December 02, 2003
Rethinking the Science of Design: A Review of Hfg Ulm: The Political History of the Ulm School of Design
by Shantel Blakely
What if one could try to change the "alphabet" of design to fit the world of experience? What if communication could be made more rational? Such was the project undertaken at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (“School of Design,” hereafter HfG), a school of industrial design and “visual communication” in Ulm, Germany, which opened in 1953 and closed in 1968. In its early phase, the School’s focus was aesthetics; in its late phase, bitter criticism. “Scientific operationalism,” the guiding philosophy of its “middle period” (roughly 1958-1965), is a case study in radical positivism. Hfg Ulm: The View Behind the Foreground, an encyclopedic “political history” by René Spitz, provides a meticulous, encyclopedic overview of this distinctive school.
During the 1950’s and 1960’s, the launching of satellites, routine space flight, and, by 1969, a walk on the moon provided imagery of human power amplified by technology, fueling cultural imaginations tuned in to new media in the context of an economic boom. While some architectural practices (like those of Alison and Peter Smithson, the Metabolist movement, and Archigram) helped themselves to the imagery of this culture, another kind of response was to adopt a tone of research and strategy. Mirroring the Cold War between covert superpowers, these analytical practices sought to define and solve design problems under conditions of specialization, secrecy, and urgency. Buckminster Fuller’s “geosphere” and “spaceship earth” exemplified this “operational” tendency, as did the HfG. While student work in early issues of its journal, Ulm, evoke a “central command” image of design, the theoretical and critical writings of its faculty and guest lecturers glow with intense, if guarded, optimism.
The HfG was initially headed by Max Bill, who sought to resume the project of the Dessau Bauhaus, where he had been a student before the school was closed; to this end, Bill modeled his design of the HfG’s building on the Dessau complex [FIG 1]. In retrospect, his own aesthetic program seems to have been a significant source of the institution’s agenda. The School’s early focus on everyday objects was in line with Bill’s celebration of aesthetic excellence (in the exhibition “Die gute Form” (“Good Form”), for example). Work at the school was also characterized by an emphasis on mathematics in the design process. [FIG 2]
“Scientific operationalism” was the project of Tomas Maldonado, a painter and early faculty member at the HfG who eventually replaced Bill as the HfG’s rector. Maldonado, a proficient orator, introduced his new curriculum in 1958. In a manifesto-like speech, he rejected the aesthetic orientation of the Bauhaus as well as American “styling” of the 1930’s. He also criticized Reyner Banham’s celebration of industrial design as a form of popular art. He dismissed the past emphasis on the aesthetic dimensions of objects; in the new curriculum, scientific subjects replaced those of craft and artistic expression. In addition, the designer was not meant to become a scientist, only to understand his language. Positioned at the “nerve centers of our industrial civilization,” Maldonado announced, the new designer and the public he serves are meant to rely “on the finesse and precision of his methods of thought and work, on the breadth of his scientific and technical knowledge, as well as on his capacity of interpreting the most secret and most subtle processes of our culture.”
At 463 pages, Spitz's tome presents an impressive amount of information that encompasses the founding, running, and collapse of this school, drawing from several archives documented in the book’s 1500 footnotes. While the book’s coffee-table dimensions may evoke visions of glossy color photos of industrial design products—say, of faculty member Hans Gugelot's sensuously minimal designs for Braun—there are few seductive images here (for a more friendly introduction, see Herbert Lindinger’s Ulm Design and issues of Ulm). Nonetheless, this volume, perhaps best viewed as a companion to other sources of information, does much to illuminate the administrative underpinnings of the Ulm School.
Arguably, there is too much detail here—do we need so many photos of bespectacled bureaucrats or details of so many meetings? The determined soul who is undaunted by these dense pages will be hard-put to keep up with the narrative, which often doubles back on itself to retell events from another point of view. But one is grateful for the many delightful passages in these pages, including details of Bill's stormy, controversial fall from power, of Otl Aicher's equally stormy, equally controversial ascent, and of the role of the German press in the school and beyond. In keeping with the political theme, chapters cover the rectorship of Max Bill, the “governing boards” that ruled in his wake, and the subsequent rectorships of Aicher, Maldonado, and Herbert Ohl. A chapter on “Prehistory” describes the early ideas of the School’s founders and explains the involvement of American authorities in funding the school, while two “Excurses” offer imagery of “current events” in design and politics. 
The value of such meticulous detail is not literary but practical, as Spitz and his publisher seem to have recognized. For American audiences familiar with the HfG only through Kenneth Frampton’s landmark essay “Apropos Ulm” (1974), publication of Hfg Ulm may prompt a much-needed historiographic shift in the until-now meager English-language literature. While Frampton’s incisive article is preeminent among English-language interpretations, its polemical tone reflects the author’s determination to deliver an urgent message to other architects in the American context of the early 1970’s; and the piece is circumscribed by the limited historical information that was then available.
The gist of Frampton’s claim is that “critical theory” arose at the HfG, and its fate within those walls was that of critical theory everywhere: it was silenced—first from within, then from without. By “critical theory,” Frampton means negative critique as exemplified by members of the Frankfurt School, for instance Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer who argued, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, that the best intentions of culture are hopelessly constrained in capitalist society. At best, they argued, the artist—or architect—is like Odysseus. Tied to the mast of his ship by his comrades, he can hear and feel the siren cries of the masses, but cannot respond to them.
This claim has tremendous éclat today, as it must have in 1974. Frampton is one of very few critics and scholars of architecture to pursue a critical path, and he does so with exceptional candor. To a reader of Ulm, Frampton's assessments ring true. Early scenes of faculty contributors interrogating science, dissecting marketing studies, examining corporate policies, and similar critical undertakings give way to later issues in which the critical writers Maldonado, Claude Schnaidt, and Gui Bonsiepe reluctantly but bravely approach the mute negativity of Horkheimer and Adorno (or of Manfredo Tafuri). Meanwhile, the voice of Aicher stands out as that of a “rear guard,” as Frampton notes.
But some of Frampton’s inferences are puzzling. It is difficult to digest the image of Otl Aicher as an apologist for the state, for example. Aicher was a co-founder of the HfG along with his wife, Inge Aicher-Scholl, and Max Bill. Having been a member of the White Rose movement of resistance to the Nazis in the 1930’s and early ‘40’s, and having helped to cultivate the HfG from its very beginnings as a line of resistance to mainstream politics, could he, by 1965, have melted into the “establishment,” as Frampton seems to suggest?
A second area of complexity concerns the critical writers. How critical were they? As Frampton observes, Maldonado was part of this group in the early 1960's. But Maldonado’s theoretical stance was never the kind of negative critique that characterized the Critical Theory school of post-war Marxism. From the late 1950's, when he first began to interrogate science, to the mid-1970's, his preoccupation with science is ongoing. The tone of his theory of “praxiology,” outlined in Design Nature and Revolution (1972), recalls the positions voiced in “Science and Design,” the essay he co-authored with Bonsiepe in 1960. In both cases, Maldonado sounds a mildly optimistic tone: he considers both disciplinary positivism and its dialectical side effects, and ultimately hovers somewhere in between.
Spitz provides details that ease these apparent contradictions between reality and historical record . Illuminating biographical detail on Aicher enables the reader to place his writings in the context of his role as an administrator during a major ideological conflict that erupted at the school. While Spitz lays no claim to objectivity, the virtue of this account of HfG history—at least with respect to the meager American, Anglophone literature—lies in its plurality. For the reader of Spitz’s book, Frampton’s schema of critical writers-against-uncritical designers gives way; a spectrum of critical positions replaces the monolithic readings that Frampton’s article appears to have encouraged.
How Maldonado, Bonsiepe, and Schnaidt can have so studiously succeeded in putting design and science into question, without abandoning their identities as designers, is as puzzling and open-ended as a Zen koan. Maybe Critical Theory at the HfG was silenced by force. To some extent, it—like the school as a whole—appears to have collapsed under the weight of its own ideals. To return to the metaphor above, its obsessive focus was theelusive “alphabet” of design. An alphabet of any sort is still a positivist scheme. As such, it revives the chilling critique of science first advanced by Manfredo Tafuri, the Marxist historian and critic of architecture: architecture can never “fit” human needs any better than suits the prevailing scheme of profit. The discourse of architecture has not yet managed to respond adequately or dismiss Tafuri’s critique. In the context of this persistent complexity and ultimate lack of resolution, however, the history of the HfG remains a compelling study in critical and theoretical discourse on design.
Shantel Blakely is a doctoral student in the Department of Architecture at Columbia University.
Posted by agglutinations at December 2, 2003 06:06 AM