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. 90 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 Many of his projects remain unpublished, and, as with many designers of his generation, his archive remains private.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 Grey Room 31, Spring 2008, pp. 90–115. © 2008 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 91 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 prod- uct 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 92 Grey Room 31 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 envi- ronment, 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 Harwood | The Wound Man: George Nelson and the “End of Architecture” 93 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.

Load more