This coming week’s class will focus on the application of cybernetic principles and ideas in design, architecture, and art. I think you’ll find this material genuinely fascinating, if a bit wild. I’m assigning several short readings by a handful of designers, critics, theorists, and historians, all of which center on the cybernetic communalist movements of the 1960s, specifically the Whole Earth network pioneered by Stewart Brand (he would later become one of the founders of Wired magazine, in 1993). Here’s the list of readings:
* Fred Turner, “The Politics of the Whole circa 1968–And Now”
* R. Buckminster Fuller, “The World Game: How to Make the World Work” (1972)
* Reyner Banham, “A Home is not a House” (1965)
Turner’s essay, from the exhibition catalogue, The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside (2013), provides a critical overview of the Whole Earth network and the application of cybernetic ideas to design. Buckminster Fuller’s proposal for a “World Game” to allocate the world’s resources efficiently and intelligently is described in his short essay on the topic. Last but not least, Reyner Banham’s essay provides a glimpse into the weird world of inflatable and biomorphic architecture, which flowered in the 1960s thanks to the influence of Wiener, Fuller, and other “whole earth” thinkers.
I encourage you to do research of your own on the Whole Earth Catalogue, Buckminster Fuller, and the architects mentioned in Banham’s essay; the internet is teeming with interesting archival material from the late 1960s. For instance, you can peek at the first pages of The Whole Earth Catalogue, no. 1, 1969, here: http://designmobs.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/whole_rth_ctlg_19691.pdf
Likewise, if you’re curious to know more about the World Game, you might want to check out this project summary written by John McHale (Fuller’s collaborator) in 1967: http://challenge.bfi.org/sites/challenge.bfi.org/files/pdf_files/wdsd_phase2_doc6.pdf
And I definitely recommend spending some time with Fuller’s “Dymaxion World Map” – you can read about it here: http://gizmodo.com/how-buckminster-fullers-dymaxion-map-tessellated-the-w-484584437
Also: some videos on Drop City, a famous cyber-commune in Colorado:
As you read/look through these texts, I’d like you to think about the way these projects attempted to put cybernetic theory into practice. How did they succeed and where did they fail? Is there anything worth recovering from this moment in design history? What do you make of the various diagrams that appear in these pages?
Please note that only the texts listed above with bullet-points are required reading.
banham home is not a house pdf
turner pdf
History of the User 