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.

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: The Culture of Nature in the History of Design

Kjetil Fallan

Part 1: Conceptual Environments

1. Design’s Ecological Operating Environments

Simon Sadler

2. Pattern Watchers I: Environmental Seeing, c. 1970
   Larry Busbea
3. Computing Environmental Design
   Peder Anker
4. Ludic Pedagogies at the College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley, 1966 to 1972
   Timothy Stott

Part 2: Ecotopian Landscapes

5. A Cityless and Countryless World: The Total Appropriation of Nature in Victorian Utopias
   Nathaniel R. Walker
6. Clean and Disciplined: The Garden City in Singapore
   Jesse O’Neill
7. Desertification, or Designing New Worlds in the Dust
   Fattori Fraser
8. ‘There’s a World Going on Underground’: Ecotopian Realism in Subterranean Design
   Even Smith Wergeland

Part 3: Design in the Garden

9. Contested Development: ICSID’s Design Aid and Environmental Policy in the 1970s
   Tania Messel
10. Power in the Landscape: Regenerating the Scottish Highlands after the Second World War
    Frances Robertson
11. Design for the Garden: Questioning Gardening as Environmentalism
    Jette Lykke Jensen
12. Permanence and Magic: Super-Natural Metaphors of Stainless Steel
    Nicolas P. Maffei

Part 4: Design as Ecology

13. Forms of Human Environment (1970): Italian Design Responds to the Global Crisis
    Elena Formia
14. Environmental Design Pedagogy in Leningrad in the 1980s
    Yulia Karpova
15. Throwaway Houses: Garbage Housing and the Politics of Ownership
    Curt Gambetta
16. The Unmaking of Autoprogettazione
    Avinash Rajagopal and Vera Sacchetti

Index

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).