George Nelson and the “End of Architecture”

George Nelson on the set of How to Kill People: A Problem of Design, 1961. From George Nelson, “How to Kill People: A Problem of Design,” Industrial Design 8, no. 1 (January 1961), 48.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 The Wound Man: George Nelson and the “End of Architecture”

JOHN HARWOOD

We will never see the whites of their eyes again. —George Nelson

Reading Nelson The architect and industrial designer George Nelson (1908–1986) is, by all accounts, both a stable fixture in the canon of twentieth-century design and a conundrum. The astonishing breadth and depth of his oeuvre—encompassing projects of nearly every conceivable type, from his houses and celebrated ofﬁce furniture to real-time computing sys- tems and propaganda programs; and for every kind of client, from small personal commissions to grand schemes for corporations and states— guarantees his centrality to any survey of twentieth-century industrial design even as it raises profound questions as to the nature of his practice and politics. Yet an aura of something like mystery continues to cling to Nelson. Many of his projects remain unpublished, and, as with many designers of his generation, his archive remains private. Several of his writings have recently been republished—including his survey of Chairs (1953) and a volume of monographic essays from Pencil Points on European modernist architects of the 1930s1—but these have little in the way of scholarly apparatus, despite the fact that they have been produced with scholars in mind. Moreover, Nelson’s writings are difﬁcult to read. His biographer, Stanley Abercrombie—the only scholar to have access to Nelson’s personal records—concluded his largely (and justifiably) admiring account of Nelson’s life by noting quizzically that in comparison with the careers of other designers, Nelson’s seems not only unconventional and appealingly uncommercial but also, at times, perversely negative, even self-destructive: it is the career of an architect who advocated the end of architecture, a furniture designer who imagined rooms without furniture, an urban designer who con- templated the hidden city, an industrial designer who questioned the future of the object and hated the obsession with products.2

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 Abercrombie accounts for this strange self-destructive tendency by identifying Nelson as what one might call a metadesigner, arguing that his object of study and practice was neither the building nor the product but rather the process of design itself. This is, in many ways, a sat- isfying thesis. Nelson and his friends and colleagues of the same generation who worked to unite architecture and industrial design— Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, Eliot Noyes, Serge Chermayeff, Ettore Sottsass Jr., Joe Columbo, and many others—under that banner of universal and rational method first lofted in Germany at the Werkbund and the Bauhaus and then carried across the Atlantic to the United States. But one would hesitate to apply the description—“perversely negative, even self-destructive”—to any of these colleagues. What is it that drove Nelson, rather than (or perhaps against) his contemporaries, to such extremities of self-negation? What might Nelson have meant by “the end of architecture”? The beginnings of an answer are to be found in the very fact that Nelson took such a point of view on his and others’ work at all. While Nelson is most definitely one of that large group of American and European designers who worked simultaneously at designing buildings and industrial products, at corporate identity programs and graphics, at curatorship and teaching, he was the only architect of his aforemen- tioned colleagues to maintain a lifelong career as a writer. He was a prolific critic, publishing in the popular press nearly as often as he did in architectural and industrial design trade journals. He contributed regularly to magazines such as Time, Life, Fortune, and McCall’s in addi- tion to the countless articles he published in Pencil Points, Architectural Forum, Industrial Design, and Interiors. He authored several books on design, many of them aimed at general audiences, and he even produced films and television programs. Despite this sizable output of written work, he rarely, if ever, identified himself as a critic or writer, clearly preferring to pen his witty and often biting commentaries on the letterhead, and at the desk, of a professional designer. Early in his career, he identified himself as an architect (even though he worked just as often as an architectural writer and editor); by the 1950s he was “architect and designer”; and by the 1960s he was simply a “designer.” By refusing to name himself by the deed, Nelson clearly downplayed the importance of writing to his design practice, but he also maintained a thoroughly ambiguous position vis-à-vis his numerous colleagues in all of these disciplines. Indeed, his opinions were more often than not self-contradictory and cloaked in willfully obvious but incomplete ironic gestures. One Italian critic even went so far as to call him “paradoxical.”3 At times Nelson was critical of the conspicuous, crass

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 consumption and waste of American post–World War II capitalist culture (as shown by his essays on “Obsolescence” and many lectures on “visual pollution”), while at other times he was a champion of industrial production for its own sake (as in his writing for Fortune magazine or his cautiously loving ﬁlm Elegy in a Junk Yard). On some occasions Nelson embraced and even helped to develop the logic of ergonomic design (in his designs for Herman Miller office furniture and in his book on Chairs). On other occasions he suspected ergonomics and other synthetic applied sciences of draining design of its intuitive and artistic aspects (see his cautious and cautionary review of Henry Dreyfuss’s The Measure of Man4). He was untiring in his promotion of modernist design but simultaneously bemoaned its increasing technocratic blank- ness and its ever-increasing overflow of commercial imagery. Such contrasting opinions—far from being the result of a progressive change in his point of view over the course of his life, or even a sudden change of heart—constitute not the outlying exceptions but rather the core of Nelson’s thought. There are thus many reasons to read—or reread—Nelson. He was one of the few writers on architecture and industrial design in his lifetime to acknowledge openly that design was no longer practiced by a single author.5 One index to his intellectual flexibility with regard to architectural authorship is that while working as an editor of Architectural Forum in the late 1930s he published monographs on both the “genius” of Frank Lloyd Wright and the global organizational matrix of Albert Kahn Inc.6 As he would describe his attitude many years later, “Wherever there is an artifact, whether a small object or an entire synthetic environment, there has to be a designer. It does not matter whether the ‘designer’ is an individual or a group, and it matters even less what the designer calls himself.”7 Equally important to understanding his design practice is the fact that Nelson was a formidable theorist of production. As the few scholars to treat Nelson’s work have noted, throughout his career he wrote convincingly of the need to produce “quality design” as a matter of social and economic necessity.8 However, it is a hitherto systematically elided fact that Nelson’s theory of production derived from a rather unusual source for a design theorist—Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of “creative destruction” as laid out in his wartime political economy treatise Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). Following Schumpeter, capitalism is a system that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. . . . Every piece of business strategy acquires its true significance only against the background of that process and within the situa- tion created by it. It must be seen in its role in the perennial gale of creative destruction.9

This violent spatial and climactic metaphor is endemic to Schumpeter’s writing; for him the storm of capitalism is fundamentally environmental, constantly forming and collapsing upon its desperate subjects. Nelson absorbed Schumpeter’s lessons on competition entirely, and recapitulated them ceaselessly in his articles on his and others’ various corporate design consultancies. This point of view alienated him early in his career from the émigrés from the Werkbund and Bauhaus, who had after World War II achieved a certain détente with industry that had eluded them in Europe. As he argued in a lecture at Serge Chermayeff’s Chicago Institute of Design that, according to Nelson, “precipitated a near riot,” true design consisted not of Baukunst but rather of “creative destruction”: the creation-destruction polarity is at the core of the whole design process. Seen in this way, the familiar notion that creation is “good” while destruction is “bad” turns out to have no meaning whatever. . . . Evolution and revolution, creation and destruction, are different names for the same thing. We use one or the other depending on our choice of a frame of reference.10 Nelson also appears to have drawn heavily on the ubiquitous war- inflected rhetoric and violent spatial metaphor of Schumpeter’s text, transposing Schumpeter’s theory of the transformation of modes of production into the arena of the product itself. In Schumpeter, for instance, we read of the new regime of competition under the aegis of creative destruction: competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage . . . and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives. This kind of competition is much more effective than the other as a bombardment is in comparison with forcing a door.11 Compare this text, on the promise of the threatening space of the market, with Nelson’s evocative description of the new world order after 1945–47:

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 The fear of sudden annihilation all of us have carried since Hiroshima is not entirely new. Mankind in its short history has lived out most of its days in jeopardy; and jeopardy, if you are exposed to it—or think you are—feels total, regardless of its spe- cific nature. But today’s fear is different in one sense: we created it. The Black Death which destroyed something between one- quarter and three-quarters of the population where it struck had no known cause or cure in the medical science of the 14th century. The Bomb was programmed, designed, built, and exploded by people who presumably knew exactly what they were doing. It is, I think, this new sense of intellectual mastery over the physical world that is making us so acutely and unhappily aware of the world over which seemingly we have no mastery at all.12 At first glance, Nelson seems to be echoing the core irony of the post– World War II period, a sentiment to be found in liberal treatises on every- thing from literature to politics to engineering in the 1950s.13 Yet upon closer inspection, Nelson shows us his hand. He uses the same metaphors— death, striking, and bombing—as Schumpeter does, but rather than deploy them according to the economist’s logic of supply, demand, and profit, Nelson reorients the entire matter of capitalist destruction (whether creative or not) around the dynamic between producer and product. The key to unpacking Nelson’s rather dense statement is the difference, in the last sentence, between “the physical world” and “the world over which seemingly we have no mastery at all.” The physical world, evidently enough, corresponds to the realm of production. We can program, design, and build The Bomb, and afterward we may use it— destroying both it and its targets. However, Nelson argues, this relatively simple process is no cycle. Once the bomb is destroyed, it takes us with it. Another way of saying this is that Nelson’s point of departure from conventional texts on production—even one of such shared violence as Schumpeter’s—was not the consideration of the practice of design per se, or even the industrial process itself, but rather the aftermath of the productive act. For Nelson, the end point of the product’s life as an object is rarely consumption—neither in the neoclassical economic sense of “purchase” and/or “use,” nor in the Marxian sense of the “using up” of a product in order to “reproduce the means of production”—but rather destruction and destructiveness. This destruction of the product—aka the “industrial object”—could either itself be productive (in Marxian terms, reproductive) or destructive (tending toward an utter objectivity, a nihilism). That final product of homo faber, The Bomb, is for Nelson paradigmatic: a world-destroying object rather than a world-making object.14 The world beyond control that this previously

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 physical object produces is not susceptible to our manipulation because the subjectivity that we once possessed within the physical (objective) regime corresponding to that subjectivity has been destroyed in the making of the object. For the production of product always and already engenders use. The example of the bomb is, admittedly, extreme; however, the metaphors of the bomb, the blow, and death are nonetheless present, in varying forms, in most of Nelson’s writings on design and form the fundamental elements of his theory of production.15 The producer (for Nelson, the designer) becomes destroyed product (designed object), precipitating a complex state of affairs that Nelson devoted the remainder of his career to explicating. Nelson worked to embody this fragmentation and displacement of the designer and designed object in his own person, perhaps nowhere so obviously as in his performance at the Visual Communications Conference at MoMA, sponsored by the Art Directors’ Club of New York and Herman Miller, in 1960. The lecture was a performative version of an essay he had written three years earlier on “Obsolescence.”16 His presentation began silently, with hundreds of ugly slides of the American urban landscape displayed on three screens, after which Nelson proclaimed that “The product is our great achievement, the crowning glory of our civilization. The product is with us everywhere— at home, on the road, in outer space, on the beach—weak in design, imi- tative, derivative, highly styled but rarely well designed, lacking in integrity.”17 The product had replaced the human being at the center of culture, Nelson asserted, whereupon he vanished from the lectern and was replaced by a “bright green robot” who finished the lecture by playing a tape recording of Nelson’s voice, mechanically distorted. Nelson’s robot stunt double then introduced a film, Elegy in a Junk Yard, which demonstrated that the quintessence of urban modernity “is junk.” The film cut between tightly framed shots of recognizable but discarded or broken products and wide-angle shots of mountains of debris. In keep- ing with the theses of both Schumpeter and his contemporary Peter Drucker, the thesis of the film—later spelled out clearly in the pages of Perspecta—was not just that America produced excessive waste but that America and its designers did not thoroughly enough do away with what was obsolete. In the heaping mounds of waste in the junkyard, Nelson maintained, we see only a reflection of our own outmoded selves. The broken product is a broken body, wounded but not yet dead, deprived of all but a sliver of its former subjectivity. Nelson’s provisional solution was to embrace this process of creative destruction fully, even radically. The designer would have to engage with the problem of destroying products and people anew. As he wrote in 1967,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 “Prehistoric Man Throwing a Tied Stone.” From Edwin Tunis, Weapons (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1954).

To a designer, anything that is, is obsolete. . . . We do not need fresh technologies to show us how to upgrade housing—but we do need a continuing method for getting rid of the production we have outmoded. The same holds for cities. What we need is more obsolescence, not less.18

“How to Kill People”: The Wound Man and the Aesthetics of the Target

In 1943, I found myself looking through a pile of 8 × 10 glossy photographs, air views of the centers of cities in the 150,000 to 250,000 range. I have forgotten why I was doing this.19 —George Nelson

In the same year as his perplexing lecture at MoMA, Nelson made a major step in developing his theory of the fallout from the radical transformation of production in the mid-twentieth century. In 1960, collab- orating with a production team at CBS, Nelson wrote and starred in a series of television programs on design for the series Camera 3. The first episode was, startlingly, an alternately deadpan and amusingly ironic history and theory of weapons called “How to Kill People: A Problem of Design.”20 Nelson knew what he was talking about. He had considerable experience in the perverse economy of the military-industrial-academic complex. After World War II, in an article for Fortune magazine on the rise of industrial design in the United States, Nelson could assert that the discipline owed much of its current status to the industrial collu- sion with government during the Great Depression.21 In the reforms Nelson proposed in that article, which included encouragement for small businesses to embrace the industrial designer, the paradigm was the newly invented jet fighter. In the 1950s, Nelson had consulted briefly for IBM on exhibition and computer design and, more interesting, on a real-time management system for American Airlines called SABER, which was based upon the hardware and software then being developed for the Air Force’s SAGE

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 air defense system.22 Nelson’s work for IBM was cut short by a contractual dispute between IBM and Herman Miller, but without missing a beat Nelson was soon working for the propaganda machine of the government, as consultant to the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). Hélène Lipstadt and Beatriz Colomina have documented Nelson’s famous collaboration with the Eameses and Fuller on the 1958 Moscow Exhibition.23 Nelson was as up to date as any of his contemporary designers on the latest in military hardware and information warfare. In “How to Kill People,” Nelson narrated what he called his “straight- faced, ironic commentary” while brandishing actual historical weapons borrowed from the American Museum of Natural History. Lovingly gazing at a medieval spiked mace, he began by qualifying his subject matter with a certain smugness: Designers create things for people. This means that to function successfully, to produce works of art, designers must have society’s approval of what they are doing. Design for killing is interesting because war occupies so much of our attention, and receives our unquestioning support. The great advantage for the designer in this area is that nobody cares what anything costs. This attitude has been prevalent from the siege of Troy to the bombing of Hiroshima. And it’s this kind of attitude towards money that has always attracted creative people.24 In order that the audience not get the wrong idea, Nelson quickly explained his characterization of the designer and his or her clients: “What we’re talking about is killing—but not murder, for murder is of no interest to the designer. Murder weapons are almost always impro- vised—a bathtub, a breadknife, a clothesline. What we are talking about is the kind of killing that is supported by society.” Nelson then illustrated the point by picking up “the ﬁrst lethal weapon,” a rock, which, he emphasized by swinging it around, was “inexpensive” and had “the great virtue of being harder than the human skull.” But, arriving at the central thesis of the program, Nelson demonstrated that the rock had a fundamental drawback: it was not good for killing at a distance. “When the designer comes into the picture,” Nelson intoned, setting down the rock and picking up a replica of a Stone-Age club, “there’s a tremendous improvement in the product. It’s more interesting to look at. [The attacker] doesn’t have to move quite as close. And the force of the blow is greatly increased.”25 As images of various subsequent developments in weaponry sped by on the screen, Nelson emphasized that few fundamentally new inventions followed upon these ﬁrst killing tools. While the “craftsmanship” of the weapons improved, melding the weapons’ representational and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 “Experimental Guided Missile.” Frontispiece to Edwin Tunis, Weapons (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1954).

functional elements into a single “beautiful” object, weapons remained and remain manifestations of a desire to separate oneself as radically as possible from one’s intended victim. One of the early leaps forward in the realization of this desire was the bow and arrow (according to Nelson, “the greatest of all inventions for separating the attacker from his victim”). The ability to kill at a distance, Nelson argued, puts an end to the “silly myth that generals win wars. What the facts show is that designers do. Let me illustrate this with a simple sit- uation. A wants to kill B. His problem is how to do it. His best chance is to bring the whole thing off as a big surprise.” Surprise, of course, is a spatial relationship: A’s ability to occupy B’s space without his knowledge, to use his extended range to bring his telepresence into B’s distant and seemingly autonomous space. This violence dealt at a distance requires a particular kind of activity, one that has only recently begun to receive meaningful critical attention in the philosophy and aesthetics of war. As Samuel Weber has outlined in his recent book Targets of Opportunity, the means of war have been misunderstood because of a misidentiﬁcation of the ends. Drawing on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Weber shows that the classical conception of ends is divided between two concepts: telos and skopos. In a colossal mistake, the former concept, which denotes the fulﬁllment of a process, has been taken to sig- nify the ontology of all ends, at the expense of the concept of skopos, or “targeting.” This concept of an end encompasses the idea of the goal and the secret interpellation of—aiming at—that (unknowing) goal: “[S]kopos designates not just the act [of targeting] but also the object of such watching: the mark or target. It is as if the word, in designating both object and subject, both the target and the targeting, had itself already semantically overcome the distance and the difference in the process it designates.”26 This collapse of distance is essential to the logic of targeting. Not only does it allow the targeting subject access to the targeted subject (i.e., the objectified subject), but it engenders a paradoxical space, in which the targeting subject is displaced from the safety of his or her blind and projected into the targeted space. In brief, the hunter becomes (also) the hunted. Nelson recognized this, and figured this new spatial relationship in his own language. He wrote at the opening of his essay “The Designer in the Modern World” (1957), “The designer

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 lives in the modern world. For him and his work it acts like a target, establishing the direction of his efforts and setting up a boundary outside which these efforts become ineffective.”27 Nelson, as a designer taking aim at the modern world, found himself aiming at himself and his own environment. Keenly exploiting the logic of targeting in his televisual analysis of weapons, Nelson related an anecdote about the medieval crossbow that clearly illustrated the distance weapon’s ability to bar subjective status: “It shot its bolt with such force that in 1139 Pope Innocent II banned its use—except against infidels.” Thankfully, Nelson noted with a wry grin, “[t]he ban still left plenty of legal weapons for Christians inter- ested in killing other Christians.” Distance weapons, we begin to sus- pect, as had the dead pope, threaten not just our bodies but our very subjectivities as they expand their range and power. Turning his attention from the crossbow to an array of guns, Nelson declared that with the invention of the ﬁrearm we took “[a] great step forward, but esthet- ically we paid a price.” Nelson did not mean that the guns’ ornament was somehow more impoverished than that of the sword or bow; rather, he was showing how the gun brings killing objects closer together into an intimate aesthetic relationship (think of the voyeuristic intimacy of the sniper’s scope) even as it distances subjects.28 The stakes and uniqueness of Nelson’s thinking here begin to become clear. From a Marxian point of view the commodity fetish simply engenders a distortion between subjects: the “magic” of exchange value blinds the subject to the social nature of labor, objectifying that labor in unrecognizable form. In Nelson’s destructive theory of production, however, the aesthetic relationship is always already one of an imminent and immanent collision. As in Marx, the result is blindness, but this blindness is not one of concealment but the attenuation and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 “2,000-Pound Demolition Bomb.” From Edwin Tunis, Weapons (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1954).

collapse of vision. Speaking over footage of the Allied bombing of Germany and jet fighters in the skies over Korea, Nelson posed a bitter rhetorical question aimed directly at the heart of the aesthetic stakes of weaponry. As the screen showed machines “attacking machines, at a combined speed of two thousand miles per hour, too fast for people to take aim and fire,” Nelson asked: “Did the Greeks and Romans ever produce anything as beautiful as this? Young men fly multi-million dollar machines. They read instruments, and presently they press buttons. They don’t bother to look out; there is nothing to see.” Furthermore, there is no “they” in the images: “It is hard to find the people anymore. From whose plane are these bombs being dropped? And onto which city? Had the pilot or the bombardier ever visited the city? Had they ever seen the museums? Had they shopped in any of the shops?”29 The answer to Nelson’s rhetorical questions was, of course, no. The target of the bomber (itself a machine, not a “pilot or . . . bombardier”) was no longer an individual body, nor the corporate body of an army, but rather the territory itself. Viewed from such a distance—from a nearly Archimedean point—the space of warfare had become an almost undifferentiated, contiguous, and wholly anonymous territory. As Nelson would write in McCall’s seven years later, reprising the argument of “How to Kill People,” “Don’t fire until you see the tops of their roofs.”30 This territory, however, concealed a hidden threat of its own. With the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, weapons began to be buried in the earth itself, giving the lie to an age-old desire: The marvelous missiles sleeping quietly in their cradles all over the world are indeed a triumph of design, but in many respects, they are still traditional, still reflecting the desire of the attacker to stay removed from his target. They are also very complicated— the best weapons have always been more expensive than people, but the cost of these is almost beyond comprehension. It may be that for further improvement of killing there are principles which still remain to be explored.31 This desire to remove oneself from one’s target—a desire impossible to fulfill, considering the nature of the target as the shooter’s subjective space—had resulted in guaranteeing one’s own territory as a target through the nuclear logic of “mutual annihilation” (deterrence). The underground missile silo is the invisible analog of the aerial bomber— the vanishing point in the perspectival regime of the targeting eye. This ridiculous “step forward” achieved its apotheosis for Nelson in the design of “push-button warfare.” In describing the apparatus of intercontinental ballistic warfare, Nelson looked crestfallen: “The designers have designed the excitement out of killing. We will never see the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 whites of their eyes again.”32 That Nelson should approach the conclusion of his televised essay by treating mechanized warfare—particularly the hydrogen bomb and ICBMs—in this morally ambiguous and over-ironized manner should not surprise us, especially considering that the Cold War was then approaching peak intensity (the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 was already in the works). The ironic response was a common one among his contemporaries. His main historical and visual resource for the television show was Edwin Tunis’s Weapons: A Pictorial History (1954), which had for a frontispiece a line drawing of an “experimental guided missile” and an end page depicting a mushroom cloud. Nor again, considering his source, is his relative silence and obvious per- plexity about “the bomb” surprising. Tunis, writing in the early stages of the Cold War, presented the history of weapons as motivated by the desire to remove oneself from one’s attacker and to increase the efficacy of this relationship by increasing the power and range of the weapon. His book, then, is a progressively disintegrating history of art, insofar as the history of weapons was the history of an aesthetic relationship incessantly pushed to the point of utter crisis. In the first instance, weapons mediated a relationship between subjects (e.g., combat with primitive clubs or slings), but in the last instance, they mediated a relationship only between themselves and territory in general, as machines whose vision and invisibility for- bade the very presence of subjecthood. In concluding his account, Tunis devoted only a single, ﬁnal paragraph to the “ultimate weapon”: To end a modern book about weapons without mentioning the atomic bomb and the more powerful hydrogen bomb would be absurd. To try to explain them would be even more ridiculous. Statistics mean little. The bombs are tremendous and uncomfort- able facts, and that’s about all that can be said of them with cer- tainty. A defense we can’t now imagine may neutralize them in time. We can only hope that man will have sense enough to ban them before it is too late.33 In a world of nuclear bombs and long-range guided missiles, there is literally no place for “man.” The discomfort with which Tunis confronted the end of the history of weapons was thus precisely the pain of an amputation. Weapons were no longer to be wielded, they were autonomous and automatic technical life forms excised entirely from the human body and returned, qua wounding force, by the touch of a button. As Nelson would later write of buttons in his exhibition catalog How to See, “The button is utterly neutral, does nothing but wait for the approach of a finger, and, because of the disparity between the light

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 Joannes de Kethem. “Wound Man,” 1491. From Fasciculus medicinae (Venice, 1491).

touch and possibly massive consequences, has become a metaphor for modern power fantasies. Any idiot can push it.” Evoking the inevitable return of the object to the body that opens and closes the wound, he powerfully identified the push-button with the sacriﬁcial, wounded body of Christ: “It is the communion wafer of technocratic society.”34 Thus it is of particular interest that Nelson illustrated the opening credits of “How to Kill People” with a peculiar kind of image of wounding and healing: a male body, contrapposto, palms facing outward, displaying manifold stig- mata like a denuded Christ figure; run through with knives, spears, swords, and arrows; bruised with stones, clubs, and maces; and, despite his relaxed posture, even pierced by the very ground upon which he stands. This “wound man” (also evocatively called a “wound manikin”) was a medical diagram derived from medieval anatomical studies, used by barber-surgeons as a reference. The particular image is taken from a late edition of Joannes de Kethem’s Fasciculus medicinae, originally published in Venice in 1491. This type of diagram, which sought to marry the descriptive and prescriptive medical text with a visual display of the body’s surfaces and interior, served as a model for later, special- use diagrams for medical texts; perhaps the most famous example is the “wound man” engraved by Hans Wechtlin for Hans von Gersdorff’s Feldtbuch der Wundartzney (Field Handbook of Wound Surgery), of 1517.35 Nelson appropriated the wound man as the image of the subject of push-button warfare, and presumably he was well aware of and unbothered by the anachronism. After all, the thrust of his argument in “How to Kill People” was precisely to identify the long unfolding of a single dynamic within the history of technics—a dynamic whose basic motion did not change, only its intensity. In what is perhaps the most graphic register of the potential violence of the wound, the wound man’s chest is gaping open, inscribed with the names of his exposed organs, demonstrating the depth of the weapons’ reach into his body. Roughly contemporary to Leonardo’s great humanist symbol, the wound man is the other of the Vitruvian man. Its relevance to Nelson’s argument is its antihumanism: an image of the human body as a radical objectiﬁcation. The weapons are not wielded by any attacker, they are not tools; rather, they are disembodied from the hand of the attacker, and reembedded in the flesh of the victim. One might say that, in the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 case of the wound man, the victim wields the weapon. Elaine Scarry writes in her examination of war and torture that physical violence has a tautological structure written in the paradoxical opening of the body (i.e., the wound is both radically subjective and subject-less). Thus, in Scarry’s language, the injury has no subject except the injuring itself: “The activity of injuring in war . . . provides a record of its own activity.”36 Yet wounding is not entirely mute. In his reading of the conclusion of The Odyssey, in which Odysseus disguises himself and slays his wife’s suitors with a carefully restored and concealed bow, Weber unpacks the description of Odysseus’s arrow piercing Antinous’s neck, who dropped his cup “as he was hit.” With the piercing of his body, Antinous, previously an autonomous subject capable of manipulating objects, of holding things and holding things in, loses his power as subject and becomes nothing but a broken object nearly identical to the shattered cup he dropped on the floor as he fell: “As he drops the gob- let, spilling the wine, his body loses its ability to serve as a container— which is to say, to define the separation of self and other, internal and external.”37 The wound thus marks not only the inevitable return of the weapon to the body but also the collapse of subjectivity onto the site upon which that body is wounded: figure returns to ground as the body hits the floor. Nelson recognized that if every space and object was weaponized at a scale hitherto unknown, then the converse was likewise true: defensive enclosures were necessarily reduced in scale to that of the human body. For Nelson, the figure of that supercession of the fortress was the medieval knight’s suit of armor.38 The anachronism hardly mattered. The essential aspect of the suit of armor was its intimate relationship to the human body. As a kind of second skin, the suit of armor “outers” into a technical object the body’s “ability to serve as a container,” to hold itself together. In other words, the generative assumption upon which the design of the suit of armor is based is the projected vulnerability of the body that it is to protect and the recognition of the vulnerability of one’s defensible territory. Therefore, the suit of armor—and many other objects, especially those designed ergonomically—demonstrate the productivity of the wound. Rather than preventing the wound, the suit of armor is the wound, rendered into objecthood through a technique of mimetic projection. In short, Nelson argues, in the face of the creative destruction of com- modities, and especially after the blinding flashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we are all walking wounded.39 Moreover, that wounding object, the weapon, is paradigmatic for all objects, precisely because our bodies bear the marks of having created, used, and exchanged. The designer in particular must take aim at and inhabit this wounded area,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 compensating for the wounds by reproducing them in efﬁgy. Nelson concluded his twisting and turning narrative in “How to Kill People” with a ﬁnal coup de grâce that suggested an alternative, ironic telos of targeting. Wielding an Australian aboriginal “magic bone . . . a weapon with no moving parts, which does not have to be thrust or thrown, and yet . . . can kill a man,” Nelson explained, while pointing the weapon directly at the camera, that it in combination with an incan- tation was “absolutely lethal.” [T]here are too many authenticated records to permit any doubt of its efficacy. The victim, learning what has happened, promptly heads into the bush and presently dies. If you feel no ill effects, it is partly because I don’t know the right phrases, but mainly because ours is not an age of faith—except in the machine.40 By wielding this ancient weapon through the television, Nelson was of course pointing out the status of the TV set as yet another distancing and distance-conquering mediation. Coyly playing upon that axiom of faithlessness, “seeing is believing,” Nelson demonstrated the social nature of killing with which he had begun his show. The weapon—and by extension the commodity—can properly wound and kill only if it takes its place within an economy of vision in which the body and target are self-same. As Nelson had argued four years earlier in a quizzical essay on the “‘Captive’ Designer vs(?) ‘Independent’ Designer,” this wounded body was not only corporal but corporate, belonging to the entire profession: “When it comes to cutting itself off at the knees by selfish and short- sighted action, the design profession is no better or smarter than the others.”41 These twin curious discoveries—that you cannot target or wound what you cannot see and that defensibility depended not upon structure but rather upon farsightedness and invisibility—led Nelson to the last large project of his design career.

The End of Architecture

Wherever we look, the message seems to be that we are moving from the monument to the bell jar.42 —George Nelson

Nelson seemed to recognize in the objectifying power of the weapon not only the obliteration of the comfortable nominative and ontological distinction of subjectivity but also a collapse of the space of the subject. In the middle of “How to Kill People,” as one of Leonardo’s theoretical drawings on the bombardment of fortiﬁcations appeared on the screen

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 (“The great Leonardo da Vinci, who turned many an honest penny inventing engines of annihilation, made this prophetic drawing showing the castle, its contents, and its occupants obliterated in a rain of fire.”43), Nelson demonstrated the growing irrelevance of the physical, social, and psychological barriers of the fortress. Each weapon was becoming more like another, all the while becoming more architectural: “This impersonal array of unbelievable precision might be an oil refin- ery in Texas, a laboratory in Alaska—it happens to be a weapon, but it’s hard to tell any longer.”44 Nelson was evoking a theme within architectural theory that has long been ignored. From Vitruvius to Vauban to Viollet-le-Duc to Virilio (such a list perhaps inspires one to return to the pages of Pynchon’s V with an appropriately paranoid eye), the progressive and deliberate erosion of the protective (and weaponized) building has been a necessary adjunct of Firmitas, Utilitas, Venustas. Although nearly any of these authors would serve the purpose, the history of this erosion is laid out in diagrammatic form in Viollet-le-Duc’s Annals of a Fortress, a “novel of ideas” that has had an impact in military engineering at least as far- reaching as that of his “structural rationalism” on architectural modernism. Written in the wake of France’s embarrassment at the hands of the Prussians in 1872, the Annals was a novel describing the history of a mythical French city from its foundation as a small village on a hill, through numerous invasions and changes of rulers, to a formidable fortified city protected by ramparts, glacis, and cannon. The novel concludes, however, with the city’s capitulation at the hands of foreigners armed with mobile artillery and advanced camouflage tech- niques. An afterword, rendered as a report from a fictional French artillery officer, bemoans the loss but puts forward a solution to the problem of fortification. Attack implies a shock or onset; defence is a resistance to this onset. Whether a piece of ordnance discharges a ball against a plate of iron, or a casing of masonry, or an earthwork; or an assaulting column climbs a breach, the problem is substantially the same; in either case we have to oppose to the impulsive force a resistance that will neutralise its effect. When there were no projectile weapons, or their range was inconsiderable, only a normal resistance had to be opposed to the shock—a man to a man—or if the effect was to be rendered certain, two men to one. But when projectile arms acquired a longer range, the position of the attack and defence became a question of importance. . . . It is evident, for example, that when it came to a close engage-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 Viollet-le-Duc. Diagram of enceinte de préservation, 1875. From Annals of a Fortress, trans. Benjamin Bucknall (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1875).

ment—a hand-to-hand struggle with an adversary; if the latter found himself placed behind a circular enclosure, the obstacle that protected him would give him a considerable advantage—an advantage that could only be compensated for by renew- ing the attack.45 Like the suit of armor, the fortress takes on the form perfectly expressive of the projected wounds it expects to receive. Within the confines of the fortress proper is the enceinte de préservation, an interior, subjective space safe from bombardment by virtue of its shape, range of vision and offensive fire- power, and, without, an invisible exterior zone, the enceinte de combat, which would rely on “temporary,” mobile camps and earthworks “affording security to a numerous army, whose manoeuvres the enemy could not espy.”46 The spatial idea behind Viollet-le-Duc’s enceinte de préservation is identical to that behind Marechal André Maginot’s famous procla- mation that We could hardly dream of building a kind of Great Wall of France, which would in any case be far too costly. Instead we have fore- seen powerful but flexible means of organizing defense, based on the dual principle of taking full advantage of the terrain and establishing a continuous line of fire everywhere.47 We already know, and Nelson certainly knew, what befell the Maginot Line. This collapse of the enceinte [enclosure] de preservation into the enceinte de combat with the advent of the blitzkrieg, strategic bombing, and the guided missile, is precisely what Virilio has diagnosed as the new spatial regime of deterrence-based or “pure” war—simultaneously offensive and defensive, in the same space, happening at the same time.48 Nelson seems to have grasped the significance for architecture and industrial design of twentieth-century martial space: Architecture itself, considered as an enceinte de preservation, was now obsolete. He for- malized this hypothesis in a perplexing essay entitled “The End of Architecture.” First delivered as a lecture at Harvard during his two- year tenure there as a professor of design in the early 1970s, “The End of Architecture” was Nelson’s attempt to come to terms with a state of total spatial crisis. In short, he began to treat the weaponized space

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 of the twentieth century as a design problem like any other. The central thesis remained the same as that of “How to Kill People,” only now it was explicitly applied to architecture and its consequences measured: “As technology advances, experience recedes. Not always, and not inevitably, but generally. The symbolic expression of all this is the lunar landing: there, if a man were permitted to experience the environment directly, he would instantly die.”49 Even worse, tele-technological space, considered broadly, was cramped: In the military area, given the capability of weapons now, a major war could begin and end within 48 hours because the fronts no longer have adequate depth. A suitable staging area for a war of greater duration, with a minimum sporting element left in the goings-on, would now require at least two planets.50 Nelson’s flexibility as a thinker allowed him to sustain the manifold contradictions between his commitment to humanism and his diagno- sis of a technology-based, means-ends future architecture. However, this very flexibility pushed him into a realm that would have been utterly ridiculous if not for the seeming reality of the threat that moved him. Confronted with the inadequacy of architecture and architects to create a humanist architecture at odds with advanced capitalism and communism at war, Nelson proposed returning depth to architecture by returning it to the depths. This much seems clear: what we think of as the “reality” of architecture, which has so long been a conspicuous expression on the exterior (just think of Venice or Paris or Florence for a moment) is now shifting with considerable rapidity to the interior. Such a transformation is not necessarily bad, but it does give rise to questions about what is happening to architecture as we are accus- tomed to think of it. My own hunch is that a lot of it is going to simply vanish, first by becoming increasingly uninteresting and then by being swallowed up into megastructures or by being buried in the earth or covered with topsoil and planted.51 Not only buried, then, but invisible. In his last architectural projects, produced by Harvard students and funded by a grant from the Graham Foundation in 1971, architecture would “simply vanish . . . . Most cities would look and feel better if half the structures in them could be made invisible.”52 Megastructures were, Nelson noted, beginning to do just this by “swallowing up” individual buildings, creating “hidden cities,” and the monumental architecture of the day—embodied most clearly, if rather oddly, for Nelson in the engineering-based work of Pier Luigi Nervi and Buckminster Fuller—was entirely devoted to the creation of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 George Nelson. Ball Clock, 1947.

an interior space, anonymous and forgettable on the exterior. Even conventional curtain-walled skyscrapers were, for Nelson, evidence of this transformation. Nelson called this, in a related essay, “the emergent dominant reality.”53 Our delicate bodies would be perfectly preserved under a bell jar, buried deep in an underground laboratory. Hiding from the roving eye of satellites and spy planes, Nelson proposed, we would be safer half-buried and half-alive, content to serve as our own lab rats. As he wrote in an essay for the inaugural exhibition of the Cooper- Hewitt Museum in October 1976, Hans Hollein’s MAN transFORMS, the city so conceived was both “mirror” and “mask”: “These sealed cages become a terminal statement about the dead end which now punctuates our long struggle to dominate Nature.”54 Thus, for Nelson, architecture did not or would not “end” simply by disappearing. Rather, he recognized in those designs that formed the “junk” of modern society the endgame of modernism. Basing modern design and production upon a bankrupt and dangerous mode of vision had led to an inexorable and violent spatial paradox. One imagines this must have been a difﬁ- cult thesis to write, considering that Nelson’s work was implicated in the unfolding of that narrative. Viewed in the light of Nelson’s intensive spatial and defensive deployment of irony, his own designs appear neither as whimsical nor as dated as they are currently received (especially by the current market in “mid-century modern” furniture and appliances). Nelson and his work are of sufficient complexity to merit more than hagiography (although this is certainly useful and deserved) and its complement, dismissal. The famous Storagewall (1945) is not just a handy space- saving device (although it certainly is designed in an effort to save space itself); it protects the consumer from the creative and destructive violence of products by using the architecture as a suit of armor. The “Atomic” or Ball Clock (1947),55 for instance, with its electron place holders attached by the spindliest of supports and its second hand tick- ing ominously down; its companion piece the Sunburst Clock (c. 1950), with its exploding rays figuring the identity of time and distance; the Marshmallow Sofa loveseat (1956), with its precarious balance of dis- crete elements that forces two sitters to carefully negotiate the impact of each other’s weight in order to avoid falling ass over teakettle onto

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 the floor—all of these iconic designs take on a new, less stable, and perhaps even critical, character. Nelson’s more “serious” work, such as the ergonomically sound office furniture for Herman Miller in the 1960s and 1970s, is more legi- ble for our understanding of his approach to wounded space. The puta- tively therapeutic contours of his chairs and desks were designed for an injured subject, as latter-day suits of armor. His “Seating Tool” (1952) designed with Buckminster Fuller out of aluminum light-reflector shields, celluloid, and a piece of piano wire, was an attempt to relate productively mechanical regimes of vision to the body. (“Unfortunately,” however, “anyone sitting on this nearly invisible object completely overhung the seat, and appeared to be balancing painfully on a knitting needle.”)56 Nelson’s response to the involuntary enclosure of the human body in the context of universalized warfare and “the end of architecture” was to open the object in turn. He sought, however naively, to limit not the wounding capacity of the weapon, but its range. Despite the fact that “we will never see the whites of their eyes again,” Nelson concluded “How to Kill People” with an optimistic caveat: “But if peace ever does break out, we designers needn’t worry. We’ll find something else to do—though it may be not so profitable—and, personally, I hope it will have to do with people.”57

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 Notes 1. George Nelson, Chairs (New York: Acanthus Press, 1994); and George Nelson, Building a New Europe: Portraits of Modern Architects, Essays by George Nelson, 1935–36 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). The latter book includes a useful essay on Nelson’s early years by Kurt W. Forster, “An American in Rome: George Nelson Talks with European Architects,” which places Nelson in the intellectual clime of Italy in the 1930s, but is not based upon archival research. Chairs includes a brief introductory essay by Nelson’s biographer, Stanley Abercrombie and is something of a companion piece to Abercrombie’s biography of Nelson, George Nelson: The Design of Modern Design (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). 2. Abercrombie, 238. 3. Enzo Fratelli, “The World of George Nelson,” Zodiac 8 (1961): 96–101. 4. See George Nelson, Problems of Design, 2nd ed. (New York: Whitney Publications, 1965); Nelson, “Business and the Industrial Designer,” Fortune 40 (July 1949): 92–98; and Nelson, book review of Henry Dreyfuss’s Designing for People and the second edition of Dreyfuss’s The Measure of Man: Human Factors in Design, in Architectural Forum (June 1968): 80–81. 5. One such praiseworthy fellow traveler was, of course, John Summerson, who relentlessly analyzed the process of architectural design through multiple stages of authorship. See, for instance, Summerson’s early essay, “The Mind of Wren” (1936), in Heavenly Mansions (New York: Norton, 1963), 51–86. 6. George Nelson, “Wright’s Houses: Two Residences, Built by a Great Architect for Himself, Make the Landscape Look as if It Had Been Designed to Fit Them,” Fortune 34 (August 1946): 116–125; and George Nelson, The Industrial Architecture of Albert Kahn Inc. (New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., 1939). 7. George Nelson, “The Human Element in Design,” Industrial Design 20, no. 5 (June 1973): 49–60. The essay was also published as “The Humane Designer,” Industrial Design 20, no. 5 (June 1973). 8. While Nelson’s personal and office records remain private, the best secondary source on Nelson’s career is Stanley Abercrombie’s biography, George Nelson. Abercrombie had full access to Nelson’s archive, and the bibliographical appendix pre- pared by Judith Nasatir is immensely useful. 9. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942; New York: Harper, 1975): 83–84. Nelson was also an admirer of management expert Peter Drucker, whom he regularly quoted in his talks and essays. 10. George Nelson, “Ends and Means,” in Problems of Design (New York: Whitney Publications, 1957), 34, 37. 11. Schumpeter, 85. 12. George Nelson, “The Enlargement of Vision,” in Problems of Design, 62; emphasis added. 13. This irony has its own special valence in architecture. Works emphasizing the primacy of humanism, such as Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London: Warburg Institute, 1949) or Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), were widely read and cited as rational grounds for modernist architecture that was profoundly posthumanist in appearance and function. For a discussion of the impact of such texts upon architectural culture in the post–World War II era, see Reinhold Martin, The Organizational

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). 14. Nelson’s argument here resonates strongly with two works of the post–World War II period that offer alternative descriptive models of production: Hannah Arendt The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); and Jean Beaudrillard The System of Objects (1968), trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996). 15. At the outset of the later, revised version of his 1957 essay “Obsolescence,” whose epigraph is taken from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” (in which a shay built to last a hundred years instantly falls apart upon reaching its appointed hour), Nelson writes, “We have bombs and we have disposable tissue, but in our total industrial inventory there appear to be very few other products that can match the perfectly planned disintegration of Dr. Holmes’ little fantasy.” George Nelson “Obsolescence,” Perspecta 11 (1967): 172. He mentions the bomb twice more in this essay alone, and it appears in all of Nelson’s essays and lectures quoted in the remainder of this essay. 16. Nelson, “Obsolescence,” 170–176. 17. Abercrombie, 188–189. 18. Nelson, “Obsolescence,” 175–176. 19. Nelson, “The Human Element in Design,” 49–60. 20. George Nelson, “How to Kill People: A Problem of Design,” Industrial Design 8, no. 1 (January 1961): 45–53. The episode was written by George Nelson and Clair Roskam, directed by John Desmond, and produced by John McGiffert. Nelson appeared again on Camera 3 in 1978 with “The Civilized City, an Illustrated Essay,” in which he presented his proposals for moving large portions of American cities underground. 21. George Nelson, “Business and the Industrial Designer,” Fortune 40 (July 1949): 92–98. 22. Nelson was hired in 1956 as part of a design consultancy headed by Eliot Noyes and staffed by Paul Rand, Charles Eames, and Edgar Kaufmann Jr. Letters describing his involvement in the consultancy, and the contractual dispute with Herman Miller, are preserved in the “George Nelson” Folder, Box 66, Eliot Noyes Archive, Norwalk, CT. 23. See Hélène Lipstadt, “‘Natural Overlap’: Charles and Ray Eames and Federal Government,” in, The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention, ed. Donald Albrecht (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997): 150–177; and Beatriz Colomina, “Enclosed by Images: The Eameses’ Multimedia Architecture,” Grey Room 2 (Winter 2001): 6–29. I treat the Eameses’ multiscreen projection stratagem in my dissertation, “The Re-Design of Design: Multinational Corporations, Computers and Design Logic, 1945–1976” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2006), ch. 5–6. 24. George Nelson, “How to Kill People: A Problem of Design,” Industrial Design 8, no. 1 (January 1961): 45–53, 47. 25. Nelson, “How to Kill People,” 47. 26. Samuel Weber, Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 7; emphasis in original. 27. George Nelson, “The Designer in the Modern World,” in Problems of Design, 75; emphasis added. 28. Nelson, “The Designer in the Modern World,” 75. 29. Nelson, “The Designer in the Modern World,” 75. 30. George Nelson, “Don’t Fire until You See the Tops of Their Roofs,” McCall’s (November 1968), quoted in Abercrombie, 278.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 31. Nelson, “How to Kill People,” 53; emphasis added. 32. Nelson, “How to Kill People,” 53. 33. Edwin Tunis, Weapons: A Pictorial History (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1954), 151. 34. George Nelson, How to See: Visual Adventures in a World God Never Made (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977), 230; emphasis in original. 35. See Elizabeth Matthew Lewis, An Exhibition of Selected Landmark Books and Articles in the History of Military Medicine Together with a Graphic Display of the Wound Man through History, exh. cat. (West Point, NY: United States Military Academy, 1976), 2–21. This fascinating little catalogue also features a local artist’s ren- dering of a “20th-century wound man” being blown apart from the outside by atomic explosions and exploded from the inside by atomic radiation. Needless to say, such a patient is beyond help. The entirety of Ketham’s treatise is also available online at the National Library of Medicine of the National Institute of Health’s History of Medicine Division Web site “Historical Anatomies on the Web”: http://165.112.6.70/exhibition/historicalanatomies/ketham_home.html. A comprehensive catalog of medical illustrations that is helpful in placing the wound man/manikin in its historical context is Diane R. Karp et al., Ars Medica: Art, Medicine, and the Human Condition (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1985), which offers brief historical texts alongside high- quality reproductions of significant medical illustrations and artworks from the fifteenth century onward. I am grateful to Stephen Campbell and Ashley West for sharing their expertise as I was researching the origins of the “wound man.” 36. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 116. The primary analogy that Scarry wields to arrive at her analytical conclusions about the ideology of war is a shell game of architectural enclosure, namely, “the cost vocabulary permits and encourages the receding series ‘War (injury) is the cost of freedom. Battle (injury) is the cost of war (formerly, injury). Slaughter (injury) is the cost of battle (formerly, injury). Blood (injury) is the cost of slaughter.’ which not only generates tautology . . . but does so in such a way that precisely that tautologically self-evident centrality of the act of injuring will itself be steadily minimized. The injury which in the first sentence is recognized as massive (by analogy, the destruction of a city) is folded within itself until by the second construc- tion it seems only the destroyed house within the otherwise standing city, and by the third only a closet within that house, and finally by the fourth a shelf in the closet.” 37. Weber, Targets of Opportunity, 13. Both Nelson’s and Weber’s approach to the damaged subjectivity of the wounded possesses a profoundly political dimension. Parallels between the wounded body and the sacrificial body—following Giorgio Agamben, the constituent body from which the body politic derives its negative image—are especially thought-provoking. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); and especially the essays on the aesthetics of humanity and animality in Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Atell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 38. Nelson entertained a lifelong interest in the medieval armor of Europe and Japan. He presented several suits of the protective enclosures in an essay on “Survival Designs” in his book How to See, 190–201. 39. This wounded unity of wounded bodies, already condemned to die, raises the question of whether Nelson was familiar with the logic underpinning Herman Kahn’s

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 On Thermonuclear War. Nelson did not turn to Kahn or the macabre thought experiment of the Doomsday Machine to prove the point. After all, even the optimistic, sui- cidal Kahn insisted that the Doomsday Machine scenario was “most unlikely” and little more than an “awful spectre.” Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 500. Nevertheless, the Doomsday Machine is ger- mane to the discussion here insofar as it can be understood as a unique apparatus, one that is both anti-ideological and anti-aesthetic. As a system of connections between a massive number of subterranean hydrogen bombs, controlled by a trigger mechanism that can be set off only by means purely external to the state, it is a preparation for the erasure of all subjects and therefore the end of both history and aesthetics. This is why, even though the Doomsday apparatus was and remains only a thought experiment in the absurdist logic of deterrence, it is always “buried deep underground” and even the trigger mechanism is described as concealed deep within the interstices of a computer, impervious to any manipulation once the apparatus is “turned on.” The Doomsday apparatus, therefore, is an image of a technology that destroys technology; it is neither tool nor weapon but rather a targeting device that wholly consumes the target, taking over its identity as its own. If realized, it would constitute the endgame of technology— its telos rather than its skopos—a final “outering” of subjective means that cannot return to the body, even the form of the wound. On deterrence, see Paul Virilio, Pure War (New York: Semiotext(e), 1998); and Paul Virilio, Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990). 40. Nelson, “How to Kill People,” 47. 41. George Nelson, “‘Captive’ Designer vs(?) ‘Independent’ Designer,” in Nelson, Problems of Design, 28. 42. Nelson, “The End of Architecture,” Architecture Plus, April 1973, 38. 43. Nelson, “How to Kill People,” 47. 44. Nelson, “How to Kill People,” 47. 45. Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Annals of a Fortress, trans. Benjamin Bucknall (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1876), 357. 46. Ibid. 47. André Maginot, speech to Parlement, December 10, 1929. 48. Viollet-le-Duc’s text is so interesting precisely because it is poised at the brink of this transformation from separate martial spheres into a self-same space of violence, a wounded space. In Viollet’s narrative, weaponry and its defensive adjuncts approach identity at increasing speed, although Viollet would seem to hold out for an asymptotic gap separating the two, which is movement. Viollet-le-Duc, Annals of a Fortress, 379: “Cannon are made whose balls pierce through and through the wooden planks of a ves- sel. Immediately these planks are cased with iron. To-day’s balls are resisted by the ves- sel’s sides. The plates of iron are doubled . . . and forthwith the penetrating force of the projectiles is increased; but those of the next day pierce them. Steel is made to take the place of iron: but after thousands upon thousands have been spent the projectile always has the best of it. But it happens in a naval engagement that an Admiral steams at full speed right athwart an enemy’s ship and sinks it! In fact it is by rapidity of movement and facility in manoeuvring [sic] that victories at sea are ensured much more than by increased protective plating.” 49. Nelson, “The End of Architecture,” 37. 50. Nelson, “The End of Architecture,” 37; emphasis added.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2008.1.31.90 by guest on 24 September 2021 51. Nelson, “The End of Architecture,” 38. 52. George Nelson, “The Hidden City,” Architecture Plus 2, no. 6 (November– December 1974), 70–77, p. 70. 53. George Nelson, “Interiors: The Emerging Dominant Reality,” in George Nelson on Design (New York: Whitney Library of Design; London: Architectural Press, 1979), 45–57. 54. George Nelson, “The City as Mirror and Mask,” in MAN transFORMS, exh. cat., ed. Hans Hollein (New York: Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1976). 55. The ball clock was probably designed by George Nelson’s associate Irving Harper, although Nelson claimed that it was the accidental outcome of a drunken evening with Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi. Nelson’s anecdote is quoted in Abercrombie, 111. 56. Arthur Drexler, “Foreword,” in Nelson, Problems of Design, ix. 57. Nelson, “How to Kill People,” 53.

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