Full Description
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.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: The Culture of Nature in the History of Design
Kjetil Fallan
Part 1: Conceptual Environments
Design's Ecological Operating Environments
Simon Sadler
Pattern Watchers I: Environmental Seeing, c. 1970
Larry Busbea
Computing Environmental Design
Peder Anker
Ludic Pedagogies at the College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley, 1966 to 1972
Timothy Stott
Part 2: Ecotopian Landscapes
A Cityless and Countryless World: The Total Appropriation of Nature in Victorian Utopias
Nathaniel R. Walker
Clean and Disciplined: The Garden City in Singapore
Jesse O'Neill
Desertification, or Designing New Worlds in the Dust
Fattori Fraser
'There's a World Going on Underground': Ecotopian Realism in Subterranean Design
Even Smith Wergeland
Part 3: Design in the Garden
Contested Development: ICSID's Design Aid and Environmental Policy in the 1970s
Tania Messel
Power in the Landscape: Regenerating the Scottish Highlands after the Second World War
Frances Robertson
Design for the Garden: Questioning Gardening as Environmentalism
Jette Lykke Jensen
Permanence and Magic: Super-Natural Metaphors of Stainless Steel
Nicolas P. Maffei
Part 4: Design as Ecology
Forms of Human Environment (1970): Italian Design Responds to the Global Crisis
Elena Formia
Environmental Design Pedagogy in Leningrad in the 1980s
Yulia Karpova
Throwaway Houses: Garbage Housing and the Politics of Ownership
Curt Gambetta
The Unmaking of Autoprogettazione
Avinash Rajagopal and Vera Sacchetti
Index
