Is an association between design and the environment obvious ? Or is it a tautology ? Actually, it’s in thinking in terms of environment that design finds, throughout its history, its legitimacy and development. According to its etymology and its root vir, the term environment covers round form, going round, what’s around. It can be grasped as container (in the form of a circle or ring) coming from a movement (going ‘round) and dealing with the contents (what’s around, the surroundings). For this reason, the environment refers to a place for living, an ambiance, a neighbourhood, in other words, to everything that is about the construction of the world and its liveability. It’s what design deals with in its most committed foundations and what will be embodied in different forms according to the period and its specific issues.

It is not a question here of going over the whole of design history with this question in mind. However, we cannot ignore the approach of the Shaker’s proto-design or the position of Catherine Beecher and her economic and political reflections on domestic life and the fitting out of American houses with, in the background, feminist and abolitionist claims. In their time, the leaders of the arts and crafts movement, such as Ruskin and William Morris, or Henri Cole, promoter of industrial manufacturing “marrying grand art and mechanical capacity,” worried about the consequences of industrialization on conditions for workers, pollution and an unhealthy habitat. Founded after WWII, the Ulm school, following the Bauhaus, would make the environment its program. In 1969, the English historian Reyner Banham publishes The Architecture of the Well-tempered environment {1} for two days while what is being prepared under his expertise are the international meetings for design in Aspen (IDCA) which in 1970 would give rise to stormy debates. That same year, in the spring of 1970, Emilio Ambasz, newly appointed design curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, announces his ambition to make the museum an active protagonist in the debate on the processes that construct the contemporary environment, whether it be the natural world or that made by humans. For this reason, in January 1972, he inaugurates the Universitas program, Solutions for a Post-Technological Society in which architects, city planners and theoreticians, including Jean Baudrillard, met for two days. {2} In France, the Ministère des Affaires Culturelles founds the Institut de l’Environnement in 1968, which was the center for teaching and research for a program on urban planning, architecture, design and communication in order to meet the challenge of a “sensitive environment,” as André Malraux called it. The teaching reform of the Beaux-arts from 1972-1973 results in two types of departments or options in the school : environment and communication. {3} In this same vein, the government of Jacques Chaban Delmas (1969-1970) tries to define the issues of the environment by associating several ministries to join forces on questions about nature and the development of the territory. So in this way, around 1970, in France and on the international level, in all of the industrialized countries, the environment becomes a primordial question. {4} Debates that aim to define the principles of broaching the issue become arenas of theoretical and conceptual tensions. They crystallize economic and political issues shaped by the relationship between modernity and nature.

For this reason, the declaration written by Jean Baudrillard for the French delegation under the supervision of the designer Roger Tallon during the meetings in Aspen in 1970 takes on meaning. “Aspen is the Disneyland of the environment and design. The problem is far from Aspen. It’s the whole theory of design and the environment itself which constitutes a generalized Utopia, a Utopia produced by the capitalist system, which dresses itself up as a second nature in order to survive and perpetuate itself under the pretext of being nature.”

This declaration, associated with the reactions and demonstrations of students and environmental activists present in 1970, marks a turning point for the Aspen meetings. The Special Edition of the Aspen Times put together by the students of CalArts in Los Angeles under the supervision of Sheila Levrant de Breteville in 1971, and published in this issue of Rosa B, reveals new forms and new themes.
In 2008, at Gasworks in London, from September 19 to November 9, artist Martin Beck makes the exhibition Panel 2 : “Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes…” By revisiting particular elements from Aspen 1970, and having the text by the French delegation staged and read in the forest in Aspen (in his video The Environmental Witch-Hunt, 2008), Beck’s exhibition enables us to grasp once again the historical references and bring them back into play forty years later. Martin Beck’s interest in questions of historicity and their visual representation make it possible to see debates on the environment in the context in which they arose, while by taking up modernist elements once again, the denouement of modernism and the new confrontations born of the post-modern movement are brought up to date.

At the heart of this preoccupation for the built environment, it is the revolution of the object and the sign, which Jean Baudrillard advocates in some of his principal texts, that is put into play. This semiotic adventure (a theme dear to poststructuralist trends) concerns all fields of activity as well as the function of the image itself in the so-called “Society of the Spectacle.” It is in this context that postmodernism is meaningful, for describing the cultural turning point as well as the changes in the sign and the image that start to transform our relationship to the environment starting with a new awareness of modes of production (Emilio Ambasz’s “man-made environment”). In addition to this, there is a new type of materialism rooted in the criticism of authoritarian and Universalist values passed down from the modernist heritage. This adventure of the sign and the environment is the subject of a chapter in Baudrillaud’s work Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign), published two years after the conference of the IDCA in Aspen and in the intensity and excitement of the theoretical/practical activity of the Institut de l’Environnement in Paris. In this chapter entitled “Design and Environment”, starting with functionality defined by the Bauhaus as a double movement of analysis and rationalization of forms (not only industrial but also environmental and social), Baudrillard reconfigures the revolution of the object into an even more precise synthesis — that of the sign {5}. In spite of this, the volatilization of the sign starts to manifest itself through symptoms that question this same idea of modern functionalism. Confronted with the new challenges of technical acceleration and cybernetics, and subject to the caprices of a consumer society and the Society of the Spectacle, the sign starts to slowly get rid of its references. It acquires its own life, thus prefiguring a budding postmodernism. According to Baudrillard, from this moment on, design immerses itself in fashion or in the mass media. Everything that is considered marginal in the precedent period, irrational, anti-art, anti-design, from pop to psychedelic, obeys the same economy of the sign whether we like it or not. In this sense, nothing can escape design. This is the supreme victory of a postmodernism that manifests itself using a whole series of resources, almost like tics, out of complexity, irony, ambiguity, play, temporal multiplicity and in a more particular way, aesthetic and utopian monumentality. The sign separates itself from its reference, the social and historical world, in order to develop itself in an extended and floating self-referential autonomy. In this sense, and according to Baudrillard, the question of environment doesn’t just emerge from an awareness of nature and ecology, but from within social practices which ultimately aim to affect the image and the production of forms. Semiotics (but also sociology) are fields in which an ecology of sign and an ecology of form can be conceived of without losing sight of the new media-environmental awareness.

This historical debate applied to creativity in design makes us wonder today about the limits of postmodernism, which as a cultural style is often presented as obsolete. At the same time, it poses questions about the options and emerging possibilities. On the one hand, any return to modernism seems practically impossible, whereas postmodernism itself (stylistically speaking, with its attachment to the beautiful but useless form) has been shown to be ineffective for grasping the potential of objects and forms in our contemporary world. Philippe Starck’s Juicy Salif lemon squeezer, which Paolo Deganello considers to be the ultimate unnecessary object, is one of the examples most frequently cited to demonstrate the ironic inanity of postmodernism. {6} After the fact (history always shows the full measure of aesthetic trends and remains the scene of surprising iconic ideas), Baudrillard’s own position after Aspen is itself associated with a standard positioning of the postmodern type rather than with a type of radical ‘70’s design, such as that of Deganello or Archizoom, or with a particular progressive and critical trend.

At the present moment, we are making the hypothesis that the semiotics of the constructed environment brings us around to ecology of form. Conceived from a maximum of function and usefulness, the forms come from the search for an efficient material and technical combination. This ecology puts the accent on the potential use of forms. When looking for solutions, it promotes the recycling of ideas to the point where, occasionally it is more appropriate to acquire a standard product on the market than to design another product on purpose. What ecology of form advocates in art and in design is a wartime economy in order to take full advantage of the creativity, which already exists around us. In this sense, environment and ecology, like nature and culture, are no longer matters of identifiable separation. What is there and available belongs to “one and the same production of nature-societies, of collectives,” according to the terms used by Bruno Latour in his development of a third path. {7} Neither modern nor postmodern, the non modern emerges in our reality. It is for this reason that Rosa B proposes to put the question of environment and design back into play. In the wake of Martin Beck and the reactivation of the Aspen documents that he carries out through his exhibition, and following the publication of his book The Aspen Complex Edited by Martin Beck and with his participation for this issue, Rosa B takes the form of an archive, a bringing up to date of historical documents that puts the current debates on the manufacture of our environment back into perspective. {8}