Referring to the environment as a political issue for the construction of a living environment, the declaration of the French delegation in Aspen is striking because of its radicalism. It has given rise to numerous debates and disputes and much criticism. Forty year later, the crisscrossing accounts made by Françoise Jollant/Braunstein, François Barré, Odile Hanappe, and Gilles de Bure, all present in Aspen in 1970, shed light on this declaration and the conditions in which it came into existence. This spirited and hedonistic experience, in connection with May 1968, is re-examined with a critical and often amused eye.
The group’s composition
In 1970, the French delegation was the fourth foreign group ever to have been invited to Aspen, after the Portuguese, Swedish and English groups. Eliot Noyes, the designer, had negotiated invitation grants from IBM. He called upon the designer Roger Tallon, who was accompanied by Nicole Tallon {1}, to make up a delegation to which Gilles de Bure, the journalist from CREE magazine, was added. Choices were made from amongst the turbulent French design and architecture scenes. The sociologist Jean Baudrillard, had just published his book Le système des objets (The System of Objects) in 1968. Jean Aubert, architect, was one of the founders of the magazine Utopie in which Jean Baudrillard was a collaborator. Economist and mathematician Odile Hanappe was a teacher at the Institut de l’Environnement which had just been created in 1969. François Barré was associate director of the CCI (Centre Création Industrielle) which he had just founded side by side with François Mathey in 1969 {2}. Claude Braunstein, initially director of the IBM design center, had been director of research at the Institut de l’Environnement since January 1970. He was accompanied by Françoise Jollant/Braunstein. The geographer André Fischer was a specialist on industrial geography. Ionel Schein, the architect who had conceived the first all-plastic house, which had been presented at the Salon des arts ménagers (household arts) in 1956, was one of the founders of the GIAP (Groupe International d’Architecture Prospective) also founded in 1965. The architect Enrique Ciriani had been a member of the AUA (Atelier d’Urbanisme et d’Architecture) since 1968.
The trip and the visit
For this little French group, fresh from May 1968, Aspen was the very locus of all of their contradictions. In spite of any reserves they may have had with regard to the United States, which was in the middle of the Vietnam War, and to this invitation financed by the most prominent companies of a capitalistic world, they were nonetheless dazzled by the welcome they received and the course of these encounters.
They all share memories of an eventful plane trip from Denver to Aspen, as related by Gilles de Bure: “... A propeller plane then, not exactly brand new, twenty seats crammed together, hardly comfortable. But with only 40 minutes of flying time, we’ll make do. In this month of June (The International Design Conference in Aspen always takes place in June), the sun is violent, the temperature high and the air seriously lacking in oxygen, that key element. Let’s just say that the air pockets come one after another; the higher we rise, the deeper, more abysmal, brutal, interminable they are. In short, the passengers are shaken up as never before. The worst flight imaginable. The plane finally lands in Aspen. Deep silence, nobody moves. It takes several minutes for the first passenger to decide to get up and get his footing back on ‘terra firma.’
The last one to descend, literally green, doubled over, staggering on wobbling legs, eyes staring into space, Roger Tallon, distraught, lost, dumbfounded, not of this world. Incredible that this machine of a man, this locomotive of a designer who had conceived, designed, transformed so many mobile contraptions for public works, motorcycles, automobiles, subways, funiculars, trains...doesn’t like planes, can’t stand planes, loathes airplanes (and air pockets)... We chuckled about it even though we ourselves had been seriously shaken up...” {3}
The flight is quickly forgotten. Dive into the swimming pool and into the international milieu of militant movements. “The trip was paid for, we had a per diem and we were put up in an extraordinary environment,” remembers Françoise Jollant- Braunstein. “We were in paradise, with all the means provided by the big companies. We played the game,” says Odile Hanappe. “I went to Berkeley, Princeton and Stanford. {4} It was a breath of fresh air compared to the intellectual climate in France. Nothing is agressive. To our great surprise, everybody listens. They were humanists.” “I felt like it was a vacation, a great opportunity to go to the US. Henrique Ciriani and I went to New York on the way over, where we spent our nights out,” says François Barré. “I had never seen any place like Aspen where there are so many people who talk about their experiences so freely and informally during long walks or cocktails. It was like a reward. Relaxation was an efficient method for transmitting knowledge. I’ve always dreamed of inventing a French-style Aspen.”
“I really had fun and learned a lot,” remembers Gilles de Bure. “Design was broached in another manner than by the product; it was also approached as the conception of something which can’t be designed. Design is taken in its largest sense, with sociologists, politicians, musicians, filmmakers, artistic directors...With Georges Nelson or Milton Glaser we talked more about cinema and politics than we did about design. After Aspen, I left for San Francisco with Bill. {5} We saw Oh! Calcutta!” {6}
A few months later, during one of his visits to Paris, Eliot Noyes has lunch with Gilles de Bure at La Coupole. Observing the difficulties in communication caused by the language barrier, and in order to avoid one group closing itself off from the others, Gilles de Bure reconsiders the principle of national delegations. He is later given the responsibility, for several years, of accompanying delegations using a new and more open principle: 12 English speakers, from 10 different countries and from 8 disciplines.
The declaration, circumstances and debates
Few members of the delegation spoke English, which made communication difficult. Françoise Braunstein acted as interpreter. Nevertheless, they remember arriving in Aspen ready to fight with the Americans. The conferences took place in a marquee in a slightly elitist atmosphere. Everything was done in a rather informal mode of exchange, in which knowledge was shared freely and in good spirits. “The French participants had come with the conviction that they were the bearers of change for the world, faced with the Americans who were diametrically opposed,” explains François Barré. “We thought we would teach them a lesson (we were under the effect of May ’68). We thought that design had to rediscover its foundations and democratic intentions in the manner of Gropius. At the same time, we spoke English badly and had an uncomfortable feeling of confinement. While people were highly respectful of Roger Tallon and Jean Baudrillard, they nevertheless found us nicely boring.”
Although there was no obligation for the delegation to make a presentation, certain members decided to stand out as different by writing a manifesto to be read to the gallery. Jean Aubert and François Barré appealed to Jean Baudrillard in particular to write a text. “We turned Jean Baudrillard into the representative of a movement. In fact, this role we wanted to give him, as political spokesman, was not really his thing. He wasn’t trying to create disciples. Jean Baudrillard didn’t like this kind of demonstration but he liked the people who were there. He wrote the text in spite of this misunderstanding,” relates François Barré.
Translated by Françoise Jollant-Braunstein, the text was read the last day without provoking the hoped-for cataclysm. {7} “We were all very nervous,” remembers Françoise Jollant-Braunstein. “At the end, they applauded very nicely. Some of us were humiliated; this was frankly not the reaction they had wanted.”
Back in France, Odile Dumas-Hanappe, as representative of the Institut de l’Environnement, made a mission report: “Environment and design in the United States” in which she recounted the people she met in Aspen and the visits she made at the time to Berkeley, Stanford and Princeton. The search for innovation in teaching methods in association with a knowledgeable relationship to the environment that the Institut de l’Environnement supported, found other references. The delegation’s declaration was included in an annex to the document.
At the time of its writing and presentation, this text had little impact. We can attribute the cause in part to the linguistic isolation of the French delegation and in part to its mission-like, rather autocratic intentions, out of step with the prevailing freedom and the critical level of these meetings. It is not until after the fact that this declaration would take on a mythical value. Although Jean Baudrillard later worried that he had not been listened to, this declaration had nonetheless been heard by the professionals and students present at the conference. As proof of this, and because it represented the crystallization of a debate, Reyner Banham published it in Aspen Papers next to the conference given by Peter Hall. {8}
Because it reveals a real gap in concepts of the environment, this declaration has become a reference. In France, it has led to debates between the conception of an environment/living context, such as the Institut de l’Environnement and its director, Claude Schnaidt, trained at the Ulm school calls for, and the concept of an environment/simulation of nature that belongs to the system of the political economy of signs developed by Jean Baudrillard. {9}
Accounts collected by Jeanne Quéheillard
{1} Close friends of Georges and Jacqueline Nelson.
{2} Initially, the philosopher Henri Lefebvre, of the Institut de L’Urbanisme, had been invited but didn’t want to make the trip because of his advanced age. Antoine Haumont, sociologist and director of research at the Institut de l’environnement, declined the offer to represent the institute because he hated taking planes. It was Odile Hanappe, therefore, who went to Aspen accompanied by her husband, the economist Paul Hanappe.
{3} Gilles de Bure, “Les mots de Roger, les silences de Tallon” in the catalogue Mathias Jousse présente Roger Tallon, Jousse Entreprise, Paris, 2012.
{4} See Odile Dumas-Hanappe in the annex “De l’environnement et du design aux Etats-Unis. Rapport de mission.” In Environnement 1, Institut de l’Environnement, Paris, February, 1971.
{5} Bill is the nickname Baudrillard is given by his close friends.
{6} Oh! Calcutta! is a musical revue created by Kenneth Tynan in 1969, directed by Jacques Levy, a close friend of Bob Dylan’s.
{7} As Jean Baudrillard didn’t speak English, Françoise Braunstein read the text.
{8} “The Environmental Witch-Hunt. Statement by the French Group,” 1970, pp. 208-210. The Liberal Conspiracy. Peter Hall.1970, pp. 211-214. In The Aspen Papers. Twenty Years of Design Theory from the International design Conference in Aspen. Edited and with commentary by Reyner Banham, New York, Praeger, 1974.
{9} In a conference held at the Ecole d’architecture de l’université de Genève in 1972, Claude Schnaidt, then director of the Institut de l’Environnement declared: “I’ll skip the diverse uses of the theme of the environment in the last big myths of our society in crisis: return to the earth, zero growth, etc., and will then come back to this interesting aspect. For the moment, I would like to say that one must not get impassioned for a worthless discussion on the environment to the point of denying all reality of the material problems that it covers. To proclaim, as in the case of Baudrillard at the Aspen conference in 1970, that the problems of the environment are only objective in appearance, that they were invented with the unique goal of conjuring up a revolution, is to commit a serious error. The facts, when we look carefully at them, are much more nuanced.” Claude Schnaidt, “Regards sur le terrain accidenté des environneurs et des environnés.” In Autrement dit. Ecrits 1950-2001. Abridged text of the conference written under the same title at the École d’architecture de l’université de Genève in 1972, published in its integral version under the title “Ausblickauf das zerklüftete Gelände der Umweltmacher und Umweltbürger,” in Claude Schnaidt: “Umweltbürger und Umweltmacher.” Dresde, VEB Verlag der Kunst 1982, pp. 302-311; Umwelt, Gestaltung und Persönlichkeit — reflexionen 30 jahre nach Gründung der Ulmer Hochschule für Gestaltung. Hildesheim, Georg Olms Verlag, 1986, pp.146-161.
During the same period, Jean Baudrillard published “Design et environnement ou l’Escalade de l’économie politique” in Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe, Editions Gallimard, 1972.