Grey Room 31, Spring 2008, pp. 90–115. © 2008 Grey Room ... · in his career from the émigrés...

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George Nelson on the set of How to Kill People: A Problem of Design, 1961. From GeorgeNelson, “How to Kill People: AProblem of Design,” IndustrialDesign 8, no. 1 (January 1961), 48.

Grey Room 31, Spring 2008, pp. 90–115. © 2008 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 91

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 NelsonThe architect and industrial designer George Nelson (1908–1986) is, byall accounts, both a stable fixture in the canon of twentieth-centurydesign and a conundrum. The astonishing breadth and depth of hisoeuvre—encompassing projects of nearly every conceivable type, fromhis houses and celebrated office furniture to real-time computing sys-tems and propaganda programs; and for every kind of client, from smallpersonal commissions to grand schemes for corporations and states—guarantees his centrality to any survey of twentieth-century industrialdesign even as it raises profound questions as to the nature of his practiceand politics.

Yet an aura of something like mystery continues to cling to Nelson.Many of his projects remain unpublished, and, as with many designersof his generation, his archive remains private. Several of his writingshave recently been republished—including his survey of Chairs (1953)and a volume of monographic essays from Pencil Points on Europeanmodernist architects of the 1930s1—but these have little in the way ofscholarly apparatus, despite the fact that they have been produced withscholars in mind. Moreover, Nelson’s writings are difficult to read. Hisbiographer, Stanley Abercrombie—the only scholar to have access toNelson’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 seemsnot only unconventional and appealingly uncommercial but also, attimes, perversely negative, even self-destructive: it is the career of anarchitect who advocated the end of architecture, a furniture designerwho imagined rooms without furniture, an urban designer who con-templated the hidden city, an industrial designer who questionedthe future of the object and hated the obsession with products.2

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Abercrombie accounts for this strange self-destructive tendency byidentifying Nelson as what one might call a metadesigner, arguing thathis object of study and practice was neither the building nor the prod-uct but rather the process of design itself. This is, in many ways, a sat-isfying thesis. Nelson and his friends and colleagues of the samegeneration 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 ofuniversal and rational method first lofted in Germany at the Werkbundand the Bauhaus and then carried across the Atlantic to the United States.

But one would hesitate to apply the description—“perversely nega-tive, even self-destructive”—to any of these colleagues. What is it thatdrove Nelson, rather than (or perhaps against) his contemporaries, tosuch 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 thatNelson took such a point of view on his and others’ work at all. WhileNelson is most definitely one of that large group of American andEuropean designers who worked simultaneously at designing buildingsand industrial products, at corporate identity programs and graphics,at curatorship and teaching, he was the only architect of his aforemen-tioned colleagues to maintain a lifelong career as a writer. He was a prolific critic, publishing in the popular press nearly as often as he didin architectural and industrial design trade journals. He contributedregularly to magazines such as Time, Life, Fortune, and McCall’s in addi-tion to the countless articles he published in Pencil Points, ArchitecturalForum, Industrial Design, and Interiors. He authored several books on design, many of them aimed at general audiences, and he even pro-duced films and television programs.

Despite this sizable output of written work, he rarely, if ever, identifiedhimself as a critic or writer, clearly preferring to pen his witty and oftenbiting commentaries on the letterhead, and at the desk, of a professionaldesigner. Early in his career, he identified himself as an architect (eventhough he worked just as often as an architectural writer and editor); bythe 1950s he was “architect and designer”; and by the 1960s he wassimply a “designer.”

By refusing to name himself by the deed, Nelson clearly downplayedthe importance of writing to his design practice, but he also maintaineda thoroughly ambiguous position vis-à-vis his numerous colleagues inall of these disciplines. Indeed, his opinions were more often than notself-contradictory and cloaked in willfully obvious but incompleteironic 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 “visualpollution”), while at other times he was a champion of industrial pro-duction for its own sake (as in his writing for Fortune magazine or hiscautiously loving film Elegy in a Junk Yard). On some occasions Nelsonembraced and even helped to develop the logic of ergonomic design (inhis designs for Herman Miller office furniture and in his book onChairs). On other occasions he suspected ergonomics and other syn-thetic applied sciences of draining design of its intuitive and artisticaspects (see his cautious and cautionary review of Henry Dreyfuss’s TheMeasure of Man4). He was untiring in his promotion of modernistdesign but simultaneously bemoaned its increasing technocratic blank-ness and its ever-increasing overflow of commercial imagery. Such contrasting opinions—far from being the result of a progressive changein his point of view over the course of his life, or even a sudden changeof heart—constitute not the outlying exceptions but rather the core ofNelson’s thought.

There are thus many reasons to read—or reread—Nelson. He was oneof the few writers on architecture and industrial design in his lifetimeto acknowledge openly that design was no longer practiced by a singleauthor.5 One index to his intellectual flexibility with regard to archi-tectural authorship is that while working as an editor of ArchitecturalForum in the late 1930s he published monographs on both the “genius”of Frank Lloyd Wright and the global organizational matrix of AlbertKahn Inc.6 As he would describe his attitude many years later, “Whereverthere is an artifact, whether a small object or an entire synthetic envi-ronment, 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 factthat Nelson was a formidable theorist of production. As the few schol-ars to treat Nelson’s work have noted, throughout his career he wroteconvincingly of the need to produce “quality design” as a matter ofsocial and economic necessity.8 However, it is a hitherto systematicallyelided fact that Nelson’s theory of production derived from a ratherunusual source for a design theorist—Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of “creative destruction” as laid out in his wartime political economytreatise Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). FollowingSchumpeter, 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

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capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalistconcern has got to live in. . . .

Every piece of business strategy acquires its true significanceonly against the background of that process and within the situa-tion created by it. It must be seen in its role in the perennial galeof creative destruction.9

This violent spatial and climactic metaphor is endemic to Schumpeter’swriting; 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, andrecapitulated them ceaselessly in his articles on his and others’ variouscorporate design consultancies. This point of view alienated him earlyin his career from the émigrés from the Werkbund and Bauhaus, whohad after World War II achieved a certain détente with industry that hadeluded them in Europe. As he argued in a lecture at Serge Chermayeff’sChicago Institute of Design that, according to Nelson, “precipitated a near riot,” true design consisted not of Baukunst but rather of “cre-ative destruction”:

the creation-destruction polarity is at the core of the whole designprocess. Seen in this way, the familiar notion that creation is“good” while destruction is “bad” turns out to have no meaningwhatever. . . . Evolution and revolution, creation and destruction,are different names for the same thing. We use one or the otherdepending on our choice of a frame of reference.10

Nelson also appears to have drawn heavily on the ubiquitous war-inflected rhetoric and violent spatial metaphor of Schumpeter’s text,transposing Schumpeter’s theory of the transformation of modes of pro-duction into the arena of the product itself. In Schumpeter, for instance,we read of the new regime of competition under the aegis of creativedestruction:

competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advan-tage . . . 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 effectivethan 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 orderafter 1945–47:


The fear of sudden annihilation all of us have carried sinceHiroshima is not entirely new. Mankind in its short history haslived out most of its days in jeopardy; and jeopardy, if you areexposed to it—or think you are—feels total, regardless of its spe-cific nature. But today’s fear is different in one sense: we createdit. The Black Death which destroyed something between one-quarter and three-quarters of the population where it struck hadno known cause or cure in the medical science of the 14th cen-tury. The Bomb was programmed, designed, built, and explodedby people who presumably knew exactly what they were doing. Itis, I think, this new sense of intellectual mastery over the physicalworld that is making us so acutely and unhappily aware of theworld 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 every-thing from literature to politics to engineering in the 1950s.13 Yet uponcloser inspection, Nelson shows us his hand. He uses the same metaphors—death, striking, and bombing—as Schumpeter does, but rather thandeploy them according to the economist’s logic of supply, demand, andprofit, Nelson reorients the entire matter of capitalist destruction (whethercreative or not) around the dynamic between producer and product.

The key to unpacking Nelson’s rather dense statement is the differ-ence, in the last sentence, between “the physical world” and “the worldover which seemingly we have no mastery at all.” The physical world,evidently enough, corresponds to the realm of production. We can pro-gram, design, and build The Bomb, and afterward we may use it—destroying both it and its targets. However, Nelson argues, this relativelysimple process is no cycle. Once the bomb is destroyed, it takes us withit. Another way of saying this is that Nelson’s point of departure fromconventional texts on production—even one of such shared violence asSchumpeter’s—was not the consideration of the practice of design perse, or even the industrial process itself, but rather the aftermath of theproductive act. For Nelson, the end point of the product’s life as anobject is rarely consumption—neither in the neoclassical economicsense of “purchase” and/or “use,” nor in the Marxian sense of the “usingup” of a product in order to “reproduce the means of production”—butrather destruction and destructiveness. This destruction of the prod-uct—aka the “industrial object”—could either itself be productive (inMarxian terms, reproductive) or destructive (tending toward an utterobjectivity, a nihilism). That final product of homo faber, The Bomb, is for Nelson paradigmatic: a world-destroying object rather than aworld-making object.14 The world beyond control that this previously

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physical object produces is not susceptible to our manipulation becausethe subjectivity that we once possessed within the physical (objective)regime corresponding to that subjectivity has been destroyed in themaking of the object. For the production of product always and alreadyengenders use.

The example of the bomb is, admittedly, extreme; however, themetaphors of the bomb, the blow, and death are nonetheless present, invarying forms, in most of Nelson’s writings on design and form the fun-damental elements of his theory of production.15 The producer (forNelson, the designer) becomes destroyed product (designed object),precipitating a complex state of affairs that Nelson devoted the remain-der of his career to explicating.

Nelson worked to embody this fragmentation and displacement ofthe designer and designed object in his own person, perhaps nowhereso obviously as in his performance at the Visual CommunicationsConference at MoMA, sponsored by the Art Directors’ Club of NewYork and Herman Miller, in 1960. The lecture was a performative ver-sion of an essay he had written three years earlier on “Obsolescence.”16

His presentation began silently, with hundreds of ugly slides of theAmerican urban landscape displayed on three screens, after whichNelson proclaimed that “The product is our great achievement, thecrowning glory of our civilization. The product is with us everywhere—at home, on the road, in outer space, on the beach—weak in design, imi-tative, derivative, highly styled but rarely well designed, lacking inintegrity.”17 The product had replaced the human being at the center ofculture, Nelson asserted, whereupon he vanished from the lectern andwas replaced by a “bright green robot” who finished the lecture by play-ing a tape recording of Nelson’s voice, mechanically distorted. Nelson’srobot stunt double then introduced a film, Elegy in a Junk Yard, whichdemonstrated that the quintessence of urban modernity “is junk.” Thefilm cut between tightly framed shots of recognizable but discarded orbroken products and wide-angle shots of mountains of debris. In keep-ing with the theses of both Schumpeter and his contemporary PeterDrucker, the thesis of the film—later spelled out clearly in the pages ofPerspecta—was not just that America produced excessive waste butthat America and its designers did not thoroughly enough do away withwhat was obsolete. In the heaping mounds of waste in the junkyard,Nelson maintained, we see only a reflection of our own outmodedselves. 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 creativedestruction fully, even radically. The designer would have to engage withthe problem of destroying products and people anew. As he wrote in 1967,


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 ofthe 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 glossyphotographs, air views of the centers of cities in the 150,000 to250,000 range. I have forgotten why I was doing this.19

—George Nelson

In the same year as his perplexing lecture at MoMA, Nelson made amajor step in developing his theory of the fallout from the radical trans-formation of production in the mid-twentieth century. In 1960, collab-orating with a production team at CBS, Nelson wrote and starred in aseries of television programs on design for the series Camera 3. The firstepisode was, startlingly, an alternately deadpan and amusingly ironichistory and theory of weapons called “How to Kill People: A Problemof Design.”20

Nelson knew what he was talking about. He had considerable expe-rience in the perverse economy of the military-industrial-academiccomplex. After World War II, in an article for Fortune magazine on therise of industrial design in the United States, Nelson could assert thatthe discipline owed much of its current status to the industrial collu-sion with government during the Great Depression.21 In the reformsNelson proposed in that article, which included encouragement forsmall businesses to embrace the industrial designer, the paradigm wasthe newly invented jet fighter.

In the 1950s, Nelson had consulted briefly for IBM on exhibition andcomputer design and, more interesting, on a real-time management sys-tem for American Airlines called SABER, which was based upon thehardware and software then being developed for the Air Force’s SAGE

“Prehistoric Man Throwing a Tied Stone.” From Edwin Tunis,Weapons (Cleveland: The WorldPublishing Company, 1954).

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air defense system.22 Nelson’s work for IBM was cut short by a contrac-tual dispute between IBM and Herman Miller, but without missing abeat Nelson was soon working for the propaganda machine of the gov-ernment, as consultant to the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). HélèneLipstadt and Beatriz Colomina have documented Nelson’s famous collaboration with the Eameses and Fuller on the 1958 MoscowExhibition.23 Nelson was as up to date as any of his contemporarydesigners on the latest in military hardware and information warfare.

In “How to Kill People,” Nelson narrated what he called his “straight-faced, ironic commentary” while brandishing actual historical weaponsborrowed from the American Museum of Natural History. Lovingly gazing at a medieval spiked mace, he began by qualifying his subjectmatter with a certain smugness:

Designers create things for people. This means that to functionsuccessfully, to produce works of art, designers must have society’sapproval of what they are doing. Design for killing is interestingbecause war occupies so much of our attention, and receives ourunquestioning support. The great advantage for the designer inthis area is that nobody cares what anything costs. This attitudehas been prevalent from the siege of Troy to the bombing ofHiroshima. And it’s this kind of attitude towards money that hasalways attracted creative people.24

In order that the audience not get the wrong idea, Nelson quicklyexplained his characterization of the designer and his or her clients:“What we’re talking about is killing—but not murder, for murder is ofno interest to the designer. Murder weapons are almost always impro-vised—a bathtub, a breadknife, a clothesline. What we are talking aboutis the kind of killing that is supported by society.” Nelson then illus-trated the point by picking up “the first lethal weapon,” a rock, which,he emphasized by swinging it around, was “inexpensive” and had “thegreat virtue of being harder than the human skull.” But, arriving at thecentral thesis of the program, Nelson demonstrated that the rock had afundamental drawback: it was not good for killing at a distance. “Whenthe designer comes into the picture,” Nelson intoned, setting down therock and picking up a replica of a Stone-Age club, “there’s a tremen-dous improvement in the product. It’s more interesting to look at. [Theattacker] doesn’t have to move quite as close. And the force of the blowis greatly increased.”25

As images of various subsequent developments in weaponry sped byon the screen, Nelson emphasized that few fundamentally new inven-tions followed upon these first killing tools. While the “craftsmanship”of the weapons improved, melding the weapons’ representational and


functional elements into a single “beauti-ful” object, weapons remained and remainmanifestations of a desire to separate oneself as radically as possible from one’sintended victim. One of the early leaps for-ward in the realization of this desire wasthe bow and arrow (according to Nelson,“the greatest of all inventions for separatingthe attacker from his victim”). The abilityto kill at a distance, Nelson argued, puts anend to the “silly myth that generals winwars. What the facts show is that designersdo. Let me illustrate this with a simple sit-uation. A wants to kill B. His problem ishow to do it. His best chance is to bring thewhole thing off as a big surprise.”

Surprise, of course, is a spatial relationship: A’s ability to occupy B’sspace without his knowledge, to use his extended range to bring histelepresence into B’s distant and seemingly autonomous space. Thisviolence dealt at a distance requires a particular kind of activity, onethat has only recently begun to receive meaningful critical attention inthe philosophy and aesthetics of war.

As Samuel Weber has outlined in his recent book Targets ofOpportunity, the means of war have been misunderstood because of amisidentification of the ends. Drawing on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy,Weber shows that the classical conception of ends is divided betweentwo concepts: telos and skopos. In a colossal mistake, the former con-cept, which denotes the fulfillment of a process, has been taken to sig-nify 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 goaland the secret interpellation of—aiming at—that (unknowing) goal:“[S]kopos designates not just the act [of targeting] but also the object ofsuch watching: the mark or target. It is as if the word, in designating bothobject and subject, both the target and the targeting, had itself alreadysemantically overcome the distance and the difference in the process itdesignates.”26 This collapse of distance is essential to the logic of tar-geting. Not only does it allow the targeting subject access to the targetedsubject (i.e., the objectified subject), but it engenders a paradoxicalspace, in which the targeting subject is displaced from the safety of hisor her blind and projected into the targeted space. In brief, the hunterbecomes (also) the hunted. Nelson recognized this, and figured thisnew spatial relationship in his own language. He wrote at the openingof his essay “The Designer in the Modern World” (1957), “The designer

“Experimental Guided Missile.”Frontispiece to Edwin Tunis,Weapons (Cleveland: The WorldPublishing Company, 1954).

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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 out-side which these efforts become ineffective.”27 Nelson, as a designertaking aim at the modern world, found himself aiming at himself andhis own environment.

Keenly exploiting the logic of targeting in his televisual analysis ofweapons, Nelson related an anecdote about the medieval crossbow thatclearly illustrated the distance weapon’s ability to bar subjective status:“It shot its bolt with such force that in 1139 Pope Innocent II banned itsuse—except against infidels.” Thankfully, Nelson noted with a wrygrin, “[t]he ban still left plenty of legal weapons for Christians inter-ested in killing other Christians.” Distance weapons, we begin to sus-pect, as had the dead pope, threaten not just our bodies but our verysubjectivities as they expand their range and power. Turning his atten-tion from the crossbow to an array of guns, Nelson declared that withthe invention of the firearm we took “[a] great step forward, but esthet-ically we paid a price.” Nelson did not mean that the guns’ ornamentwas somehow more impoverished than that of the sword or bow; rather,he was showing how the gun brings killing objects closer together intoan intimate aesthetic relationship (think of the voyeuristic intimacy ofthe sniper’s scope) even as it distances subjects.28

The stakes and uniqueness of Nelson’s thinking here begin tobecome clear. From a Marxian point of view the commodity fetish simply engenders a distortion between subjects: the “magic” of exchangevalue blinds the subject to the social nature of labor, objectifying thatlabor in unrecognizable form. In Nelson’s destructive theory of produc-tion, however, the aesthetic relationship is always already one of animminent and immanent collision. As in Marx, the result is blindness,but this blindness is not one of concealment but the attenuation and


collapse of vision. Speaking over footage of the Allied bombing ofGermany and jet fighters in the skies over Korea, Nelson posed a bitterrhetorical question aimed directly at the heart of the aesthetic stakes ofweaponry. As the screen showed machines “attacking machines, at acombined speed of two thousand miles per hour, too fast for people totake aim and fire,” Nelson asked: “Did the Greeks and Romans everproduce 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 whichcity? Had the pilot or the bombardier ever visited the city? Had theyever seen the museums? Had they shopped in any of the shops?”29

The answer to Nelson’s rhetorical questions was, of course, no. Thetarget 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 anearly Archimedean point—the space of warfare had become an almostundifferentiated, contiguous, and wholly anonymous territory. AsNelson would write in McCall’s seven years later, reprising the argu-ment of “How to Kill People,” “Don’t fire until you see the tops of theirroofs.”30 This territory, however, concealed a hidden threat of its own.With the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, weaponsbegan to be buried in the earth itself, giving the lie to an age-old desire:

The marvelous missiles sleeping quietly in their cradles all overthe world are indeed a triumph of design, but in many respects,they are still traditional, still reflecting the desire of the attackerto 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 bethat for further improvement of killing there are principles whichstill remain to be explored.31

This desire to remove oneself from one’s target—a desire impossible tofulfill, considering the nature of the target as the shooter’s subjectivespace—had resulted in guaranteeing one’s own territory as a targetthrough the nuclear logic of “mutual annihilation” (deterrence). Theunderground missile silo is the invisible analog of the aerial bomber—the vanishing point in the perspectival regime of the targeting eye. Thisridiculous “step forward” achieved its apotheosis for Nelson in thedesign of “push-button warfare.” In describing the apparatus of inter-continental ballistic warfare, Nelson looked crestfallen: “The designershave designed the excitement out of killing. We will never see the

“2,000-Pound Demolition Bomb.”From Edwin Tunis, Weapons(Cleveland: The World PublishingCompany, 1954).

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whites of their eyes again.”32

That Nelson should approach the conclusion of his televised essayby treating mechanized warfare—particularly the hydrogen bomb andICBMs—in this morally ambiguous and over-ironized manner shouldnot surprise us, especially considering that the Cold War was thenapproaching peak intensity (the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962was already in the works). The ironic response was a common oneamong his contemporaries. His main historical and visual resource forthe television show was Edwin Tunis’s Weapons: A Pictorial History(1954), which had for a frontispiece a line drawing of an “experimentalguided missile” and an end page depicting a mushroom cloud. Noragain, considering his source, is his relative silence and obvious per-plexity about “the bomb” surprising.

Tunis, writing in the early stages of the Cold War, presented the his-tory of weapons as motivated by the desire to remove oneself from one’sattacker and to increase the efficacy of this relationship by increasingthe power and range of the weapon. His book, then, is a progressivelydisintegrating history of art, insofar as the history of weapons was thehistory of an aesthetic relationship incessantly pushed to the point ofutter crisis. In the first instance, weapons mediated a relationshipbetween subjects (e.g., combat with primitive clubs or slings), but in thelast instance, they mediated a relationship only between themselvesand territory in general, as machines whose vision and invisibility for-bade 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 theatomic bomb and the more powerful hydrogen bomb would beabsurd. To try to explain them would be even more ridiculous.Statistics mean little. The bombs are tremendous and uncomfort-able facts, and that’s about all that can be said of them with cer-tainty. A defense we can’t now imagine may neutralize them in time.We can only hope that man will have sense enough to ban thembefore 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 con-fronted the end of the history of weapons was thus precisely the pain ofan amputation. Weapons were no longer to be wielded, they wereautonomous and automatic technical life forms excised entirely fromthe human body and returned, qua wounding force, by the touch of abutton. As Nelson would later write of buttons in his exhibition catalogHow to See, “The button is utterly neutral, does nothing but wait for theapproach of a finger, and, because of the disparity between the light


touch and possibly massive consequences, hasbecome a metaphor for modern power fantasies.Any idiot can push it.” Evoking the inevitablereturn of the object to the body that opens andcloses the wound, he powerfully identified thepush-button with the sacrificial, wounded bodyof Christ: “It is the communion wafer of techno-cratic society.”34

Thus it is of particular interest that Nelsonillustrated the opening credits of “How to KillPeople” with a peculiar kind of image of wound-ing and healing: a male body, contrapposto,palms facing outward, displaying manifold stig-mata like a denuded Christ figure; run throughwith knives, spears, swords, and arrows; bruisedwith stones, clubs, and maces; and, despite hisrelaxed posture, even pierced by the very ground upon which he stands.This “wound man” (also evocatively called a “wound manikin”) was amedical diagram derived from medieval anatomical studies, used bybarber-surgeons as a reference. The particular image is taken from a lateedition of Joannes de Kethem’s Fasciculus medicinae, originally pub-lished in Venice in 1491. This type of diagram, which sought to marrythe descriptive and prescriptive medical text with a visual display of the body’s surfaces and interior, served as a model for later, special-use 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 WoundSurgery), of 1517.35

Nelson appropriated the wound man as the image of the subject ofpush-button warfare, and presumably he was well aware of andunbothered by the anachronism. After all, the thrust of his argument in“How to Kill People” was precisely to identify the long unfolding of asingle dynamic within the history of technics—a dynamic whose basicmotion did not change, only its intensity. In what is perhaps the mostgraphic register of the potential violence of the wound, the woundman’s chest is gaping open, inscribed with the names of his exposedorgans, demonstrating the depth of the weapons’ reach into his body.Roughly contemporary to Leonardo’s great humanist symbol, thewound man is the other of the Vitruvian man. Its relevance to Nelson’sargument is its antihumanism: an image of the human body as a radicalobjectification. The weapons are not wielded by any attacker, they arenot 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

Joannes de Kethem. “WoundMan,” 1491. From Fasciculus medicinae (Venice, 1491).

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case of the wound man, the victim wields the weapon. Elaine Scarrywrites in her examination of war and torture that physical violence hasa tautological structure written in the paradoxical opening of the body(i.e., the wound is both radically subjective and subject-less). Thus, inScarry’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 conclusionof The Odyssey, in which Odysseus disguises himself and slays hiswife’s suitors with a carefully restored and concealed bow, Weberunpacks 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 manipulatingobjects, of holding things and holding things in, loses his power as sub-ject and becomes nothing but a broken object nearly identical to theshattered cup he dropped on the floor as he fell: “As he drops the gob-let, 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 andexternal.”37 The wound thus marks not only the inevitable return of theweapon to the body but also the collapse of subjectivity onto the siteupon which that body is wounded: figure returns to ground as the bodyhits the floor.

Nelson recognized that if every space and object was weaponized ata scale hitherto unknown, then the converse was likewise true: defen-sive enclosures were necessarily reduced in scale to that of the humanbody. For Nelson, the figure of that supercession of the fortress was themedieval knight’s suit of armor.38 The anachronism hardly mattered.The essential aspect of the suit of armor was its intimate relationship tothe 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 vul-nerability 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 thosedesigned ergonomically—demonstrate the productivity of the wound.Rather than preventing the wound, the suit of armor is the wound, ren-dered into objecthood through a technique of mimetic projection. Inshort, Nelson argues, in the face of the creative destruction of com-modities, and especially after the blinding flashes of Hiroshima andNagasaki, we are all walking wounded.39 Moreover, that woundingobject, the weapon, is paradigmatic for all objects, precisely becauseour bodies bear the marks of having created, used, and exchanged. Thedesigner in particular must take aim at and inhabit this wounded area,


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, ironictelos of targeting. Wielding an Australian aboriginal “magic bone . . . a weapon with no moving parts, which does not have to be thrust orthrown, and yet . . . can kill a man,” Nelson explained, while pointingthe weapon directly at the camera, that it in combination with an incan-tation was “absolutely lethal.”

[T]here are too many authenticated records to permit any doubt ofits efficacy. The victim, learning what has happened, promptlyheads into the bush and presently dies. If you feel no ill effects, itis partly because I don’t know the right phrases, but mainlybecause ours is not an age of faith—except in the machine.40

By wielding this ancient weapon through the television, Nelson was ofcourse pointing out the status of the TV set as yet another distancingand distance-conquering mediation. Coyly playing upon that axiom offaithlessness, “seeing is believing,” Nelson demonstrated the socialnature of killing with which he had begun his show. The weapon—andby extension the commodity—can properly wound and kill only if it takes its place within an economy of vision in which the body andtarget are self-same.

As Nelson had argued four years earlier in a quizzical essay on the“‘Captive’ Designer vs(?) ‘Independent’ Designer,” this wounded bodywas not only corporal but corporate, belonging to the entire profession:“When it comes to cutting itself off at the knees by selfish and short-sighted action, the design profession is no better or smarter than theothers.”41 These twin curious discoveries—that you cannot target orwound what you cannot see and that defensibility depended not uponstructure but rather upon farsightedness and invisibility—led Nelsonto the last large project of his design career.

The End of Architecture

Wherever we look, the message seems to be that we are movingfrom the monument to the bell jar.42

—George Nelson

Nelson seemed to recognize in the objectifying power of the weaponnot only the obliteration of the comfortable nominative and ontologicaldistinction 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 theoreticaldrawings on the bombardment of fortifications appeared on the screen

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(“The great Leonardo da Vinci, who turned many an honest pennyinventing engines of annihilation, made this prophetic drawing show-ing the castle, its contents, and its occupants obliterated in a rain offire.”43), Nelson demonstrated the growing irrelevance of the physical,social, and psychological barriers of the fortress. Each weapon wasbecoming more like another, all the while becoming more architectural:“This impersonal array of unbelievable precision might be an oil refin-ery in Texas, a laboratory in Alaska—it happens to be a weapon, but it’shard to tell any longer.”44

Nelson was evoking a theme within architectural theory that haslong 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 Vwith an appropriately paranoid eye), the progressive and deliberate ero-sion of the protective (and weaponized) building has been a necessaryadjunct of Firmitas, Utilitas, Venustas. Although nearly any of theseauthors would serve the purpose, the history of this erosion is laid out indiagrammatic form in Viollet-le-Duc’s Annals of a Fortress, a “novel ofideas” that has had an impact in military engineering at least as far-reaching as that of his “structural rationalism” on architectural modernism.

Written in the wake of France’s embarrassment at the hands of thePrussians in 1872, the Annals was a novel describing the history of amythical 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 tech-niques. An afterword, rendered as a report from a fictional Frenchartillery officer, bemoans the loss but puts forward a solution to theproblem 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 ofiron, or a casing of masonry, or an earthwork; or an assaulting column climbs a breach, the problem is substantially the same; ineither case we have to oppose to the impulsive force a resistancethat will neutralise its effect.

When there were no projectile weapons, or their range wasinconsiderable, only a normal resistance had to be opposed to the shock—a man to a man—or if the effect was to be renderedcertain, two men to one. But when projectile arms acquired alonger 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 engage-


ment—a hand-to-hand struggle withan adversary; if the latter found him-self placed behind a circular enclo-sure, the obstacle that protectedhim would give him a considerableadvantage—an advantage that couldonly be compensated for by renew-ing the attack.45

Like the suit of armor, the fortress takeson the form perfectly expressive of theprojected wounds it expects to receive.Within the confines of the fortressproper is the enceinte de préservation,an interior, subjective space safe frombombardment by virtue of its shape, range of vision and offensive fire-power, 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 enemycould not espy.”46

The spatial idea behind Viollet-le-Duc’s enceinte de préservationis identical to that behind Marechal André Maginot’s famous procla-mation 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 fore-seen powerful but flexible means of organizing defense, based onthe dual principle of taking full advantage of the terrain and estab-lishing a continuous line of fire everywhere.47

We already know, and Nelson certainly knew, what befell the MaginotLine. This collapse of the enceinte [enclosure] de preservation into theenceinte de combat with the advent of the blitzkrieg, strategic bombing,and the guided missile, is precisely what Virilio has diagnosed as thenew spatial regime of deterrence-based or “pure” war—simultaneouslyoffensive and defensive, in the same space, happening at the same time.48

Nelson seems to have grasped the significance for architecture andindustrial design of twentieth-century martial space: Architecture itself,considered as an enceinte de preservation, was now obsolete. He for-malized this hypothesis in a perplexing essay entitled “The End ofArchitecture.” First delivered as a lecture at Harvard during his two-year tenure there as a professor of design in the early 1970s, “The Endof Architecture” was Nelson’s attempt to come to terms with a state oftotal spatial crisis. In short, he began to treat the weaponized space

Viollet-le-Duc. Diagram ofenceinte de préservation, 1875.From Annals of a Fortress, trans.Benjamin Bucknall (London:Sampson Low, Marston, Low, andSearle, 1875).

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of the twentieth century as a design problem like any other. The centralthesis remained the same as that of “How to Kill People,” only now itwas explicitly applied to architecture and its consequences measured:“As technology advances, experience recedes. Not always, and notinevitably, but generally. The symbolic expression of all this is the lunarlanding: there, if a man were permitted to experience the environmentdirectly, he would instantly die.”49 Even worse, tele-technologicalspace, considered broadly, was cramped:

In the military area, given the capability of weapons now, a majorwar could begin and end within 48 hours because the fronts nolonger have adequate depth. A suitable staging area for a war ofgreater duration, with a minimum sporting element left in thegoings-on, would now require at least two planets.50

Nelson’s flexibility as a thinker allowed him to sustain the manifoldcontradictions between his commitment to humanism and his diagno-sis of a technology-based, means-ends future architecture. However,this very flexibility pushed him into a realm that would have beenutterly ridiculous if not for the seeming reality of the threat that movedhim. Confronted with the inadequacy of architecture and architects tocreate a humanist architecture at odds with advanced capitalism andcommunism at war, Nelson proposed returning depth to architectureby returning it to the depths.

This much seems clear: what we think of as the “reality” of archi-tecture, which has so long been a conspicuous expression on theexterior (just think of Venice or Paris or Florence for a moment) isnow shifting with considerable rapidity to the interior. Such atransformation is not necessarily bad, but it does give rise to ques-tions about what is happening to architecture as we are accus-tomed to think of it. My own hunch is that a lot of it is going tosimply vanish, first by becoming increasingly uninteresting andthen by being swallowed up into megastructures or by beingburied 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 GrahamFoundation in 1971, architecture would “simply vanish . . . . Most citieswould look and feel better if half the structures in them could be madeinvisible.”52 Megastructures were, Nelson noted, beginning to do justthis 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 LuigiNervi and Buckminster Fuller—was entirely devoted to the creation of


an interior space, anonymous and forgettable on the exterior. Even con-ventional curtain-walled skyscraperswere, for Nelson, evidence of thistransformation. Nelson called this, in arelated essay, “the emergent dominantreality.”53 Our delicate bodies would beperfectly preserved under a bell jar,buried deep in an underground labora-tory. Hiding from the roving eye ofsatellites and spy planes, Nelson pro-posed, we would be safer half-buriedand half-alive, content to serve as ourown lab rats.

As he wrote in an essay for the inaugural exhibition of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in October 1976, Hans Hollein’s MAN transFORMS,the city so conceived was both “mirror” and “mask”: “These sealedcages become a terminal statement about the dead end which nowpunctuates 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 societythe endgame of modernism. Basing modern design and productionupon a bankrupt and dangerous mode of vision had led to an inexorableand violent spatial paradox. One imagines this must have been a diffi-cult thesis to write, considering that Nelson’s work was implicated inthe unfolding of that narrative.

Viewed in the light of Nelson’s intensive spatial and defensivedeployment of irony, his own designs appear neither as whimsical noras dated as they are currently received (especially by the current mar-ket in “mid-century modern” furniture and appliances). Nelson and hiswork 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 space-saving device (although it certainly is designed in an effort to save spaceitself); it protects the consumer from the creative and destructive vio-lence of products by using the architecture as a suit of armor. The“Atomic” or Ball Clock (1947),55 for instance, with its electron placeholders attached by the spindliest of supports and its second hand tick-ing ominously down; its companion piece the Sunburst Clock (c. 1950),with its exploding rays figuring the identity of time and distance; theMarshmallow Sofa loveseat (1956), with its precarious balance of dis-crete elements that forces two sitters to carefully negotiate the impactof each other’s weight in order to avoid falling ass over teakettle onto

George Nelson. Ball Clock, 1947.

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the floor—all of these iconic designs take on a new, less stable, and perhapseven critical, character.

Nelson’s more “serious” work, such as the ergonomically soundoffice furniture for Herman Miller in the 1960s and 1970s, is more legi-ble for our understanding of his approach to wounded space. The puta-tively therapeutic contours of his chairs and desks were designed for aninjured subject, as latter-day suits of armor. His “Seating Tool” (1952)designed with Buckminster Fuller out of aluminum light-reflectorshields, celluloid, and a piece of piano wire, was an attempt to relateproductively mechanical regimes of vision to the body. (“Unfortunately,”however, “anyone sitting on this nearly invisible object completelyoverhung the seat, and appeared to be balancing painfully on a knittingneedle.”)56

Nelson’s response to the involuntary enclosure of the human bodyin the context of universalized warfare and “the end of architecture”was to open the object in turn. He sought, however naively, to limit notthe wounding capacity of the weapon, but its range. Despite the factthat “we will never see the whites of their eyes again,” Nelson con-cluded “How to Kill People” with an optimistic caveat: “But if peaceever does break out, we designers needn’t worry. We’ll find somethingelse to do—though it may be not so profitable—and, personally, I hopeit will have to do with people.”57


Notes1. 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 usefulessay on Nelson’s early years by Kurt W. Forster, “An American in Rome: George NelsonTalks with European Architects,” which places Nelson in the intellectual clime of Italyin the 1930s, but is not based upon archival research. Chairs includes a brief introductoryessay by Nelson’s biographer, Stanley Abercrombie and is something of a companionpiece 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 edi-tion 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, whorelentlessly analyzed the process of architectural design through multiple stages ofauthorship. See, for instance, Summerson’s early essay, “The Mind of Wren” (1936), inHeavenly Mansions (New York: Norton, 1963), 51–86.

6. George Nelson, “Wright’s Houses: Two Residences, Built by a Great Architect forHimself, Make the Landscape Look as if It Had Been Designed to Fit Them,” Fortune34 (August 1946): 116–125; and George Nelson, The Industrial Architecture of AlbertKahn Inc. (New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., 1939).

7. George Nelson, “The Human Element in Design,” Industrial Design 20, no. 5 (June1973): 49–60. The essay was also published as “The Humane Designer,” IndustrialDesign 20, no. 5 (June 1973).

8. While Nelson’s personal and office records remain private, the best secondarysource on Nelson’s career is Stanley Abercrombie’s biography, George Nelson.Abercrombie had full access to Nelson’s archive, and the bibliographical appendix pre-pared 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: WhitneyPublications, 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 Ageof Humanism (London: Warburg Institute, 1949) or Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecturewithout Architects (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), were widely read andcited as rational grounds for modernist architecture that was profoundly posthumanistin appearance and function. For a discussion of the impact of such texts upon archi-tectural culture in the post–World War II era, see Reinhold Martin, The Organizational

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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 ArendtThe Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); and Jean BeaudrillardThe 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” (inwhich a shay built to last a hundred years instantly falls apart upon reaching itsappointed hour), Nelson writes, “We have bombs and we have disposable tissue, butin our total industrial inventory there appear to be very few other products that canmatch the perfectly planned disintegration of Dr. Holmes’ little fantasy.” George Nelson“Obsolescence,” Perspecta 11 (1967): 172. He mentions the bomb twice more in thisessay alone, and it appears in all of Nelson’s essays and lectures quoted in the remainderof 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 ClairRoskam, directed by John Desmond, and produced by John McGiffert. Nelson appearedagain on Camera 3 in 1978 with “The Civilized City, an Illustrated Essay,” in which hepresented 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 Noyesand staffed by Paul Rand, Charles Eames, and Edgar Kaufmann Jr. Letters describing hisinvolvement in the consultancy, and the contractual dispute with Herman Miller, arepreserved in the “George Nelson” Folder, Box 66, Eliot Noyes Archive, Norwalk, CT.

23. See Hélène Lipstadt, “‘Natural Overlap’: Charles and Ray Eames and FederalGovernment,” 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 (Winter2001): 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.


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 theWound Man through History, exh. cat. (West Point, NY: United States MilitaryAcademy, 1976), 2–21. This fascinating little catalogue also features a local artist’s ren-dering of a “20th-century wound man” being blown apart from the outside by atomicexplosions and exploded from the inside by atomic radiation. Needless to say, such apatient is beyond help. The entirety of Ketham’s treatise is also available online at theNational Library of Medicine of the National Institute of Health’s History of MedicineDivision Web site “Historical Anatomies on the Web”: http://165.112.6.70/exhibi-tion/historicalanatomies/ketham_home.html. A comprehensive catalog of medicalillustrations that is helpful in placing the wound man/manikin in its historical contextis 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 high-quality reproductions of significant medical illustrations and artworks from the fifteenthcentury onward. I am grateful to Stephen Campbell and Ashley West for sharing theirexpertise as I was researching the origins of the “wound man.”

36. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1985), 116. The primary analogy that Scarry wields toarrive at her analytical conclusions about the ideology of war is a shell game of archi-tectural enclosure, namely, “the cost vocabulary permits and encourages the recedingseries ‘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 thecost of slaughter.’ which not only generates tautology . . . but does so in such a way thatprecisely that tautologically self-evident centrality of the act of injuring will itself besteadily minimized. The injury which in the first sentence is recognized as massive (byanalogy, the destruction of a city) is folded within itself until by the second construc-tion it seems only the destroyed house within the otherwise standing city, and by thethird 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 thedamaged subjectivity of the wounded possesses a profoundly political dimension.Parallels between the wounded body and the sacrificial body—following GiorgioAgamben, the constituent body from which the body politic derives its negativeimage—are especially thought-provoking. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans.Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); and especially theessays 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 andJapan. He presented several suits of the protective enclosures in an essay on “SurvivalDesigns” in his book How to See, 190–201.

39. This wounded unity of wounded bodies, already condemned to die, raises thequestion of whether Nelson was familiar with the logic underpinning Herman Kahn’s

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On Thermonuclear War. Nelson did not turn to Kahn or the macabre thought experi-ment of the Doomsday Machine to prove the point. After all, even the optimistic, sui-cidal Kahn insisted that the Doomsday Machine scenario was “most unlikely” and littlemore than an “awful spectre.” Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1961), 500. Nevertheless, the Doomsday Machine is ger-mane to the discussion here insofar as it can be understood as a unique apparatus, onethat is both anti-ideological and anti-aesthetic. As a system of connections between amassive number of subterranean hydrogen bombs, controlled by a trigger mechanismthat can be set off only by means purely external to the state, it is a preparation for theerasure 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 inthe absurdist logic of deterrence, it is always “buried deep underground” and even thetrigger mechanism is described as concealed deep within the interstices of a computer,impervious to any manipulation once the apparatus is “turned on.” The Doomsdayapparatus, therefore, is an image of a technology that destroys technology; it is neithertool nor weapon but rather a targeting device that wholly consumes the target, takingover 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 cannotreturn to the body, even the form of the wound. On deterrence, see Paul Virilio, PureWar (New York: Semiotext(e), 1998); and Paul Virilio, Popular Defense and EcologicalStruggles (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 approachidentity at increasing speed, although Viollet would seem to hold out for an asymptoticgap 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 ves-sel. Immediately these planks are cased with iron. To-day’s balls are resisted by the ves-sel’s sides. The plates of iron are doubled . . . and forthwith the penetrating force of theprojectiles is increased; but those of the next day pierce them. Steel is made to take theplace of iron: but after thousands upon thousands have been spent the projectile alwayshas the best of it. But it happens in a naval engagement that an Admiral steams at fullspeed right athwart an enemy’s ship and sinks it! In fact it is by rapidity of movementand facility in manoeuvring [sic] that victories at sea are ensured much more than byincreased protective plating.”

49. Nelson, “The End of Architecture,” 37.50. Nelson, “The End of Architecture,” 37; emphasis added.


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 IrvingHarper, although Nelson claimed that it was the accidental outcome of a drunkenevening with Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi. Nelson’s anecdote is quoted inAbercrombie, 111.

56. Arthur Drexler, “Foreword,” in Nelson, Problems of Design, ix.57. Nelson, “How to Kill People,” 53.

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