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
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 systems 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Many of his projects remain unpublished, and, as with many designers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 contemplated 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
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 product but rather the process of design itself. This is, in many ways, a satisfying 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 aforementioned 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 addition 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
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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 blankness 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 environment, 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
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 situation 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. Seen in this way, the familiar notion that creation is
“good” while destruction is “bad” turns out to have no meaning
whatever. . . . Evolution and revolution, creation and destruction,
are different names for the same thing. We use one or the other
depending on our choice of a frame of reference.10
Nelson also appears to have drawn heavily on the ubiquitous warinflected rhetoric and violent spatial metaphor of Schumpeter’s text,
transposing Schumpeter’s theory of the transformation of modes of production into the arena of the product itself. In Schumpeter, for instance,
we read of the new regime of competition under the aegis of creative
destruction:
competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage . . . and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and
the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and
their very lives. This kind of competition is much more effective
than the other as a bombardment is in comparison with forcing
a door.11
Compare this text, on the promise of the threatening space of the
market, with Nelson’s evocative description of the new world order
after 1945–47:
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The fear of sudden annihilation all of us have carried since
Hiroshima is not entirely new. Mankind in its short history has
lived out most of its days in jeopardy; and jeopardy, if you are
exposed to it—or think you are—feels total, regardless of its specific nature. But today’s fear is different in one sense: we created
it. The Black Death which destroyed something between onequarter and three-quarters of the population where it struck had
no known cause or cure in the medical science of the 14th century. The Bomb was programmed, designed, built, and exploded
by people who presumably knew exactly what they were doing. It
is, I think, this new sense of intellectual mastery over the physical
world that is making us so acutely and unhappily aware of the
world over which seemingly we have no mastery at all.12
At first glance, Nelson seems to be echoing the core irony of the post–
World War II period, a sentiment to be found in liberal treatises on everything from literature to politics to engineering in the 1950s.13 Yet upon
closer inspection, Nelson shows us his hand. He uses the same metaphors—
death, striking, and bombing—as Schumpeter does, but rather than
deploy them according to the economist’s logic of supply, demand, and
profit, Nelson reorients the entire matter of capitalist destruction (whether
creative or not) around the dynamic between producer and product.
The key to unpacking Nelson’s rather dense statement is the difference, in the last sentence, between “the physical world” and “the world
over which seemingly we have no mastery at all.” The physical world,
evidently enough, corresponds to the realm of production. We can program, design, and build The Bomb, and afterward we may use it—
destroying both it and its targets. However, Nelson argues, this relatively
simple process is no cycle. Once the bomb is destroyed, it takes us with
it. Another way of saying this is that Nelson’s point of departure from
conventional texts on production—even one of such shared violence as
Schumpeter’s—was not the consideration of the practice of design per
se, or even the industrial process itself, but rather the aftermath of the
productive act. For Nelson, the end point of the product’s life as an
object is rarely consumption—neither in the neoclassical economic
sense of “purchase” and/or “use,” nor in the Marxian sense of the “using
up” of a product in order to “reproduce the means of production”—but
rather destruction and destructiveness. This destruction of the product—aka the “industrial object”—could either itself be productive (in
Marxian terms, reproductive) or destructive (tending toward an utter
objectivity, a nihilism). That final product of homo faber, The Bomb,
is for Nelson paradigmatic: a world-destroying object rather than a
world-making object.14 The world beyond control that this previously
Harwood | The Wound Man: George Nelson and the “End of Architecture”
95
physical object produces is not susceptible to our manipulation because
the subjectivity that we once possessed within the physical (objective)
regime corresponding to that subjectivity has been destroyed in the
making of the object. For the production of product always and already
engenders use.
The example of the bomb is, admittedly, extreme; however, the
metaphors of the bomb, the blow, and death are nonetheless present, in
varying forms, in most of Nelson’s writings on design and form the fundamental elements of his theory of production.15 The producer (for
Nelson, the designer) becomes destroyed product (designed object),
precipitating a complex state of affairs that Nelson devoted the remainder of his career to explicating.
Nelson worked to embody this fragmentation and displacement of
the designer and designed object in his own person, perhaps nowhere
so obviously as in his performance at the Visual Communications
Conference at MoMA, sponsored by the Art Directors’ Club of New
York and Herman Miller, in 1960. The lecture was a performative version of an essay he had written three years earlier on “Obsolescence.”16
His presentation began silently, with hundreds of ugly slides of the
American urban landscape displayed on three screens, after which
Nelson proclaimed that “The product is our great achievement, the
crowning glory of our civilization. The product is with us everywhere—
at home, on the road, in outer space, on the beach—weak in design, imitative, derivative, highly styled but rarely well designed, lacking in
integrity.”17 The product had replaced the human being at the center of
culture, Nelson asserted, whereupon he vanished from the lectern and
was replaced by a “bright green robot” who finished the lecture by playing a tape recording of Nelson’s voice, mechanically distorted. Nelson’s
robot stunt double then introduced a film, Elegy in a Junk Yard, which
demonstrated that the quintessence of urban modernity “is junk.” The
film cut between tightly framed shots of recognizable but discarded or
broken products and wide-angle shots of mountains of debris. In keeping with the theses of both Schumpeter and his contemporary Peter
Drucker, the thesis of the film—later spelled out clearly in the pages of
Perspecta—was not just that America produced excessive waste but
that America and its designers did not thoroughly enough do away with
what was obsolete. In the heaping mounds of waste in the junkyard,
Nelson maintained, we see only a reflection of our own outmoded
selves. The broken product is a broken body, wounded but not yet dead,
deprived of all but a sliver of its former subjectivity.
Nelson’s provisional solution was to embrace this process of creative
destruction fully, even radically. The designer would have to engage with
the problem of destroying products and people anew. As he wrote in 1967,
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“Prehistoric Man Throwing a
Tied Stone.” From Edwin Tunis,
Weapons (Cleveland: The World
Publishing Company, 1954).
To a designer, anything that is, is obsolete. . . .
We do not need fresh technologies to show us how to upgrade
housing—but we do need a continuing method for getting rid of
the production we have outmoded. The same holds for cities.
What we need is more obsolescence, not less.18
“How to Kill People”:
The Wound Man and the Aesthetics of the Target
In 1943, I found myself looking through a pile of 8 × 10 glossy
photographs, air views of the centers of cities in the 150,000 to
250,000 range. I have forgotten why I was doing this.19
—George Nelson
In the same year as his perplexing lecture at MoMA, Nelson made a
major step in developing his theory of the fallout from the radical transformation of production in the mid-twentieth century. In 1960, collaborating with a production team at CBS, Nelson wrote and starred in a
series of television programs on design for the series Camera 3. The first
episode was, startlingly, an alternately deadpan and amusingly ironic
history and theory of weapons called “How to Kill People: A Problem
of Design.”20
Nelson knew what he was talking about. He had considerable experience in the perverse economy of the military-industrial-academic
complex. After World War II, in an article for Fortune magazine on the
rise of industrial design in the United States, Nelson could assert that
the discipline owed much of its current status to the industrial collusion with government during the Great Depression.21 In the reforms
Nelson proposed in that article, which included encouragement for
small businesses to embrace the industrial designer, the paradigm was
the newly invented jet fighter.
In the 1950s, Nelson had consulted briefly for IBM on exhibition and
computer design and, more interesting, on a real-time management system for American Airlines called SABER, which was based upon the
hardware and software then being developed for the Air Force’s SAGE
Harwood | The Wound Man: George Nelson and the “End of Architecture”
97
air defense system.22 Nelson’s work for IBM was cut short by a contractual dispute between IBM and Herman Miller, but without missing a
beat Nelson was soon working for the propaganda machine of the government, as consultant to the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). Hélène
Lipstadt and Beatriz Colomina have documented Nelson’s famous
collaboration with the Eameses and Fuller on the 1958 Moscow
Exhibition.23 Nelson was as up to date as any of his contemporary
designers on the latest in military hardware and information warfare.
In “How to Kill People,” Nelson narrated what he called his “straightfaced, ironic commentary” while brandishing actual historical weapons
borrowed from the American Museum of Natural History. Lovingly
gazing at a medieval spiked mace, he began by qualifying his subject
matter with a certain smugness:
Designers create things for people. This means that to function
successfully, to produce works of art, designers must have society’s
approval of what they are doing. Design for killing is interesting
because war occupies so much of our attention, and receives our
unquestioning support. The great advantage for the designer in
this area is that nobody cares what anything costs. This attitude
has been prevalent from the siege of Troy to the bombing of
Hiroshima. And it’s this kind of attitude towards money that has
always attracted creative people.24
In order that the audience not get the wrong idea, Nelson quickly
explained his characterization of the designer and his or her clients:
“What we’re talking about is killing—but not murder, for murder is of
no interest to the designer. Murder weapons are almost always improvised—a bathtub, a breadknife, a clothesline. What we are talking about
is the kind of killing that is supported by society.” Nelson then illustrated the point by picking up “the first lethal weapon,” a rock, which,
he emphasized by swinging it around, was “inexpensive” and had “the
great virtue of being harder than the human skull.” But, arriving at the
central thesis of the program, Nelson demonstrated that the rock had a
fundamental drawback: it was not good for killing at a distance. “When
the designer comes into the picture,” Nelson intoned, setting down the
rock and picking up a replica of a Stone-Age club, “there’s a tremendous improvement in the product. It’s more interesting to look at. [The
attacker] doesn’t have to move quite as close. And the force of the blow
is greatly increased.”25
As images of various subsequent developments in weaponry sped by
on the screen, Nelson emphasized that few fundamentally new inventions followed upon these first killing tools. While the “craftsmanship”
of the weapons improved, melding the weapons’ representational and
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Grey Room 31
“Experimental Guided Missile.”
Frontispiece to Edwin Tunis,
Weapons (Cleveland: The World
Publishing Company, 1954).
functional elements into a single “beautiful” object, weapons remained and remain
manifestations of a desire to separate
oneself as radically as possible from one’s
intended victim. One of the early leaps forward in the realization of this desire was
the bow and arrow (according to Nelson,
“the greatest of all inventions for separating
the attacker from his victim”). The ability
to kill at a distance, Nelson argued, puts an
end to the “silly myth that generals win
wars. What the facts show is that designers
do. Let me illustrate this with a simple situation. A wants to kill B. His problem is
how to do it. His best chance is to bring the
whole thing off as a big surprise.”
Surprise, of course, is a spatial relationship: A’s ability to occupy B’s
space without his knowledge, to use his extended range to bring his
telepresence into B’s distant and seemingly autonomous space. This
violence dealt at a distance requires a particular kind of activity, one
that has only recently begun to receive meaningful critical attention in
the philosophy and aesthetics of war.
As Samuel Weber has outlined in his recent book Targets of
Opportunity, the means of war have been misunderstood because of a
misidentification of the ends. Drawing on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy,
Weber shows that the classical conception of ends is divided between
two concepts: telos and skopos. In a colossal mistake, the former concept, which denotes the fulfillment of a process, has been taken to signify the ontology of all ends, at the expense of the concept of skopos, or
“targeting.” This concept of an end encompasses the idea of the goal
and the secret interpellation of—aiming at—that (unknowing) goal:
“[S]kopos designates not just the act [of targeting] but also the object of
such watching: the mark or target. It is as if the word, in designating both
object and subject, both the target and the targeting, had itself already
semantically overcome the distance and the difference in the process it
designates.”26 This collapse of distance is essential to the logic of targeting. Not only does it allow the targeting subject access to the targeted
subject (i.e., the objectified subject), but it engenders a paradoxical
space, in which the targeting subject is displaced from the safety of his
or her blind and projected into the targeted space. In brief, the hunter
becomes (also) the hunted. Nelson recognized this, and figured this
new spatial relationship in his own language. He wrote at the opening
of his essay “The Designer in the Modern World” (1957), “The designer
Harwood | The Wound Man: George Nelson and the “End of Architecture”
99
lives in the modern world. For him and his work it acts like a target,
establishing the direction of his efforts and setting up a boundary outside which these efforts become ineffective.”27 Nelson, as a designer
taking aim at the modern world, found himself aiming at himself and
his own environment.
Keenly exploiting the logic of targeting in his televisual analysis of
weapons, Nelson related an anecdote about the medieval crossbow that
clearly illustrated the distance weapon’s ability to bar subjective status:
“It shot its bolt with such force that in 1139 Pope Innocent II banned its
use—except against infidels.” Thankfully, Nelson noted with a wry
grin, “[t]he ban still left plenty of legal weapons for Christians interested in killing other Christians.” Distance weapons, we begin to suspect, as had the dead pope, threaten not just our bodies but our very
subjectivities as they expand their range and power. Turning his attention from the crossbow to an array of guns, Nelson declared that with
the invention of the firearm we took “[a] great step forward, but esthetically we paid a price.” Nelson did not mean that the guns’ ornament
was somehow more impoverished than that of the sword or bow; rather,
he was showing how the gun brings killing objects closer together into
an intimate aesthetic relationship (think of the voyeuristic intimacy of
the sniper’s scope) even as it distances subjects.28
The stakes and uniqueness of Nelson’s thinking here begin to
become clear. From a Marxian point of view the commodity fetish
simply engenders a distortion between subjects: the “magic” of exchange
value blinds the subject to the social nature of labor, objectifying that
labor in unrecognizable form. In Nelson’s destructive theory of production, however, the aesthetic relationship is always already one of an
imminent and immanent collision. As in Marx, the result is blindness,
but this blindness is not one of concealment but the attenuation and
100 Grey Room 31
“2,000-Pound Demolition Bomb.”
From Edwin Tunis, Weapons
(Cleveland: The World Publishing
Company, 1954).
collapse of vision. Speaking over footage of the Allied bombing of
Germany and jet fighters in the skies over Korea, Nelson posed a bitter
rhetorical question aimed directly at the heart of the aesthetic stakes of
weaponry. As the screen showed machines “attacking machines, at a
combined speed of two thousand miles per hour, too fast for people to
take aim and fire,” Nelson asked: “Did the Greeks and Romans ever
produce anything as beautiful as this? Young men fly multi-million
dollar machines. They read instruments, and presently they press buttons.
They don’t bother to look out; there is nothing to see.” Furthermore,
there is no “they” in the images: “It is hard to find the people anymore.
From whose plane are these bombs being dropped? And onto which
city? Had the pilot or the bombardier ever visited the city? Had they
ever seen the museums? Had they shopped in any of the shops?”29
The answer to Nelson’s rhetorical questions was, of course, no. The
target of the bomber (itself a machine, not a “pilot or . . . bombardier”)
was no longer an individual body, nor the corporate body of an army,
but rather the territory itself. Viewed from such a distance—from a
nearly Archimedean point—the space of warfare had become an almost
undifferentiated, contiguous, and wholly anonymous territory. As
Nelson would write in McCall’s seven years later, reprising the argument of “How to Kill People,” “Don’t fire until you see the tops of their
roofs.”30 This territory, however, concealed a hidden threat of its own.
With the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, weapons
began to be buried in the earth itself, giving the lie to an age-old desire:
The marvelous missiles sleeping quietly in their cradles all over
the world are indeed a triumph of design, but in many respects,
they are still traditional, still reflecting the desire of the attacker
to stay removed from his target. They are also very complicated—
the best weapons have always been more expensive than people,
but the cost of these is almost beyond comprehension. It may be
that for further improvement of killing there are principles which
still remain to be explored.31
This desire to remove oneself from one’s target—a desire impossible to
fulfill, considering the nature of the target as the shooter’s subjective
space—had resulted in guaranteeing one’s own territory as a target
through the nuclear logic of “mutual annihilation” (deterrence). The
underground missile silo is the invisible analog of the aerial bomber—
the vanishing point in the perspectival regime of the targeting eye. This
ridiculous “step forward” achieved its apotheosis for Nelson in the
design of “push-button warfare.” In describing the apparatus of intercontinental ballistic warfare, Nelson looked crestfallen: “The designers
have designed the excitement out of killing. We will never see the
Harwood | The Wound Man: George Nelson and the “End of Architecture”
101
whites of their eyes again.”32
That Nelson should approach the conclusion of his televised essay
by treating mechanized warfare—particularly the hydrogen bomb and
ICBMs—in this morally ambiguous and over-ironized manner should
not surprise us, especially considering that the Cold War was then
approaching peak intensity (the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962
was already in the works). The ironic response was a common one
among his contemporaries. His main historical and visual resource for
the television show was Edwin Tunis’s Weapons: A Pictorial History
(1954), which had for a frontispiece a line drawing of an “experimental
guided missile” and an end page depicting a mushroom cloud. Nor
again, considering his source, is his relative silence and obvious perplexity about “the bomb” surprising.
Tunis, writing in the early stages of the Cold War, presented the history of weapons as motivated by the desire to remove oneself from one’s
attacker and to increase the efficacy of this relationship by increasing
the power and range of the weapon. His book, then, is a progressively
disintegrating history of art, insofar as the history of weapons was the
history of an aesthetic relationship incessantly pushed to the point of
utter crisis. In the first instance, weapons mediated a relationship
between subjects (e.g., combat with primitive clubs or slings), but in the
last instance, they mediated a relationship only between themselves
and territory in general, as machines whose vision and invisibility forbade the very presence of subjecthood. In concluding his account,
Tunis devoted only a single, final paragraph to the “ultimate weapon”:
To end a modern book about weapons without mentioning the
atomic bomb and the more powerful hydrogen bomb would be
absurd. To try to explain them would be even more ridiculous.
Statistics mean little. The bombs are tremendous and uncomfortable facts, and that’s about all that can be said of them with certainty. A defense we can’t now imagine may neutralize them in time.
We can only hope that man will have sense enough to ban them
before it is too late.33
In a world of nuclear bombs and long-range guided missiles, there is
literally no place for “man.” The discomfort with which Tunis confronted the end of the history of weapons was thus precisely the pain of
an amputation. Weapons were no longer to be wielded, they were
autonomous and automatic technical life forms excised entirely from
the human body and returned, qua wounding force, by the touch of a
button. As Nelson would later write of buttons in his exhibition catalog
How to See, “The button is utterly neutral, does nothing but wait for the
approach of a finger, and, because of the disparity between the light
102 Grey Room 31
Joannes de Kethem. “Wound
Man,” 1491. From Fasciculus
medicinae (Venice, 1491).
touch and possibly massive consequences, has
become a metaphor for modern power fantasies.
Any idiot can push it.” Evoking the inevitable
return of the object to the body that opens and
closes the wound, he powerfully identified the
push-button with the sacrificial, wounded body
of Christ: “It is the communion wafer of technocratic society.”34
Thus it is of particular interest that Nelson
illustrated the opening credits of “How to Kill
People” with a peculiar kind of image of wounding and healing: a male body, contrapposto,
palms facing outward, displaying manifold stigmata like a denuded Christ figure; run through
with knives, spears, swords, and arrows; bruised
with stones, clubs, and maces; and, despite his
relaxed posture, even pierced by the very ground upon which he stands.
This “wound man” (also evocatively called a “wound manikin”) was a
medical diagram derived from medieval anatomical studies, used by
barber-surgeons as a reference. The particular image is taken from a late
edition of Joannes de Kethem’s Fasciculus medicinae, originally published in Venice in 1491. This type of diagram, which sought to marry
the descriptive and prescriptive medical text with a visual display
of the body’s surfaces and interior, served as a model for later, specialuse diagrams for medical texts; perhaps the most famous example
is the “wound man” engraved by Hans Wechtlin for Hans von
Gersdorff’s Feldtbuch der Wundartzney (Field Handbook of Wound
Surgery), of 1517.35
Nelson appropriated the wound man as the image of the subject of
push-button warfare, and presumably he was well aware of and
unbothered by the anachronism. After all, the thrust of his argument in
“How to Kill People” was precisely to identify the long unfolding of a
single dynamic within the history of technics—a dynamic whose basic
motion did not change, only its intensity. In what is perhaps the most
graphic register of the potential violence of the wound, the wound
man’s chest is gaping open, inscribed with the names of his exposed
organs, demonstrating the depth of the weapons’ reach into his body.
Roughly contemporary to Leonardo’s great humanist symbol, the
wound man is the other of the Vitruvian man. Its relevance to Nelson’s
argument is its antihumanism: an image of the human body as a radical
objectification. The weapons are not wielded by any attacker, they are
not tools; rather, they are disembodied from the hand of the attacker,
and reembedded in the flesh of the victim. One might say that, in the
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case of the wound man, the victim wields the weapon. Elaine Scarry
writes in her examination of war and torture that physical violence has
a tautological structure written in the paradoxical opening of the body
(i.e., the wound is both radically subjective and subject-less). Thus, in
Scarry’s language, the injury has no subject except the injuring itself:
“The activity of injuring in war . . . provides a record of its own activity.”36
Yet wounding is not entirely mute. In his reading of the conclusion
of The Odyssey, in which Odysseus disguises himself and slays his
wife’s suitors with a carefully restored and concealed bow, Weber
unpacks the description of Odysseus’s arrow piercing Antinous’s neck,
who dropped his cup “as he was hit.” With the piercing of his body,
Antinous, previously an autonomous subject capable of manipulating
objects, of holding things and holding things in, loses his power as subject and becomes nothing but a broken object nearly identical to the
shattered cup he dropped on the floor as he fell: “As he drops the goblet, spilling the wine, his body loses its ability to serve as a container—
which is to say, to define the separation of self and other, internal and
external.”37 The wound thus marks not only the inevitable return of the
weapon to the body but also the collapse of subjectivity onto the site
upon which that body is wounded: figure returns to ground as the body
hits the floor.
Nelson recognized that if every space and object was weaponized at
a scale hitherto unknown, then the converse was likewise true: defensive enclosures were necessarily reduced in scale to that of the human
body. For Nelson, the figure of that supercession of the fortress was the
medieval knight’s suit of armor.38 The anachronism hardly mattered.
The essential aspect of the suit of armor was its intimate relationship to
the human body. As a kind of second skin, the suit of armor “outers”
into a technical object the body’s “ability to serve as a container,”
to hold itself together. In other words, the generative assumption
upon which the design of the suit of armor is based is the projected vulnerability of the body that it is to protect and the recognition of the
vulnerability of one’s defensible territory.
Therefore, the suit of armor—and many other objects, especially those
designed ergonomically—demonstrate the productivity of the wound.
Rather than preventing the wound, the suit of armor is the wound, rendered into objecthood through a technique of mimetic projection. In
short, Nelson argues, in the face of the creative destruction of commodities, and especially after the blinding flashes of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, we are all walking wounded.39 Moreover, that wounding
object, the weapon, is paradigmatic for all objects, precisely because
our bodies bear the marks of having created, used, and exchanged. The
designer in particular must take aim at and inhabit this wounded area,
104 Grey Room 31
compensating for the wounds by reproducing them in effigy.
Nelson concluded his twisting and turning narrative in “How to Kill
People” with a final coup de grâce that suggested an alternative, ironic
telos of targeting. Wielding an Australian aboriginal “magic bone . . .
a weapon with no moving parts, which does not have to be thrust or
thrown, and yet . . . can kill a man,” Nelson explained, while pointing
the weapon directly at the camera, that it in combination with an incantation was “absolutely lethal.”
[T]here are too many authenticated records to permit any doubt of
its efficacy. The victim, learning what has happened, promptly
heads into the bush and presently dies. If you feel no ill effects, it
is partly because I don’t know the right phrases, but mainly
because ours is not an age of faith—except in the machine.40
By wielding this ancient weapon through the television, Nelson was of
course pointing out the status of the TV set as yet another distancing
and distance-conquering mediation. Coyly playing upon that axiom of
faithlessness, “seeing is believing,” Nelson demonstrated the social
nature of killing with which he had begun his show. The weapon—and
by extension the commodity—can properly wound and kill only if
it takes its place within an economy of vision in which the body and
target are self-same.
As Nelson had argued four years earlier in a quizzical essay on the
“‘Captive’ Designer vs(?) ‘Independent’ Designer,” this wounded body
was not only corporal but corporate, belonging to the entire profession:
“When it comes to cutting itself off at the knees by selfish and shortsighted action, the design profession is no better or smarter than the
others.”41 These twin curious discoveries—that you cannot target or
wound what you cannot see and that defensibility depended not upon
structure but rather upon farsightedness and invisibility—led Nelson
to the last large project of his design career.
The End of Architecture
Wherever we look, the message seems to be that we are moving
from the monument to the bell jar.42
—George Nelson
Nelson seemed to recognize in the objectifying power of the weapon
not only the obliteration of the comfortable nominative and ontological
distinction of subjectivity but also a collapse of the space of the subject.
In the middle of “How to Kill People,” as one of Leonardo’s theoretical
drawings on the bombardment of fortifications appeared on the screen
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(“The great Leonardo da Vinci, who turned many an honest penny
inventing engines of annihilation, made this prophetic drawing showing the castle, its contents, and its occupants obliterated in a rain of
fire.”43), Nelson demonstrated the growing irrelevance of the physical,
social, and psychological barriers of the fortress. Each weapon was
becoming more like another, all the while becoming more architectural:
“This impersonal array of unbelievable precision might be an oil refinery in Texas, a laboratory in Alaska—it happens to be a weapon, but it’s
hard to tell any longer.”44
Nelson was evoking a theme within architectural theory that has
long been ignored. From Vitruvius to Vauban to Viollet-le-Duc to Virilio
(such a list perhaps inspires one to return to the pages of Pynchon’s V
with an appropriately paranoid eye), the progressive and deliberate erosion of the protective (and weaponized) building has been a necessary
adjunct of Firmitas, Utilitas, Venustas. Although nearly any of these
authors would serve the purpose, the history of this erosion is laid out in
diagrammatic form in Viollet-le-Duc’s Annals of a Fortress, a “novel of
ideas” that has had an impact in military engineering at least as farreaching as that of his “structural rationalism” on architectural modernism.
Written in the wake of France’s embarrassment at the hands of the
Prussians in 1872, the Annals was a novel describing the history of a
mythical French city from its foundation as a small village on a hill,
through numerous invasions and changes of rulers, to a formidable
fortified city protected by ramparts, glacis, and cannon. The novel
concludes, however, with the city’s capitulation at the hands of
foreigners armed with mobile artillery and advanced camouflage techniques. An afterword, rendered as a report from a fictional French
artillery officer, bemoans the loss but puts forward a solution to the
problem of fortification.
Attack implies a shock or onset; defence is a resistance to this onset.
Whether a piece of ordnance discharges a ball against a plate of
iron, or a casing of masonry, or an earthwork; or an assaulting
column climbs a breach, the problem is substantially the same; in
either case we have to oppose to the impulsive force a resistance
that will neutralise its effect.
When there were no projectile weapons, or their range was
inconsiderable, only a normal resistance had to be opposed to
the shock—a man to a man—or if the effect was to be rendered
certain, two men to one. But when projectile arms acquired a
longer range, the position of the attack and defence became
a question of importance. . . .
It is evident, for example, that when it came to a close engage106 Grey Room 31
Viollet-le-Duc. Diagram of
enceinte de préservation, 1875.
From Annals of a Fortress, trans.
Benjamin Bucknall (London:
Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and
Searle, 1875).
ment—a hand-to-hand struggle with
an adversary; if the latter found himself placed behind a circular enclosure, the obstacle that protected
him would give him a considerable
advantage—an advantage that could
only be compensated for by renewing the attack.45
Like the suit of armor, the fortress takes
on the form perfectly expressive of the
projected wounds it expects to receive.
Within the confines of the fortress
proper is the enceinte de préservation,
an interior, subjective space safe from
bombardment by virtue of its shape, range of vision and offensive firepower, and, without, an invisible exterior zone, the enceinte de combat,
which would rely on “temporary,” mobile camps and earthworks
“affording security to a numerous army, whose manoeuvres the enemy
could not espy.”46
The spatial idea behind Viollet-le-Duc’s enceinte de préservation
is identical to that behind Marechal André Maginot’s famous proclamation that
We could hardly dream of building a kind of Great Wall of France,
which would in any case be far too costly. Instead we have foreseen powerful but flexible means of organizing defense, based on
the dual principle of taking full advantage of the terrain and establishing a continuous line of fire everywhere.47
We already know, and Nelson certainly knew, what befell the Maginot
Line. This collapse of the enceinte [enclosure] de preservation into the
enceinte de combat with the advent of the blitzkrieg, strategic bombing,
and the guided missile, is precisely what Virilio has diagnosed as the
new spatial regime of deterrence-based or “pure” war—simultaneously
offensive and defensive, in the same space, happening at the same time.48
Nelson seems to have grasped the significance for architecture and
industrial design of twentieth-century martial space: Architecture itself,
considered as an enceinte de preservation, was now obsolete. He formalized this hypothesis in a perplexing essay entitled “The End of
Architecture.” First delivered as a lecture at Harvard during his twoyear tenure there as a professor of design in the early 1970s, “The End
of Architecture” was Nelson’s attempt to come to terms with a state of
total spatial crisis. In short, he began to treat the weaponized space
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107
of the twentieth century as a design problem like any other. The central
thesis remained the same as that of “How to Kill People,” only now it
was explicitly applied to architecture and its consequences measured:
“As technology advances, experience recedes. Not always, and not
inevitably, but generally. The symbolic expression of all this is the lunar
landing: there, if a man were permitted to experience the environment
directly, he would instantly die.”49 Even worse, tele-technological
space, considered broadly, was cramped:
In the military area, given the capability of weapons now, a major
war could begin and end within 48 hours because the fronts no
longer have adequate depth. A suitable staging area for a war of
greater duration, with a minimum sporting element left in the
goings-on, would now require at least two planets.50
Nelson’s flexibility as a thinker allowed him to sustain the manifold
contradictions between his commitment to humanism and his diagnosis of a technology-based, means-ends future architecture. However,
this very flexibility pushed him into a realm that would have been
utterly ridiculous if not for the seeming reality of the threat that moved
him. Confronted with the inadequacy of architecture and architects to
create a humanist architecture at odds with advanced capitalism and
communism at war, Nelson proposed returning depth to architecture
by returning it to the depths.
This much seems clear: what we think of as the “reality” of architecture, which has so long been a conspicuous expression on the
exterior (just think of Venice or Paris or Florence for a moment) is
now shifting with considerable rapidity to the interior. Such a
transformation is not necessarily bad, but it does give rise to questions about what is happening to architecture as we are accustomed to think of it. My own hunch is that a lot of it is going to
simply vanish, first by becoming increasingly uninteresting and
then by being swallowed up into megastructures or by being
buried in the earth or covered with topsoil and planted.51
Not only buried, then, but invisible. In his last architectural projects,
produced by Harvard students and funded by a grant from the Graham
Foundation in 1971, architecture would “simply vanish . . . . Most cities
would look and feel better if half the structures in them could be made
invisible.”52 Megastructures were, Nelson noted, beginning to do just
this by “swallowing up” individual buildings, creating “hidden cities,”
and the monumental architecture of the day—embodied most clearly,
if rather oddly, for Nelson in the engineering-based work of Pier Luigi
Nervi and Buckminster Fuller—was entirely devoted to the creation of
108 Grey Room 31
George Nelson.
Ball Clock, 1947.
an interior space, anonymous and
forgettable on the exterior. Even conventional curtain-walled skyscrapers
were, for Nelson, evidence of this
transformation. Nelson called this, in a
related essay, “the emergent dominant
reality.”53 Our delicate bodies would be
perfectly preserved under a bell jar,
buried deep in an underground laboratory. Hiding from the roving eye of
satellites and spy planes, Nelson proposed, we would be safer half-buried
and half-alive, content to serve as our
own lab rats.
As he wrote in an essay for the inaugural exhibition of the CooperHewitt Museum in October 1976, Hans Hollein’s MAN transFORMS,
the city so conceived was both “mirror” and “mask”: “These sealed
cages become a terminal statement about the dead end which now
punctuates our long struggle to dominate Nature.”54 Thus, for Nelson,
architecture did not or would not “end” simply by disappearing. Rather,
he recognized in those designs that formed the “junk” of modern society
the endgame of modernism. Basing modern design and production
upon a bankrupt and dangerous mode of vision had led to an inexorable
and violent spatial paradox. One imagines this must have been a difficult thesis to write, considering that Nelson’s work was implicated in
the unfolding of that narrative.
Viewed in the light of Nelson’s intensive spatial and defensive
deployment of irony, his own designs appear neither as whimsical nor
as dated as they are currently received (especially by the current market in “mid-century modern” furniture and appliances). Nelson and his
work are of sufficient complexity to merit more than hagiography
(although this is certainly useful and deserved) and its complement,
dismissal. The famous Storagewall (1945) is not just a handy spacesaving device (although it certainly is designed in an effort to save space
itself); it protects the consumer from the creative and destructive violence of products by using the architecture as a suit of armor. The
“Atomic” or Ball Clock (1947),55 for instance, with its electron place
holders attached by the spindliest of supports and its second hand ticking ominously down; its companion piece the Sunburst Clock (c. 1950),
with its exploding rays figuring the identity of time and distance; the
Marshmallow Sofa loveseat (1956), with its precarious balance of discrete elements that forces two sitters to carefully negotiate the impact
of each other’s weight in order to avoid falling ass over teakettle onto
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the floor—all of these iconic designs take on a new, less stable, and perhaps
even critical, character.
Nelson’s more “serious” work, such as the ergonomically sound
office furniture for Herman Miller in the 1960s and 1970s, is more legible for our understanding of his approach to wounded space. The putatively therapeutic contours of his chairs and desks were designed for an
injured subject, as latter-day suits of armor. His “Seating Tool” (1952)
designed with Buckminster Fuller out of aluminum light-reflector
shields, celluloid, and a piece of piano wire, was an attempt to relate
productively mechanical regimes of vision to the body. (“Unfortunately,”
however, “anyone sitting on this nearly invisible object completely
overhung the seat, and appeared to be balancing painfully on a knitting
needle.”)56
Nelson’s response to the involuntary enclosure of the human body
in the context of universalized warfare and “the end of architecture”
was to open the object in turn. He sought, however naively, to limit not
the wounding capacity of the weapon, but its range. Despite the fact
that “we will never see the whites of their eyes again,” Nelson concluded “How to Kill People” with an optimistic caveat: “But if peace
ever does break out, we designers needn’t worry. We’ll find something
else to do—though it may be not so profitable—and, personally, I hope
it will have to do with people.”57
110 Grey Room 31
Notes
1. George Nelson, Chairs (New York: Acanthus Press, 1994); and George Nelson,
Building a New Europe: Portraits of Modern Architects, Essays by George Nelson,
1935–36 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). The latter book includes a useful
essay on Nelson’s early years by Kurt W. Forster, “An American in Rome: George Nelson
Talks with European Architects,” which places Nelson in the intellectual clime of Italy
in the 1930s, but is not based upon archival research. Chairs includes a brief introductory
essay by Nelson’s biographer, Stanley Abercrombie and is something of a companion
piece to Abercrombie’s biography of Nelson, George Nelson: The Design of Modern Design
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).
2. Abercrombie, 238.
3. Enzo Fratelli, “The World of George Nelson,” Zodiac 8 (1961): 96–101.
4. See George Nelson, Problems of Design, 2nd ed. (New York: Whitney Publications,
1965); Nelson, “Business and the Industrial Designer,” Fortune 40 (July 1949): 92–98;
and Nelson, book review of Henry Dreyfuss’s Designing for People and the second edition of Dreyfuss’s The Measure of Man: Human Factors in Design, in Architectural Forum
(June 1968): 80–81.
5. One such praiseworthy fellow traveler was, of course, John Summerson, who
relentlessly analyzed the process of architectural design through multiple stages of
authorship. See, for instance, Summerson’s early essay, “The Mind of Wren” (1936), in
Heavenly Mansions (New York: Norton, 1963), 51–86.
6. George Nelson, “Wright’s Houses: Two Residences, Built by a Great Architect for
Himself, Make the Landscape Look as if It Had Been Designed to Fit Them,” Fortune
34 (August 1946): 116–125; and George Nelson, The Industrial Architecture of Albert
Kahn Inc. (New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., 1939).
7. George Nelson, “The Human Element in Design,” Industrial Design 20, no. 5 (June
1973): 49–60. The essay was also published as “The Humane Designer,” Industrial
Design 20, no. 5 (June 1973).
8. While Nelson’s personal and office records remain private, the best secondary
source on Nelson’s career is Stanley Abercrombie’s biography, George Nelson.
Abercrombie had full access to Nelson’s archive, and the bibliographical appendix prepared by Judith Nasatir is immensely useful.
9. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942; New York:
Harper, 1975): 83–84. Nelson was also an admirer of management expert Peter Drucker,
whom he regularly quoted in his talks and essays.
10. George Nelson, “Ends and Means,” in Problems of Design (New York: Whitney
Publications, 1957), 34, 37.
11. Schumpeter, 85.
12. George Nelson, “The Enlargement of Vision,” in Problems of Design, 62; emphasis
added.
13. This irony has its own special valence in architecture. Works emphasizing the
primacy of humanism, such as Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age
of Humanism (London: Warburg Institute, 1949) or Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture
without Architects (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), were widely read and
cited as rational grounds for modernist architecture that was profoundly posthumanist
in appearance and function. For a discussion of the impact of such texts upon architectural culture in the post–World War II era, see Reinhold Martin, The Organizational
Harwood | The Wound Man: George Nelson and the “End of Architecture”
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Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).
14. Nelson’s argument here resonates strongly with two works of the post–World
War II period that offer alternative descriptive models of production: Hannah Arendt
The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); and Jean Beaudrillard
The System of Objects (1968), trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996).
15. At the outset of the later, revised version of his 1957 essay “Obsolescence,”
whose epigraph is taken from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” (in
which a shay built to last a hundred years instantly falls apart upon reaching its
appointed hour), Nelson writes, “We have bombs and we have disposable tissue, but
in our total industrial inventory there appear to be very few other products that can
match the perfectly planned disintegration of Dr. Holmes’ little fantasy.” George Nelson
“Obsolescence,” Perspecta 11 (1967): 172. He mentions the bomb twice more in this
essay alone, and it appears in all of Nelson’s essays and lectures quoted in the remainder
of this essay.
16. Nelson, “Obsolescence,” 170–176.
17. Abercrombie, 188–189.
18. Nelson, “Obsolescence,” 175–176.
19. Nelson, “The Human Element in Design,” 49–60.
20. George Nelson, “How to Kill People: A Problem of Design,” Industrial Design 8,
no. 1 (January 1961): 45–53. The episode was written by George Nelson and Clair
Roskam, directed by John Desmond, and produced by John McGiffert. Nelson appeared
again on Camera 3 in 1978 with “The Civilized City, an Illustrated Essay,” in which he
presented his proposals for moving large portions of American cities underground.
21. George Nelson, “Business and the Industrial Designer,” Fortune 40 (July 1949):
92–98.
22. Nelson was hired in 1956 as part of a design consultancy headed by Eliot Noyes
and staffed by Paul Rand, Charles Eames, and Edgar Kaufmann Jr. Letters describing his
involvement in the consultancy, and the contractual dispute with Herman Miller, are
preserved in the “George Nelson” Folder, Box 66, Eliot Noyes Archive, Norwalk, CT.
23. See Hélène Lipstadt, “‘Natural Overlap’: Charles and Ray Eames and Federal
Government,” in, The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention, ed.
Donald Albrecht (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997): 150–177; and Beatriz Colomina,
“Enclosed by Images: The Eameses’ Multimedia Architecture,” Grey Room 2 (Winter
2001): 6–29. I treat the Eameses’ multiscreen projection stratagem in my dissertation,
“The Re-Design of Design: Multinational Corporations, Computers and Design Logic,
1945–1976” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2006), ch. 5–6.
24. George Nelson, “How to Kill People: A Problem of Design,” Industrial Design 8,
no. 1 (January 1961): 45–53, 47.
25. Nelson, “How to Kill People,” 47.
26. Samuel Weber, Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 7; emphasis in original.
27. George Nelson, “The Designer in the Modern World,” in Problems of Design, 75;
emphasis added.
28. Nelson, “The Designer in the Modern World,” 75.
29. Nelson, “The Designer in the Modern World,” 75.
30. George Nelson, “Don’t Fire until You See the Tops of Their Roofs,” McCall’s
(November 1968), quoted in Abercrombie, 278.
112 Grey Room 31
31. Nelson, “How to Kill People,” 53; emphasis added.
32. Nelson, “How to Kill People,” 53.
33. Edwin Tunis, Weapons: A Pictorial History (Cleveland: The World Publishing
Company, 1954), 151.
34. George Nelson, How to See: Visual Adventures in a World God Never Made
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977), 230; emphasis in original.
35. See Elizabeth Matthew Lewis, An Exhibition of Selected Landmark Books and
Articles in the History of Military Medicine Together with a Graphic Display of the
Wound Man through History, exh. cat. (West Point, NY: United States Military
Academy, 1976), 2–21. This fascinating little catalogue also features a local artist’s rendering of a “20th-century wound man” being blown apart from the outside by atomic
explosions and exploded from the inside by atomic radiation. Needless to say, such a
patient is beyond help. The entirety of Ketham’s treatise is also available online at the
National Library of Medicine of the National Institute of Health’s History of Medicine
Division Web site “Historical Anatomies on the Web”: http://165.112.6.70/exhibition/historicalanatomies/ketham_home.html. A comprehensive catalog of medical
illustrations that is helpful in placing the wound man/manikin in its historical context
is Diane R. Karp et al., Ars Medica: Art, Medicine, and the Human Condition (Philadelphia:
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1985), which offers brief historical texts alongside highquality reproductions of significant medical illustrations and artworks from the fifteenth
century onward. I am grateful to Stephen Campbell and Ashley West for sharing their
expertise as I was researching the origins of the “wound man.”
36. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 116. The primary analogy that Scarry wields to
arrive at her analytical conclusions about the ideology of war is a shell game of architectural enclosure, namely, “the cost vocabulary permits and encourages the receding
series ‘War (injury) is the cost of freedom. Battle (injury) is the cost of war (formerly,
injury). Slaughter (injury) is the cost of battle (formerly, injury). Blood (injury) is the
cost of slaughter.’ which not only generates tautology . . . but does so in such a way that
precisely that tautologically self-evident centrality of the act of injuring will itself be
steadily minimized. The injury which in the first sentence is recognized as massive (by
analogy, the destruction of a city) is folded within itself until by the second construction it seems only the destroyed house within the otherwise standing city, and by the
third only a closet within that house, and finally by the fourth a shelf in the closet.”
37. Weber, Targets of Opportunity, 13. Both Nelson’s and Weber’s approach to the
damaged subjectivity of the wounded possesses a profoundly political dimension.
Parallels between the wounded body and the sacrificial body—following Giorgio
Agamben, the constituent body from which the body politic derives its negative
image—are especially thought-provoking. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); and especially the
essays on the aesthetics of humanity and animality in Giorgio Agamben, The Open:
Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Atell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
38. Nelson entertained a lifelong interest in the medieval armor of Europe and
Japan. He presented several suits of the protective enclosures in an essay on “Survival
Designs” in his book How to See, 190–201.
39. This wounded unity of wounded bodies, already condemned to die, raises the
question of whether Nelson was familiar with the logic underpinning Herman Kahn’s
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113
On Thermonuclear War. Nelson did not turn to Kahn or the macabre thought experiment of the Doomsday Machine to prove the point. After all, even the optimistic, suicidal Kahn insisted that the Doomsday Machine scenario was “most unlikely” and little
more than an “awful spectre.” Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1961), 500. Nevertheless, the Doomsday Machine is germane to the discussion here insofar as it can be understood as a unique apparatus, one
that is both anti-ideological and anti-aesthetic. As a system of connections between a
massive number of subterranean hydrogen bombs, controlled by a trigger mechanism
that can be set off only by means purely external to the state, it is a preparation for the
erasure of all subjects and therefore the end of both history and aesthetics. This is why,
even though the Doomsday apparatus was and remains only a thought experiment in
the absurdist logic of deterrence, it is always “buried deep underground” and even the
trigger mechanism is described as concealed deep within the interstices of a computer,
impervious to any manipulation once the apparatus is “turned on.” The Doomsday
apparatus, therefore, is an image of a technology that destroys technology; it is neither
tool nor weapon but rather a targeting device that wholly consumes the target, taking
over its identity as its own. If realized, it would constitute the endgame of technology—
its telos rather than its skopos—a final “outering” of subjective means that cannot
return to the body, even the form of the wound. On deterrence, see Paul Virilio, Pure
War (New York: Semiotext(e), 1998); and Paul Virilio, Popular Defense and Ecological
Struggles (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990).
40. Nelson, “How to Kill People,” 47.
41. George Nelson, “‘Captive’ Designer vs(?) ‘Independent’ Designer,” in Nelson,
Problems of Design, 28.
42. Nelson, “The End of Architecture,” Architecture Plus, April 1973, 38.
43. Nelson, “How to Kill People,” 47.
44. Nelson, “How to Kill People,” 47.
45. Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Annals of a Fortress, trans. Benjamin
Bucknall (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1876), 357.
46. Ibid.
47. André Maginot, speech to Parlement, December 10, 1929.
48. Viollet-le-Duc’s text is so interesting precisely because it is poised at the brink
of this transformation from separate martial spheres into a self-same space of violence,
a wounded space. In Viollet’s narrative, weaponry and its defensive adjuncts approach
identity at increasing speed, although Viollet would seem to hold out for an asymptotic
gap separating the two, which is movement. Viollet-le-Duc, Annals of a Fortress, 379:
“Cannon are made whose balls pierce through and through the wooden planks of a vessel. Immediately these planks are cased with iron. To-day’s balls are resisted by the vessel’s sides. The plates of iron are doubled . . . and forthwith the penetrating force of the
projectiles is increased; but those of the next day pierce them. Steel is made to take the
place of iron: but after thousands upon thousands have been spent the projectile always
has the best of it. But it happens in a naval engagement that an Admiral steams at full
speed right athwart an enemy’s ship and sinks it! In fact it is by rapidity of movement
and facility in manoeuvring [sic] that victories at sea are ensured much more than by
increased protective plating.”
49. Nelson, “The End of Architecture,” 37.
50. Nelson, “The End of Architecture,” 37; emphasis added.
114 Grey Room 31
51. Nelson, “The End of Architecture,” 38.
52. George Nelson, “The Hidden City,” Architecture Plus 2, no. 6 (November–
December 1974), 70–77, p. 70.
53. George Nelson, “Interiors: The Emerging Dominant Reality,” in George Nelson
on Design (New York: Whitney Library of Design; London: Architectural Press, 1979),
45–57.
54. George Nelson, “The City as Mirror and Mask,” in MAN transFORMS, exh. cat.,
ed. Hans Hollein (New York: Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1976).
55. The ball clock was probably designed by George Nelson’s associate Irving
Harper, although Nelson claimed that it was the accidental outcome of a drunken
evening with Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi. Nelson’s anecdote is quoted in
Abercrombie, 111.
56. Arthur Drexler, “Foreword,” in Nelson, Problems of Design, ix.
57. Nelson, “How to Kill People,” 53.
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