools, a graduation project developed at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Here, Howard imagined a set of household appliances that users can produce, repair, and modify by themselves, combining readily available hardware products and rapid-​manufacturing techniques. By basing the design of his appliances on a grid-​based schematic, Howard strips these common objects (a toaster, coffee grinder, vacuum cleaner, and kettle) of their intimidating complexity. These designs do not propose iconic, closed forms, but rather a set of instructions, a one-​page manual that enables the user to source, recycle, or 3D-​ print the various parts locally. On a larger scale and developed by farmers and scientists, instead of designers, was the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), represented by a large scale, open-​source tractor –​the LifeTrac III –​flown directly from Maysville, Ohio, in the heart of the American Midwest. This was to represent a set of 50 essential, open source industrial machines developed by the GVCS and published on a platform called Open Source Ecology. Significantly cheaper to produce than comparable machines currently on the market, the key to the GVCS system was a set of parts that can perform core functions in different kinds of equipment. These include the Power Cube, an engine in a box that can be swapped in and out of many GVCS machines, or the QA Plate, a metal frame used to combine various modular parts. The system allowed for a machine such as the LifeTrac III tractor to be built, from scratch, in six days. Finally, on the more utopian end of the spectrum, the ideas of open-​source, authorship, collaboration, and sustainability in Adhocracy came together in the powerful example of OpenStructures. ‘The most powerful aspect of the networked

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economy that emerged in the Internet age is, perhaps, the bypassing of the middleman of profit-​driven companies in the relationship between consumers and producers,’ the exhibition catalogue asserted. ‘By establishing a universal modular grid around which hardware can be designed –​an “Esperanto for objects”, so to speak –​OpenStructures positions itself at this juncture, amplifying the conversation by giving diverse users a shared vocabulary and framework’ (Rajagopal, Sacchetti and Shafrir 2012). The system allowed progressive scales of participation, with users being able to customize a design previously made by another user, adapting it to their own needs, and print and assemble a final object using partially the information available on the internet, and partially the local potential of a FabLab or hardware store. ‘OpenStructures expands the debate on authorship and collaboration’, the exhibition catalogue postulates, ‘by raising questions about its nature and the domain of the anointed designer in the 21st century’. As a literal platform on which all of these inspiring examples were displayed, in Adhocracy the large-​scale tables and shelves developed as exhibition furniture were inspired by Autoprogettazione principles, reminding visitors and participants alike of the project that had preceded, and in some ways made possible, many of the objects on display. In a small vitrine on the second floor, the original Autoprogettazione booklet also made an appearance, like a patron saint in a small, hidden wall niche.

The unmaking of Autoprogettazione One of the most recent reinterpretations of Autoprogettazione is perhaps the one that more strongly conveys its unmaking. After a decade of resurgence of interest in the project, the Berlin-​based NGO Cucula, who works with refugees recently arrived in Germany, contacted Mari to be able to produce the Autoprogettazione designs in its workshops. Cucula ‘takes care of the refugees it works with by teaching them professional skills that could be useful for sustaining an independent future’ (Herring 2016, 50–​57). Founded in 2013 by designers Corinna Sy, Sebastian Däschle, and Michael Wolke, and a cultural centre director, Barbara Meyer, Cucula calls itself a ‘refugee company for crafts and design’. Mari’s –​and by extension, Artek’s –​permission to build the Autoprogettazione came with the blessing to ‘improve’ upon them, and thus Cucula produces chairs for adults and children, as well as other pieces of furniture. According to a 2016 report in Crafts magazine, ‘many of the objects produced in the workshop draw on the refugees’ own experience and culture, incorporating pieces of wood from the broken-​up boats in which they made the dangerous crossing to Europe’ (Herring 2016, 50–​57). As with many others before it, Cucula also saw the material of Autoprogettazione as open-​ended, exploiting the wood of the chair to tie in the notion of recycling as well as a sentimental evocation of the plight of refugees.They hoped to entangle DIY, sustainability, and social justice in every chair. In what can be read as a dangerous proximity to an aesthetic fetishism of poverty, Cucula then sells these items on their online shop, and has high-​profile supporters in different corners of the world, who are presumably happy to pay $300 (plus

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shipping costs) for a design that not only carries the formal appeal of a highly collectible design item, but also makes them feel good for helping a social initiative. Nevertheless, the NGO states that the proceeds from sales are ‘invested back into the project, to cover the costs of language classes, legal advice and immediate practical support for the trainees, and up to 20 other refugees’. Attesting to the pieces’ highly collectible appeal, Cucula’s Ambassador Chair (the name given to their ‘evolution’ of Sedia 1) has recently been added to the collection of the Vitra Design Museum (Kries, Büscher, Eisenbrand, and Lipsky 2019), and is now on display as part of the museum’s permanent collection installation at the Schaudepot in Weil am Rhein. In a further step towards its canonization, in June 2018 critic Alice Rawsthorn included the Ambassador Chair in one of her popular Instagram round-​ups, describing it as a successful example of design working to mitigate the refugee crisis. But if the museum has further helped commodify and unmake Mari’s radical experiment, Artek seems to have taken a step back. In 2018, following two years under the leadership of Marianne Goebl, the company decided to remove Sedia 1 from its catalogue, in an apparent recognition of how strangely it resonated with the rest of its products. In a strange turn of events, Autoprogettazione seems to –​at least for the time being –​have returned to the popular domain, as a kit of parts (and nails).

Conclusion: an object lesson in idealism In the introduction to the second, 2008 edition of Autoprogettazione?, the editor’s note reads: ‘It is not easy to translate into English the Italian word autoprogettazione […] By the word Autoprogettazione Mari means an exercise to be carried out individually to improve one’s personal understanding of the sincerity behind the project. To make this possible you are guided through an archetypal and very simple technique.Therefore the end product, although usable, is only important because of its educational value’ (Mari 2008). Autoprogettazione is indeed an object lesson. Mari has time and again emphasized the project’s didactical nature, and as such it has allowed a wide range of artists and designers over nearly four decades to draw their own learnings from it.This in itself is extraordinary in the history of design –​allowing these artists and designers to have a relationship with the project in a way that they possibly couldn’t with other icons of design history. The fact that their interpretations  –​rendered in stainless steel, made from IKEA parts, or remade as exhibition display units –​subvert Mari’s own ideals and politics only serves to emphasize the radical open-​endedness of Autoprogettazione. Conceived at the very dawn of the digital age  –​when computers were still the preserve of large institutions and long before the internet was widely available –​Autoprogettazione also predicted the concept of open source and the sharing economy. By its very nature, it destabilized the industrially produced, completely designed object with something more iterative, imperfect, and communal. When

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considered from a sustainability perspective, the project gains an even wider appeal. Seen from this standpoint, it is unsurprising that Autoprogettazione became a mascot for many designers. While this radical potential remains, newer iterations have a tendency to tame this wild design historical beast. The commodification of Autoprogettazione by Artek in 2010, as we have shown, was born out of the project’s popularity –​furniture from the collection was already fetching high prices at auctions. It was also carried out with the best of intentions, in order to draw links between Mari and Aalto’s desires to democratize design. Yet it opened up questions about copyright and value that Mari didn’t have to deal with in 1974. Faced with these questions, he floundered. His ‘granting’ of non-​commercial reproduction rights to Cucula further confuses the original aims of Autoprogettazione, which was designed to be open and collaborative. Thus, in this millennium, Mari himself has played a part in the unmaking of Autoprogettazione. With other icons of design history, preservation usually involves the careful stewardship of original design details, manufacturing, and materials. But in the case of Autoprogettazione, the innovation of its design lies in none of these things. Instead it lies in its idealism, and that has proven extraordinarily hard to preserve, even for Mari himself.

References Allen, G. (2009a). ‘Enzo Mari X Rirkrit Tiravanija’ Greg.org: the making of, by Greg Allen (http://​greg.org/​archive/​2009/​04/​25/​enzo_​mari_​x_​r irkrit_​tiravanija.html) Allen, G. (2009b). ‘Enzo Mari X IKEA Mashup, Ch. Last’ Greg.org (http://​greg.org/​archive/​ 2009/​11/​24/​enzo_​mari_​x_​ikea_​mashup_​ch_​last.html) Allen, G. (2011). ‘Autoprotestazione.’ Greg.org: the making of, by Greg Allen (http://​greg. org/​archive/​2011/​08/​26/​autoprotestazione.html) Ambasz, E. (ed.) (1972). Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. New  York: The Museum of Modern Art. Borgonuovo, V. and S. Franceschini (eds.) (2019). Global Tools 1973–1975: When Education Coincides with Life. Rome: Nero Editions. Brand, S. et al. (1969). Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute. Collard, P. (2013). ‘Italy: The New Domestic Landscape’ in Disegno 2 (http://​www. disegnodaily.com/​article/​italy-​the-​new-​domestic-​landscape) Fineder, M., T. Geisler and S. Hackenschmidt (eds.) (2017). Nomadic Furniture 3.0: Neues befreites Wohnen?/​New Liberated Living?, Zurich: Niggli Verlag. Hennessey, J. and V. Papanek (1973). Nomadic Furniture. New York: Pantheon Books. Hennessey, J. and V. Papanek (1974). Nomadic Furniture 2. New York: Pantheon Books. Herring, E. (2016). ‘Carpentry and Crisis’ in Crafts Magazine July/​August 2016, 50–​57. Huxtable, A.L. (1969). ‘The Crisis of the Environment’ in The New York Times, 28 December 1969, 28. Kries M., H. Büscher, J. Eisenbrand, and J. Lipsky (eds.) (2019). The Atlas of Furniture Design. Weil am Rhein:Vitra Design Museum. Kristoffersson, S. (2014). Design by IKEA:A Cultural History, London and Oxford: Bloomsbury. Lang, P. and W. Menking (eds.) (2003). Superstudio: Life Without Objects. Milan: Skira. Mari, E. (1974). Proposta per un’Autoprogettazione, Milan: Corraini Edizioni.

The unmaking of Autoprogettazione  247

Mari, E. (2002). Autoprogettazione? Mantova: Corraini Edizioni. Mari, E. (2008). Proposta per un’Autoprogettazione, Milan: Corraini Edizioni. Mari, E. (2009). ‘Autoprogettazione Revisited: Easy-​to-​assemble Furniture’, 15min., 1 sec. (http://​www.aaschool.ac.uk//​VIDEO/​lecture.php?ID=1164) Mari, E. (2011a). Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain ‘Vaudon-​ Vodun, African Voodoo Art from the Collection of Anne and Jacques Kerchache: Exhibition Designer Enzo Mari’ (http://​www.vaudou-​vodun.com/​en/​#/​cartier/​15/​the-​exhibition-​vodun-​ african-​voodoo/​page/​18/​) Mari, E. (2011b). in Monopol Magazin, October 2011. Mascheroni, L. (2012). Design Communities in Domusweb 13 June 2012. (http://​www. domusweb.it/​en/​news/​2012/​06/​13/​design-​communities.html) McGuirk, J. (2009). ‘Enzo Mari’ in Icon. December 2009. Packard, V. (1960). The Waste Makers. New York:Van Rees Press. Pettigrew, P. (2008). ‘Enzo Mari Autoprogettazione Milan 1974  –​Chicago 2008’, lecture at the Italian Cultural Institute Chicago, Illinois, 18 September 2008. (https://​ architecture.mit.edu/ ​ a rchitecture- ​ a nd- ​ u rbanism/​ p roject/​ e nzo-​ m ar i-​ a utopro gettazione-​milan-​1974-​chicago-​2008) Rajagopal, A.,V. Sacchetti, and T. Shafrir (eds.) (2012). The Adhocray Reader. Istanbul: IKSV.. Rawsthorn, A. (2008). ‘Enzo Mari: A Rebel with an Obsession for Form’ in The International Herald Tribune, 2 October 2008. (www.nytimes.com/​2008/​11/​03/​style/​03iht-​design3. 1.17414904.html?_​r=1) Reif, R. (1974). ‘Logs: “Healthy Kind of Chic”’ in The New  York Times, 9 July 1974, 41 (www.nytimes.com/​1974/​07/​09/​archives/​logs-​healthy-​kind-​of-​chic-​a-​new-​element-​ dramatize-​natural-​look.html?_​r=0) Accessed 7 December 2017. Sabır, B. and E.Wilk (2014).‘Global Tools. A Radical Italian Pedagogy Group From the 1970s Gets Brought Back to Life’ in Uncube Magazine, April 2014 (www.uncubemagazine. com/​blog/​12651903) Sotheby’s (2006) ‘EFFE’ Table, Sotheby’s Architonic.com (www.architonic.com/​dcsht/​effe-​ table-​sotheby-​s/​4107675)

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abramowitz, J. 143 actor network theory (ANT) 20, 162, 172 Adhocracy exhibition 243–​244 Adobeland 110 aerial photography 33 Africa 24, 242 Aggressività e violenza dell’uomo nei confronti dell’ambiente exhibition see Man’s Aggression and Violence toward the Environment exhibition Ahmedabad Declaration 135, 136 Aiap (Associazione Italiana Artisti Pubblicitari) see Italian Association of Advertising Artists AIROH house 224 AISI see American Iron and Steel Institute ALADI (Asociación Latinoamericana de Diseño) (Latin American Design Association) 132, 141, 143 Alexander, C. 48–​54; Design Methods Movement 59, 60 Alier, J.M. 132–​133 Allen, G. 240–​241 Alternative Elevator Project 64 aluminium 149, 152, 177–​178, 180, 231 Ambasz, E. 237 ‘America Two Hundred Years Later’ seminar 184 American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) 176, 181, 184 American Metal Market (journal) 183 American Underground Association 120

anarchism 25, 29 Anker, P. 68, 69, 209 ANT see actor network theory Anceschi, L. 191 Ant Farm 65, 67–​68 Anthropocene 2, 4, 33 Apollonio, U. 191 ‘Appropriate Technology’ movement  132 Arch 284 64–​69 Architect’s Journal 227 Architectural Association, London 241 Architectural Design (journal) 26 Architectural Review (journal) 154, 202 arcology 116 Arendt, H. 107 Argan, G.C. 191 Armiero, M. 132 The Art Directors Club of Milan 190, 195, 200 Artek 241, 244, 245 Le Arti (magazine) 197 Arts and Crafts movement 27 Asociación Latinoamericana de Diseño (Latin American Design Association) see ALADI Assman, J. 153 Association of Scientific Workers 154; Highland Power report 149, 152 Associazione Italiana Artisti Pubblicitari (Aiap) see Italian Association of Advertising Artists Auböck, Carl 137, 139, 140, 141, 142

Index  249

Autoprogettazione project 237–​246 Autoprogettazione Revisited exhibition 241 BACo (British Aluminium Company) 149, 152 Bain, G. 153 Ball, P. 32 Ballyn, J. 141 Banham, R. 68, 113n2 Barker, E.W. 97 Barmin, V. 209 Barton, N. et al. (1994) 123 Bastide, F. 108 Bateson, G. 19, 22, 40, 42n3 Baudrillard, J. 106 Bauhaus 5, 44–​45, 47–​48, 50–​51, 55, 210–​211 Bazalgette, J. 22 Beecher, C. 75 Bellamy, E. 82–​84 Berry, J. 151 Bible, the, on nature 8, 77, 78, 86 Biesta, G. 69 biocentrism 5 Bizunova, E. 208 Black Panther Party 20, 26 Blackett, Professor P.M.S. 152 Blair, A. 79–​80 Blake, P. 49 Bokov, A. 208 Bon, R. 36 Bonsiepe, G. 134–​135, 203, 207 Bookchin, M. 25 Boston Architectural Center 53 Bottici, C. 105 Boyle, G. see Radical Technology Braddock, A.C. 69 Brand, S. 22–​27, 68, 239 Branzi, A. 26, 27 Braungart, M. 183–​184 Braziller, G. 34 Brearley, H. 179–​180, 182 Britain: AIROH house 224; Free Schools 65; housing policy 222–​223; National Grid 150; National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 147; National Trust for Places of Historic Interest and Natural Beauty 149 British Aluminium Company see BACo Broadacre City 84 Broch, E. 120–​121 Brundtland report 208 Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah 108 Buchan, Hora 230 Buchan House 230, 231, 232

The Building Institute of Los Angeles 195 Bulwer-​Lytton, E.  78–​79 Burnett, J. 150, 154 Burning Man festival 110 Busbea, L. 116–​117, 121–​122 Byron, Lord 120 California Highway Patrol 61 Calvino, I. 189 Campbell, S. 119 Campe, J. 64–​65, 66, 67 Canada Land Inventory 54 Cape Cod 44–​52 Cape Cod National Seashore Park 45–​47, 49 The Cape Codder (newspaper) 52 capitalism 24–​28, 75, 110, 135, 201, 224 cars and housing 224–​226, 227, 230–​231 Carlsbad, New Mexico, nuclear waste spillage 106 Carmody, J. 119, 121, 125–​126, 127 Carson, R. 22, 46, 49 Casabella (magazine) 26, 27, 200–​201, 202, 238 Castellano, M. 200 Castillo, G. 59, 68–​69 Ceannacroc Generating Station 156, 157 CEB (Central Electricity Board, Britain) 149 Ceccato, S. 195, 203 Cencetti, A. 195 Chakrabarty, D. 4 Changi airport, Singapore 98 Chapman, J. 184 Chermayeff, S. 44–​54 Chernobyl disaster 208 Chicago 82 Children, Nature, and the Urban Environment symposium 63–​64 Chile 223, 227, 233 Chua Sian Chin 91 Cipriani, C. 45 City University of New York 64 Clarke, A. 135, 141 classroom redesign 65–​68 climate change 25, 111, 172 closed ecosystems 68, 209 Club of Rome 190; Limits to Growth 131, 134 Co-​Evolution Quarterly 26 Coachella festival 110 CODIGRAM (Colegio de Diseñadores Industriales y Gráficos de México)

250 Index

(Mexican Society of Industrial and Graphic Designers) 137–​138 Cold War 23, 116, 119, 135, 181, 206 Colonetti, A. 3 colonialism 26, 93, 100 Community and Privacy:Toward a New Architecture of Humanism (Chemayeff and Alexander) 49–​54 community co-​operation  26–​27 Composing Room, New York 197 computing and conservation design 44–​55; software 53–​54 Conservation Foundation 54 consumerism 149, 175–​176, 178, 180–​185, 190, 238–​239 Convegni Internazionali Artisti, Critici e Studiosi d’arte (International Conferences of Artists, Critics, and Art Scholars) 191 Cooper Marcus, C. 59, 69 Cornell University 222, 223, 233 Corraini Edizioni (publishing house) 240 counterculture 5, 6, 13, 19–​21, 68–​69, 109–​110, 200 Cowan, S. 58 Crafts (magazine) 244 Crocker, R. 4 Crosby, T.  24 Crouch, Professor D. 226 Crowe, S. 155 Cucula (NGO) 244–​246; Ambassador Chair 245–​246 Cuetzalan indigenous community, Mexico 138 cybernetics 22, 40, 58, 190 The Danish Garden Association 163 Däschle, S. 244 Dasi, G.F. 191 decentralization 26, 75, 76, 243 de-​territorialization 107 Dempsey, S. 110–​111 Denmark, domestic gardening 163–​172 dependency theory 137, 143 deserts, American 103–​113; binaries of 104; and counterculture 109–​110; federal ownership of 104; and immigration control 111, 112; militarization of 111; National Parks 107–​108; Nevada Test Site (NTS) 107–​109; simulations 104, 106–​109, 111; women’s land 110–​111 Design History Society 2, 24 Design Methods Movement 59, 60 Design Museum, London 22 ‘design outlaws’ 69

Design Sense (corporate journal) 181 Doblin, J. 184 Domus (magazine) 242 Dora Crouch houses 227, 228 Dorfles, G. 3, 191 Dorwin Teague Jr., W.  141 Douglas, M. 95 Drumnadrochit, Celtic art study centre 153 dualities 191, 193 Dubenskaia, T. 212, 213 Dymaxion House 224 Earth Day 184 Earth Sheltered Building Conference 121 Eaton Jr., C. 216 Eco, U. 195 The Ecologist (magazine) 26 eco-​pragmatism  24 ‘eco-​social’ model  195 ecology as term 5 ecotopian realism 116, 121, 125–​127 Eden, M. 33–​34 Eisenman, P. 58 Empire Exhibition, Glasgow 149 Energy Pavilion project 65 England, countryside and the city 77–​78 entropy 35, 175, 180 environment, as concept 4 environmental corridors 54 ‘environmental design,’ first use of 47 Environmental Yard  62–​64 Enzo Mari x Ikea Mashup project 240–​241 Erbacher, E. 1, 10 Escobar, A. 131, 133, 144 Etzler, J.A. 80–​81 evolutionism 5, 133 Expo ’70, Osaka 97 Fabbri, P. 108 Fallan, K. 76, 132, 217 FAMU (Florida A&M University) 222, 226; Experimental Low-​Cost Construction Unit (EXCON) 229–​233 Farallones Institute 65 Farallones Scrapbook (Van der Ryn) 65, 67–​68 Fasnakyle power station 155 Fedenko, S. 217, 218 Ferraro, P. 203 Ferrarotti, F. 191 Fineder, M. 238 Fisher, H. 54 Florida A&M University see FAMU

Index  251

Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain 242 Le forme dell’ambiente umano (Forms of Human Environment) exhibition 189–​197 Fortification AS 116–​119, 122–​127 Fossick, P. 217 Foyers, Scotland 149 Francis, M. 64, 162 Friedman, M. 25 Fry, T. 179, 183 Fuller, R.B. 22, 40–​41, 113n6, 209, 224, 234n1, 239 future studies 190, 203 Futuribili (magazine) 203 Gaelic language 149 Gallardo Latapí, J. 137–​138 Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin  240 Galleria Milano 238, 242 game theory 23 Gamper, M. 241 Gandhi, M. 27 Gandy, M. 24 Garbage Housing project 221–​234; reuse of materials 226–​229; system theory 223–​226 Garden City movement 75, 83; see also Singapore gardening 161–​172; and biodiversity 168, 172; hybridity and 163; material culture of 163–​172 Gateway Arch for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial 182 Geddes, Patrick 5; see also Notation of Life diagram Geisler, T.  238 gender identities 110–​111 Genisaretskii, O. 208 Geodesic domes 40, 65, 113n6 Geographical Information System see GIS Geo-​Grid, Tokyo  121 George Washington University  64 Gersdorf, C. 110 Ghyka, M. 32 Gianotti, E. 202 Gibson, W.  99 Giedion, S. 19 Giornate Internazionali di Studio (International Study Days) 201 GIS (Geographical Information System) 54 Gjøvik Olympic Mountain Hall 123–​124 Glendinning, M. 155 Glenmoriston power station 155, 156, 157

Global Tools (journal) 26 Global Tools initiative 20, 26, 27, 238 Global Village Construction Set see GVCS Goebl, M. 245 Gorbachev, M. 206, 208 Gould, S.J. 36 Grand Canyon, Arizona, radiation from nuclear test sites 108 Great American Project 103–​104 Grieve, C.M. see MacDiarmid, H. Grima, J. 242–​243 Gropius, W. 45, 47–​48, 49, 53, 210 groundscape 119 Gruppo Futuribili Italia 204n7 Gruppo Futuro project 64 Guattari, F. 19 Guha, R. 132–​133 Gutkind, E.A. 33 GVCS (Global Village Construction Set) 243 Habraken, J. 233 Hackenschmidt, S. 238 Haeckel, E. 5, 32 Haines, J. 134 Hales, P. 108 Halland, I. 4 handicraft 210–​211 Hangeldian Camagni, T.  200 Haraway, D.J. 105, 111 Hardin, G. 23 Harper, C. 27, 28 Harper, P. see Radical Technology Hart, R. 64 Harvard Philomorphs 31, 36 Harvard University: Carpenter Center for the Arts 36; Chermayeff and 44–​54; ‘Environmental Design’ courses 44, 48; Graduate School of Design (GSD) 48, 54; Gropius and 45; Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis 54; Wellfleet Study Group 46; see also Alexander, C. Haven (Danish magazine) 163–​171 Haymarket Affair, Chicago 82 Heidegger, M. 24, 152, 157 Heizer, M., Double Negative (land artwork) 104–​105 Hennessey, J. 239 Herman Miller (company) 181 Herring, E. 244 Hester, R.T. 162 HfG Ulm (Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm) 58, 195

252 Index

Highland Herald (HH) 147, 153 Hill, G.A. 54 Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm see HfG Ulm Hockney, D. 113n2 Holberg, L. 120 Holford, W. 154–​155 Hollister, D.T. 231–​233 Holmlia Sports Hall and Swimming Pool, Oslo (Holmlia Pool) 116–​119, 124–​127 home ownership 222, 224, 229, 233–​234; see also land ownership Howard, E. 75, 76, 83, 90, 93, 95, 97 Howard, J. 243 Huber, M. 197 Hughes, T.P. 151, 234n3 Human Interference Task Force 1981 108 humanism 12, 49, 51 Hunt, J.D. 78 Hunter Austin, M. 110 Huxley, J. 154 Huxtable, A.L. 238–​239 Hyannis Port, Cape Cod 46 hydro-​electric development, Scotland 147–​152, 153–​157 Hydro-​Electric Development (Scotland) Act 1943 147, 149 ICSID (International Council of Societies of Industrial Design) 131–​144; Congress 143; design for development 134; Memorandum of Understanding 135; and neo-​colonialism 141, 143; paternalistic approach 132, 141; Working Group IV Developing Countries 134–​135; Xth General Assembly and Congress 134 IKEA 240–​241 Iliprandi, G. 190, 195, 197–​201, 203 Illich, I. 25 Imperial War Graves Commission 154 imperialism 27 IN. Argomenti e Immagini di Design (magazine) 203 ‘indicator species’ 108–​109 indigenous communities: Ahmedabad Declaration 135; Mexico 132, 138, 141; Scotland 155; US 105, 106, 110 Indonesia 90 Industrial Designers Society of America 12, 216 industrial urbanism 79–​80 industrialization 131–​135, 144, 190, 228

Inflatocookbook (Ant Farm) 67–​68 institutional distrust 109 Institute of Applied Economics Research (IREA) 204n7 Institute of Design, Chicago 47 Integral Urban House project 65 The Intellectual Work: Enzo Mari exhibition 242 Interdesign ’78, Cuetzalan 132, 135, 136–​144 Interdesign ’92, San Jose, California 216–​217, 218 International Conferences of Artists, Critics, and Art Scholars see Convegni Internazionali Artisti, Critici e Studiosi d’arte International Council of Societies of Industrial Design see ICSID International Housing Conference, Santiago 223, 233 International Study Days see Giornate Internazionali di Studio International Tunnelling and Underground Space Association 120 intersectionality 105 interspecies kinship 111 interventionism 135 Inverness, Point Reyes Peninsula 64, 65 IREA see Institute of Applied Economics Research Irmscher, C. 69 Istanbul Design Biennial 243 Italian Association of Advertising Artists (Aiap –​Associazione Italiana Artisti Pubblicitari) 200 The Italian Centre on Ergonomic Design 195 Italian Socialist party 201 Italy 189–​203; Fascism 177; future studies 190; Global Tools initiative 20, 26, 27, 238; ‘industrial style’ 200; modernism 177;Years of Lead 26 Italy:The New Domestic Landscape exhibition 237–​238 Jackson, K. 75 Jacobs, J. 75 Jefferson, T.  80 Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, St. Louis, Gateway Arch 181–​182 Jelinski, D.E. 176–​177 Johnson, M. 176, 184 Jørgensen, F.A. 76 Kaika, M. 154 Kallipoliti, L. 5, 224

Index  253

Kantor, K. 207 Karwan, D. 13 Katonin, L. 209 Kaufmann Jr., E. 178 Keats, J. 120 Kelly, K. 25 Kennedy, J.F. 45–​46 Kepes, G. 34–​35, 37, 58 King, A. 190 Kirby, A.H.M. 154 Kirpichev, V. 206, 209–​212, 214–​217 Kolers, P. 33–​34 Kong, L. 91, 95 Koolhaas, R. 24 Kramnick, J. 42 Kranzberg, M. 11 Kretinin, I. 217 Kuala Lumpur 90, 93 Kuching, Malaysia 90 Kuletz, V. 107 Lagos, Nigeria 24 Lakoff, G. 176, 184 land ownership 77, 90, 93, 104, 148, 150, 151; see also home ownership landfill sites 106 Latin American Design Association see ALADI (Asociación Latinoamericana de Diseño) Latour, B. 6, 20, 22, 24, 28–​29, 42 Le Corbusier 21, 75 Le Guin, U. 103, 113 Lee, W. 224 Lee Kuan Yew 89–​91, 93, 96, 97 Leningrad Higher School of Art and Industry, Department of Industrial Art 206–​217, 218; ‘environmental design’ 209–​215 Leone, S. 110 Lepselter, S. 109 ‘Lesbian National Parks Services’ project 110–​111 Lesser, W.  118 Lesser Arts (Morris) 29 Lewis, P.H. 54 Linea Grafica (magazine) 200 Linnaeus, C. 5 Lippincott and Margulies (design consultancy) 181 Lithgow, J. 80 Loeb, A.L. 36, 38, 39, 40 London 22, 77–​78, 155 Lorenzetti, A., The Allegory of Good and Bad Government (frescos) 20, 21 Lorenzo, R. 64

Lorimer, H. 155 Los Alamos, NM, nuclear weapons testing 107 Luhan, M.D. 110 Lumley, B. 79 Lystra, M. 49, 60 MacDiarmid, H. (C.M. Grieve) 149–​150 Machor, J. 76 MacNie, J. 81–​82 Maderna, B. 194 Malacca 93 Malaya 89, 90, 93, 100 Malaysia 89, 90 Maldonado, T. 2, 191, 195, 204n5, 207 Man’s Aggression and Violence Toward the Environment exhibition (Aggressività e violenza dell’uomo nei confronti dell’ambiente) 190, 195–​200 Mantanari, D. 224 Manzù, P. (Pio Manzoni) 203n1 Mao 27 Marathon Dam, Athens 154 Margolin, V. 134 Mari, E. 237, 238, 239–​246 Martin, R. 58 Martin Juez, F. 138 Martínez, J.A. 138 Martner, G. 223 Maruo-​Schröder, N.  1, 10 Marx, L. 1, 10, 76 Mascheroni, L. 242 Massachusetts Institute of  Technology see MIT Massey, J. 234n1 materials history 177–​179 Mau, B. 24 McDonough, W. 183–​184 McHale, J. 5 McHarg, I. 5, 7, 54 McMahon, P. 45 Meijenfeldt, E. von 119 Meikle, J.L. 178, 182 Mendini, Alessandro 202 metaphor: car as 224; and desert 106; and modern materials 175–​177, 179, 180, 182, 184–​185 Mexican Design Centre 137 Mexican Society of Industrial and Graphic Designers see CODIGRAM (Colegio de Diseñadores Industriales y Gráficos de México) Mexico: indigenous communities 132, 138, 141; Mexico-​US Border

254 Index

wall prototype 112; see also ICSID (International Council of Societies of Industrial Design) Meyer, B. 244 Millan, L. 110–​111 Minimum Cost Housing Group 222, 233 Mining Association of Great Britain 150 Misrach, R., Desert Cantos (photo-​series)  108 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) 241; Center for Advanced Visual Studies 58; Computation Center 49 modernism: Cape Cod and 44, 45; challenges to 19, 22, 23, 24, 190, 206, 208; computing and 49, 51, 55; desert settlement 105; engineering and 154; Italian 177; metals and 178; patterns and 31, 33, 42; Scottish 149, 155 Moholy-​Nagy,  L.  47 Moles, A. 207 Moore, R. 59, 62–​64, 69 More, T. 77–​78, 79 Morris, W. 20, 27, 28–​29, 84 Mosso, L. 195, 196 Mount Faber, Singapore 100 Mukhina, V. 209 Mulholland, W.  111 Mullin, M. 138, 141 Mumford, L. 49 Munari, B. 191 myths 104–​105, 107, 109, 111, 117, 120, 153, 179

Nomadic Furniture (catalog) 239 Nora, P. 155 North Carolina State University, Natural Learning Initiative 64 Norway see Holmlia Sports Hall and Swimming Pool, Oslo (Holmlia Pool) Norwegian Civil Defence 123 NoSHEB (North of Scotland Hydro-​ Electricity Board) 151, 153–​154 Notation of Life diagram (Geddes) 20–​21 NTS see Nevada Test  Site nuclear fallout shelter see Holmlia Sports Hall and Swimming Pool, Oslo Nye, D. 105

Nahua indigenous community, Mexico 132, 141 NASA 20, 50 Nash, K. 111 Nash, L. 4 Nash, P., The Battle of Britain (painting) 154 National Autonomous University of Mexico 137 Nature Conservancy Scotland 151 Negri, I. 199, 200 Nelson, G. 31, 181 Nersessian, A. 42 Neva Bay, Russia 215 Nevada Test Site (NTS) 107–​109 New Games Tournament, Marin 23 The New York Times 52, 180, 238 The New Yorker 183 Nicholson, S. 59–​64, 69 Nixon, R. 2 No More Deaths group 111

Packard, V. 238 Papanek, V. 135, 208, 210, 211, 216, 239 patterns 31–​42; pattern recognition 33–​34 Patterns in Nature (Stevens) 36, 38 Paulsson, G. et al. (1948) 155 Pawley, M., Garbage Housing project 221–​234; reuse of materials 226–​229; system building 223–​226 Peccei, A. 190 Pennick, N. 118 People’s Park, Berkeley 60–​61, 63 Perrault, D. 119, 121 Pettigrew, Professor P. 241 Pio Manzù International Research Centre 191, 194 Pivano, F. 201 place-​making 103, 104, 105, 110 Plattes, G. 78 play and playgrounds 58–​69; Arch 284 64–​68; Environmental Yard  62–​64

Oakland, California 20, 26 Occupy movement 29 Odda Sports Hall 123 Odyssey School Initiative 65 Oelschlaeger, M. 76 Ohl, H. 194–​195, 204n5 Oil Crisis 1973 137, 226, 229 O’Keeffe, G. 110 Olerich, H. 83 Olmsted, F.L. 82 Omo-​Fadaka,  J.  26 Open University, UK 62, 64 OpenStructures 243–​244 Oregon Experiment 60 Oslo byråd 126 Otay Mesa 111 Our City project 64 outlaw builder studios 64–​65, 68–​69

Index  255

Poe, E.A. 120 Polo, R. 143 postcolonialism 8, 24, 89–​91 post-​industrialism  8, 27 postmodernism 176 pragmatist approach 23, 24, 26, 68, 116, 126 Preti, L. 191 primrose 42n3 Progressive Architecture (journal) 69 Proposta per un’Autoprogettazione see Autoprogettazione Pubblicità-​Progresso  200 Radical Technologists  20 Radical Technology (Harper and Boyle) 26–​27, 28 Raffles Place, Singapore 97, 98 Rajagopal, A. 244 Rand, A. 25 Rappaport, A. 208 Rawsthorn, A. 240, 245 Reade, C.C. 90, 93 RCAHMS see Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland realism: of the commons 28, 29; ecotopian 9, 116, 125–​127 Reed House, London 197 Reggiani, S. 202 Ren Matsui 91 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute see RPI Il Resto del Carlino (newspaper) 202 Riabushin, A. 207 Richardson, F. 27 Rimini, First International Biennial of Global Design Methodology see Le forme dell’ambiente umano (Forms of Human Environment) exhibition Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit 216 Rittel, H. 59 Roebling, J. 81 Rolston, H., III 157 Romanticism 23, 28, 32, 152 Rowntree, D. 52 Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) 153 Rozenblium, E. 207–​208 RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) 222, 226, 233 Ruckle, S. 62 Ruskin, J. 149 Rygh, J.A. 117, 118, 120, 122, 126

Saarinen, E. 181–​182 Sacchetti, V. 244 Salone del Mobile, Milan 241–​242 Samoilova, T.  216 Sample, H. 125 Sandilands, C. 110 Sarawak, Miri development 93 Sargent, L.T. 80 SAS (‘Space Addition System’) 231–​233 Sauer, C.O. 33 Scerbanenco, G. 200 Schnapp, J.T. 177 Schneider, P. 46 Scotland, regeneration of Highlands 147–​158; architectural traditionalism 153–​158; Celtic Revivalism 153; centralization 150; Crofters’ Act 148; culture 147–​151, 153, 154, 155; depopulation 150; economy 148; emigration 149; Fisheries Committee and the Amenity Committee 151; and fishing rights 151; Hydro-​Electric Development (Scotland) Act 1943 147, 149, 151; hydro-​electric developments in Scotland 149, 151–​152, 155–​157; identity 149–​151; indigenous populations 155; land ownership 148; modernism and nationalism 149–​150; parochialism 150; pollution 149; Scottish Labour Party 153–​154; ‘sites of memory’ 155–​156; tourism 148, 149, 151, 153; vested interests 150–​151; wartime refugees (displaced persons) (DPs) 150 Scott, R. 111 Scott, Sir W.  148 Scottish Labour Party, Plan for Post-​War Scotland 154 SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) 144 Sedia 1 chair 241, 242, 245 Sedlmeier, F. 1, 10 Sedrez, L. 132 semiotics 195, 202 Serres, M. 111 Sert, J.L. 48 Service Through Application of Research see STAR Shafrir, T.  244 Shaitarov, E. 213, 214 Shearer, J. 155 Sheffield, England 179 Sheller, M. 178 Shimizu Corporation 121 Shove, E. et al. (2007) 163 Siena, Palazzo Pubblico 20

256 Index

Simon, H. 19 Simonetti, G.E. 195 Singapore 89–​100; Design Unit 91; independence 90–​91; ‘Keep Singapore Clean’ campaign 91; land ownership 93; modernization 97–​99; national and social engineering 96–​97; Parks and Recreation Department 91; People’s Action Party 91; public education campaigns 91, 93–​95; School of Ornamental Horticulture 91; Tourism Promotion Board 97, 99; trade unionism 96; Tree Planting Day 94; Trees and Plants Unit 91; Wah Garden City 93; Western cultural practices 96 Skorneck, J. 224–​226 Sloterdijk, P. 22, 24 Smith, C.S. 36, 37 Snow, J. 22 Sobchak, A. 216 socialism 20, 24, 25, 28–​29, 47, 82, 223 Soleri, P. 113n6, 116, 120, 126, 184 Solomon, S. 63 Soloviev, Y.  141 Soper, K. 3 Sörlin, S. 4 Sottsass Jr., E. 27, 201 Soviet All-​Union Research Institute of Industrial Design see VNIITE (Vsesoyuzny Nauchno-​Issledovatelskiy Institut Teknicheskoy Esteriki) Soviet Union 206–​209 ‘Space Addition System’ see SAS Space Structure:Their Harmony and Counterpoint (Loeb) 38, 39 spaceships 50 Sparke, P. 178 St. Francis Dam 111, 112 stainless steel 175–​185; magic and 179, 182–​183; marketing campaign 183; as modern metal 180–​183; origins 179–​180; and sustainability 183–​184; US marketing campaign 175 STAR (Service Through Application of Research) 232 Steelmark logo 181 Steiner, A. 200 Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson) 40 Sterling, R. 119, 121, 125–​126 Stevens, P.S. 36, 38 Stevens Elementary School 64 Stoll, S. 81 Straits Times  90 Strutture Ambientali (Environmental Structures) (magazine) 191–​194, 196, 198, 201–​202

subjectivism 3 subterranean spaces: carparks 97, 98; Holmlia Pool project 116–​127; in science fiction 79, 120 suburbs 75–​76, 82, 84, 86, 90, 93, 164 Sunrise, NV, landfill site 106 sustainability: design education and 208, 217; and development 131, 132, 133–​135, 144; hydro-​electric power and 148; of older buildings 125–​126; and reuse of materials 211, 239–​241, 246; Rimini Biennial 190; stainless steel and 183–​184 Sustainable Development Goals see SDGs Sy, C. 244 Synergetics (Fuller) 40–​41 systems theory 207, 223–​224 Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin 242 Taos Art Colony, New Mexico 110 Technical Aesthetics (VNIITE bulletin) 208, 211 techno-​optimism  206 Telford, T.  152 Ten designers from Milan exhibition 197 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) 150, 152, 154–​155 Thomas Firth and Son, Ltd. 179–​180 Thoreau, H.D. 75–​76, 81 Tiravanija, R. 240 Tkachuk, L. and G. 213–​214, 215 Today’s Italian Publicity and Graphic Design exhibition 197 Toffler, A 184 Tonkinwise, C. 29, 172 ‘total architecture’ approach 47, 48 tourism 97–​99, 148, 149, 151, 153–​154, 210, 212–​213 Tovaglia, P. 200 ‘tragic commons’ 24–​25, 29 Transparent Tools project  243 Turin 240 TVA see Tennessee Valley Authority UC (University of California), Berkeley campus 58–​69; Arch 284 64–​69; Centre for Environmental Structure 60; College of Environmental Design (CED) 58–​69; Design 12 course 59–​60; Design Methods Group 59; Environmental Yard 62–​64; use of computerization 54 UC (University of California), Davis campus 59, 61–​62, 64 UFOs (unidentified flying objects) 109

Index  257

Ulm School 207 Underground Space (journal) 120–​121 Underground Space Design (journal) 121, 124 underground spaces see subterranean spaces UNEP see United Nations Environment Programme UNESCO symposium on art and technology, Tbilisi, Georgia  209 UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization) 9, 132, 134–​135, 137–​138; Lima Declaration 1975 135 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment 1972 131 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) 134 Univac (Universal Automatic Computer) 194–​195, 196 University of California see UC University of Minnesota, Center for Sustainable Building Research 119 University of Oregon 60 Uribe, B. 143 US (United States): African Americans 26, 232, 233; Border Patrol 111; cities 82; consumerism 180; Desert Land Acts 105, 110; disposable consumer goods 238–​239; educational integration 65; Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 12, 58, 216; Federal Housing Administration 232; Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program 26; Homestead Acts 105; National Environmental Policy Act 58; National Guard 61; National Park System 108; Public Land Survey System 105 United States Geological Survey (USGS) 105 Utopia (More) 77–​78 utopias: American 80–​83, 109–​110; and capitalism 28; developing countries 143; Italian 203; OpenStructures 243–​244; and pattern 32, 34, 35; subterranean design 116, 121; Victorian 75, 78–​80, 83–​86 Vaks, I. 209, 210 Van der Ryn, S. 58, 60–​61, 64–​69 Vassøyholtet, Norway 123 Vaudon-​Vodun, African Voodoo Art from the Collection of Anne and Jacques Kerchache exhibition 242

Vera Mukhina School of Art and Industry (later Leningrad Higher School of Art and Industry) 206 Verne, J. 120 Virilio, P. 116, 122 Vitra Design Museum 245 Vkhutemas 210 VNIITE (Vsesoyuzny Nauchno-​ Issledovatelskiy Institut Teknicheskoy Esteriki) (Soviet All-​Union Research Institute of Industrial Design) 207, 208, 209, 216 Vogel, C.M. 216 Vuoksa National Park, Russia 209–​215 Waldman, J. 180 Ward, C. 59 Washington Elementary School, Berkeley 62–​64 Wellfleet, Cape Cod 44–​46, 49, 52, 54 Wells, H.G. 84–​86, 120 Wenner-​Gren Foundation symposium 33 Wentworth Thompson,  D.  32 Westminster, Duke of 149 Wethe, P.I. 118, 122 Whole Earth Catalog 20–​29, 239 Whyte, L.L. 35–​36 Wild, L. 13 Williams, Raymond 78 Williams, Rosalind 117, 119–​120, 122 Williamson, C. 110 Willis, A.-​M. 179, 183 Wills, J. 108 Winnemucca, Nevada, landfill site 106 Winter Olympics, Lillehammer 123–​124 Wisconsin Recreation Study 54 Wolke, M. 244 Wong, H. 62 Wordsworth, W.  42n3 World Game 40 WORLDESIGN foundation 216 Wright, F.L. 5, 75, 84, 113n6 Yale University 48, 49 Yeoh, B. 91, 95 York, A.D. 90 Yucca Mountain 108 Zion National Park, Utah, and nuclear test sites 108 Zissovici, J. 224