The Legibility of Environment: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (1968-1976)

Abstract

The notion of “environment” took on a plethora of meanings in the 1960s, encompassing both the natural and the man-made, locating the concept within the complex connections between objects, cities, users, and systems. The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum entered the fray as they reframed their legacy of decorative arts collections through the new paradigm of design. The museum took on the legibility of environment as a key problem in the reshaping of its mission and collections—particularly with respect to architecture. Through its inaugural exhibition, MANtransFORMS, the museum resisted the social-scientization of “environment” by highlighting the continuities between architecture and everyday objects, and the agency of the layperson in shaping and interpreting their milieu.

Notes

1 The birdcage was included in a section on the “Line,” or linear design. This section explored two-dimensional designs emphasizing outline and three-dimensional objects that utilized linear elements. The birdcage joined an eighteenth-century metal grille, seventeenth-century lace, a Turkish calligraphic composition, wallpaper designed by Saul Steinberg, and an upholstered wrought iron rocking chair. Cast among these diverse objects, Elements of Design asked its visitors to consider how the overall form of the birdcage was composed by the repeated linear elements of its bars, foregrounding a single aspect of the object's design.

2 See, e.g., Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (London: Architectural Press, 1969).

3 For example, the May 1969 issue of Progressive Architecture was devoted to the engineers, financiers, planners, and consultants who ultimately determined the structure and organization of the built environment. Architects, in this view, came on to projects essentially to style them after the economic, political, and spatial logics were already worked out.

4 Two essays of very different tone each suggested that the building had become obsolete in achieving architectural effects: Melvin Charney, “Experimental Strategies: Notes for Environmental Design,” Perspecta 12 (1969); Hans Hollein, “Alles Ist Architektur,” Bau: Schrift für Architektur und Städtebau 23, no. 1/2 (1968).

5 Both were moderated by George Nelson, the first think tank taking place October 18–20, 1971, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and the second February 14–15, 1972, in the Cooper Hewitt's offices in the townhouse adjoining the Carnegie Mansion, whose renovation was then just beginning. “Curatorial Studies and Design Conference,” ca. 1972. Box 39, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 267, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Records.

6 “Untitled (Think Tank Questions for Participants),” ca. 1971. Box 41, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 267, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Records, 3.

7 “Think Tank Conferences,” ca. 1972. Box 39, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 267, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Records.

8 George Nelson, “The Cooper-Hewitt Conference, February 14–15, 1972,” March 6, 1972. Box 50, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 267, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Records.

9 Studying the effects of DDT used to control fire ants, Carson found deleterious consequences not only in nature, in the form of mass casualties in wild bird populations, but also in humans. Its use in agricultural areas allowed the chemical to enter the food chain, causing a spike in cancer rates.

10 As individual conditions were mapped and overlayed to create a composite view, environmental precarity (such as areas susceptible to erosion) and human value (such as scenic views or areas well-suited to outdoor recreation) coalesced into a single visual language indicating where new development might be most fruitfully and least destructively located. McHarg also applied the “ecological inventory” to urban areas and their social problems. In a study of Philadelphia, for example, McHarg mapped physical, mental, and social diseases alongside the locations of ethnic enclaves, poverty, and population density, among others. Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1969), 188-193.

11 Lynch described the act of constructing an environmental image as “a two-way process between the observer and his environment. The environment suggests distinctions and relations, and the observer—with great adaptability and in the light of his own purposes—selects, organizes, and endows with meaning what he sees. The image so developed now limits and emphasizes, while the image itself is being tested against the filtered perceptual input in a constant interacting process. Thus the image of a given reality may vary significantly between different observers.” Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Publications of the Joint Center for Urban Studies (Cambridge, MA: Technology Press, 1960), 6.

12 Ibid., 4.

13 Kepes was the founder of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, where he oversaw Lynch's research for The Image of the City. The Vision + Value series, published between 1965 and 1972, grew out of fifteen years of seminars Kepes gave at MIT in which artists, architects, and scientists came together to consider problems endemic to all three fields, to share knowledge that would aid in pursuing solutions, and to collaborate on projects. Kepes described this origin in his introduction to György Kepes, Structure in Art and in Science, Vision + Value Series, vol. 2 (New York: G. Braziller, 1965), v. Lynch explicitly disavowed any interest in the individual psychology of perception, preferring instead to focus on “‘public images’, the common mental pictures carried by large numbers of a city's inhabitants.” Lynch, Image of the City (note 7), 7.

14 See Kepes's “Introduction” in Education of Vision, Vision + Value Series, vol. 1 (New York: G. Braziller, 1965), ii.

15 In his 1965 Education of Vision, Kepes acknowledged the limits of innate human faculties to deal with what he described as an increasingly disordered world. “But vision, though the key orderer, nevertheless receives its scope and scale from what it orders. Our visual experiences are drawn from the features of the visible world around us. The strength, the richness, and the order of the visual forms that we create depend, to a certain extent, upon the nature of our visual surroundings. … There is a reciprocal relationship between our distorted environment and our impoverished ability to see with freshness, clarity and joy.” Ibid., ii–iii.

16 György Kepes, “Art and Ecological Consciousness,” in Arts of the Environment (New York: G. Braziller, 1972). 11.

17 The categories employed by Lynch largely had to do with the circumnavigation of the city: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. Kepes, in contrast, employed categories that were compositional in nature: vision, motion, structure, image, module, and object.

18 The games took place November 17–18, 1972, and January 12–13, 1973. They were held at the IBM headquarters because the games required the use of a computer to model a collection of variables, such as population growth, property value appreciation, etc.

19 For a general history and context of urban design-focused gaming simulations, see Jennifer Light, “Taking Games Seriously,” Technology and Culture 49, no. 2 (2008), 347-75. For more extensive descriptions of METROPOLIS and CLUG, see Elizabeth Keslacy, “Fun and Games: The Suppression of Architectural Authoriality and the Rise of the Reader,” Footprint, no. 17 (2015), 101-124.

20 METROPOLIS was designed by Richard Duke, while CLUG was authored by Allan Feldt, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan, and Duke's collaborator in the Environmental Simulation Laboratory.

21 Keslacy, “Fun and Games” (note 19), 105.

22 The exhibition was well documented by a young Paul Goldberger, writing several years before he joined the staff of the New York Times. Goldberger, “Lower Manhattan Makes a Fine Exhibition of Itself,” New York Times, July 14, 1975.

23 Lisa Taylor to Charles Blitzer, Director of the Office of Education and Training, Smithsonian Institution, June 24, 1974. Box 40, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 267, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Records, 5.

24 Emily Stillman to Lisa Taylor, September 12, 1973. Box 42, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 267, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Records.

25 Emily Stillman, “Collection of Environmental Design, or Documenting ‘The Changing Man-Made Landscape,’” ca. 1974. Box 42, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 267, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Records, 1–2.

26 Ibid., 2.

27 “Friends of the Environmental Design Collections,” ca. 1975. Box 33, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 492, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Office of the Director, Subject Files.

28 “Minutes and Comments on the Meeting of the Environmental Design Committee of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum held at CUNY, May 8, 1964 at 2 p.m.,” ca. 1974. Box 33, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 492, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Office of the Director, Subject Files.

29 Denise Scott Brown to Lisa Taylor, July 19, 1974. Box 33, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 492, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Office of the Director, Subject Files.

30 “The point is to show that design is the result of the effort, lifestyle, aspirations and needs of a great many people, most of whom are not architects, industrial designers, graphic designers or city planners.” “The Design Process: Opening Exhibition of the National Museum of Design, Smithsonian Institution,” ca. 1973. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 531, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Department of Exhibitions, Exhibition Records.

31 Isozaki reported that the profile of the cage's deformations was based on the curves of Marilyn Monroe's legs, a geometry he claimed to have also utilized in his 1973 Marilyn chairs.

32 These included Ettore Sottsass Jr., Joe Colombo, Marco Zanuso, Gaetano Pesce, Archizoom, and Superstudio, among others.

33 Emilio Ambasz, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape; Achievements and Problems of Italian Design (New York: Distributed by New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, Conn., 1972), 139; emphasis in the original.

34 The material Sottsass contributed to MANtransFORMS was part of a larger project that he began in 1972 and concluded in 1979, one that would later be published as Design Metaphors and then simply Metaphors. See Ettore Sottsass and Barbara Radice, Design Metaphors (New York: Rizzoli, 1988); Ettore Sottsass, Milco Carboni, and Barbara Radice, Ettore Sottsass: Metaphors (Milan: Skira; London: Thames & Hudson, 2002).

35 Hollein was (and continues to be) well known for his 1968 polemical essay, “Alles Ist Architektur” (note 4) in which he argued that architecture had surpassed building, opening up the category to include such diverse phenomena as psychopharmaceuticals, fashion, and media. A discussion at the Paris think tank explicitly likened the museum's intellectual project as an extension of his thesis, radically expanding the traditional category of design just as Hollein had for architecture.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth M. Keslacy

Author Biography

Elizabeth Keslacy is a Lecturer at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, where she recently received her doctorate in architectural history and theory. Her research centers on architectural discourse, pedagogy, and museology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She received a BS in Architecture from the University of Michigan and an MArch from the Southern California Institute of Architecture. She also teaches at Kendall College of Art and Design.