Total integration: design, business, and society in the United States, 1935–1985

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TOTAL INTEGRATION:
DESIGN, BUSINESS, AND SOCIETY IN THE UNITED STATES, 1935–1985

by

Robert Gordon-Fogelson

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)

December 2021

Copyright 2021 Robert Gordon-Fogelson
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation was generously supported by funding from the University of Chicago
Library, the Decorative Arts Trust, the Cary Graphic Arts Collection at the Rochester Institute of
Technology, and the Hagley Museum and Library. At the University of Southern California
(USC), the project was made possible by the Graduate School, the Department of Art History,
and the Visual Studies Research Institute.
Thanks are due first and foremost to the members of my dissertation committee, whose
generosity and counsel extended far beyond the dissertation itself. Vanessa Schwartz contributed
to my conception of the project even before I arrived at USC. Her recommendations and
penetrating insights helped shape the project’s contours and sharpen its arguments. My abilities
as an art historian, especially as an interpreter of commercial imagery, developed substantially
under the expert eye of Jennifer Greenhill. Steve Ross’s essential question—“Why should trees
die for anything you have to say?”—was a constant refrain in the back of my head as I filled
page after page with words that, I hope, warrant the paper. Finally, Amy Ogata has been an
unfailingly generous and incisive advisor, as well as an empathetic colleague and friend. Under
her guidance, I have improved not only as a writer, thinker, and educator, but also as a person.
She is, in the integrative language of midcentury design, a model of the “whole person” to which
I humbly aspire.
Exceptional mentors have cultivated my intellectual and professional growth at every
stage of my educational career. At USC, I developed as a scholar in the classrooms and through
the invaluable insights of Suzanne Hudson, Megan Luke, Kate Flint, Ann Marie Yasin, Daniella
Bleichmar, Karen Halttunen, Jim Thomas, and John Blakinger. At the Bard Graduate Center,
under the influence of Peter Miller, Catherine Whalen, Pat Kirkham, Paul Stirton, and Nina
iii
Stritzler-Levine, I became not just an avid consumer, but also an earnest producer of knowledge.
I first gained confidence in my abilities as a thinker and educator at Brown University thanks to
the positive encouragement of Evelyn Lincoln and Rebecca Molholt. This whole journey began
at Moses Brown School in the classroom of Sandy Richter, whose dramatic reenactment of a
scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail made medieval architecture seem accessible and
surprisingly hip, launching me on the path to pursue my own quirky brand of art history.
Research for this project was made possible by the generosity of librarians, archivists,
and curators at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; the Art Institute of
Chicago; the Bancroft Library and the Environmental Design Archives at the University of
California, Berkeley; the Hagley Library; the Stanford University Libraries; the University of
Chicago Libraries; and the University of Illinois at Chicago Libraries. Special thanks are due to
Jennifer Whitlock at the Vignelli Center for Design Studies and to the staff at the Cary Graphic
Arts Collection, including Steven Galbraith, Amelia Hugill-Fontanel, Ella Von Holtum, and
Shani Avni. For providing me with opportunities to workshop the ideas and arguments contained
in this dissertation, I am grateful to the organizers and participants of the 2017 conference
International Design Organisations: History, Legacies, Values at the University of Brighton; the
2019 meetings of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Design History Society; the
2020 meeting of the College Art Association; and the 2021 Getty Graduate Symposium.
During my time at USC, I have benefitted from the camaraderie, wit, and remarkable
intelligence of a truly inspiring cohort. Natalia Lauricella and Dina Murokh heroically assumed
roles too numerous to list here. To call them colleagues, friends, confidants—all would be vast
understatements. Suffice it to say that they made the dissertation, and the process of writing it,
immeasurably better. I might have been able to do it without them, but I certainly wouldn’t have
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wanted to. Jessica Brier, Lauren Dodds, and Emily Anderson were models of magnanimity,
setting a tone of collegiality and making the task of earning a Ph.D. seem, if not effortless, at
least eminently more attainable. Danielle Charlap, Grace Converse, Frances Lazare, and Isabel
Wade were constant sources of compassion and encouragement that sustained me through some
of the most challenging periods of research and writing.
Finally, I am forever grateful to my family for their support throughout this long process.
Maggie Gordon-Fogelson, Ashley Miller, and Piper Miller helped keep me clearheaded,
especially in the final stages of writing. Weekends with them in the Berkshires reminded me of
the life waiting at the end of the tunnel. I can only imagine what it might have been like to
complete this project with the companionship, guidance, and wisdom of Dan Fogelson, my late
father: to have enjoyed his company on research trips, to have spied him in the audience at
conferences, to have plied him with questions and probed his mind for its keen insights. I wrote
this dissertation in his memory, as well as those of Jeffrey Osborne and Georgina Walker.
Fortunately, my mother, Debbie Gordon, was there at every stage of the process. She talked me
through research and writing blocks, listened to run-throughs of conference talks, and spun
riveting tales of her own experiences as a professional designer, including visits with my father
to the Aspen design conference in the early eighties. I dedicate this dissertation to Dan and
Debbie, the first designers I ever knew and this project’s reason for being.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ii

List of Figures vi

Abstract xxii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1
Containing Corporate Flow:
Container Corporation of American and the Design of Business 41

Chapter 2
Discordant by Design:
Reanimating the International Design Conference in Aspen 86

Chapter 3
Creativity and Control:
Unimark International and a Systems Theory of Design 142

Chapter 4
Recycling Capitalist Aesthetics:
The Economics and Ecology of the Integral Urban House 196

Epilogue
Apple in Aspen:
The Technological Afterlives of Integrated Design 257

Figures 268

Bibliography 457

vi
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1. A. M. Cassandre, advertisement for Container Corporation of America,
Fortune, November 1937. 268

Figure 1.2. Edward McKnight Kauffer, advertisement for Container Corporation of
America, Fortune, June 1941. 269

Figure 1.3. (top) Organization chart showing Container Corporation of America’s first
board of directors, c. 1926; (bottom) Map showing Container Corporation of America’s
network of mills, factories, and offices, 1929. From Susan Black, ed., The First Fifty
Years, 1926–1976 (Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1976), 16–17. 270

Figure 1.4. (top) Container Corporation of America’s accounting department, 1928;
(bottom) Interior of one of Container Corporation of America’s carton factories,
c. early 1930s. From Susan Black, ed., The First Fifty Years, 1926–1976 (Chicago:
Container Corporation of America, 1976), 22–23. 271

Figure 1.5. Early advertisement for Container Corporation of America, c. 1926–35.
Walter P. Paepcke Papers, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center,
University of Chicago Library. 272

Figure 1.6. Cover of Gebrauchsgraphik, January 1935. 273

Figure 1.7. Egbert Jacobson, cover design for a promotional booklet for Cluett, Peabody
& Co., c. 1918. From J. M. Bowles, Some Examples of the Work of American Designers
(Philadelphia: Dill & Collins, 1918), unpaginated. 274

Figure 1.8. Routing diagram for materials and for printed forms in a manufacturing
plant, c. 1914. From Willard C. Brinton, Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1914), 18. 275

Figure 1.9. “German Reparation and Interallied Debt Payments,” 1931. From “A
Portfolio of Charts on the Subject of Reparations, Interallied Debts, and National
Budgets,” Fortune 4, no. 5 (November 1931): 52. 276

Figure 1.10. Two advertisements for Container Corporation of America, Fortune, July
and October 1936. 277

Figure 1.11. Toni Zepf, advertisement for Container Corporation of America, Fortune,
May 1938. 278

Figure 1.12. Toni Zepf, advertisement for Container Corporation of America, Fortune,
June 1938. 279

vii
Figure 1.13. Herbert Bayer, two advertisements for Container Corporation of America,
Fortune, April and October 1942. 280

Figure 1.14. Xanti Schawinsky, advertisement for Container Corporation of America,
Fortune, September 1941. 281

Figure 1.15. Jean Carlu, advertisement for Container Corporation of America, Fortune,
December 1942. 282

Figure 1.16. Matthew Leibowitz, advertisement for Container Corporation of America,
Fortune, May 1943. 283

Figure 1.17. (left) A. M. Cassandre, advertisement for Container Corporation of
America, Fortune, October 1937; (right) György Kepes, advertisement for Container
Corporation of America, Fortune, February 1939. 284

Figure 1.18. “Sources and flow of primary materials through mills and factories of
Container Corporation of America,” 1938. From Annual Report, Container Corporation
of America, 1937 (Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1938). 285

Figure 1.19. Edgar Miller, “Modern Paperboard Processes,” 1937. From Alexander
Weaver, Paper, Wasps and Packages: The Romantic Story of Paper and Its Influence
on the Course of History (Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1937), 78–9. 286

Figure 1.20. Edgar Miller, “Number 6 Cylinder Paperboard Machine at the Philadelphia
plant of Container Corporation of America,” 1937. From Alexander Weaver, Paper,
Wasps and Packages: The Romantic Story of Paper and Its Influence on the Course of
History (Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1937). 287

Figure 1.21. Reproduction of a conference room mural by Katherine O’Brien at
Container Corporation of America’s Lake Shore Mill, Chicago, n.d. From Egbert
Jacobson, “Good Design: An Important Function of Management,” Graphis 6, no. 30
(February 1950): 136. 288

Figure 1.22. View of International Package exhibition, including the “Making
Paperboard” mural by Wayne Colvin, in the reception room of Container Corporation
of America’s New York office, 1936. From Annual Report, Container Corporation of
America, 1936 (Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1937). 289

Figure 1.23. Reproduction of the “Making Paperboard” mural by Wayne Colvin, 1936.
From Annual Report, Container Corporation of America, 1936 (Chicago: Container
Corporation of America, 1937). 290

Figure 1.24. The reception room of Container Corporation of America’s Chicago
headquarters, 1954. From Susan Black, ed., The First Fifty Years, 1926–1976 (Chicago:
Container Corporation of America, 1976), 60. 291
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Figure 1.25. Egbert Jacobson, receptionist desk in Container Corporation of America’s
Chicago headquarters, c. 1937. From “How Container Corporation Forecasts Profits,”
American Business, August 1937, 44. 292

Figure 1.26. Maria Bergson using models to demonstrate the versatility of her unit
furniture, 1948. Photograph by Bernard Hoffman. 293

Figure 1.27. Arrangement of Maria Bergson’s unit furniture in the Chicago headquarters
of Container Corporation of America, 1947. From “Many Combinations Easy with
Bergson ‘Unit’ Furniture,” American Business, December 1947, 16. 294

Figure 1.28. Maria Bergson, detail of unit furniture, 1947. From “Many Combinations
Easy with Bergson ‘Unit’ Furniture,” American Business, December 1947, 15. 295

Figure 1.29. Egbert Jacobson, stationery forms for Container Corporation of America,
c. 1936. From Egbert Jacobson, “Good Design: An Important Function of Management,”
Graphis 6, no. 30 (February 1950): 136. 296

Figure 1.30. Office designed by Maria Bergson in Container Corporation of America’s
Chicago headquarters, 1947. From “Many Combinations Easy with Bergson ‘Unit’
Furniture,” American Business, December 1947, 14. 297

Figure 1.31. (top) Plant leased by Container Corporation of America in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, c. 1935. From Annual Report, Container Corporation of America, 1935
(Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1936); (bottom) Container Corporation of
America plant in Fort Worth, Texas, c. 1940. From Annual Report, Container
Corporation of America, 1940 (Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1941). 298

Figure 1.32. (top) Interior of a plant leased by Container Corporation of America in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, c. 1935. From Annual Report, Container Corporation of
America, 1935 (Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1936); (bottom) The same
plant furnished with Container Corporation of America’s machinery, c. 1936. From
Annual Report, Container Corporation of America, 1936 (Chicago: Container
Corporation of America, 1937). 299

Figure 1.33. (top) Container Corporation of America factory in Cleveland, Ohio, c. 1938.
From Annual Report, Container Corporation of America, 1938 (Chicago: Container
Corporation of America, 1939); (bottom) Container Corporation of America plant in
Medford, Massachusetts, c. 1944. From Annual Report, Container Corporation of
America, 1944 (Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1945). 300

Figure 1.34. Walter Gropius, Container Corporation of America’s Greensboro Plant seen
from the west, Greensboro, North Carolina, c. 1946. Photograph by Lionel Freedman.
Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Walter Gropius. 301

ix
Figure 1.35. Counterclockwise from top left: Containers awaiting shipment in a
Container Corporation of America warehouse, c. 1939; Container Corporation of
America delivery truck, c. 1936; “Inquiry for Prices” form for Container Corporation
of America, c. 1930s; Container Corporation of America’s Greensboro Plant, 1946. 302

Figure 1.36. (top) Early Container Corporation of America delivery truck, c. 1920s.
From Susan Black, ed., The First Fifty Years, 1926–1976 (Chicago: Container
Corporation of America, 1976), 19; (bottom) Container Corporation of America delivery
truck, c. 1935. From Annual Report, Container Corporation of America, 1935 (Chicago:
Container Corporation of America, 1936). 303

Figure 1.37. (top) Walter Gropius, Office Unit and Factory Building, Greensboro, North
Carolina, 1944–1946: East and north elevations; (bottom) Exterior view of Container
Corporation of America’s plant in Greensboro, North Carolina, c. 1946. Harvard Art
Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Walter Gropius. 304

Figure 1.38. (top) Walter Gropius, Office Unit and Factory Building, Greensboro, North
Carolina, 1944–1946: First floor layout. Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger
Museum, Gift of Walter Gropius; (bottom) Interior of Container Corporation of
America’s Greensboro Plant, Greensboro, North Carolina, 1946. Photograph by Hedrich
Blessing Studio. From “Container Plant: Finely Composed Masonry Encloses an
Efficient Factory,” Architectural Forum 89, no. 2 (August 1948): 92. 305

Figure 1.39. Flow sketch of the Container Corporation of America plant in Greensboro,
North Carolina, 1948. From “Container Plant: Finely Composed Masonry Encloses an
Efficient Factory,” Architectural Forum 89, no. 2 (August 1948): 93. 306

Figure 1.40. First and ground floor plans for the Container Corporation of America plant
in Greensboro, North Carolina, 1948. From “Container Plant: Finely Composed Masonry
Encloses an Efficient Factory,” Architectural Forum 89, no. 2 (August 1948): 92. 307

Figure 1.41. (top) Container Corporation of America plant, Fernandina Beach, Florida,
1947. From Annual Report, Container Corporation of America, 1947 (Chicago:
Container Corporation of America, 1948); (bottom) Container Corporation of America
plant, Muskogee, Oklahoma, 1948. From Susan Black, ed., The First Fifty Years,
1926–1976 (Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1976), 64. 308

Figure 1.42. Herbert Bayer, “Modern Art in Advertising” exhibition, Art Institute of
Chicago, April 28–June 24, 1945. From Alexander Dorner, The Way Beyond “Art”:
The Work of Herbert Bayer (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947), 214. 309

Figure 1.43. Herbert Bayer, entrance to the “Modern Art in Advertising” exhibition, Art
Institute of Chicago, April 28–June 24, 1945. From Alexander Dorner, The Way Beyond
“Art”: The Work of Herbert Bayer (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947), 214. 310

x
Figure 1.44. Herbert Bayer, advertisement for Container Corporation of America,
Fortune, July 1941. 311

Figure 1.45. (left) A. M. Cassandre, advertisement for Container Corporation of
America, Fortune, April 1938; (right) Toni Zepf, advertisement for Container
Corporation of America, Fortune, August 1938. 312

Figure 2.1. Herbert Bayer, Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies logo, 1950. Bayer
Collection, Aspen Historical Society. 313

Figure 2.2. Louis Danziger, mailer for fifth International Design Conference in Aspen,
1955. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute. 314

Figure 2.3. Cover of a pamphlet for the fifth International Design Conference in Aspen,
1955. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute. 315

Figure 2.4. Bruce Beck, poster for the ninth International Design Conference in Aspen,
1959. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute. 316

Figure 2.5. Margaret Mead and Paul Byers, The Small Conference: An Innovation in
Communication (The Hague: Mouton, 1968). 317

Figure 2.6. “Program of Panel Discussions” from the invitation to the first design
conference in Aspen, 1951. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty
Research Institute. 318

Figure 2.7. (top) Tentative program and (bottom) final program for the fifth
International Design Conference in Aspen, 1955. International Design Conference in
Aspen records, Getty Research Institute. 319

Figure 2.8. (top) Tentative program and (bottom) final program for the sixteenth
International Design Conference in Aspen, 1966. International Design Conference in
Aspen records, Getty Research Institute. 320

Figure 2.9. (top) Walter Paepcke speaking at the first design conference in Aspen, 1951;
(bottom) Identification badge for the design conference in Aspen. International Design
Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute. 321

Figure 2.10. Speakers at International Design Conference in Aspen, clockwise from top
left: R. Buckminster Fuller, 1952; Henry Wolf, 1966; Allen Hurlburt, 1966; Leo Lionni,
1967. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute. 322

Figure 2.11. Mildred Constantine responding—“You make taste sound like a 4 letter
word”—to a question from Russell Lynes at the fourth International Design Conference
in Aspen, 1954. Mildred Constantine papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution. 323
xi
Figure 2.12. Herbert Bayer asking a question from the audience during the fifth
International Design Conference in Aspen, 1955. Will Burtin papers, Cary Graphic
Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology. 324

Figure 2.13. Panel discussion during the sixth International Design Conference in
Aspen, 1956. Will Burtin papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute
of Technology. 325

Figure 2.14. H. L. Baum, Jr., far right, leads a roundtable discussion at the second
International Design Conference in Aspen, 1952. From “Aspen Design Conference,”
Fortune (September 1952): 114. 326

Figure 2.15. A moment of levity during a group seminar session at the sixth
International Design Conference in Aspen, 1956. Will Burtin papers, Cary Graphic Arts
Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology. 327

Figure 2.16. Possibly the “Integrated Design” exhibition organized by Leo Lionni for
the first design conference in Aspen, 1951. Herbert Pinzke papers, Special Collections
and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago. 328

Figure 2.17. Installation view of the exhibition, “Olivetti: Design in Industry,” October
21–November 30, 1952. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives,
New York. IN523.2. Photograph by Soichi Sunami. 329

Figure 2.18. Panel discussions during the third (top) and sixth (bottom) International
Design Conference in Aspen, 1953 and 1956. Herbert Pinzke papers, Special
Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago. 330

Figure 2.19. Participants viewing an exhibition of British design by W. M. de Majo at
the fifth International Design Conference in Aspen, 1955. Will Burtin papers, Cary
Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology. 331

Figure 2.20. Photographs of participants interacting during the design conference in
Aspen: (top left) Walter Paepcke, Alfred Knopf, and Walter Dorwin Teague, 1952;
(top right) Leo Lionni and Charles Eames, 1953; (bottom) Mildred Constantine, John
Entenza, Alfred Parr, and Herbert Bayer, 1954. Herbert Pinzke papers, Special
Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago. 332

Figure 2.21. (left) Harry Bertoia, second from right, speaking with conference
participants at the fifth International Design Conference in Aspen, 1955; (right) Harry
Bertoia, light sculpture displayed at the fifth International Design Conference in Aspen,
1955. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute. 333

Figure 2.22. W. M. de Majo adjusts his kite during the kite festival at the fifth
International Design Conference in Aspen, 1955. Will Burtin papers, Cary Graphic Arts
Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology. 334
xii
Figure 2.23. Publicity material for the fifth International Design Conference in Aspen,
1955. Walter P. Paepcke Papers, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research
Center, University of Chicago Library. 335

Figure 2.24. Likely Morton Goldsholl, preliminary announcement for the second Aspen
design conference, 1952. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty
Research Institute. 336

Figure 2.25. Eric Fraser, cover design for Art & Industry, March 1947. 337

Figure 2.26. Final announcement and program for the second Aspen design conference,
1952. R. Buckminster Fuller papers, Stanford University Libraries. 338

Figure 2.27. Jack Wolfgang Beck, inside cover of the 31st Annual of National
Advertising and Editorial Art (New York: The Art Directors Club of New York, 1952). 339

Figure 2.28. Donald Brun, cover design for Graphis, July 1951. 340

Figure 2.29. Albert Kner, slide illustration, part of a promotional slideshow developed
by the International Design Conference in Aspen, 1955. Herbert Pinzke papers, Special
Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago. 341

Figure 2.30. Membership pamphlet for sixth International Design Conference in Aspen,
1956. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute. 342

Figure 2.31. Publicity material for seventh International Design Conference in Aspen,
1957. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute. 343

Figure 2.32. Tony Palladino, announcement for the nineteenth International Design
Conference in Aspen, 1969. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty
Research Institute. 344

Figure 2.33. Robert Miles Runyan, folder for the seventeenth International Design
Conference in Aspen, 1967. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty
Research Institute. 345

Figure 2.34. (left) Cover of “Report: Ninth International Design Conference in Aspen,”
1959; (right) Cover of the papers for the fourteenth International Design Conference in
Aspen, 1964. International Design Conference in Aspen papers, Special Collections and
University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago. 346

Figure 2.35. Invitation to the first Aspen design conference, “Design as a Function of
Management,” 1951. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research
Institute. 347

xiii
Figure 2.36. Part of the pamphlet for the second Aspen design conference, 1952.
R. Buckminster Fuller papers, Stanford University Libraries. 348

Figure 2.37. (top) Ferenc Berko, view of Eero Saarinen’s tented amphitheater during the
Goethe Bicentennial Convocation, 1949; (bottom) Interior view of Saarinen’s tent, 1949. 349

Figure 2.38. Alexander Ebin and R. Hunter Middleton, Impressions from the Design
Conference held at Aspen, Colorado, June 28 through July 1, 1951, 1951. International
Design Conference in Aspen papers, Special Collections and University Archives,
University of Illinois at Chicago. 350

Figure 2.39. Students and other volunteers erect a geodesic dome on the grounds of the
Aspen design conference, 1953. R. Buckminster Fuller papers, Stanford University
Libraries. 351

Figure 2.40. View of the geodesic dome erected during the third Aspen design
conference, 1953. R. Buckminster Fuller papers, Stanford University Libraries. 352

Figure 2.41. View at night of the geodesic dome erected during the third Aspen design
conference, 1953. R. Buckminster Fuller papers, Stanford University Libraries. 353

Figure 2.42. Herbert Bayer, geodesic dome covering a pool at the Aspen Chalets, 1955.
Will Burtin papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology. 354

Figure 2.43. Publicity materials for the 1955 and 1957 design conferences.
International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute. 355

Figure 2.44. Film stills from “International Design Conference in Aspen: The First
Decade,” 1960. Rhodes Patterson Collection, Chicago Film Archives. 356

Figure 2.45. Film stills from “International Design Conference in Aspen: The First
Decade,” 1960. Rhodes Patterson Collection, Chicago Film Archives. 357

Figure 2.46. Film still from “International Design Conference in Aspen: The First
Decade,” 1960. Rhodes Patterson Collection, Chicago Film Archives. 358

Figure 2.47. Chermayeff & Geismar Associates, advertisement for the fourteenth
International Design Conference in Aspen, 1964. International Design Conference in
Aspen records, Getty Research Institute. 359

Figure 2.48. Publicity materials for the fifteenth International Design Conference in
Aspen, clockwise from top left: Giulio Cittato and Bob Noorda (Unimark International),
cover design for the IDCA ’65 conference papers, 1965; Jim Lienhart and Hans Graff
(Unimark International), corporate membership booklet, 1965; John Massey (Center for
Advanced Research in Design), invitation and conference symbol, 1965. International
Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute. 360
xiv
Figure 3.1. Unimark International, corporate organization chart, 1970. Unimark
International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of
Technology. 361

Figure 3.2. Radio Corporation of America, Trade-marks: Usages, Practices and
Procedures (New York: Radio Corporation of America, 1946). Cary Graphic Arts
Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology. 362

Figure 3.3. Ford Corporate Identity Manual, Volume 1: Corporate Systems,
1969/revised March 1971. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design
Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology. 363

Figure 3.4. Pages from Heinz von Foerster’s talk at the twelfth International Design
Conference in Aspen, 1962. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty
Research Institute. 364

Figure 3.5. Lester Beall, cover of the Connecticut General Style Book, 1958. Lester
Beall papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology. 365

Figure 3.6. Lester Beall, diagram from the Connecticut General Style Book, 1958.
Lester Beall papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology. 366

Figure 3.7. Lester Beall, trademark samples from the Connecticut General Style Book,
1958. Lester Beall papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of
Technology. 367

Figure 3.8. Lester Beall, color samples from the Connecticut General Style Book, 1958.
Lester Beall papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology. 368

Figure 3.9. Lester Beall, typeface samples from Connecticut General Style Book, 1958.
Lester Beall papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology. 369

Figure 3.10. Westinghouse Identification Manual (Pittsburgh: Westinghouse Electric
Corporation, 1955). Hagley Museum and Library. 370

Figure 3.11. Paul Rand, cover of the Westinghouse Graphics Identification Manual,
1961. Paul Rand collection, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of
Technology. 371

Figure 3.12. Paul Rand, “The Circle W” from the Westinghouse Graphics Identification
Manual, 1961. Paul Rand collection, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute
of Technology. 372

Figure 3.13. Paul Rand, “Gothic Westinghouse Typeface” from the Westinghouse
Graphics Identification Manual, 1961. Paul Rand collection, Cary Graphic Arts
Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology. 373
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Figure 3.14. Paul Rand, “Westinghouse Blue” from the Westinghouse Graphics
Identification Manual, 1961. Paul Rand collection, Cary Graphic Arts Collection,
Rochester Institute of Technology. 374

Figure 3.15. Unimark International, phased project flowchart, c. late 1960s. Unimark
International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of
Technology. 375

Figure 3.16. Unimark International, “Control Communication System,” c. late 1960s.
Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute
of Technology. 376

Figure 3.17. Unimark International, corporate identity analysis, n.d. Unimark
International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of
Technology. 377

Figure 3.18. Unimark International, “Target: Focal Points Merchandising
Environmental Design Concept,” January 27, 1972. Unimark International records,
Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology. 378

Figure 3.19. Unimark International, “Symbol Development” from the Hortors
Corporate Identification Manual, n.d. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center
for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology. 379

Figure 3.20. Unimark International, “Symbol Construction” from the Mondi Valley
Paper Company Interim Graphic Standards Manual, 1967. Unimark International
records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology. 380

Figure 3.21. Unimark International, “The Corporate Symbol Construction” from the
Truman Limited Corporate Identity Manual, 1972. Unimark International records,
Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology. 381

Figure 3.22. Unimark International, “Memorex Corporation: Typography” from the
Memorex Corporate Identity Manual, 1970. Unimark International records, Vignelli
Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology. 382

Figure 3.23. Unimark International, “Colors” from Volvo Dealership Identification,
1975. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester
Institute of Technology. 383

Figure 3.24. Unimark International, corporate logotype, trademark, and color samples
for Parke-Davis, 1969. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design
Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology. 384

xvi
Figure 3.25. Unimark International, “Signature Systems” from The Wickes Corporation
Graphic Identification Standards, 1970. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center
for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology. 385

Figure 3.26. Unimark International, “Stationery Systems” from The Wickes Corporation
Graphic Identification Standards, 1970. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center
for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology. 386

Figure 3.27. Unimark International, “Facilities Identification/Retail” from The Wickes
Corporation Graphic Identification Standards, 1970. Unimark International records,
Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology. 387

Figure 3.28. Jan Tschichold, figures from The New Typography, 1928. 388

Figure 3.29. Le Corbusier, pattern exercises in The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure
to the Human Scale, Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics, 1954. 389

Figure 3.30. Unimark International, “Application of the grid,” from Alcoa Print
Advertising Coordination Program, 1966. Unimark International records, Vignelli
Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology. 390

Figure 3.31. Will Burtin, design process for a typographic specimen page for the
Upjohn Brand Identification Manual, c. 1960s. Will Burtin papers, Cary Graphic
Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology. 391

Figure 3.32. Unimark International, diagram showing how the Information and Design
Systems Division screened problems to determine if existing or experimental systems
techniques could be useful, c. 1970. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for
Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology. 392

Figure 3.33. Photographs showing Unimark International’s use of computer-aided
design software: (top) “Graphic designer Harry Boller uses a CRT scope to automatically
lay out pages of graphic material many times faster and more accurately than by
conventional hand methods”; (bottom) “The designer, working with a computer driven
photo setting device, checks for accurate alignment of characters on a CRT scope
connected to the main CRT in the phototypesetting unit.” From Richard Branham,
“The Case for Computerized Design,” Industrial Design (March 1970): 24. 393

Figure 3.34. Photographs showing Unimark International’s use of computer-aided
design software: (top) “Product designer Dale Fahnstrom uses a time-shared storage
tube CRT scope, as a scouting tool in the development of a series of cologne bottles
for men”; “The resulting designers were drawn on a small XY plotter.” From Richard
Branham, “The Case for Computerized Design,” Industrial Design (March 1970): 27. 394

Figure 3.35. Selection of trademarks created by Unimark International, c. 1966–1976. 395

xvii
Figure 3.36. Various public signage designed by Unimark International, c. 1966–1976.
Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute
of Technology. 396

Figure 3.37. Pantone Super Warm Red color swatch, n.d. Unimark International
records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology. 397

Figure 3.38. (top) New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual, 1970;
(bottom) Knoll au Louvre, 1972. Massimo and Lella Vignelli papers, Vignelli Center
for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology. 398

Figure 3.39. Selection of graphic designs by Vignelli Associates, c. 1980s–1990s.
Massimo and Lella Vignelli papers, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester
Institute of Technology. 399

Figure 3.40. Selection of publications by Vignelli Associates, c. 1976–2010. Massimo
and Lella Vignelli papers, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of
Technology. 400

Figure 3.41. Unimark International, advertisements for Alcoa, Memorex, and Ecodyne,
c. 1966–1976. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies,
Rochester Institute of Technology. 401

Figure 3.42. Unimark International, package designs for Target, Parke-Davis, and
Great Western Foods, c. 1966–1976. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center
for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology. 402

Figure 3.43. (left) John Greiner for Unimark International, table of contents for The
Wickes Corporation Graphic Identification Standards, 1970. Unimark International
records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology; (right)
Lester Beall, table of contents for Caterpillar Corporate Identification Manual, 1968.
Lester Beall papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology. 403

Figure 3.44. Bob Noorda, signage designs for the Metropolitana di Milano, 1964. 404

Figure 3.45. Unimark International, pages from the New York City Transit Authority
Graphic Standards Manual, 1970. Massimo and Lella Vignelli papers, Vignelli Center
for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology. 405

Figure 3.46. Clockwise from top left: Jock Kinneir, signage system for British Railways,
n.d.; Jacques Guillon and Associates, signage for the Montreal Metro, n.d.; Cambridge
Seven Associates, signage system for the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, n.d. 406

Figure 3.47. Unimark International, mockup for New York City 53rd Street project,
1967. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester
Institute of Technology. 407
xviii
Figure 3.48. Unimark International, “Denver General Hospital Interior Signage,” 1971.
Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute
of Technology. 408

Figure 3.49. (left) Massimo Vignelli, “Unigrid Design Specifications,” 1977; (right)
Massimo Vignelli, Grids: Their Meaning and Use for Federal Designers (Washington,
D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, 1978). Massimo and Lella Vignelli papers,
Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology. 409

Figure 4.1. “Habitat and Life Support System of an Integral Urban House,” 1979. From
Farallones Institute, The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the City (San
Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979), 10. 410

Figure 4.2. “City Map” Score for Day One of “Experiments in Environment,” 1968.
From Alison B. Hirsch, “Scoring the Participatory City: Lawrence (& Anna) Halprin’s
Take Part Process,” Journal of Architectural Education 64, no. 2 (2011): 133. 411

Figure 4.3. Stills from IDCA 1970 by Eli Noyes and Claudia Weill, showing members
of the Moving Company performing at the twentieth International Design Conference
in Aspen, 1970. 412

Figure 4.4. Still from IDCA 1970 by Eli Noyes and Claudia Weill, showing an
inflatable structure erected by Ant Farm at the twentieth International Design
Conference in Aspen, 1970. 413

Figure 4.5. François Dallegret, “The Environment Bubble,” 1965. From Reyner
Banham, “A Home Is Not a House,” Art in America 53, no. 2 (April 1965): 77. 414

Figure 4.6. View of the geodesic dome erected during the third Aspen design
conference, 1953. R. Buckminster Fuller papers, Stanford University Libraries. 415

Figure 4.7. Pages from Sim Van der Ryn’s talk, “Persistence of Form,” in International
Design Conference in Aspen, June 14–19, 1970, Environment by Design (1970), 41.
International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute. 416

Figure 4.8. György Kepes, advertisement for Container Corporation of America,
Fortune, February 1939. 417

Figure 4.9. Leo Lionni, advertisement for Container Corporation of America, Fortune,
November 1941. 418

Figure 4.10. Sim Van der Ryn, “Tecno-Fantacy House-Hold,” c. 1972. From Simon
Sadler, “Mandalas or Raised Fists? Hippie Holism, Panther Totality, and Another
Modernism,” in Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, ed. Andrew Blauvelt
(Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015), 122. 419

xix
Figure 4.11. Sim Van der Ryn, “Eco-Tecture House-Hold,” c. 1972. From
https://revolution.berkeley.edu/assets/AbstractofProposaltoBuildEcotecturalHouse.pdf. 420

Figure 4.12. Herbert Bayer, advertisement for Container Corporation of America,
Fortune, July 1939. 421

Figure 4.13. Herbert Matter, advertisement for Container Corporation of America,
Fortune, March 1941. 422

Figure 4.14. (top) Photograph of boy scouts collecting wastepaper for Container
Corporation of America, c. 1930s. From Annual Report, Container Corporation of
America, 1941 (Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1942); (bottom)
Photographs showing the recycling program of Ecology Action, c. 1970s. Ecology
Action Records, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 423

Figure 4.15. (left) Herbert Bayer, advertisement for Container Corporation of America,
Fortune, July 1939; (right) Sim Van der Ryn, “Eco-Tecture House-Hold,” c. 1972. From
https://revolution.berkeley.edu/assets/AbstractofProposaltoBuildEcotecturalHouse.pdf. 424

Figure 4.16. “A Graphic Organizing Technique: PERT,” 1979. From Farallones
Institute, The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the City (San Francisco:
Sierra Club Books, 1979), 44. 425

Figure 4.17. Frank Gilbreth and Lillian Gilbreth, “Process Chart: Loading VB Rifle
Grenades,” 1921. From Frank Gilbreth and Lillian Gilbreth, Process Charts: First Steps
in Finding the One Best Way to Do Work (New York: The American Society of
Mechanical Engineers, 1921), 12. 426

Figure 4.18. (top) Simplified model of a PERT flow plan, 1962. From Daniel D. Roman,
“The PERT System: An Appraisal of Program Evaluation Review Technique,” The
Journal of the Academy of Management 5, no. 1 (April 1962); (bottom) “System Flow
Plan-Missile” in censored form, 1958. From U.S. Department of the Navy, “Program
Evaluation Research Task, Summary Report, Phase 1,” (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1958). 427

Figure 4.19. “Schematic of a Generalized Ecosystem,” 1979. From Farallones Institute,
The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the City (San Francisco: Sierra Club
Books, 1979), 22. 428
Figure 4.20. “Integral House Ecosystem,” 1979. From Farallones Institute, The Integral
Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the City (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979),
27. 429

Figure 4.21. Gordon Ashby, advertisement for the “Be a Transformer” poster, 1970.
From “Advertisements for a Counter Culture,” Progressive Architecture 51, no. 7 (July
1970): 83. 430

xx
Figure 4.22. Gordon Ashby and Bill Wells, illustration for “Part One: The Concept,”
1979. From Farallones Institute, The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the
City (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979). 431

Figure 4.23. Bill Wells, illustration for “Part Two: Conserving Energy and Resources,”
1979. From The Farallones Institute, The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in
the City (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979). 432

Figure 4.24. Ant Farm, Truckstop Network Placemat, 1970. Collection SFMOMA,
Gift of Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier. 433

Figure 4.25. Souvenir Map of Colorado with a route charted by R. Buckminster Fuller,
1952. R. Buckminster Fuller papers, Stanford University Libraries. 434

Figure 4.26. “Freestone Conference Site Plan,” 1970. From “Advertisements for a
Counter Culture,” Progressive Architecture (July 1970): 74–5. 435

Figure 4.27. Curtis Schreier, Freestone Conference chart, 1970. From “Advertisements
for a Counter Culture,” Progressive Architecture (July 1970): 72. 436

Figure 4.28. Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, 1968. 437

Figure 4.29. Ecology Action, “Curbside Recycling Guide,” c. 1970s. Ecology Action
Records, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 438

Figure 4.30. (top to bottom) Letterheads for Ecology Action, Ecology Center Workshop,
Environmental Action Coalition, and The Environment Monthly, c. 1960s–1970s.
Ecology Action Records, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 439

Figure 4.31. Front and back covers of the Underground Press Guide, 1969. Ecology
Action Records, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 440

Figure 4.32. James Campe, “Trash Can Do It,” Farallones Designs poster, c. 1969.
From Greg Castillo, “Salvage Salvation: Counterculture Trash as a Cultural Resource,”
in The Routledge Companion to Architecture and Social Engagement, ed. Farhan Karim
(New York: Routledge, 2018), 314. 441

Figure 4.33. Pages from “An Eco-Activist Fable: The Color-In Book,” Ecology Action:
The Journal of Cultural Transformation 2, no. 2 (1971): 2; 21. Ecology Action Records,
The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 442

Figure 4.34. “Ecology of Revolution,” Win: Peace and Freedom through Nonviolent
Action (1969): 4–5. Ecology Action Records, The Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley. 443

xxi
Figure 4.35. Ecology Action poster, c. 1969. Ecology Action Records, The Bancroft
Library, University of California, Berkeley. 444

Figure 4.36. (top to bottom) Ecology Action recycling truck, c. 1970s. Ecology Action
Records, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; New Alchemy truck,
c. 1970s. From Journal of the New Alchemists 1 (1973): 59; Ant Farm, Media Van,
c. 1970. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California,
Berkeley. 445

Figure 4.37. Gordon Ashby, poster for “The New Possibilities Show,” 1976. Oakland
Museum of California, All Of Us Or None Archive, Gift of the Rossman Family. 446

Figure E.1. Steve Jobs speaking at the 33rd International Design Conference in Aspen,
1983. 447

Figure E.2. Paul Rand (top) presenting his design for NeXT’s visual identity to Steve
Jobs and company (bottom) at NeXT’s headquarters in Palo Alto, 1986. 448

Figure E.3. Paul Rand, NeXT logo presentation booklet, 1986. 449

Figure E.4. Steve Jobs presenting the first iMac, 1998. 450

Figure E.5. (top) Paul Rand, NeXT logo, 1986; (bottom) The NeXTstation and
Nextcube, 1990. 451

Figure E.6. Melvin Conway, diagram showing the homomorphism, or structural
correlation, between a computer system and the organizational system of its designer.
From Melvin E. Conway, “How Do Committees Invent?,” Datamation 14, no. 4
(April 1968): 30. 452

Figure E.7. Manu Cornet, Organizational Charts, 2011. 453

Figure E.8. Walter Gropius, diagram of the Bauhaus curriculum, 1922. From Walter
Gropius, Satzungen Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar (Statutes of the State Bauhaus in
Weimar), July 1922. 454

Figure E.9. László Moholy-Nagy, diagram of the New Bauhaus curriculum, 1937.
From “The New Bauhaus, American School of Design” promotional booklet, Box 189,
Folder 7, György Kepes papers (M1796). Department of Special Collections, Stanford
University Libraries, Stanford, CA. 455

Figure E.10. “Fall Courses 2021,” Center for Integrated Design, University of Texas at
Austin, 2021. 456

xxii
ABSTRACT

In 1948, German-American designer Will Burtin organized an exhibition that proclaimed
“integration” as “the new discipline in design.” He defined this as an endless exercise in creative
comparison and interrelation, and he believed this work contributed directly to the integration of
our culture, which had split into innumerable, disconnected compartments under the influence of
unfettered industrial, technological, and urban development. In 1951, the International Design
Conference in Aspen took up the challenge of defining and debating the terms of integration and
its role as a formative concept in the creation of comprehensive visual environments through the
coordination of art, architecture, and design.
This dissertation examines how the concept of integration, defined as the composition of
wholes from separate parts, shaped design in the U.S. from 1935 to 1985. While scholars have
appraised design’s critical role in twentieth-century capitalism, my analysis focuses on the
technics of capitalist aesthetics, evident in the publicity materials, standards manuals, and built
structures that designers used to manage the economic, visual, and social environment. I argue
that the paired organizational forces of design and corporate culture established integration as a
versatile style of visual and spatial management. My project centers on four organizations that
produced key theories and practices of integrated design: Container Corporation of America, the
International Design Conference in Aspen, Unimark International, and the Farallones Institute. I
argue that their distinct yet related efforts to achieve economic, visual, and social cohesion were
tethered to a speculative design discourse that flourished in Aspen, Colorado. In this postwar
context, the idea of integration transformed the aims and aesthetics of corporate capitalism. The
corporate visual style that resulted from these activities appealed to corporate and countercultural
designers alike, who put it to work in the service of both economic and social improvement.
1
INTRODUCTION

An ideology of integration pervaded mid-twentieth-century American society, from the
pursuit of educational reforms and racial equality to the rise of cybernetics and systems theory.
Integration became a watchword of aspirational improvement, described by one philosopher as
an endless “search for new meanings through new connections.”
1
Used by executives, designers,
sociologists, and ecologists, among others, it promised to shore up a wide array of sociocultural
schisms—the rift between commerce and culture, for instance, or the split between the sciences
and the humanities. This dissertation examines how the concept of integration, defined as the
composition of wholes from separate parts, shaped midcentury design. It considers how
executives and designers cultivated an integrative approach to design so potent in its ability to
organize visual experience that even those who opposed the dominant corporate culture were
compelled to assimilate its tools. While scholars have explored design’s critical role in twentieth-
century capitalism, little research has been done on the technics of capitalist aesthetics and their
redeployment by countercultural designers.
2
By analyzing an understudied corpus of objects that
designers used to manage organizations’ identities—such as institutional advertisements, annual
reports, and standards manuals—my research yields fresh insights into the organizational power
of midcentury design and how it transformed the aims and aesthetics of corporate capitalism. I
argue that the visual, economic, and social work of the corporation coalesced around integration
as a style of organization that remained operative throughout the mid-twentieth century.

1
Kurt F. Leidecker, “What Does Integrated Education Mean?,” Social Science 25, no. 4 (1950): 242.
2
I define “capitalist aesthetics” as a system of formal principles and perceptual equipment—often but not always
cultivated under the auspices of certain capitalist organizations, such as advertising agencies or public relations
firms—that thematize, internalize, and reinforce ideals of productivity, prosperity, and efficiency. I refer principally
to corporate capitalism, the predominant economic system in the U.S., in which industry and commerce are
organized around hierarchical, bureaucratic corporations run by a managerial elite. This system has established order
and organization, alongside productivity and prosperity, as key features of an aesthetic regime that, I argue, came to
dominate midcentury visual experience in the U.S.
2
This project considers notions of visual integration rooted in earlier international efforts
to coordinate art, architecture, and design, evident, for instance, in Peter Behrens’ work for the
AEG, in the mission of the Deutscher Werkbund, and in the pedagogy of the Bauhaus. I explore
how corporate designers adapted the concept of integration to create what Egbert Jacobson, art
director for the Chicago packaging company Container Corporation of America (CCA), called
“integrated design.” Modeled on corporate efforts to control all levels of industry, integrated
design encompassed everything from the layout of annual reports to the painting of trucks and
the renovation of offices—that is, every designed and aesthetically purposeful manifestation of a
company. By showing how designers visualized the logic of corporate integration, this project
challenges essentialist readings of corporate design that cast commercial artists and designers as
mere capitulators to capitalism. Rather than simply sell goods or foster goodwill, I argue that
designers engaged on a structural level with corporate enterprise to create a visual style capable
of organizing the total environment.
Moving between the American Midwest, a longstanding center of industrial production,
and the West Coast, a hub of countercultural activity, this project hinges on Aspen, Colorado, as
a key site of cultural contact. When CCA president Walter Paepcke rehabilitated the former
mining town in the 1940s and 1950s, he envisioned it as a center of corporate and cultural
enrichment fueled by such organizations as the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, the
Aspen Music Festival and School, and the International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA).
The capitalist forces that created Aspen contributed not only to the development of modern
culture, as James Sloan Allen has shown, but also to its putative adversaries.
3
By the 1960s,
Aspen had become home to a counterculture of its own, welcoming figures such as Hunter S.

3
James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen
Crusade for Cultural Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
3
Thompson, the gonzo journalist who famously ran for sheriff on the Freak Power ticket. It also
spawned alternative design projects such as Aspen, a multimedia “magazine in a box” that
alluded to Paepcke’s efforts to rebuild the city on the profits of paperboard packaging. Aspen
was a crucible for both corporate culture and counterculture. But it also revealed these two
cultures to be fundamentally interrelated, not least because both relied on visual integration to
render themselves and their messages more coherent.
This is the story of how corporations transformed the art historical concept of style,
defined as a set of attributes that connect objects across time and space, into a commercially
viable aesthetic program. Postwar designers often promoted their work as a rigorous discipline
that spurned changing trends in the visual arts. Yet if we understand style as an effort to locate
coherence amid an onslaught of visual material, then corporate executives and designers created
what we might call a capitalist style by conceiving design as a way to produce visually coherent
corporate environments. This integrative form of design far exceeded the formal properties of
“simplicity” and “uniformity” described by designer-writers such as Steven Heller and Lorraine
Wild, who maintain a traditional conception of style as a series of progressions, dismissing
corporate modernism as a trend that postmodernist and countercultural aesthetics eventually
superseded.
4
I show how integrated design managed visual experience so effectively that it
shaped visual culture long after the purported demise of modernism. By considering how
corporate designers and counterculturists alike applied techniques of integrated design to such
diverse ends as commercial branding and ecological activism, this dissertation redeploys visual
style as a central organizational apparatus in the age of corporate capitalism.

4
See Lorraine Wild, “The 1950s: Design in Gray Flannel,” Print 43, no. 6 (November 1989): 90–111; Steven
Heller, “The 1960s: Mainstream and Counterculture,” Print 43, no. 6 (November 1989): 112–37, 197–200; and
Lorraine Wild and David Karwan, “Agency and Urgency: The Medium and Its Message,” in Hippie Modernism:
The Struggle for Utopia, ed. Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015), 44–57.
4
This project intervenes in three wide-ranging discourses: the efficacy of integration as an
ideal; the interdependence of capitalism and aesthetics; and the relationship between corporate
culture and counterculture. In the 1990s, historians of art and culture produced an initial wave of
scholarship on the relationship between art and industry in the U.S. that sought to clarify the
borders between art and business, the working relationships between artists and businesspeople,
and the impacts these collaborations had on American visual culture.
5
In the last decade,
architecture and design historians have attended more specifically to the increasingly dominant
status of the corporation in the twentieth century and its role in shaping design, culture, and
theories of modernism.
6
Using new archival evidence, my dissertation offers original analyses of
many of the designers and corporations central in this historiography, but it also draws them
together to construct a narrative of integrated design with broad historical implications.
The ideal of integration has long been central to the history of modern art. Peter Bürger
argued that the aim of the historical avant-garde in Europe was to reintegrate art into the praxis
of life, while Daniel Singal identified an “integrative mode” as the basis of modernist culture in
the U.S.
7
Recent research reexamines this idea through such lenses as ecology, science, media,
and race.
8
These studies characterize the concept of integration in the mid-twentieth century as a

5
See Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993); Michele H. Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995); and Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in
American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
6
See John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Wim de Wit, ed., Design for the Corporate World, 1950–1975 (London:
Lund Humphries, 2017); Nicholas Adams, Gordon Bunshaft and SOM: Building Corporate Modernism (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); and Grace Ong Yan, Building Brands: Corporations and Modern Architecture
(London: Lund Humphries, 2020).
7
Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Daniel Joseph
Singal, “Towards a Definition of American Modernism,” American Quarterly 39, no. 1 (1987): 7–26.
8
See James Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s (Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 2014); John R. Blakinger, Gyorgy Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2019);
Justus Nieland, Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2020); and John Ott, Mixed Media: The Visual Cultures of Racial Integration, 1931–1954
(forthcoming).
5
corrective to the fragmentation of modern life, evident, for instance, in the forms of racial
segregation, the two cultures debate, and the endangerment of natural ecosystems.
9
To expand on
this literature, I examine how midcentury executives and designers constructed integration as an
economic, visual, and social ideal. I argue that designers were not simply participants in the
discourse of integration; rather, they actively worked to produce it by creating spaces and visual
languages for cross-disciplinary exchange. I consider how this discourse changed through the
long midcentury, from 1935 to 1985, to show how integrated design adapted to new conditions,
from prewar economic collapse to the postwar rise of systems thinking and environmental
activism. And I acknowledge how designers contested the meanings and efficacy of integration
even as they assimilated the concept into their work.
A robust body of recent literature has considered the central role of corporate patrons in
supporting the arts, especially in the U.S., where corporations and corporate executives have
been among the most prominent supporters of art and architecture since the nineteenth century.
10

According to John Ott, the ways in which patrons collect, commission, trade, and display works
of art can provide important information about the meanings of art consumption, and through
such studies, art historians can offer important insights into business and economic history.
Much work remains to be done, however, on the economic dimensions of artistic production and
consumption, especially given the fact that many midcentury designers and critics questioned
whether work produced for corporations could truly be considered “art,” or whether the concept

9
For period texts addressing these issues, see: Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery
Story (New York: Harper & Row, 1958); C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1959); and Rachel L. Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
10
See John Ott, “Patrons, Collectors, and Markets,” in A Companion to American Art, ed. John Davis, Jennifer A.
Greenhill, and John D. LaFountain (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015); Monica E. Jovanovich and Melissa Renn,
eds., Corporate Patronage of Art & Architecture in the United States, Late 19th Century to the Present (New York:
Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019); “Commentaries,” American Art 33, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 2–31; and Alex Taylor,
Forms of Persuasion: Art and Corporate Image in the 1960s (forthcoming).
6
of patronage adequately encapsulated the relationship between designers and corporations. These
relations were determined less by the frameworks of collecting, philanthropy, and the art market,
I suggest, and more by the dynamics of professional working relationships, business practices,
and managerial strategies. Reinhold Martin’s and John Harwood’s respective theorizations of the
“organizational complex” and the “interface” inform my efforts to identify and explain structural
correlations between the activities of corporations and designers.
11

Finally, my dissertation intervenes in a critical discussion about the politics of cultural
resistance, especially as they pertain to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Scholars have
framed the work of countercultural designers, especially when pursued in the name of ecology
and environmental activism, as ideologically opposed to the hegemonic project of corporate
capitalism.
12
Building on the work of business, technology, and media theorists such as Thomas
Frank, John Markoff, and Fred Turner, I challenge this normative discourse by showing how
some countercultural groups actually embraced ideas and practices of corporate management
even as they vocally attacked corporate culture.
13
I contribute to this ongoing discussion by
exploring the aesthetic dimensions of this shared organizational ethos. I argue that capitalists and
counterculturists alike relied on the spectacular and mnemonic qualities of a postwar corporate
visual style to achieve their organizational aims.
14

11
Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2003), 3–4; and Harwood, The Interface, 9–11.
12
Chris Zelov and Phil Cousineau, eds., Design Outlaws on the Ecological Frontier (Philadelphia: Knossus, 1997);
Felicity D. Scott, Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010);
Andrew Blauvelt, ed., Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015); and
Alice Twemlow, Sifting the Trash: A History of Design Criticism (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2017).
13
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture
Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005); and Fred Turner, From Counterculture
to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2008).
14
For a recent study of how organizational culture shaped midcentury aesthetics, see Pamela M. Lee, Think Tank
Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020).
7
Ideals of Integration
In 1933, The Oxford English Dictionary defined “integration” as “the making up or
composition of a whole by adding together or combining the separate parts.”
15
Derived from the
Latin integer—meaning “whole” or “intact”—the word had been operative in many academic
disciplines for centuries. In mathematics, for instance, it denoted the process by which the
integral of an equation is calculated; in biology, it referred to part of the evolutionary process, a
corollary to structural differentiation. For some mid-twentieth-century thinkers, the concept of
integration also appealed as a panacea for a number of crises they perceived as specifically
disintegrative in nature—the collapse of the global economy, the specter of nuclear apocalypse,
or the persistence of racial discrimination, to name but a few. The effort to form a world
government and the fight to end racial segregation were among the many integrative solutions to
these disintegrative problems. Because it carries so many different meanings, “integration” can
easily slip into meaninglessness and therefore requires specification. This dissertation engages a
particular midcentury discourse of integrated design concerned with the distinct yet interrelated
ideals of economic, visual, and social integration. It was not simply that economists, designers,
and social scientists all used this word, but also that they used it in similar ways to describe a
process by which separate parts (companies, designs, or individuals) could be brought together to
create more dynamic and coherent wholes. I argue that this shared discourse transformed
midcentury design, establishing it as a profitable, process-based, and collaborative inter-
discipline that was widely applicable to the problems of modern society.
Today, the word “integration” typically calls to mind first and foremost the civil rights
movement and the pursuit of racial equality in the U.S. Racial integration was certainly a critical

15
“Integration,” The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), 367.
8
issue at midcentury, part of a complex and urgent discourse around race relations.
16
During the
early twentieth century, this discussion centered on a concept of “amalgamation” that was subtly
yet importantly distinct from the term “integration,” which entered racial discourse later in the
1930s. To amalgamate meant simply to mix or combine into a single mass; it was related to the
metaphor of the U.S. as a “melting pot” and the process by which turn-of-the-century immigrants
assimilated into American culture. In the context of race relations, amalgamation primarily
referred to debates over interracial marriage and miscegenation, which hinged on biological,
legal, and sociological justifications for the preservation of “racial integrity,” a concept that was
fundamentally opposed to “racial integration.”
17
White and black writers alike worried that racial
mixing would lead to the erasure of important traits and differences.
18
By midcentury, however,
civil rights activists increasingly condemned such concepts, collectively understood as forms “of
bondage, however polite the name by which it may be called—parallel culture, separate but
equal, or racial integrity.”
19
To integrate, on the other hand, meant to bring individuals or groups
into equal participation in society. By the early 1950s, education had become the main arena in
the struggle for racial integration.
20
John Ott has examined the art world, armed forces, and

16
Although dominated by discussions about the relationship between White and Black Americans, the study of race
relations in the U.S. also addressed the conditions of other marginalized social groups, such as immigrant and Native
American populations. See Melville J. Herskovits, “Race Relations,” American Journal of Sociology 37, no. 6
(1932): 976–82. The subject of race relations was, in turn, part of a broader sociological discourse around
“intergroup relations,” a term coined by American sociologist William G. Sumner in Folkways: A Study of the
Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1906).
17
See Charles Hillman Brough, “Work of the Commission of Southern Universities on the Race Question,” The
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 49 (1913): 47–57; W. D. Weatherford, “Race
Relationship in the South,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 49 (1913): 164–72;
and Albert Ernest Jenks, “The Legal Status of Negro-White Amalgamation in the United States,” American Journal
of Sociology 21, no. 5 (1916): 666–78.
18
The concept of racial integrity was related to eugenics, a racist ideology rooted in pseudoscience that had material
effects on early twentieth-century design. See Christina Cogdell, Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the
1930s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
19
Mary McLeod Bethune, “The Negro in Retrospect and Prospect,” The Journal of Negro History 35, no. 1 (January
1950): 12.
20
See the special issue, “The Courts and Racial Integration in Education,” The Journal of Negro Education 21, no. 3
(Summer 1952).
9
industrial labor union as other key, interconnected fronts in the contest for racial equality,
arguing that graphic work produced in these contexts contributed to a midcentury visual culture
of racial integration.
21
Ott identifies an important distinction between, on the one hand, efforts to
assimilate to the dominant culture, condemn discrimination, or form unions of convenience, and,
on the other hand, the integrative pursuit of a truly interracial “community that does not diminish
or paper over differences but acknowledges, respects, and celebrates them.”
22
This distinction
was central to a broader midcentury discourse of integration, as well as the particular project of
integrated design, which theoretically embraced difference and rejected notions of uniformity,
conformity, or purity.
The organizations examined in this dissertation were far from integrated racially, but they
pursued other forms of combination and other ideals of wholeness that transformed design and
business in significant ways. The robust textual and visual discourse around racial integration did
not eclipse or prevent the term’s use in other contexts. Even in education, a major battleground in
the fight for civil rights, integration denoted numerous educational reforms beyond the pursuit of
racial equality. The Foundation for Integrated Education (est. 1947), for instance, pursued
integration as a humanistic solution to the problems caused by overspecialization, especially the
perceived loss of shared human values and ideals.
23
The Foundation promoted curricula that

21
See John Ott, “Graphic Consciousness: The Visual Cultures of Integrated Industrial Unions at Midcentury,”
American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2014): 883–917; “Battle Station MoMA: Jacob Lawrence and the Desegregation of
the Armed Forces and the Art World,” American Art 29, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 58–89; and “A Show of Unity: Art
Exhibitions, Racial Integration, and the CIO,” International Review of African American Art 26, no. 3 (October
2016): 28–33.
22
Ott, “Graphic Consciousness,” 886.
23
Other organizations devoted to this type of integrated education emerged in the immediate postwar period. In
1952, a group of professors from Bucknell University argued that a “continuing search for integration” had become
symptomatic of America’s educational system, evident in the development of various survey, cross-sectional, and
humanities courses. This desire for integrative order arose in response to a perceived “lack of conceptual clarity and
order” in general education. See W. Preston Warren, F. David Martin, and H. R. Garvin, “Concepts as Integrators,”
Bucknell University Studies 3, no. 2 (March 1952): 55–72. In the 1960s, the project of integrated education took on
international dimensions. Swedish scholar Erling A. Thunberg founded the International Center for Integrative
Studies in New York City in 1962 with the aim of integrating knowledge across disciplines and cultures.
10
centered on “unified, overall concepts” and communication between disciplines, arguing that all
fields are interrelated precisely by virtue of being fields of human endeavor.
24
The word
integration seemed particularly suited to this humanistic project in part because it was already
operative in so many of these fields, “thus expressing well the multifaceted world of man.”
25

Integration was not simply widely applicable, then; rather, it was deliberately constructed as an
interdisciplinary concept to serve as a basis for interactions between ideas and individuals.
Crucially, the Foundation’s members set no limits or firm goals in their pursuit of
integrated education. “Integration is a process rather than an accomplished fact,” explained
philosopher Kurt F. Leidecker in 1950, “and in this sense is equivalent to an endless endeavor or
search for new meanings through new connections.”
26
This notion of integration as an ongoing
process rather than a fixed outcome was critical to the design programs examined in this
dissertation. It may seem paradoxical that a concept understood as inherently unachievable could
serve as a guiding principle for designers and executives beholden to concrete corporate
imperatives. Yet it was precisely because of its unattainability and mutability that integration
operated as an effective ideal in so many areas of human endeavor. This dissertation places
similar emphasis on process over result, focusing not on the material impacts of integrated
design—its success or failures—but rather on how it was contested and transformed as an ideal
over the course of the mid-twentieth century.
Integration was a particularly potent economic ambition that shaped patterns of industrial
and corporate organization. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the history of
business in the U.S. centered on a debate over the ethics of big business and the “Robber Baron”

24
“The Foundation for Integrated Education, Inc.,” Christian Education 31, no. 1 (1948): 61–64.
25
Leidecker, “What Does Integrated Education Mean?,” 239.
26
Ibid., 242.
11
concept of the American businessman as a crook.
27
In the 1950s, business historians such as
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. began to develop theoretical explanations for the growth of large,
integrated corporations and their impact on American society.
28
Louis Galambos described such
scholarship as part of a historical model known as the “organizational synthesis,” which
proposed “that some of the most (if not the single most) important changes which have taken
place in modern America have centered about a shift from small-scale, informal, locally or
regionally oriented groups to large-scale, national, formal organizations.”
29
This model is useful
for understanding the place of the corporation in the mid-twentieth century, both as a source of
increasing complexity and as a model for how to resolve that complexity through organizational
techniques. Sociologist Peter Drucker characterized the corporation in precisely this way, as the
dominant postwar social institution in the U.S., burdened both with the “curse of bigness” and
the managerial strategies and “creative instincts” necessary to control it.
30

Industrial integration was among the most creative and widely adopted organizational
strategies. First employed in the second half of the nineteenth century, techniques of horizontal
and vertical integration were codified in the first decades of the twentieth century, when they
became the dominant modes of economic expansion. Vertical integration, in which a corporation
assumed control over the entire chain of industrial production and distribution, from the

27
Hal Bridges, “The Robber Baron Concept in American History,” The Business History Review 32, no. 1 (1958):
1–13.
28
See Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., “The Beginnings of ‘Big Business’ in American Industry,” The Business History
Review 33, no. 1 (1959): 1–31; Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American
Business (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1977); Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., “The Emergence of Managerial
Capitalism,” The Business History Review 58, no. 4 (1984): 473–503; Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., “The Beginnings of
the Modern Industrial Corporation,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 130, no. 4 (1986): 382–89.
29
Louis Galambos, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” The Business History
Review 44, no. 3 (1970): 280. Galambos has since updated this model, arguing for its continued efficacy as an
explanatory framework for twentieth-century U.S. history. See Louis Galambos, “Technology, Political Economy,
and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis,” The Business History Review 57, no. 4
(1983): 471–93; and “Recasting the Organizational Synthesis: Structure and Process in the Twentieth and Twenty-
First Centuries,” The Business History Review 79, no. 1 (2005): 1–38.
30
Peter Drucker, Concept of the Corporation (New York: The John Day Company, 1946).
12
procurement of raw materials to the delivery of goods to customers, proved particularly essential
for companies seeking to keep pace with the rapidly increasing rate and scale of technological
and industrial change. “Each step in the direction of integration implies a lessening of possible
friction and a substitution of a direct for a more indirect method, and both of these mean greater
economy and increased efficiency of production,” explained economist William Willoughby in
1901.
31
Two decades later, sociologist Lawrence Frank observed that integration had become not
just another method of industrial organization, but rather a fully-fledged economic ideology that
impacted all areas of corporate culture.
32
I show that this ideology proved remarkably durable
when, in the latter part of the twentieth century, even counterculturists opposed to corporate
hegemony assimilated strategies of integrated design to support ecological integration.
At around the same time that economists were formulating theories of industrial and
corporate integration, experimental psychologists were searching for principles capable of
explaining how sense perceptions combine in the human mind.
33
Gestalt psychology, born in
Germany around the turn of the twentieth century, was particularly applicable to the work of
visual design. Gestalt psychologists rejected the atomistic view that the mind was comprised of
mental processes that could be broken down and studied analytically by their constituent parts.
They observed that humans respond most naturally and effectively not to individual stimuli, but
rather to whole perceptual configurations.
34
From their observations, they derived a series of
laws governing perception. The law of similarity, for instance, holds that given an array of
elements with uniform proximity, those that are visually similar will more naturally organize into

31
William F. Willoughby, “The Integration of Industry in the United States,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics
16 (November 1901): 115.
32
Lawrence K. Frank, “The Significance of Industrial Integration,” Journal of Political Economy 33, no. 2 (1925):
179–95. See Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
33
James L. Mursell, “The Principle of Integration in Objective Psychology,” The American Journal of Psychology
35, no. 1 (1924): 1–15.
34
Harry Helson, “The Psychology of ‘Gestalt,’” The American Journal of Psychology 36, no. 3 (1925): 342–70.
13
clusters in the mind. The basic principle linking these precepts, called the law of prägnanz or the
law of “good gestalt,” dictates that the human mind organizes visual stimuli in ways that favor
simplicity and regularity. In other words, psychological organization tends toward a minimum of
mental effort in order to achieve maximum apprehension and information retention.
Although gestaltism entered the mainstream of American psychology during the 1920s,
its impact on design was negligible until the following decades, when European art theorists such
as György Kepes and Rudolf Arnheim began immigrating to the U.S.
35
In his 1954 book Art and
Visual Perception, Arnheim observed that art pervaded the writings of Gestalt psychologists, and
he argued that “something like an artistic vision of reality” was necessary for scientists to realize
that natural phenomena cannot be adequately analyzed piece by piece.
36
Scholars have since
shown how Gestalt psychology reinforced ideas of artistic unity.
37
Until recently, however, they
have neglected the fact that ideas of perceptual and visual organization were part of a broader
preoccupation with integration that corporations and corporate designers operationalized in the
mid-twentieth century.
38
This dissertation’s case studies show that design appealed to corporate
executives and managers not simply as a source of beauty or visual interest, but also because of
its ability to organize visual perception, bolstering the communicative efficiency of corporate
publicity in the same way that methods of industrial organization increased the efficiency of
production.

35
György Kepes, Language of Vision (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1944).
36
Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1954).
37
Roy R. Behrens, “Art, Design and Gestalt Theory,” Leonardo 31, no. 4 (1998): 299–303. For a discussion of the
similarities between psychological and artistic notions of what constitutes a “structural whole,” see Harold Osborne,
“Artistic Unity and Gestalt,” The Philosophical Quarterly 14, no. 56 (1964): 214–28; and Julia Moszkowicz,
“Gestalt and Graphic Design: An Exploration of the Humanistic and Therapeutic Effects of Visual Organization,”
Design Issues 27, no. 4 (2011): 56–67.
38
For a recent exception to this scholarly gap, see Hannah Pivo, “The Role of Vision in Ladislav Sutnar and Knud
Lönberg-Holm’s Designing Information,” Design Issues 35, no. 3 (2019): 3–19.
14
The concept of integration also served the purposes of midcentury social scientists
seeking to describe interactions between individuals or social groups. In a 1957 address, Robin
M. Williams, Jr., president of the American Sociological Society, discussed unity and diversity
as a major theme in American sociological research. Central to American identity since the
nation’s founding, the basic idea of “unity-in-diversity” had become so firmly established in the
U.S., Williams argued, that it no longer held any specific meaning. The related term “social
integration” was similarly capacious. It referred not to any precise concept of social relations, but
rather to a “complex connotative network” that comprised “a number of identifiable modes of
cohesion, interdependence, congruence, and conformity.”
39
However daunting it might appear,
Williams affirmed integration as an indisputable social ideal, insisting “the positive rewards of
interdependence in modern America require no elaborate documentation at this point in national
history.”
40
The task of social scientists, he argued, was to subject the concept of integration to
empirical research so that it could be applied as a solution to social problems, smoothing over
conflicts between regional, ethnic, religious, political, racial, or occupational factions.
41

Cooperation between businesspeople and designers, achieved through the formation of
in-house corporate art and design departments, might be understood as one example of the type
of social integration, or intergroup relations, that Williams and other social scientists promoted.
Yet the integrated design programs that resulted from these collaborations also were capable, in
theory, of fostering social cohesion. In his efforts to codify integration as a “new discipline in
design,” German-American designer Will Burtin argued that the designer should function as a
“communicator, link, interpreter, and inspirer” in modern society. Engaged in the “unceasing

39
Robin M. Williams, Jr., “Unity and Diversity in Modern America,” Social Forces 36, no. 1 (1957): 4.
40
Ibid., 7.
41
Robin M. Williams, Jr., “Application of Research to Practice in Intergroup Relations,” American Sociological
Review 18, no. 1 (1953): 78–83.
15
comparison and interrelation of factors,” designers had a social responsibility to synthesize a
cohesive “visual language, and thereby contribute toward integration of our culture.”
42
It should
come as no surprise that Burtin viewed America’s “great industrial apparatus” as an asset rather
than a barrier to the designer’s integrative function. For at midcentury, executives and designers
were allied in their pursuit of integration as an economic, visual, and social ideal.

Beyond the Bauhaus
The notion that society could benefit from the integration of art and design into everyday
life has deep ideological roots in European modernism. During the 1930s and 1940s, numerous
émigré designers carried these ideas across the Atlantic.
43
Through teaching posts and English-
language publications, they helped cultivate an approach to design pedagogy and practice in the
U.S. that emphasized the interconnectedness of the arts.
44
The Bauhaus looms especially large in
the history and historiography of midcentury American design. Former Bauhaus masters,
students, and collaborators—such as Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, and
György Kepes—contributed both directly and indirectly to the design programs examined in this
dissertation. They designed advertisements and architecture for companies such as CCA, and
they participated in the IDCA and other conferences that helped disseminate ideas forged within
the Bauhaus to a U.S. audience. While it is important to acknowledge this genealogy, principles
of European modernism did not spread to the U.S. unaltered. Nor did they provide the only basis

42
Will Burtin, “Integration, The New Discipline in Design,” Graphis 5, no. 27 (July 1949): 232.
43
Émigré cultures and transatlantic exchange, especially in the years around World War II, have become topics of
central interest among historians of art, architecture, and design. See Stephanie Barron, Exiles and Émigrés: The
Flight of European Artists from Hitler (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997); and Alison Clarke
and Elana Shapira, ed., Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).
44
Publications either written in or translated into English during the 1930s and 1940s include: László Moholy-Nagy,
The New Vision: From Material to Architecture, trans. Daphne M. Hoffmann (New York: Brewer, Warren &
Putnam, Inc., 1932); Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, trans. P. Morton Shand (London:
Faber and Faber, 1935); György Kepes, Language of Vision (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1944); and László Moholy-
Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1947).
16
for American modernism. A predominantly humanistic project in Europe, the integration of art
into life became more operational in the U.S. under the influence of American pragmatism and
corporate capitalism. Accounts of modern design in the U.S. must therefore consider the degree
to which the exigencies of business in general, and integrated corporations in particular, shaped
ideas about integration in design, including those inherited from the Bauhaus.
The ideal of integration has been central to the history of European modernism ever since
German literary critic Peter Bürger described the avant-garde’s attempt to reintegrate art into life.
In Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), Bürger discussed how, in contrast to a bourgeois
institution of art that sought to separate itself from social life in order to interpret the world at a
distance, the historical avant-garde instead aimed to intervene in social reality. Yet Bürger also
believed that true reintegration—a sublation of art into life that preserved art’s critical function—
is impossible under conditions of corporate capitalism, in which the “intentions of the historical
avant-garde are being realized but the result has been a disvalue.”
45
He identified “commodity
aesthetics” in particular as a form of “mere enticement, designed to prompt purchasers to buy
what they do not need.”
46
If the central aim of the avant-garde was to liberate humanity from
subjugation and exploitation, he reasoned, then corporate capitalism could only ever impede the
social concerns of modern artists. Bürger’s theory of the avant-garde thus negated the possibility
that art, business, and society could ever enter into a mutually beneficial relationship.
Yet in their efforts to establish design as a central feature of modern life, many European
modernists accommodated rather than opposed the demands of industry. This was especially true
in Germany, where a desire to boost the national economy prompted turn-of-the-century efforts
to improve consumer goods, such as the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony and the Deutscher

45
Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 54.
46
Ibid.
17
Werkbund.
47
The Bauhaus took up this project after the First World War. Walter Gropius, the
school’s founder and first director, shared the avant-garde desire to reintegrate art into life. In the
school’s founding proclamation of 1919, he proposed abolishing “the class distinctions” between
art and craft to support the “cooperative effort of all craftsmen” and to combine “architecture and
sculpture and painting in one unity.”
48
In 1923, Gropius reoriented the Bauhaus more firmly
toward industry. Building on his earlier criticism of the division between craftsmen and artists,
he condemned the traditional separation between fine and applied arts as a primary reason for the
social alienation and unproductiveness of the academically trained artist, whom he described as
“‘remote from the world,’ at once too unpractical and too unfamiliar with technical requirements
to be able to assimilate his conceptions of form to the processes of manufacture.”
49
Instead of
resisting the forces of industry and commerce, Gropius envisioned the reoriented Bauhaus as a
laboratory for “working out practical new designs for present-day articles and improving models
for mass-production.” By emphasizing technical proficiency in its system of design instruction,
the Bauhaus aimed to produce “useful members of society” capable of meeting “all technical,
aesthetic, and commercial demands.”
50
As several scholars have observed, however, while the
Bauhaus was amenable to the exigencies of industry and commerce and succeeded in promoting
its commercial aesthetic, it was less successful in capitalizing on this aesthetic or realizing its
aim to support the industrial mass-production of consumer goods.
51

47
For a detailed study of the latter, see Frederic Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before
the First World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). The activities of the Werkbund inspired other
national design organizations, such as Britain’s Design and Industries Association. See Pat Kirkham, Harry Peach:
Dryad and DIA (London: Design Council, 1986).
48
Translated and reproduced in Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius, eds., Bauhaus, 1919–1928 (New
York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1938), 18.
49
Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, 65.
50
Ibid., 52–61.
51
See Frederic J. Schwartz, “Utopia for Sale: The Bauhaus and Weimar Germany’s Consumer Aesthetic,” in
Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to The Cold War, ed. Kathleen James-Chakraborty (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2006), 115–38.
18
Despite its shortcomings, Bauhaus pedagogy found a receptive audience in the U.S.
52
In a
1934 article, “Wanted: An American Bauhaus,” art critic E. M. Benson argued that adopting
European design principles could help adapt artistic production to changing conditions of
modern life in America. Dissatisfied with his country’s “archaic system of art instruction,”
Benson believed the training offered by most American art schools failed to equip students for
the “changing requirements of industry and the new modes of living resulting therefrom.”
53
He
called for closer contact between art and industry through the creation of an independent
teaching and research institute devoted to the education of well-rounded students. Drawing on
Bauhaus pedagogy, the proposed Institute of Art and Industrial Design would provide “sound
training in the theory and practice of the materials used in the structure of all the arts and
crafts.”
54
Benson reserved special praise for the teachings of Hungarian designer László Moholy-
Nagy, whom he deemed the Bauhaus’s “most passionate expounder.” Moholy-Nagy had joined
the Bauhaus faculty in 1923, and under his influence the school further embraced technology,
mechanization, and mass production. In The New Vision, a text based on lectures delivered at the
Bauhaus between 1923 and 1928, Moholy-Nagy argued that “the future needs the whole man
[…] an integrated man” with “a natural balance of intellectual and emotional power.”
55
Such a
person could function, in turn, as an “integrator,” synthesizing art, science, and technology to
develop creative solutions to the problems of unbridled technological progress.

52
For literature on the migration of Bauhaus ideas and pedagogy, see Hans Maria Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimar,
Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, trans. Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1969); Margret
Kentgens-Craig, The Bauhaus and America: First Contacts, 1919–1936 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999);
Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2006); Alan Powers, Bauhaus Goes West: Modern Art and Design in Britain and America (New
York: Thames & Hudson, 2019); and Marion von Osten and Grant Watson, eds., Bauhaus Imaginista (New York:
Thames & Hudson, 2019). For a satirical critique of the transfer of Bauhaus theories and aesthetics to the U.S., see
Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981).
53
E. M. Benson, “Wanted: An American Bauhaus,” The American Magazine of Art 27, no. 6 (1934): 307.
54
Ibid., 310.
55
Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, 15.
19
Although Benson conceived the “American Bauhaus” as an independent organization not
beholden to corporate imperatives, his proposed institute found its nearest realization in the New
Bauhaus, a design school that Moholy-Nagy established in Chicago in 1937 with the support of
local industry leaders.
56
Chicago had become an important center for industrial art at the turn of
the twentieth century. Frank Lloyd Wright helped advance this position when he called for the
establishment of an arts and crafts society made up of artists and manufacturers, with the aim of
understanding machine processes and their proper application to artistic production.
57
In 1922,
the newly formed Chicago Association of Arts and Industries took up this mission, identifying
the need for a school to train designers for work in industry.
58
It was not until fifteen years later,
however, that the Association finally assembled a search committee to recruit a director for their
proposed school. Gropius, who had already accepted a post at Harvard’s Graduate School of
Design, declined the position and recommended his old Bauhaus colleague, Moholy-Nagy.
In Chicago, Moholy-Nagy transplanted elements of Bauhaus pedagogy while adapting
the program to a new cultural milieu.
59
The process of immigrating to the U.S. transformed the
of thinking many designers. According to art historian Robin Schuldenfrei, an emerging military-
industrial complex provided opportunities for the “anxious assimilation” of émigré designers.
60

56
Joseph Malherek, “The Industrialist and the Artist: László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Paepcke, and the New Bauhaus
in Chicago, 1918–46,” Journal of Austrian-American History 2, no. 1 (2018): 51–76.
57
Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Art and Craft of the Machine,” Brush and Pencil 8, no. 2 (1901): 77–90. Wright also
helped found the Industrial Arts League of Chicago in 1899, a short-lived organization that aimed to train craftsmen
to create designs for machine production.
58
Lloyd Engelbrecht, “The Association of Arts and Industries: The Background and Origins of the Bauhaus
Movement in Chicago” (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1973), 43. The Association collaborated with the Art Institute
of Chicago to develop a program in industrial art but found the Institute’s goals and methods to be inconsistent with
its aim to produce designers with hands-on training capable of applying their work in the service of industry.
59
For one interpretation of Moholy-Nagy’s transformed pedagogical approach, see Alain Findeli, “Moholy-Nagy’s
Design Pedagogy in Chicago (1937–46),” Design Issues 7, no. 1 (1990): 4–19. For the school’s later development,
see Alain Findeli, “Design Education and Industry: The Laborious Beginnings of the Institute of Design in Chicago
in 1944,” Journal of Design History 4, no. 2 (1991): 97–113.
60
Robin Schuldenfrei, “Assimilating Unease: Moholy-Nagy and the Wartime/Postwar Bauhaus in Chicago,” in
Atomic Dwelling: Anxiety, Domesticity, and Postwar Architecture, ed. Robin Schuldenfrei (New York: Routledge,
2012), 90.
20
Dislocated from their homelands, they faced the task of assimilating to a country that existed in
the European imagination as a multicultural melting pot, but also as an exemplar of advanced
industrialization. On the one hand, Moholy-Nagy continued to espouse humanistic ideals.
Reiterating objectives he expressed at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, he endowed the New Bauhaus
with the aim “to educate the contemporary man as an integrator, the new designer able to re-
evaluate human needs warped by machine civilization.”
61

On the other hand, Moholy-Nagy also had to acclimate to the conditions of American
capitalism and the involvement of big business in all areas of life.
62
Logistically, this meant that
the New Bauhaus primarily relied on financial support from industry. When the Association of
Arts and Industries shuttered the school, Paepcke and other industrialists provided support for its
successors, the School of Design (1939–1944) and the Institute of Design (1944–present).
63
But
the influence of industry also shaped the aims and pedagogy of the New Bauhaus. In a speech
intended to attract sponsors, Moholy-Nagy promised industrialists that the school would address
their problems by developing designs for mass production and commercial art for advertising.
Similar assurances appeared in the school’s charter and publicity, and in Moholy-Nagy’s regular
appeals to businesses for funding. Unlike its predecessor, the Chicago school also included a
course called “Intellectual Integration,” taught by American pragmatist Charles Morris, which
incorporated science and philosophy as core elements of a comprehensive design education.

61
László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947), 64.
62
Moholy-Nagy experienced the vicissitudes of capitalist enterprise when the Chicago Association of Arts and
Industries closed the New Bauhaus only a year after it opened. For a detailed discussion of the ideological
differences and financial troubles that led to this falling out, see Engelbrecht, “The Association of Arts and
Industries,” 294–306. Paepcke demonstrated a commitment to art and design that exceeded that of his fellow
industrialists, becoming the only member of the Association’s board to maintain support of the New Bauhaus. In
1942, Moholy-Nagy thanked Paepcke for his continued assistance: “I have said it so often, and I know that with
words such things cannot be expressed adequately enough, that without you we could not have gotten so far. […]
The concrete assurance of your confidence in the School is as much to us as the financial help which we have
received through you.” Quoted in Engelbrecht, “The Association of Arts and Industries,” 220 n29.
63
Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture, 61–74; Malherek, “The Industrialist and the Artist,” 51–76.
21
Despite his own metaphysical and humanistic inclinations, Moholy-Nagy framed the integration
of art into life not only as a source of cultural enrichment, but also as an economic imperative.
Other European modernists similarly revised their ideas about art, business, and
integration after visiting the U.S. Swiss architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, a close friend of
Moholy-Nagy (who invited Giedion to lecture at the New Bauhaus in 1937), witnessed the
effects of American industry and commerce during extended stays in America.
64
In Space, Time
and Architecture (1941), a text based in part on observations made in the U.S., Giedion argued
that modern humans suffered from split personalities caused by a division between artistic and
scientific endeavor, and that they “must be integrated” in terms of their “emotional and
intellectual outlets.”
65
Giedion later extended this diagnosis of modern alienation, attributing it to
the effects of mechanization and calling for the integration not only of “our minds, our
production, our feeling,” but also “our economic and social development.”
66
Giedion outlined a
vision of “man in equipoise,” balancing and counterbalancing scientific discoveries and
technological innovations with their social implications.
67
To achieve this balance, he called for
further research into existing connections between industrial methods and techniques of art and
visualization. In a letter to Paepcke in 1945, he praised the Chicago industrialist as “the only one
in the U.S.A. whose is able to utilize the creative forces,” though he hoped other business leaders
would soon follow suit.
68

64
Douglas Tallack, “Siegfried Giedion, Modernism and American Material Culture,” Journal of American Studies
28, no. 2 (1994): 149–67. See also Reto Geiser, Giedion and America: Repositioning the History of Modern
Architecture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
65
Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1941), 880. Giedion first presented sections of this book at Harvard as part of the Charles Eliot Norton
Lecture Series (1938–1939).
66
Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1948), v.
67
Ibid., 721.
68
Sigfried Giedion to Walter Paepcke, June 29, 1945, Box 23, Folder 5, Walter P. Paepcke Papers, Special
Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
22
While the Bauhaus and New Bauhaus served as key conduits for the spread of European
modernism in the U.S., American modernists also called upon homegrown ideas of integration.
Literary scholar Daniel Singal has argued that American modernists, like their European
counterparts, exhibited integrative tendencies in all areas of cultural life, from the anthropology
of Franz Boas to the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright:
What all these various manifestations of Modernism had in common was a passion not
only for opening the self to new levels of experience, but also for fusing together
disparate elements of that experience into new and original “wholes,” to the point where
one can speak of an “integrative mode” as the basis of the new culture. Put simply, the
quintessential aim of Modernists has been to reconnect all that the Victorian moral
dichotomy tore asunder—to integrate once more the human and the animal, the civilized
and savage, and to heal the sharp divisions that the nineteenth century had established in
areas such as class, race, and gender.
69

Like the midcentury writers who formulated integration as an economic, visual, and social ideal,
Singal notes that complete integration is not only unattainable, but also undesirable, for it would
bring about a stultifying stasis. “The coalescing of the varied fragments of our contemporary
existence can never be consummated,” he insists, “but must constantly be sought.”
70

Singal locates the roots of America’s integrative ethos in the pragmatism of William
James and John Dewey. The latter, in particular, advanced the project of integration by devoting
his career “to combating dualisms of all kinds—including those dividing mind from body,
science from art, the city from the countryside, and the elite from the common people.”
71
In Art
as Experience (1934), a culmination of his thinking on aesthetics since the 1880s, Dewey argued
that the growth of capitalism was partly responsible for the misguided idea of “art for art’s sake,”
that is, for the separation of art from life.
72
Unable to adapt to modern changes in industry and

69
Daniel Joseph Singal, “Towards a Definition of American Modernism,” American Quarterly 39, no. 1 (1987): 12.
70
Ibid., 14.
71
Ibid., 17.
72
Dewey gave Moholy-Nagy a copy of Art as Experience when the two met in 1938; the text subsequently became
required reading in certain New Bauhaus courses. Findeli, “Moholy-Nagy’s Design Pedagogy in Chicago,” 14.
23
commerce—such as mechanization, division of labor, and other methods of mass production and
distribution—artists instead exaggerated their separateness. The widening gulf between producer
and consumer created a corresponding “chasm between ordinary and esthetic experience.”
73
To
close this gap, Dewey defined art not as a “spiritualized” object, but rather as an experience
integral to daily life, including existing economic conditions. Central to this pragmatic view was
the notion that periods of disintegration caused by unrestrained technological and industrial
progress were not only unavoidable, but also productive processes of modern life. Years before
Giedion wrote about “man in equipoise,” Dewey discussed a form of “temporary equilibrium” in
which organisms periodically fall out of step with their surroundings before recovering a sense of
harmony. Each return to equilibrium, he believed, further enriched life.
74

Dewey’s pragmatic theories about the integration of art and life prompted U.S. designers
to speculate on the intersections of design and business. In 1934, Norman Bel Geddes imagined a
future in which an American tradition of individualism would give way to a cooperative ethos
modeled on integrated corporations. He prophesied that in the future, “attention will be focused
on the economic structure of the combine and its contribution to society.”
75
In Thoughts on
Design (1947), Paul Rand acknowledged Dewey’s influence on his thinking about the integration
of aesthetics and utility, which he viewed as “mutually generative.”
76
And in 1951, George
Nelson quoted Dewey on the disintegrative effects of modern industry, coming to a similarly
optimistic conclusion that such forces of destruction fueled periods of creation, producing a new
kind of individual capable of operating as “a member of a synchronized, cooperative group.”
77

73
John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1934), 10.
74
Ibid., 14.
75
Norman Bel Geddes, Horizons (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1932), 291.
76
Paul Rand, Thoughts on Design (New York: Wittenborn and Company, 1947), 10.
77
George Nelson, George Nelson on Design (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1957), 74. Originally
published as George Nelson, “The Enlargement of Vision,” Interiors (November 1951).
24
Many American art critics and historians also engaged critically with the work of James
and Dewey. Although Lewis Mumford was openly critical of American pragmatism, scholars
have shown how, at least for a period during the middle of the century, Mumford’s ideas about
the relationship between art and industry aligned with those of Dewey.
78
In a series of lectures
about the effects of industrialization on modern culture, delivered at Columbia University in
1951 and compiled in Art and Technics (1952), Mumford discussed the problems of deskilled
and alienated labor that mechanization and specialization engendered. Extending his earlier
formulations of this dilemma, Mumford argued that “the great problem of our time is to restore
modern man’s balance and wholeness” by giving him mastery over the machines he has
created.
79
In his search for solutions to helpless mechanization and purposeless materialism,
Mumford praised modern industry’s attention to the aesthetic qualities of its products as well as
the organization and attractiveness of the industrial environment. Mumford believed that CCA,
for instance, was a logical leader in the integration of art and technics given that its business lay
in aestheticizing industrial products through neater and more striking packaging. He questioned
the merits of sales appeal as a primary motive in packaging design, but he conceded that the
designer’s attention to visual order and beauty addressed “qualities and human interests that were
flatly disregarded under a purely quantitative ideology of the machine.”
80
In integrated design,
and particularly in the activities of CCA, Mumford identified the kind of equilibrium or
equipoise—the balancing and counterbalancing of human interests and corporate imperatives—
that Dewey, Giedion, and others prescribed.

78
See John Westbrook, “Lewis Mumford, John Dewey, and the ‘Pragmatic Acquiescence,’” Lewis Mumford: Public
Intellectual, ed. Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 301–22; and
Stewart Long, “Lewis Mumford and Institutional Economics,” Journal of Economic Issues 36, no. 1 (2002): 167-82.
79
Lewis Mumford, Art and Technics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 11. This text pursued, with a
narrower focus on art, a subject that Mumford had explored two decades earlier in Technics and Civilization (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934).
80
Ibid., 154.
25
German-American art historian Alexander Dorner was among the most passionate yet
under-acknowledged proponents of this integrative vision of modern design. Dorner began his
career as director of Hannover’s Provinzialmuseum in 1923, where he sought to reorganize the
collections in a way that represented the history of art as a transformation in what he called
“artists’ reality concepts,” historically contingent world visions conditioned by changes in
mankind’s mental faculties.
81
Thwarted by the Nazis, Dorner fled to the U.S. in 1937. There his
thinking underwent a radical transformation under the influence of American pragmatism, which
he believed offered “the only road toward a reintegration of art history, esthetics and the art
museum with actual life.”
82
In The Way Beyond ‘Art’ (1947), Dorner outlined a philosophy that
emphasized the need not simply for the reintegration of art into life, but rather for an entirely
“new species of visual communication” capable of shaping everyday experience.
83
This project
was partly a matter of semantics. Dorner argued that the word “art,” like the concept it
represented, had become outdated and ill-suited to the demands of modern life. His preferred
terms—“modern design,” “visual communication,” and “visual production”—underscored a
midcentury identity crisis wherein creative professionals struggled to define and delimit the
nature of their work, assuming convoluted titles such as “artist-designer” or “designer-
architect.”
84

81
Sarah Ganz Blythe and Andrew Martinez, eds., Why Art Museums?: The Unfinished Work of Alexander Dorner
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2018). Dorner planned to partner with modern designers such as Moholy-Nagy and
Russian constructivist El Lissitzky for this project.
82
Alexander Dorner, The Way Beyond ‘Art’: The Work of Herbert Bayer (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947),
19. Dorner dedicated this book to John Dewey, who also wrote its preface.
83
Ibid., 15.
84
Scholars have examined the professionalization of artists, architects, and designers. See Caroline A. Jones,
Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998);
Mary N. Woods, From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999); Ellen Mazur Thomson, The Origins of Graphic Design in America, 1870–
1920 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); and Grace Lees-Maffei, “Introduction: Professionalization as a
Focus in Interior Design History,” Journal of Design History 21, no. 1 (April 2008): 1–18. Much work remains to be
done, however, to explicate how these professional categories overlapped and converged.
26
The rise of such fluid, compound terms in midcentury design discourse also corresponded
with what Dorner described as an essential transformation in the modern concept of reality. This
shift, present in all areas of human endeavor, involved the replacement of the traditional Western
belief in immutable laws and truths as the building blocks of a static unity, with the modern
philosophy that a dynamic and unceasing interplay of energies served as the basis for mankind’s
unification. Dewey’s attempt to reframe art as fluid experience, rather than as a discrete object,
was emblematic of this new reality concept. In order to bring about a “new integration” of art
and life, Dorner believed it was imperative for artists, art historians, and museum professionals
to realize that “modern design is no longer self-sufficient art—produced by dreamers withdrawn
from life—but an active component of the new economy and society which it will help to
unify.”
85
In charting the trajectory of this integrative impulse, Dorner drew a direct line from
William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, through Gropius and the Bauhaus, to
German-American designer Herbert Bayer, whom Dorner deemed closest to embodying a new
type of modern designer capable of operationalizing design for the purposes of socioeconomic
progress.
86
In Dorner’s formulation, commercial art and industrial design were not the
disreputable activities that artists undertook to support their fine art endeavors; rather, these were
the only viable forms of visual production under conditions of corporate capitalism.
As the theories of Dewey, Mumford, and Dorner show, the pursuit of integrated design in
the U.S. progressed beyond the avant-garde aim to reintegrate art into life. What was needed was
an entirely “new integration,” as Dorner described it, one that recognized design and business as
mutually constitutive and capable of solving both social and economic problems.

85
Dorner, The Way Beyond ‘Art’, 232.
86
This trajectory was similar to the one German art historian Nikolaus Pevsner charted a decade earlier in his
seminal book, Pioneers of the Modern Movement (London: Faber & Faber, 1936).
27
The Problem with Patronage
At the same time that Dorner was theorizing “a way beyond art,” Bayer and other
midcentury designers were seeking a way beyond traditional forms of art patronage, a system of
economic support that had underpinned artistic production for centuries. Although particularly
central in histories of medieval and Renaissance art, a preoccupation with patronage continues to
dominate studies about the logistics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, architecture, and
design.
87
As many scholars have observed, corporations have been among the most significant
sources of modern art patronage, especially in the U.S., assuming a role that the Church filled in
the Middle Ages and private patrons during the Renaissance.
88
Indeed, corporations have been
rivaled in their support of modern American art perhaps only by the federal government in the
period of the New Deal.
89
Yet by the middle of the twentieth century, designers and critics
questioned whether the notion of patronage adequately encapsulated the relationship between
business and design. Scholars have focused on the roles that museums, department stores, and
the popular press filled in facilitating partnerships between manufacturers and designers and in
cultivating consumer interest in modern design.
90
While this literature helps clarify the

87
See Nicholas Fox Weber, Patron Saints: Five Rebels Who Opened America to a New Art, 1928–1943 (New York:
Knopf, 1992); Gabriel P. Weisberg, DeCourcy E. McIntosh, and Alison McQueen, Collecting in the Gilded Age: Art
Patronage in Pittsburgh, 1890–1910 (New York: Frick Art and Historical Center, 1997); Marjorie B. Garber,
Patronizing the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); John Ott, Manufacturing the Modern Patron in
Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority (Burlington: Routledge,
2014); and Esmée Quodbach, ed., What’s Mine Is Yours: Private Collectors and Public Patronage in the United
States (New York: Center for the History of Collecting, Frick Art Reference Library, 2021).
88
See Whitney Museum of American Art, Business Buys American Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American
Art, 1960); Richard Eells, The Corporation and the Arts (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1967); Art Inc. and
Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Art Inc.: American Paintings from Corporate Collections (Montgomery,
Alabama: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, 1979); Neil Harris and Martina Roudabush Norelli, Art, Design, and
the Modern Corporation: The Collection of Container Corporation of America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1985); and Jovanovich and Renn, Corporate Patronage of Art & Architecture.
89
See Sharon Ann Musher, Democratic Art: The New Deal’s Influence on American Culture (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2015).
90
The Good Design program, a curatorial and commercial project spearheaded by MoMA curator Edgar Kaufmann,
Jr. in partnership with Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, has dominated literature on midcentury American design. See
Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., What Is Modern Design? (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1950); Sidney Lawrence,
“Declaration of Function: Documents from the Museum of Modern Art’s Design Crusade, 1933–1950,” Design
28
popularization of modern design, it does not explain how corporations came to see design as a
viable mechanism of business. This dissertation argues that midcentury efforts to integrate
design and business hinged on a discourse that recast design not simply as an object of corporate
beneficence (or even consumer desire), but rather as a key organizational apparatus.
The IDCA was a pivotal forum for the discourse on design and business, but it was not
the only one. Several previous conferences served as provocations. The “Conference on Business
and Art,” convened at the Milwaukee Art Institute in 1948, attracted 150 representatives from
national businesses, advertising agencies, and art publications. Paepcke and Jacobson were
among those in attendance, while Bayer submitted a statement to be read during the proceedings.
This statement criticized the Milwaukee conference for promoting the anachronistic concepts of
“modern Maecenaship” and corporate art patronage, which perpetuated an “unfortunate split
between the ideal world of art and the practical world of business.”
91
In her coverage of the
event, reporter Aline Louchheim condemned the conference for similar reasons. “Only
occasionally did the discussion touch the basic question of what intrinsic value art might have for
industry outside of the ‘easel-painting-for-prestige-value’ programs,” she argued. “And only very
rarely did business shed its pious and evangelizing attitude.”
92
Louchheim criticized corporate
patronage not because it debased fine art, but rather because, in their narrow and paternalistic

Issues 2, no. 1 (1985): 65–77; Irene Sunwoo, “Whose Design? MoMA and Pevsner’s Pioneers,” Getty Research
Journal, no. 2 (2010): 69–82. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis was another key promoter of modern design
through its Idea Houses, Everyday Art Gallery, and corresponding publication, Everyday Art Quarterly (later Design
Quarterly). See Alexandra Griffith Winton, “‘A Man’s House Is His Art’: The Walker Art Center’s ‘Idea House’
Project and the Marketing of Domestic Design 1941–1947,” Journal of Design History 17, no. 4 (2004): 377–96.
For the roles departments stores and the popular press played in marketing modern design during the 1920s and
1930s, see Marilyn F. Friedman, Selling Good Design: Promoting the Modern Interior (New York: Rizzoli, 2003);
and Kristina Wilson, Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
91
Quoted in Joanne Leigh George, “The Functions of Graphic Design: Sociologies, History, and the International
Design Conference in Aspen” (Ph.D., Ann Arbor, State University of New York at Binghamton, 2002), 148. The
term “modern Maecenaship” refers to the Roman statesman Gaius Maecenas, who was so well known for his
support of young poets that his name became synonymous with artistic patronage.
92
Aline B. Louchheim, “Culture, Industry, Popular Prizes,” New York Times (December 19, 1948).
29
view of artists simply as painters of pretty pictures, corporate executives failed to perceive
structural correlations between the work of art and the work of industry.
Louchheim’s critique of the “Conference on Business and Art” was part of a larger 1940s
discourse devoted to the relationship between art and industry and the efficacy of corporate art
patronage.
93
Art historian Walter Abell identified corporations that had invested in art—such as
CCA, Dole Pineapple Co., Pepsi-Cola, and Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.—grouping them under
the umbrella of “industrial patronage.”
94
While he conceded that “an interplay between art and
other activities of society makes for mutually beneficial integration,” he worried that corporate
control over art sponsorship threatened the integrity of artistic expression, indeed of all cultural
activity.
95
Russell Lynes critiqued corporate patronage in different terms. “The artist and the
‘fine arts’ are not being used solely for their integral worth,” he observed, “but for some curious
sort of cultural snob appeal that is alien to them.”
96
According to Lynes, the notion that art could
endow corporations with an “aura of ostentatious culture” was the result of an ideological divide
that fragmented artistic practice into “fine art” and “commercial art.” Yet Renaissance patronage,
he argued, had flourished precisely because it refused such distinctions, instead fostering “an
atmosphere of mutual respect” in which patrons perceived artists both as the practitioners of a
“‘liberal’ art” and as the “foreman-owners” of their own small factories. The failure of corporate
patronage resided in the myth of the artist as an object of “uncertain reverence” remote from the
world of business, “someone not quite to be trusted and yet to be pampered.”
97

93
Neil Harris mapped this discourse in an essay on CCA. See Neil Harris, “Designs on Demand: Art and the
Modern Corporation,” in Art, Design, and the Modern Corporation: The Collection of Container Corporation of
America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 8–30.
94
These programs, like the paintings they sponsored, were in fact highly diverse in structure and intent.
95
Walter Abell, “Industry and Painting,” Magazine of Art 39 (March 1946): 92. See also Walter Abell, “Viewpoints:
Can Industry Be Counted on as a Patron of the Arts?,” Magazine of Art 37, no. 4 (April 1944): 135.
96
Russell Lynes, “Suitable for Framing,” Harper’s Magazine (February 1946): 164.
97
Ibid., 165.
30
According to Lynes and Louchheim, the solution to a defective system of corporate art
patronage was to dispense with “sugar-coated notions of patronage” altogether and to develop
instead a more logical, integral, and operational relationship between art and business.
98
They
called for corporations to become employers rather than patrons of the arts, for executives and
designers to become confident colleagues rather than uncertain bedfellows. Both Lynes and
Louchheim considered CCA a model corporation in this respect. Despite her criticism of the
Milwaukee conference, Louchheim reserved praise for Paepcke, Jacobson, and Bayer, who
cogently explained how art had impacted every phase of CCA’s operations. She suggested that
despite the conference’s shortcomings, the example of CCA might serve as “a starting point for
another conference which would deal with what could be done instead of with what has been
done” in the realm of design for business.
99

The IDCA filled this role by pursuing a more speculative discourse about the relationship
between design and business. At the very first meeting in 1951, Bayer delivered a talk similar in
subject matter to the statement he had submitted to the “Conference on Business and Art” three
years earlier. He argued that with “the development of design as a function of business,” existing
terms and classification systems—some less than half a century old—were no longer capable of
expressing the creative professional’s role in modern capitalist society. The notion of “corporate
art patronage” exemplified such “antiquated or misleading” terminology.
100
From Bayer’s point
of view, the connotations of protection, power, and prestige that inhered in the concept of
patronage failed to encapsulate the dynamics of midcentury corporate design culture. “If we can
see that art needs industry as much as industry needs art, there will be no more patronage, in the

98
Aline B. Louchheim, “Business, Artists and Patronage,” New York Times (October 29, 1950).
99
Louchheim, “Culture, Industry, Popular Prizes.”
100
Quoted in Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., “Design, Designer and Industry,” Magazine of Art, no. 44 (December 1951):
324.
31
sense of benefaction or material support,” he insisted. “Instead, a new collaboration and
interdependency have grown up.”
101

Unburdened by abiding disciplinary preoccupations with the idea of patronage, cultural
histories of advertising and branding often address more effectively the interdependence of art
and business, revealing how executives and designers have collaborated to produce promotional
imagery.
102
Each is limited, however, in its ability to explain the aims and operations of the
integrated design program. With its typical focus on how advertisements reveal societal values,
shape consumer desires, and construct consumer culture, advertising history offers less insight
into the dynamics of corporate culture, that is, how business and design transformed through
their interactions with one another. Literature on branding, though often less explicitly oriented
toward consumer culture, shares with the history of advertising a tendency to privilege the visual
over the material or spatial aspects of design. In addition to focusing on corporate rather than
consumer culture, this dissertation also seeks to situate commercial imagery as part of a complex
mediascape, the material and spatial dimensions of which were critical to its integrative function.

The Matter of Integrated Design
Assimilated into the managerial structures of large organizations, midcentury designers
gained creative control over the entire corporate environment. They oversaw everything from the
layout of annual reports to the painting of delivery trucks and the decoration of office interiors—
that is, every designed and aesthetically purposeful expression of an organization. Under the

101
Ibid.
102
See Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1976); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity,
1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural
History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress:
American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); and
Dawn Spring, Advertising in the Age of Persuasion: Building Brand America 1941–1961 (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011).
32
supervision of the designer and through the implementation of an integrated design program, the
corporation came to embody the modernist ideal of “total design,” which architectural historian
Mark Wigley has described as “a fantasy about control.”
103
This dissertation takes the entire
corporate environment, as well as the impulse to control it, as its object of inquiry. It insists not
simply that all types of images and objects are worthy of study, but also that our understanding
of American corporate culture will remain fragmentary unless examined in its full visual and
material complexity. CCA is a useful case in point. Considered only in terms of its well-known
advertising campaigns, which employed famous designers to create images often unrelated to its
packaging business, CCA’s engagement with art might appear merely as an experiment in
corporate patronage for the purpose of garnering public attention and cultural prestige. Yet if we
consider these publicity images in relation to the full gamut of CCA’s design program, we find a
sustained, multifaceted attempt to use design as an organizational technique in coordination with
methods of industrial production and corporate management.
The history of art is rife with examples of total design. Although most famously taken up
by Gropius at the Bauhaus, designers working in many periods and cultural contexts pursued
forms of this ideal. The fantasy of total design first took hold around the middle of the nineteenth
century, when German composer Richard Wagner articulated the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total
work of art,” as a way to produce unified aesthetic experiences via the theater.
104
Turn-of-the-
century attempts to realize the Gesamtkunstwerk in the domestic environment aimed at a total
design that integrated forms of architecture, decoration, clothing, and music into an elevated and

103
Mark Wigley, “Whatever Happened to Total Design?,” Harvard Design Magazine no. 5 (Summer 1998). See
also Simon Sadler, “An Architecture of the Whole,” Journal of Architectural Education 61, no. 4 (2008): 108–29.
104
See Juliet Koss, Modernism after Wagner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). For a discussion
of the political implications of Wagner’s concept, see Éric Michaud, “The Total Work of Art and Totalitarianism,”
Thesis Eleven 152, no. 1 (June 2019): 3–18.
33
idealized notion of everyday life. Some also aimed to integrate the urban environment of the
street, popular advertising, and the storefront, shop, or restaurant into a public spectacle of
coordinated forms. For William Morris and other members of the Arts and Crafts movement,
total design signaled mastery over a range of handcrafts and a vision of the domestic sphere as a
synthesis of utility and beauty.
105
Henry Van de Velde and other proponents of Art Nouveau
used decorative motifs to create cohesive furnishings and interiors emphasizing spatial unity.
106

Under Hermann Muthesius’s influence, members of the Deutscher Werkbund sought to develop
types for the production of any consumer good.
107
Ernesto Rogers borrowed one of Muthesius’s
key ideas, “from the spoon to the city” (dal cucchiaio alla città), to describe a scalable vision of
urban design, while Buckminster Fuller outlined a “comprehensive anticipatory design science,”
in which professionals pooled expertise and resources to solve global problems. This brief survey
shows that integrated design’s totalizing impulse was not unprecedented.
108
Indeed, Wigley
argues not simply that a totalizing ambition has inflected the work of many (if not most) modern
designers, but rather that all design is theoretically total design, even if the dream of achieving
totality is always frustrated.
109

Even if we accept total design as a modernist rule rather than an exception, it is important
to acknowledge that the model for totality changes—from theater to interior to building to urban
plan. In the midcentury integrated design programs examined in this dissertation, design was
unbound not only from any particular material or medium, but also from any particular space or

105
See Wendy Kaplan, ed., The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America: Design for the Modern World
1880–1920 (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004); and Wendy Kaplan, ed., “The Art That Is Life”: The Arts &
Crafts Movements in America, 1875–1920 (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1998).
106
See Chris Dähne, Rixt Hoekstra, and Carsten Ruhl, eds., The Death and Life of the Total Work of Art: Henry van
de Velde and the Legacy of a Modern Concept (Berlin: Jovis, 2015).
107
See Schwartz, The Werkbund.
108
A more exhaustive treatment of the topic of total design would include pre-modern and non-Western examples.
109
Wigley refers specifically to architects, whom he distinguishes from “design artists,” such as interior designers
and industrial designers, thereby nullifying his argument to some extent.
34
place. Instead, these programs held up the large, national or multinational integrated organization
as a model of wholeness. The visual identities they sought to coordinate were as expansive and
mobile as the organizations themselves, shaping not only business papers and office interiors, but
all kinds of media and environments in the image of the corporation.
Integrated design relies on multiple media, but also on particular objects rooted in the
operations of corporate culture, such as business forms, annual reports, signage, administrative
documents, conference ephemera, slide presentations, promotional films, operating manuals,
research proposals, design samples, and technical diagrams. I treat this material not simply as
process work that served the production of advertisements, posters, office buildings, and other
public-facing elements of the corporate environment, but also as important visual forms in their
own right. Take diagrams, for instance. In both business management and design (as well as
many other fields), diagrams serve as key instructional tools that support everything from the
administration of office work to the layout of letterheads. Yet as art historian Jeffrey Hamburger
has observed in his recent study of medieval art, diagrams are also active vehicles of thought that
render abstract concepts, which might otherwise be difficult to grasp, accessible to the human
intellect.
110
By encouraging viewers to draw relationships and think through concepts rationally
in a step-by-step fashion, diagrams do not simply reflect patterns of thinking, Hamburger
argues—they direct them. In this dissertation, I interpret diagrams and other materials of
corporate design and management not only as tools for coordinating integrated design programs,

110
Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Diagramming Devotion: Berthold of Nuremberg’s Transformation of Hrabanus Maurus’s
Poems in Praise of the Cross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). On the functions of diagrams in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture and design, see Anthony Vidler, “Diagrams of Diagrams:
Architectural Abstraction and Modern Representation,” Representations, no. 72 (2000): 1–20; Simon Sadler,
“Diagrams of Countercultural Architecture,” Design and Culture 4 (November 2012): 345–67; Johanna Drucker,
Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); Orit Halpern,
Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2015); and
Michael Osman, Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2018).
35
but also as visual evidence of a midcentury form of integrative thinking that allowed designers to
see things whole and, in theory, to make them so.

An Integrative Approach to Art History
To make sense of integrated design’s visual and material complexity, I pursue a primarily
synthetic, or integrative, mode of interpretation that aims to identify formal, conceptual, and
ideological correlations within and between midcentury design programs. This attempt to employ
integration as an interpretative strategy is related to a move literary scholar Nico Israel makes in
his study of the spiral as a literary and visual trope. In addition to examining how twentieth-
century writers and artists employed whirled imagery in their work, Israel also uses the spiral as
a spatiotemporal metaphor for a method of “critical swerving” that allows him to probe issues of
form, history, and geopolitics while avoiding the tendencies of formalism, periodization, and
globalization to flatten or essentialize their objects of study.
111
This dissertation employs a
method of “integrative looking” as a way to draw together a wide variety of objects, but also a
series of disparate organizations: an industrial manufacturer of paperboard packaging, an annual
design conference, a multinational design and marketing firm, and an ecological research center.
This method of integrative looking can be understood as a period way of seeing, analogous to the
way midcentury subjects actively sought to see things whole, whether it be industrial operations,
design discourse, corporate identities, or natural ecosystems.
112

Applying integration as a method to the study of corporate design allows for a perhaps
surprising recuperation of the traditional art historical concept of style within the context of

111
Nico Israel, Spirals: The Whirled Image in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2015), 13.
112
For theories of period seeing, see John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972); and Michael
Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1985).
36
midcentury corporate culture. Designers often promoted their work as a rigorous discipline that
spurned changing trends in the arts. Yet if we understand style as an effort to locate coherence
among objects across time and space, then corporate executives and designers created what we
might call a corporate visual style by using design to create institutional identities that were
individually cohesive, but also formally and procedurally related to one another. And like other
visual styles, corporate aesthetics was readily adaptable to many different types of organizations,
including those ideologically opposed to the bureaucratic, hierarchical, and hegemonic nature of
corporations. Considering integration as a style of organization allows us to explore how this
concept operated as a recurrent and versatile ideal throughout the mid-twentieth century.
Looking “integratively” also means recognizing that imagery and styles are not fixed, but
rather emerge and change over time. A growing literature on technical or scientific imagery—
images that are predominantly instrument-based or the results of imaging procedures rather than
artistic activities—is useful not so much because it positions images as generative of information
and meaning (a core premise of art history), but rather because it emphasizes their contingent
modes of operation. “Images,” in the words of art historian Horst Bredekamp, “must be
considered in process.”
113
According to French philosopher Bruno Latour, it is the very mobility
and combinability of scientific images that makes them useful as mechanisms for observing
changes in human consciousness, cognition, and scientific thought. Rather than resort to
“grandiose schemes and conceptual dichotomies,” he suggests we focus instead on “simple
modifications in the way in which groups of people argue with one another using paper, signs,
prints and diagrams.”
114
Viewed in this way, the methods of administration and bureaucratization

113
Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, eds., The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific
Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 2.
114
Bruno Latour, “Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,” in Knowledge and Society Studies in the
Sociology of Culture Past and Present, ed. Henrika Kuklick, 6 vols. (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1984), 3. Latour
37
that facilitated the rise of big business originated not in the minds of a few “enlightened”
businessmen, but rather in the actual files, or bureaus, of inscriptions that allowed for the
coordination of all aspects of a business.
115

If, as I have suggested, integrated design constituted an inter-discipline—a mode of
practice that assimilated new methods, forms of knowledge, and schools of thought as needed—
then the study of integrated design calls for a similarly interdisciplinary approach. Just as
midcentury designers had to obtain expertise in unfamiliar fields to perform the tasks required of
integrated design—such as management, engineering, and computer science—design historians
must combine knowledge and interpretative strategies from numerous disciplines. To understand
the particular examples of integrated design examined in this dissertation has required basic
knowledge of industrial organization, conference theory, systems science, and ecology. Another
set of case studies, however, would likely require traversing an entirely different set of
disciplinary boundaries. It is a central aim of this dissertation to encourage comparative studies
of other types of organizations in order to establish a fuller and more complex picture of how
design operates within capitalist societies.

Chapter Overview
My dissertation charts a history of integration in design during the mid-twentieth century,
from early experiments to correlate art and industry, to later efforts to systematize and recycle
practices of integrated design. Rather than a progressive history or a deliberate march toward a
new paradigm for design, this story occurred in fits and starts. In order to explicate this uneven

further elaborated on these ideas, developing them into the theoretical and methodical approach known as “actor-
network-theory.” See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007).
115
See Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham: Duke University Press
Books, 2014).
38
development, I examine a series of organizations as determining case studies, each invested in
ideas of integration. These include Container Corporation of America (CCA), the International
Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA), Unimark International, and the Farallones Institute.
Comparing their missions, operations, and visual and material production reveals that for all their
differences, these organizations shared a fundamental belief in integration as an economic,
visual, and social ideal. Seeking to tell a story of American visual and material culture rather
than of American business, I deal not with the major firms at the center of business histories, but
rather with a series of lesser-known institutions linked by a common concern with integrated
design as a means of organizing the visual environment.
The first chapter, “Containing Corporate Flow: Container Corporation of American and
the Design of Business,” focuses on the packaging company that Chicago industrialist Walter
Paepcke founded in 1926. With the establishment of an art department under Egbert Jacobson in
1935, CCA became an early implementer of integrated design and helped define its terms and
methods. The chapter examines how Paepcke and Jacobson combined their respective expertise
in business and art to implement integrated design as an organizational tool. Rather than focus on
CCA’s well-known postwar advertising campaigns, I instead consider an earlier range of graphic
materials, as well as designs for stationery, trucks, office interiors, and factory architecture. I
argue that these materials evidence an understanding of integrated design as a way to contain the
flow of materials and information through the corporation. CCA’s design program therefore
shared a basic logic with corporate management, revealing design and business to be mutually
constitutive, rather than just expediently allied.
In 1951, to help disseminate their integrative approach to corporate design, Paepcke and
Jacobson helped organize the first meeting of what later became the IDCA. My second chapter,
39
“Discordant by Design: Reanimating the International Design Conference in Aspen,” recuperates
the IDCA’s role in shaping midcentury design discourse. While most scholars have focused on a
particular conference in 1970 as evidence of the IDCA’s failed efforts at consensus building, I
argue that the conference was actually designed for debate rather than resolution or agreement. I
analyze the IDCA’s visual materials in relation to the speakers’ papers to recover a sense of the
critical debates that were integral to the conference format and to changing ideas about integrated
design. I suggest that considering verbal and visual discord as a generative form of knowledge
production allows for a key shift in design history scholarship, away from the analysis of
canonical design objects and toward the interrogation of transformations in design thinking.
The second part of my dissertation examines postwar design projects that built on the
efforts of CCA and the IDCA to establish integrated design as a standard yet versatile practice.
Chapter 3, “Creativity and Control: Unimark International and a Systems Theory of Design,”
examines how postwar designers took up the concept of integrated design and adapted it to the
conditions of a postindustrial capitalist society. In 1965, Ralph Eckerstrom, former director of
design at CCA and president of the IDCA, co-founded the design firm Unimark International.
The firm’s corps of designers, led by Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda, developed a systematic
approach to design that resulted in highly standardized corporate identities. I argue that
Unimark’s designers, in an attempt to dissociate their work from the pejorative period concepts
of uniformity and conformity, reimagined creativity not only as the conception of new forms or
ideas, but also as the controlled combination of existing elements. The result of these efforts—a
universally applicable corporate visual style—tested the limits of integrated design, especially
when faced with the rise of more pluralistic and particularistic forms of postmodernist thinking
in art, architecture, and design.
40
The final chapter, “Recycling Capitalist Aesthetics: The Economics and Ecology of the
Integral Urban House,” explores an ecological approach to the design of modern life. Bay Area
architect Sim Van der Ryn, head of the Farallones Institute, helped lead this effort, which was
centered in Berkeley, California. Building on the ideas of Buckminster Fuller and others, Van
der Ryn developed a form of ecologically integrated design in the 1960s and 1970s to address
environmental concerns. Van der Ryn led student protesters in their occupation of the IDCA in
1970, criticizing corporate designers whose work, they believed, abetted ecological disaster. Yet
the Integral Urban House, a project spearheaded by the Farallones Institute, drew on ideas of
integration promoted by the very establishment whose hegemony it sought to undermine. In their
efforts to design sustainable living environments and to organize local initiatives into a national
movement, ecological designers relied on diagrammatic imaging techniques to make immaterial
processes and relations visible. Focusing on the Integral Urban House and a network of related
ecological projects, I identify not simply a recurring pattern or motif, but a pervasive visual style
that relied on design’s didactic, meditative, and mnemonic qualities, and which underpinned the
convergence of corporate culture and counterculture in the U.S.
The boundary crossing activities these case studies epitomize show how the synthesis of
design and business not only created new visual sales techniques, but also established design as
the control center of a midcentury culture of integration. In each of these cases, the concept of
integration served as a corrective to some form of fragmentation, which my dissertation
establishes as a visual and social condition that permeated midcentury America. The debate over
design’s purpose in business and society therefore centered on how to reintegrate aspects of
modern experience that unfettered industrial, technological, and urban development had torn
asunder.
41
CHAPTER 1:
Containing Corporate Flow: Container Corporation of American and the Design of
Business

In 1935, Walter Paepcke, president of the Chicago packaging company Container
Corporation of America (CCA), hired designer Egbert Jacobson as director of the company’s
newly established art department. Both born to German immigrants, Paepcke and Jacobson
shared an industrious work ethic and, at least by the mid-1930s, a common commitment to
corporate image making.
1
They combined their expertise in business management and visual
design to create an institutional identity that promoted CCA as a vertically integrated company.
Although this program began in the mid-1930s, it was not until after World War II that Jacobson
articulated its rationale, stating that CCA’s institutional advertising began not as an act of
corporate patronage, but rather “as a forthright bid for attention to the company’s developing
business, to its policy of integrated production and management.”
2
This policy served as the
subject of a 1937 advertisement by French designer A. M. Cassandre, one of his first for CCA
(fig. 1.1). The image depicts four interrelated stages of paperboard package production stacked
one on top of the other. A connective line snakes downward from an assemblage of raw
materials—lumber, straw, and wastepaper—past a series of smoking factories—pulp mill, paper
mill, and package plant—to culminate at the bottom in a finished paperboard package. Cassandre
portrays CCA as a vertically integrated corporation that merged the acquisition of raw materials,
the production of paperboard, and the fabrication of containers into one continuous process. The

1
Hermann Paepcke and Gustav Jacobson were both born in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany, in small towns
less than fifty miles apart. The former established the Chicago lumber company that his son would later transform
into CCA, while the latter founded an aircraft engine testing company in New York.
2
Egbert Jacobson, “Foreword,” in Modern Art in Advertising: Designs for Container Corporation of America
(Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1946). Despite a prolific career that included stints as art director at J. Walter Thompson
and N. W. Ayer & Son, Jacobson exhibited relatively little interest in public recognition or personal advancement.
He seems to have preferred to work behind the scenes, building professional networks and organizing events and
exhibitions, but rarely sharing in the limelight and leaving behind little in the way of a written or archival record.
42
word “integration” that runs vertically along the left side reinforces this point typographically,
vaunting CCA’s organizational structure as critical to its success. In his depiction of CCA’s
integrated production processes, Cassandre translates the economic ideal of vertical integration
into graphic form. By following the vertical trajectory indicated in his design, viewers re-enact
visually the sequence of industrial production that results in finished packages.
The ability to combine varied operations seamlessly in “a single organization,” as CCA’s
advertising claimed, was no small feat during the Great Depression, a period of major economic
upheaval in the U.S. when most companies struggled to hold themselves together, let alone
expand. Midcentury educators, cultural critics, and social scientists agreed that the rate and scale
of technological innovation had atomized human experience, alienating people from their work,
from each other, and even from their inner selves.
3
In a company-wide memo released in the late
1930s, Paepcke acknowledged this entropic tendency and the struggle taking place within his
own organization to counteract it. He thanked his staff for their courage, cooperation, and ability
to adjust to the company’s changing circumstances. “Without this admirable attitude of mind,”
Paepcke acknowledged, “the Corporation itself could not have made what little progress it has
made for, as we all know, a Corporation of itself is only an inanimate object, a collection of
physical properties, goods and chattel, which is entirely dependent on its human members for its
life.”
4
At a time of decreased confidence in the nation’s economic future and the survivability of
big business, Paepcke recognized the precarious position of a corporation such as CCA, a
conglomeration of assets and activities held together by sheer managerial might and willpower.

3
See Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934). Historian
Robert Wiebe later argued that a tension between unity and division, between competing segments and a cohesive
whole, has been central to U.S. history since the nation’s founding. See Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order,
1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); and Robert H. Wiebe, The Segmented Society: An Introduction to the
Meaning of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
4
Walter Paepcke, memo, n.d., Box 22, Folder 3, Walter P. Paepcke Papers, Special Collections Research Center,
University of Chicago Library. [hereafter WPPP]
43
With the establishment of an art department in 1935, design became a key component of
CCA’s administrative apparatus, a way to visualize the connective tissue that helped it function.
In addition to establishing vertical integration as a central theme in CCA’s advertising, Jacobson
also drew a comparison between industrial and artistic production. “As it is [CCA’s] business to
produce containers,” he explained, “it is the artists’ business to express ideas graphically.”
5
The
designer’s role, in other words, was to produce containers for corporate communications. The
correlation was not literal. CCA’s designers did not use techniques of industrial production to
create publicity materials, and their working methods were not nearly as systematic as those of
corporate managers or later corporate designers. Instead, I argue that Paepcke and Jacobson
conceived a more abstract connection between vertical and visual integration that enabled them
to establish an ideological, rather than purely pragmatic, relationship between design and
business, to imagine them as mutually constitutive, rather than just expediently allied.
In order to correlate processes of vertical and visual integration, CCA developed an
institutional identity that emphasized the idea of “contained flow,” a movement of resources and
information that was not just continuous, but also controlled. The concept of “flow” was central
to the way midcentury executives and designers understood how resources moved through large
organizations, presenting as smooth and effortless processes that might otherwise appear
disjointed or overwhelmingly complex.
6
A vertically integrated corporation combined successive
stages of production so that they functioned as a unified system, despite the distances between
facilities and the differences between their manufacturing or managerial methods. This type of
organization relied not only on continuous machinery, conveyor belts, and assembly lines, but

5
Ibid.
6
Hannah Pivo has discussed how the concept of “flow” informed the work of Czech émigré designer Ladislav
Sutnar. See Hannah Pivo, “The Role of Vision in Ladislav Sutnar and Knud Lönberg-Holm’s Designing
Information,” Design Issues 35, no. 3 (2019): 3–19.
44
also on techniques of planning and control, such as cost accounting, administrative statistics, and
industrial engineering. Social scientist Lawrence Frank argued that these business strategies
made it possible “to supervise one or a dozen organizations carrying on distinct operations at
widely separated locations and to coordinate them into a single industrial process, so that
materials flow from plant to plant, from stage to stage, as readily and as surely as they pass
through a single machine or department.”
7
Midcentury designers applied an analogous logic to
the creative process. In 1950, art critic Russell Lynes described design as the result of a similarly
smooth “interrelation of parts,” such that “spaces fit and flow into spaces, planes into planes, and
functions into functions,” the result being “a perfectly integrated design.”
8

As these two definitions indicate, vertical and visual integration were both fundamentally
spatial concepts that hinged on the corporation’s ability to bring its numerous parts into close
proximity, smoothing over as much as possible any gaps between them. An advertisement by
designer Edward McKnight Kauffer, created for CCA in 1941, draws an explicit connection
between flows of vertical and visual integration (fig. 1.2). Kauffer’s image pictures three phases
of the package-making process—raw materials, paper mills, and package factories—that CCA
claimed to combine into “one integrated flow of production.” A swatch of ochre ink flows lithely
across the page, establishing a visual connection between the distinct stages of production. Yet
for CCA, it was crucial not only that these processes connect, flowing fluidly from one to the
next, but also that they be contained, as Cassandre’s and Kauffer’s designs manage to do within
the space of the magazine page. For these flows became lucrative only if the corporation could
harness them to boost production, profits, and public opinion.

7
Lawrence K. Frank, “The Significance of Industrial Integration,” Journal of Political Economy 33, no. 2 (1925):
187. Frank was vice-president of the Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation from 1936 to 1942 and helped initiate the Macy
conferences together with Frank Fremont-Smith.
8
Russell Lynes, “‘Functional’ Is Out,” New York Times (September 24, 1950).
45
Although CCA’s engagement with modern art has been well documented, the full scope
and integrative logic of its design program have received little scholarly attention, even though
this program became an important model for an emerging concept of integrated design after
World War II. In early studies of CCA, cultural historians James Sloan Allen and Neil Harris
explained the company’s use of art in advertising as the basis for a new, systematic, and even
sinister form of corporate art patronage.
9
Art historian Michele Bogart extended this narrative,
describing CCA as anomalous in its development of a form of “fine art advertising” that “exalted
art.”
10
More recently, Lara Allison and Justus Nieland have devoted greater attention to the
rationale behind CCA’s design program, describing it as part of a midcentury effort to bring
modern design and avant-garde culture into the ambit of corporate aesthetics through advertising,
film, exhibitions, and education.
11
Yet Paepcke and Jacobson did not introduce design to
business; rather, I argue that they showed them to be always already inseparable, predicated on
the same basic logic of integration as the controlled flow of information and resources through
an organization.

Integrating CCA’s Operations
The concept of vertical integration that Cassandre and Kauffer pictured in their designs
for CCA first emerged as an organizational ideal around the turn of the twentieth century. In
1901, Harvard economics professor William Willoughby identified a growing trend toward what

9
James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen
Crusade for Cultural Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and Neil Harris and Martina Roudabush
Norelli, Art, Design, and the Modern Corporation: The Collection of Container Corporation of America
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985).
10
Michelle H. Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995),
166.
11
Lara N. Allison, “Perception and Pedagogy: Design, Advertising and Education in Chicago, c. 1935–1955”
(Ph.D., Columbia University, 2009); and Justus Nieland, “Container Culture: Film, Packaging, and the Design of
Corporate Humanism at the CCA,” Post45, Modern Design Cultures, no. 6 (February 12, 2021),
https://post45.org/2021/02/container-culture-film-packaging-and-the-design-of-corporate-humanism-at-the-cca/.
46
he called “the integration of industry” in the U.S. While “the concentration of industry” had
occurred earlier and involved the consolidation of similar operations under central management,
integration instead entailed the combination of “dissimilar, but interdependent, branches of an
industry, so that complete harmony may be obtained among them.”
12
Willoughby’s distinction
between “concentration” and “integration” aligns, in theory, with the now more familiar ideas of
horizontal and vertical integration. In reality, midcentury corporations did not always distinguish
between these strategies, which they often pursued simultaneously.
13

Vertical integration entailed a series of standard steps. Typically, corporations first
integrated forward by investing in marketing and distribution facilities and personnel; they then
moved backward into the acquisition of raw materials; finally, the most farsighted companies
expanded further into research and development.
14
Willoughby identified the conglomerate U.S.
Steel, newly formed in 1901, as perhaps the clearest example of a vertically integrated company
that controlled all stages of an industrial process. Whereas early steel production had been
disjointed and dispersed among numerous specialized organizations, U.S. Steel welded the entire
process into one continuous chain of production and distribution, including mining ore, coking
coal, smelting pig iron, refining steel, rolling slabs, billets, and blooms, and selling the finished
products to commercial buyers. Turn-of-the-century corporations were not simply bigger than

12
William F. Willoughby, “The Integration of Industry in the United States,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics
16 (November 1901): 95.
13
This shift in the scale and the structure of U.S. industry originated in the latter part of the nineteenth century when
companies devised business strategies based on acquisitions and mergers, leading to the Great Merger Movement
from 1895 to 1905. Monopolization became so prevalent at the turn of the century that it encroached on competition,
prompting new federal regulations and antitrust legislation. These laws, including the Sherman Act of 1890 and the
Clayton Act of 1914, sought to regulate free enterprise and protect consumers by prohibiting noncompetitive,
unilateral agreements. The merger movement contributed to a highly competitive economic climate in which
manufacturers increasingly relied on strategies of integration to keep pace with mass production and the enormous
growth of American industry. See Henry R. Seager, “The New Anti-Trust Acts,” Political Science Quarterly 30, no.
3 (1915): 448–62.
14
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., “The Beginnings of the Modern Industrial Corporation,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 130, no. 4 (1986): 384.
47
their predecessors, then, but also vastly more complex. This complexity, achieved through the
combination of previously independent industrial operations, engendered new organizational
methods, as well as new economic theories and ambitions. Whereas companies typically
concentrated in order to lessen outside competition, Willoughby believed that a corporation’s
attempt to integrate instead centered on the desire to “bring about a more perfect organization
and integration of its own properties.”
15

Vertical integration was more than a mere money-making scheme, then; it also served as
an ideal for how to achieve a more harmonious economic order. In 1925, a year before Paepcke
combined his father’s lumber mill with paper and box making facilities to form CCA, Lawrence
Frank reiterated Willoughby’s analysis of vertical integration as part of a fundamental
reorientation of capitalist society. In contrast with horizontal combination, which aimed simply
to raise profitability through increased production and reduced competition, Frank claimed that
vertical integration constituted a fully-fledged “industrial methodology.”
16
By reconsolidating
manufacturing processes—once unified under a system of handicraft production, but later split
into fragments through mechanization and division of labor—vertical integration fulfilled the
promise of the industrial revolution and “the great change in industry and in social life” that it
inaugurated.
17
While many of Frank’s predictions proved wildly inaccurate—greater economic
stability, for instance, as well as a diminishing wealth gap—vertical integration did help focus
corporate culture, and social life more broadly, around ideals of combination and wholeness.
When he founded CCA in 1926, Paepcke made vertical integration the crux of his
business plan. By this point, the concept of vertical integration had come into common usage to

15
Willoughby, “The Integration of Industry,” 103.
16
Frank, “The Significance of Industrial Integration,” 188.
17
Ibid., 193.
48
describe established modes of corporate organization that were especially widespread in the U.S.
“There can hardly be any doubt,” claimed British economist John Jewkes in 1930, “that, in the
past twenty years in the United States at least, there has been a rapid growth of integration.”
18

CCA’s initial success relied on a series of strategically located mills, plants, and offices that
formed a distribution network capable of servicing customers across the country. Paepcke built
upon this infrastructure through continuous investments and acquisitions, which allowed the
company to expand geographically, increase its rate of production, broaden its product lines, and
secure access to raw materials.
19
This strategy of vertical integration, employed even in the midst
of the Great Depression, endowed CCA with a level of self-sufficiency and flexibility that gave it
an edge over competitors while insulating it from market fluctuations and resource shortages.
20

By the 1930s, CCA presided over an impressively integrated flow of production that included
collecting lumber, straw, and wastepaper, converting these raw materials into pulp, shipping pulp
from mills to factories, transforming pulp into sheets of corrugated paperboard, printing folding
cartons and containers, and delivering the finished packages to buyers.
These ambitious patterns of industrial expansion created challenges that required new
organizational strategies. Paepcke observed that in the process of integrating, large corporations
such as CCA accumulated a staggering array of business holdings, facilities, and personnel. To
contend with this growing complexity, CCA adopted state-of-the-art paper-making processes—
such as automated rolling, printing, and cutting machines—and managerial techniques—such as
hierarchical chains of command and distributed communication networks. Yet managing a
corporation of CCA’s size was also a fundamentally visual problem, a matter of conveying to

18
John Jewkes, “Factors in Industrial Integration,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 44, no. 4 (1930): 623.
19
Susan Black, ed., The First Fifty Years, 1926–1976 (Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1976), 11.
20
CCA’s only two losing years came in 1931 and 1932. Modest profits in 1933 marked a return to continuous
growth.
49
customers, employees, and stockholders the organization’s strength and stability. Assimilating a
newly acquired company, for instance, involved the incorporation of its trademarks, letterheads,
trucks, offices, and other forms of visual and material culture. “After all,” Paepcke pronounced
in a 1936 address at the Art Directors Club of Chicago, “every company controls a lot of things
itself.”
21
The challenge lay in managing this ever-expanding array of assets and activities.

Discovering the Power of Packaging
Between 1926 and 1935, even before the establishment of a dedicated art department,
CCA produced and distributed various types of images to help people picture the impressive
scope of its operations. This corporate imagery included maps and organization charts that
portrayed CCA as a national network of operating facilities managed by a corps of expert
executives (fig. 1.3). These diagrams were joined by photographs of office and manufacturing
work, which promoted CCA as a productive company whose success relied on droves of workers
laboring under the direction of corporate management (fig. 1.4). These images likely circulated
through The Container, a monthly magazine that CCA issued to keep employees informed about
the corporation and its future. After ceasing publication in 1930 due to economic stagnation, The
Container was eventually replaced by a new house organ, Concora News, which contained more
wide-ranging information about the packaging industry.
With its focus on the technics of business, CCA’s early imagery exemplified a shift in the
visual culture of American publicity. Cultural historian T. J. Jackson Lears has shown how early
twentieth-century advertisers replaced pre-industrial themes of magical abundance with new
myths of scientific-managerial productivity.
22
By mapping its expansive network of factories and

21
Walter Paepcke, “Address before the Art Directors Club Chicago,” May 19, 1936, Box 23, Folder 5, WPPP.
22
T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books,
1994).
50
offices, and by picturing the productive operations that took place within them, CCA contributed
to these fantasies of engineered efficiency. In its attempt to represent the entirety of its business
structure, however, CCA struggled to convey a sense of how its varied operations fit together to
form an integrated flow of production. Paepcke later remarked that CCA’s early communication
materials incorporated “everything but the kitchen sink” and were “properly hideous” as a
result.
23
It was not simply that the materials were overabundant, but, more importantly, that they
failed to cohere.
This lack of coordination extended to CCA’s early product advertising, which combined
photographs of products and didactic copy to create visually dense, informative images. These
advertisements appeared in trade journals such as American Box Maker, targeting manufacturers,
wholesalers, and retailers in need of CCA’s full packaging services (fig. 1.5). This type of
publicity, which Paepcke later referred to as “orthodox advertising,” differed from burgeoning
forms of institutional advertising that some other companies had begun to implement. To help
build brand recognition, institutional advertisements prioritized visual impact and repetition over
detailed information.
24
Rather than market specific goods and services through trade journals,
this publicity typically appeared in general interest magazines, promoting companies themselves
to the public at large. This promotional strategy was based, therefore, on the assumption that the
company could benefit from communicating directly with consumers.
25
In the case of CCA, it
required a belief that people cared about the packages that contained consumer goods.

23
Paepcke, “Address before the Art Directors Club Chicago.”
24
Dawn Spring has chronicled a mid-twentieth-century shift in which brand identity assumed precedence over
product information in advertising-based media. See Dawn Spring, Advertising in the Age of Persuasion: Building
Brand America 1941–1961 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
25
According to Roland Marchand, early-twentieth-century corporations developed image-making programs in part
to mitigate concerns over corporate hegemony. To communicate a recognizable and reassuring image to the public,
a company might construct its identity around a founding figure or an identifiable landmark, clear visual expressions
of the so-called “corporate soul.” See Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations
and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
51
Paepcke initially resisted the use of institutional advertising because he underestimated
the significance of packaging—not as a practical object, for he was well aware that paperboard
containers had revolutionized how goods circulated and sold; but rather as a concept, a way to
consolidate not just merchandise but also consumer desires and corporate messages as complete
units for sale. In a 1931 letter to stockholders detailing CCA’s financial situation and efforts to
improve its business, Paepcke referred only briefly to the Research Laboratory’s role in
designing “more attractive containers.”
26
A year later, he responded to a stockholder’s suggestion
for more widespread advertising by stating that CCA “cannot stimulate demand on the part of the
individual user,” since consumers “are interested in the commodities [they] are buying and not
the package.”
27
If consumers were interested only in goods and not in the boxes that contained
them, Paepcke believed, then there was no use in promoting packaging to the general public.
28

Other experts, however, had already recognized packaging as a key component of
modern merchandising, capable of imparting sales messages and structuring viewer responses.
Richard Franken, a lecturer on the psychology of advertising, and Carroll Larrabee, an editor for
Printers’ Ink, billed their co-authored Packages that Sell (1928) as the first systematic study of
how packages could help sell goods. Intended as a manual for manufacturers, designers, and
advertisers, the book treated the creation of competitive packaging as an empirical problem that
could be solved through scientific methods of research and development. Recognizing that
packages not only contained and protected goods but also advertised them, Franken and Larrabee

26
Letter from Walter Paepcke to CCA’s stockholders, August 15, 1931, Box 30, Folder 14, WPPP.
27
Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture, 25.
28
In the 1940s and 1950s, organizations such as the Package Research Institute and the Package Designers Council
used market and motivational research to show how aesthetically pleasing packages could appeal to and influence
consumer desires. See Arthur J. Pulos, “The Package and the Public,” in The American Design Adventure
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988), 280–93. CCA eventually established a Design Laboratory of its own in 1946
under the direction of Albert Kner, who joined the company as package designer in 1940 after immigrating to the
U.S. from Hungary.
52
argued that qualities of “good design,” such as size, shape, color, and lettering, could endow
packages with merchandising appeal. Combining these fundamental design principles with data
derived from experimental research methods, they promoted packaging as a service that could
fulfill both “an economic and psychological need.”
29

In 1935, Larrabee followed up Packages that Sell with an updated examination of the
packaging problem. In How to Package for Profit, he warned of the danger that “manufacturers
will overemphasize the value of the package itself” and stressed the importance of “advertising
backing” and “merchandising support.”
30
Larrabee defined packaging not as a physical
container, then, but rather as a process by which meanings could be bundled up like goods and
delivered to consumers through a range of visual cues, such as trademarks, logotypes, and
corporate colors. In such an approach to merchandising, the design of individual packages or
other marketing devices mattered less than the way in which they synthesized to create a total
image of the corporation.
By the mid-1930s, ideas about the importance of packaging had begun to circulate widely
in the business and design press. On the cover of the January 1935 issue of the design journal
Gebrauchsgraphik, a well-groomed gentleman lingers before an array of cigarettes, spirits, and
soaps (fig. 1.6). He appears as the consummate consumer, contemplating shelves of merchandise
while a cigarette pokes out from under his waxed mustache. Dangling a bright pink package
from the forefinger of his gloved hand, he has even transformed himself into a makeshift display.
Yet instead of consumer goods, his box advertises the services of German designer O. H. W.
Hadank, a specialist in the design of packages, including all those shown on the magazine’s

29
Richard B. Franken and Carroll B. Larrabee, Packages That Sell (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928), xiii.
30
Carroll B. Larrabee, How to Package for Profit: A Manual of Packaging (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935),
8.
53
cover. First published in 1923, Gebrauchsgraphik regularly showcased such packaging in its
coverage of cutting-edge advertising art. In addition to visually innovative work, critics
commended designs that “served presentation” and “caused good sales.” They attributed to
packaging designers such as Hadank the remarkable “faculty of harmoniously combining two
sources of power which obviously strive to pull apart—his own highly personal urge to artistic
expression and the sober advertising purpose the merchant has in view.”
31
In Hadank’s striking
yet sensible packages, critics identified the successful integration of art and merchandising.
This issue of Gebrauchsgraphik was perhaps among those that Elizabeth Nitze Paepcke,
wife of Walter Paepcke, reportedly displayed on her husband’s desk in an effort to convince him
of art’s commercial value.
32
A native Chicagoan reared on the city’s rich cultural life, Elizabeth
struggled in the early years of marriage to share these artistic interests with her more business-
minded husband. Her eventual recourse to Gebrauchsgraphik was well conceived. The word
itself—from the German Gebrauch, meaning “use” or “application,” and Grafik, denoting the
“graphic arts”—came into common usage during the 1920s. Typically translated as “commercial
art,” it encompassed several previously distinct spheres of design, including printing, advertising,
and typography. According to design historian Jeremy Aynsley, Gebrauchsgraphik was
associated with the “capitalist application of design for improved economic performance” and
served “a more pragmatic trade interest” compared with similar publications.
33
By focusing on
the practical and profitable benefits of design, the journal appealed to the motivations of
midcentury industrialists.

31
Eberhard Hölscher, “O. H. W. Hadank,” trans. E. T. Scheffauer, Gebrauchsgraphik 11, no. 11 (November 1934):
2–20.
32
Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture, 27. Allen cites Graphis as another of Elizabeth’s tools for
persuading Paepcke. The first issue of that journal did not appear until 1944, however, almost a decade after
Paepcke’s initial acceptance of art and design.
33
Jeremy Aynsley, “‘Gebrauchsgraphik’ as an Early Graphic Design Journal, 1924–1938,” Journal of Design
History 5, no. 1 (1992): 54.
54
Paepcke, whose company was struggling through the Great Depression, rationalized the
formation of an art department as an experimental yet commercially expedient business
maneuver. He spoke of CCA’s “struggle to prove to the great unwashed masses that we are
thinking in terms of art,” not in order to portray itself as some sort of cultural institution, but
because “it is this vehicle which we hope to ride some day into the door of the purchasing
agent.”
34
Paepcke therefore identified art and design as potential sales tools that could help
distinguish his company from competitors and capture the interest of customers. The logic of
integration—of a controlled flow of corporate operations—was central to Paepcke’s
rationalization of commercial art and design. By establishing an art department to oversee a
diverse array of corporate activities, he aimed to translate the economic principle of integration
into a comprehensive design program. Whereas vertical integration had contributed to CCA’s
early financial success, Paepcke identified visual integration as a way to generate a similarly
successful—that is, visible and recognizable—corporate image.

Directing CCA’s Art Department
Although CCA employed artists prior to 1935 to help design the packages it produced
and the advertisements that promoted them, these activities lacked an overarching direction and
therefore remained peripheral to the company’s operations. This changed in 1935 when Paepcke
decided, at his wife’s urging, to establish a central art department. He initially asked Elizabeth to
manage the department, but she declined, insisting that someone with professional experience
was necessary. With help from the experts at R. R. Donnelley, a Chicago printing company that
later handled much of CCA’s printing needs, Paepcke selected Jacobson, a former art director at
the advertising agencies J. Walter Thompson and N. W. Ayer and president of the Art Directors’

34
Paepcke, “Address before the meeting of the Art Directors Club Chicago.”
55
Club of Chicago.
35
Unlike other successful designers, Jacobson preferred to operate behind the
scenes. His formative role in launching CCA’s design program has therefore been overshadowed
by the contributions of Paepcke and former Bauhaus master Herbert Bayer, who became a key
advisor to CCA in the 1940s.
36
Yet Paepcke himself acknowledged that Jacobson was chiefly
responsible for establishing the role of design at CCA. “We all feel that the Design Department
under your able leadership has made an important place for itself in the Company,” he wrote to
Jacobson in 1945. “Your untiring and conscientious efforts, inspiration, and talents have made
the department.”
37
Jacobson’s position within CCA’s corporate structure was essential to the
success of the company’s integrated design program.
Born in New York City in 1890, Jacobson trained at the Art Students League of New
York before embarking on a career in commercial art. By the end of the First World War, he had
established a reputation for daring modernist design and achieved special recognition for his
experiments with color, which one critic called “as extraordinary and as original as some of the
color schemes in the best German work.”
38
Jacobson’s scintillating color combinations, bold
lettering, and asymmetric layouts recalled Germany’s Plakatstil, or poster style (fig. 1.7).
Perhaps influenced by German designers such as Lucian Bernhard and Karl Schulpig, whose
poster designs circulated in magazines such as Das Plakat, Jacobson developed a “unique art of
design” that was simpler and more direct than the work of most of his U.S. contemporaries.
39

35
Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture, 27.
36
In addition to contributing to design discourse through publications and lectures, Bayer was also an effective self-
promoter who worked to secure his legacy. See Herbert Bayer, Herbert Bayer: Painter, Designer, Architect (New
York: Reinhold, 1967); and Herbert Bayer, Herbert Bayer: A Total Concept (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 1973).
For secondary literature, see Arthur A. Cohen, Herbert Bayer: The Complete Work (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984);
Gwen Finkel Chanzit, Herbert Bayer and Modernist Design in America (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987);
Ellen Lupton, Herbert Bayer: Inspiration and Process in Design (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2020).
37
Walter Paepcke to Egbert Jacobson, February 22, 1945, Box 24, Folder 11, WPPP.
38
J. M. Bowles, Some Examples of the Work of American Designers (Philadelphia: Dill & Collins, 1918).
39
Jacobson helped promote a modernist approach to commercial art and design as a member of the Art Directors
Club and as a juror for its annual exhibitions of advertising art.
56
Though trained in principles of art and design, Jacobson also gained valuable managerial
expertise during his early career as an art director. Art direction first emerged within the fields of
publishing, advertising, and theater production around the turn of the twentieth century.
40
In The
Business of Advertising (1915), Earnest Elmo Calkins discussed the role of the “art manager,” a
figure absent from his earlier treatment of the subject, Modern Advertising (1905). Responsible
for specifying illustrations, the art manager “has at his disposal an art department,” Calkins
explained, “which may consist of resident artists working in the studio of the agency, or more
likely of artists of various special acquirements who are called in and given a definite
commission for a particular piece of work.”
41
Art direction achieved professional status in 1920
with the founding of the Art Directors Club of New York. Yet the professional art director
typically operated on a consulting basis, working either as a freelancer or as a member of an
advertising agency. Hired to perform design services as the need arose, art directors, like their
colleagues in industrial design, rarely worked full time for a single corporation.
42

Evaluating the industrial design profession in 1934, designer George Nelson perceived
two main barriers to the assimilation of design into the operations of American corporations:
first, the simple fact that few companies were large enough to keep a design staff fully
employed; and second, a deep-seated skepticism about the value of creative professionals.
43
Of a
small group of perhaps two dozen established designers, Nelson identified only two full-time
corporate employees: Donald Dohner, Director of Art in the Engineering Department at

40
For an account of the professional art director’s role in uniting art and commerce, see Bogart, Artists, Advertising,
and the Borders of Art.
41
Earnest Elmo Calkins, The Business of Advertising (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1915), 68.
42
Even German designer Peter Behrens, whose extensive work for the AEG in the 1910s constituted an early
example of corporate identity design, operated as an outside artistic consultant rather than a full-time employee. See
Tilmann Rogge Buddensieg and Henning Rogge, Industriekultur: Peter Behrens and the AEG, 1907–1914, trans.
Iain Boyd Whyte (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1984).
43
George Nelson, “Both Fish and Fowl,” Fortune 9, no. 2 (February 1934): 98.
57
Westinghouse, and George Sakier, head of the Bureau of Design Development at American
Radiator.
44
Years later, Nelson still believed that in order to achieve a more secure professional
status, the designer would have “to establish a position as a member of a company’s policy-
making group” with influence over all design-related matters. “It is at this level that the topflight
designer can really earn his fee,” Nelson believed, “for his design activity can then be integrated
with a long-term, consistent policy he has helped to make.”
45

Jacobson’s appointment as CCA’s art director in 1935 signaled a shift in the status and
purview of corporate art direction. Rather than retain an outside consultant to perform design
services on an ad hoc basis, Paepcke instead positioned design as a central function of his
business. Recognizing “imagination and visual appeal” as essential to a wide range of corporate
activities, Paepcke later argued that design should be “the concern of all management,” and that
“a Design Department, properly staffed, and given support and wide latitude, can enhance a
company’s reputation as an alert and progressive business institution within and without its
organization.”
46
From his integral position within CCA, Jacobson assumed control over the full
gamut of corporate image making, from business forms to advertisements to office interiors.
47

44
For literature on the latter, see Christine Taylor Klein, “The Quiet Dissemination of American Modernism:
George Sakier’s Designs for American Radiator,” Design Issues 28, no. 1 (2012): 81–90.
45
George Nelson, “Business and the Industrial Designer,” Fortune 40, no. 1 (July 1949): 95. For an alternate view
of this problem, see Henry Dreyfuss’s characterization of the corporate designer as a “captive” of the corporation.
Although Dreyfuss defined the ideal relationship between client and designer as “one of friendly but respectful
integration,” in which the designer becomes a part of the corporate family, he advocated that industrial design
maintain its independence. See Henry Dreyfuss, “Relationship of Designer to Client,” in Designing for People (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), 186–193. Nelson subsequently challenged this dualistic view of industrial design
in his article, “‘Captive’ Designer vs. (?) ‘Independent’ (!) Designer,” Industrial Design (August 1956).
46
Excerpted from an undated talk delivered by Paepcke to the Yale Alumni of Chicago, and quoted in the invitation
to the conference, Design as a Function of Management, 1951, Box 1, Folder 5, International Design Conference in
Aspen records, 1949–2006, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.
47
According to Jacobson, the full range of activities included: “design for packages; design for administration, such
as business cards, signs, stationery forms and annual reports; design for production control, as in the layout of
studios, sample rooms and laboratories; design for maintenance; the painting of trucks, mill rooms and factories;
design for workers; the layout of locker rooms, employee facilities, conference rooms and cafeterias; design for
offices; the arrangement and choice of furniture, flooring and lighting; design for advertising; direct-mail material,
exhibitions, convention displays.” See Egbert Jacobson, “Good Design: An Important Function of Management,”
Graphis 6, no. 30 (February 1950): 140.
58
These designs did more than just help sell boxes; they also directed the flow of communication
from the corporation, shaping public perceptions about CCA and its integrated operations.
Together, Paepcke and Jacobson positioned CCA’s integrated design program as a specifically
visual means of managing the company’s identity.

Visualizing Vertical Integration
Although CCA is best known for its institutional advertising campaigns, scholars have
provided relatively little insight into how these images underpinned CCA’s concept of design
and its position within the corporation. The centrality of vertical integration, as both a theme and
a compositional strategy, has been particularly overlooked. Instead of simply promoting the
benefits of paperboard containers, Paepcke and Jacobson orchestrated campaigns that visualized
the mechanics of integrated package production. Moreover, CCA’s institutional advertising from
the late 1930s and early 1940s has attracted significantly less scholarly attention than its
successor series: the United Nations (1944–46), the United States (1946–49), and especially the
Great Ideas of Western Man (1950–84) campaigns. Critics and historians alike have focused on
these later campaigns as important examples of corporate art patronage because they embraced
avant-garde art and privileged themes that had little to do with CCA’s packaging business.
48
As
Jacobson claimed in 1946, however, he and Paepcke conceived the program not as a form of art
patronage, but rather as way to visualize CCA’s “policy of integrated production and
management.”
49
Despite stylistic differences, CCA’s advertisements cohered around the idea of

48
For period criticism, see Edwin Arnet, “World-Famed Artists in the Service of Advertising.” Graphis 1, no. 1/2
(September 1944): 82–87, 101, 104; Alexander Ebin, “Corporate Patrons of the Typographic Arts in Chicago,” Print
7, no. 6 (March 1953): 40–50; and Georgine Oeri, “Great Ideas of Western Man: Advertising by Inference,” Graphis
(November 1957). For historical scholarship, see Harris and Norelli, Art, Design, and the Modern Corporation;
Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art, 259–69; and Jackson Lears, “The Artist and the Adman,”
Boston Review (April 1986): 5–11.
49
Jacobson, “Foreword,” in Modern Art in Advertising, unpaginated.
59
integration, understood as a method of both industrial expansion and graphic visualization. The
early advertisements are therefore critical to understanding how Paepcke and Jacobson viewed
the relationship between business and design, or between vertical and visual integration.
The graphic visualization of complex organizational processes was not a new problem in
the 1930s. Almost as soon as corporations began to integrate vertically, industrial engineers
sought to translate often inscrutable business data into visually legible forms. Willard Brinton, a
pioneer of information design, published a textbook in 1914 that aimed to establish standards for
the visual communication of information. In Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts, he argued
that “the manner of presentation is more important than the facts themselves.”
50
By combining
individual data points, or “component parts,” into whole charts and diagrams, Brinton believed
that graphic visualizations could generate “interest and action” in word-weary readers (fig. 1.8).
He also argued that visual depictions of information compelled readers to make connections
more readily than textual presentations, which offered less room for interpretation. The charts,
curves, and other graphic visualizations that companies published in the business press cultivated
an expert audience of viewers capable of comprehending complex data when presented in
graphic form and using these data to make decisions.
51
Such viewers would have understood
integration as a visual ideal, as a way to combine fragments of information into comprehensible
wholes. If taught early in the education system, Brinton believed this kind of active viewing
would encourage even average citizens, in addition to business managers, to develop a greater
investment in the information they encountered on a daily basis.

50
Willard C. Brinton, Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1914), 1.
51
Michael Golec has identified a similar form of graphic visualization for expert viewership in his discussion of
Lester Beall’s posters for the REA. Begun, like CCA’s design program, in the late 1930s, these posters contributed
to a style of bureaucratic visual communication that conveyed information not just to government agents but also to
well-informed farmers. See Michael J. Golec, “Graphic Visualization and Visuality in Lester Beall’s Rural
Electrification Posters, 1937,” Journal of Design History 26, no. 4 (November 2013): 401–15.
60
CCA’s design program capitalized on this infrastructure of information communication,
in which techniques of graphic visualization informed practices of business management, and
vice versa. In their approach to institutional advertising, Paepcke and Jacobson commissioned
advertisements that combined text and image to promote vertical integration as an organizational
ideal and to position CCA as a model of this integrative potential. To accomplish this feat, they
assembled a group of ad men, designers, and artists to harness modern art’s communicative
value. In 1936, N. W. Ayer replaced The Buchen Company as CCA’s advertising agency. One of
the oldest agencies in America, Ayer was also an early advocate for the use of art in advertising,
appointing its first art director in 1910. Initially “responsible for the design and illustration of all
the advertisements turned out,” the role of art director gradually shifted from the production of
advertisements to the management of entire advertising campaigns.
52
Charles T. Coiner, who
joined Ayer as a layout designer in 1924 and served as art director from 1929 to 1964, reinforced
the agency’s commitment to art in advertising by hiring avant-garde artists to create striking
images.
53
As the art director in charge of CCA’s account, Coiner recruited modern designers—
many European émigrés—whose work Paepcke admired in the pages of Gebrauchsgraphik. In
1937, Cassandre inaugurated this new publicity program with twelve designs that promoted
CCA’s business structure. Over the next five years, the company commissioned advertisements
from a host of acclaimed designers, including Herbert Bayer, Jean Carlu, Edward McKnight
Kauffer, György Kepes, Fernand Léger, Leo Lionni, Herbert Matter, and Toni Zepf.
54

52
Ralph M. Hower, The History of an Advertising Agency, N. W. Ayer & Son at Work, 1869–1949 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1949), 313.
53
Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art, 168. According to Bogart, Coiner’s approach to art in
advertising was successful because it “celebrated and reinforced traditional romantic ideologies of art, and because
the gap between fine and commercial art was so large.” I contest this presumed disparity, arguing both that
techniques of fine art lent themselves to the commercial aims of advertising, and that many of the artists whom
Coiner employed actively pursued careers in fine and commercial art, often refusing to distinguish between the two.
54
Bayer later became a principal advocate of the concept of integrated design. See Herbert Bayer, “Design as an
Expression of Industry,” Gebrauchsgraphik 23, no. 9 (September 1952): 57–60.
61
Paepcke placed these institutional advertisements in major business and general interest
magazines, such as Fortune and Time, rather than in trade journals, such as Packaging Parade or
American Box Maker, where CCA’s product advertising typically appeared.
55
Readers of
Fortune were perhaps particularly receptive to experimental graphic methods for presenting
information. In 1931, the magazine reported on a series of charts related to World War I
reparations, which showed how payments flowed from Germany to and between the Allied
nations (fig. 1.9). The diagrams “so clearly” visualized “a complicated international problem”
that Fortune reproduced them in their entirety.
56
Yet like Brinton, Paepcke must also have
believed that even members of the general public, that is, readers of magazines such as Time,
could learn to interpret graphic visualizations.
In 1936, as a prelude to the well-known designs by Cassandre that formally marked the
beginning of CCA’s institutional advertising, Paepcke placed a series of advertisements in Time
and Fortune. Two of these used bar and line charts to promote the paperboard business in
general and CCA in particular (fig. 1.10). In the first, a roll of spooling paper serves as backdrop
for a horizontal bar chart that quantifies the amount of paper produced in the U.S. during 1935.
The chart clearly shows that paperboard accounted for the vast majority of production, nearly as
much as every other paper product combined. Below, a line of copy identifies CCA as “the
largest U.S. producer of paperboard,” presenting the company as the leader of a thriving
industry. The other advertisement indicates how well the paperboard business had recovered
from the Depression in relation to U.S. industry in general. Using a line chart, the image shows

55
In the 1950s, after CCA’s advertising shifted from the mechanisms of industry and war to focus on cultural and
intellectual themes, Paepcke pulled advertising from Fortune and Businessweek and began advertising in The New
Yorker.
56
“A Portfolio of Charts on the Subject of Reparations, Interallied Debts, and National Budgets,” Fortune 4, no. 5
(November 1931): 50–3.
62
that while the nation’s industrial production remained almost twenty percent below its 1929
output, the paperboard industry was running a full seventeen percent above its pre-Depression
numbers. A line at the bottom of the image now promotes CCA as the “world’s largest producer
of paperboard.” While later advertisements were less direct in their use of quantitative statistics
and data visualization techniques, they employed graphic design principles in similar, if more
qualitative, ways to communicate CCA’s organizational prowess. This publicity relied not
simply on the shock of modern art, but also on the visual literacy of readers familiar with efforts
to present information graphically and therefore capable of recognizing the flow of visual
information as analogous to the flow of industrial production.
Cassandre’s “Integration” advertisement was perhaps the clearest expression of CCA’s
rhetoric of visual integration, but it also influenced many of the promotional materials that
followed, in concept if not always in style. In 1938, Zepf designed an advertisement that
celebrated CCA’s ability to manage the entire process of manufacturing containers, from pulp to
paperboard to package, all “under one control” (fig. 1.11). Even without the word “integration,”
it is clear from the vertical orientation of Zepf’s illustration—a steaming vat of pulp at the
bottom gives rise to a sheet of paperboard, which in turn leads to a finished package—that this is
a vertically integrated process. A figure in the background performs this very reading of the
scene. Dressed in a suit and with an oversized eye in place of a head, he is perhaps the business
manager who oversees the manufacturing of paperboard packages. Yet it could also be the figure
of the art director, who manages the processes of visual integration that produce advertisements
by combining text and images to communicate promotional messages. It may even represent the
expert viewer, who pieces together these elements in order to apprehend the advertisement’s
meaning. In either case, Zepf’s design pictures vision, manifest as managerial oversight, as a key
63
mechanism of industrial enterprise. It therefore establishes a clear correlation between processes
of vertical and visual integration.
The designers that CCA commissioned to create institutional advertisements found
numerous ways to visualize vertical integration. In Zepf’s second design for the company,
published under the title “Integration,” a drawing of a finished container, rendered precisely on a
sheet of graph paper, peels back to reveal a photograph of pulp and paper mills and, below that,
scraps of lumber, straw, and wastepaper (fig. 1.12). A synthetic technique that became popular
among modern artists around the turn of the twentieth century, collage was uniquely suited to
represent vertical integration as the accumulation of layers.
57
Most of CCA’s advertisements,
however, pictured integration as a sequence of events unfolding across the page instead of
layered on top of it. Two wartime advertisements by Bayer, for instance, show bundles of
wastepaper transforming into finished containers (fig. 1.13). These containers reveal packed
munitions, which slide smoothly into the fuselage of a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, in one
image, or a waiting artillery gun, in the other. The serpentine forms and pseudo-cinematic
sequencing in these images effectively conveyed industrial production as a type of flow that
proceeded smoothly and continuously, rather than in a series of separate stages.
CCA’s rhetoric of visual integration also incorporated more abstract or metaphorical
concepts of industrial organization. A 1941 advertisement by Swiss designer Xanti Schawinsky
uses a spool of unraveling paperboard to approximate a conveyor belt (fig. 1.14). The raw
materials, smoking factory, and completed container that travel along the belt indicate an
increasing level of finish as materials move through the corporation’s flow of production. The
following year, Jean Carlu created an advertisement that likened CCA’s raw materials, paper

57
See Clement Greenberg, “The Pasted-Paper Revolution,” ARTnews (September 1958): 46–49, 60.
64
mills, and package factories—represented by a thicket of trees, rolls of paperboard, and the
silhouette of a factory—to three links in a literal chain of manufacturing (fig. 1.15). Both images
illustrate integrated production as a flow of resources contained visually by the curves of
conveyor belts and metal chains.
The hand was a particularly common trope in CCA’s advertising, appearing in designs by
Bayer, Carlu, Cassandre, and others.
58
It signaled the kind of administrative supervision, or
handling, that was necessary to effectively manage a large organization. In his 1977 analysis of
America’s managerial revolution, business historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. argued that the
“visible hand” of purposeful managerial decisions replaced what eighteenth-century economist
Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of unintended market forces as the central structuring
mechanism of modern business.
59
Decades before Chandler’s publication of The Visible Hand,
Matthew Leibowitz rendered management as a literal “visible hand” in his 1943 advertisement
for CCA, which compared corporate management to a game of checkers (fig. 1.16). The red
game piece appears suspended in a moment of triumph, its winning trajectory marked by an
arrow that arches over three black game pieces. The winning checker is color-coded to
correspond with CCA, whose logotype appears in red at the bottom of the page. The black
lettering below the game board clarifies that the opposing black checkers represent three facets
of CCA’s production process: pulp materials, paper-making mills, and packaging factories. The
attendant lines of celebratory red text—“ALL THREE IN ONE” and “all in one organization!”—
claim that by integrating these elements into a single process, CCA had mastered its complex,

58
The hand came to represent a broad ideal of control not confined to corporate managers and designers. In CCA’s
World War II advertising, for example, the hands of consumers who saved wastepaper appeared to serve an indirect
role in managing the war effort by helping to deliver packaged supplies to the armed forces.
59
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: The
Belknap Press, 1977).
65
diversified operations. The hand that carries the red checker to victory is, as Chandler might say,
the “visible hand” of management, responsible for devising strategies of vertical integration. Yet
it could also be the designer’s hand, capable of converting business plans into visual programs.
By visualizing the abstract concept of the deft managerial maneuver, Leibowitz draws a direct
connection between strategies of industrial and visual integration. The hands of the businessman
and the designer are joined—indeed, they become one—in a mutual effort to achieve a more
organized and efficient economic order.
Not all of CCA’s early institutional advertisements referenced the full scope of vertically
integrated package production explicitly. Many designers instead exploited the metaphorical
possibilities inherent in the concept of vertical integration to render other forms of combination
that were central to CCA’s business. Cassandre, for instance, positioned a container between a
crenellated castle wall and a classical bust to show how packages unite “strength” and “beauty,”
protecting products while appealing to consumers’ aesthetic sensibilities. György Kepes
conveyed this same type of combination using a radiographed nautilus shell as a symbol of the
container’s “beauty and protective strength” (fig. 1.17). Other advertisements promoted CCA’s
ability to combine various raw materials, geographic regions, packaging types, consumer goods,
or even different forms of expertise.
While some scholars have argued that CCA developed “the first fully integrated
corporate identity program in America,” its early institutional graphics lacked the standardization
and systematization evident in later corporate design programs and even some contemporaneous
ones.
60
Paepcke and Jacobson welcomed stylistic diversity, which they viewed as compatible
with the principle of integration, of combining separate parts to create new wholes. Reflecting on

60
Philip B. Meggs, “The Rise and Fall of Design at a Great Corporation,” Print 46, no. 3 (May 1992): 48.
66
the first decade of CCA’s institutional advertising, Jacobson recalled that he and Paepcke gave
commissioned designers only a “general idea” of what they wanted and encouraged each “to
develop a suitable and personal statement of it.”
61
At the same time, Jacobson sought to maintain
“a central direction, with emphasis on integration rather than on personal artistic expression.”
62

Even though individual advertisements differed in style, the theme of vertical integration
provided an overall structuring framework. While it is difficult to know to what extent viewers
actually perceived this structure, it was critical to CCA’s formulation of integrated design as a
way to organize the flow and direction of corporate communications.
63

Re-Mediating CCA’s Visual Identity
Although CCA’s institutional advertising was the most visible component of its publicity
program, appearing in magazines with wide circulations, Jacobson translated the theme of
vertical integration into other promotional materials aimed at a smaller, more expert audience of
stockholders, employees, and clients. Like CCA’s advertisements, much of this imagery centered
on the flow of industrial production, picturing how resources moved through machinery, from
factory to factory, and ultimately to customers. The images themselves flowed, too, moving
between media, from annual reports to publications to murals. By transforming CCA’s identity
across multiple media, Jacobson showed that design was itself a resource that moved through the
corporation, distributing ideas and information about CCA to viewers in the process.
Jacobson’s first job at CCA was to design its 1934 annual report, a document that
communicated the status of the corporation to stockholders primarily through quantitative facts

61
Jacobson, “Foreword,” unpaginated.
62
Jacobson, “Good Design,” 201.
63
Anecdotal evidence, which exists primarily for CCA’s later campaigns, suggests at least some viewers recognized
the company’s advertising as a cohesive whole. See Henry Dreyfuss to Walter Paepcke, February 21, 1956, Box 23,
Folder 4, WPPP; and William Benton to Walter Paepcke, August 31, 1959, Box 22, Folder 6, WPPP.
67
and figures. The 1936 report included photographs for the first time, using images of factory and
office work to convey the scope of CCA’s operations. Beginning in 1937, Jacobson incorporated
graphic visualizations that guided viewers more smoothly and deliberately through the package-
making process. In one diagram, simple pictographs show the stages of vertical integration in the
form of a flowchart (fig. 1.18).
64
A graphic representation of step-by-step problem solving, the
flowchart was a relatively new information tool that Frank and Lillian Gilbreth introduced during
the 1920s to help managers establish more efficient working methods.
65
CCA used this graphic
technique to give visual form to its integrated flow of production. Raw materials move through
clusters of mills and factories, all neatly contained within an undulating sequence of rectangles.
Pulp, wastepaper, and straw come out the other end of this graphical apparatus as finished cans,
cartons, and containers, which clients used to package everything from soft drinks to sporting
goods. By rendering its production process in a pictographic flowchart, CCA demonstrated its
ability to contain a complex flow of production within a single, unified system.
This rhetoric of visual integration extended to other forms of printed matter. In 1937,
CCA delivered copies of the self-published book Paper, Wasps and Packages: The Romantic
Story of Paper and its Influence on the Course of History to stockholders and other friends of the
corporation. As the subtitle suggests, this book promoted CCA’s integrated production process
not only as a pragmatic economic ideal, but also as the denouement of a romanticized tradition of

64
The use of pictographs, or universal picture languages, to translate complex information into comprehensible
visual form was widespread during the 1930s. The best-known example of a picture language is Otto and Marie
Neurath’s International System of Typographic Picture Education, or Isotype, created during the 1920s in the
context of Red Vienna. The Neuraths published their findings around the same time that CCA launched its corporate
identity program. See Otto Neurath, International Picture Language: The First Rules of Isotype (London: Kegan
Paul Trench Trubner, 1936). For a discussion of how Isotype spread to the United States during the decades around
World War II, see Keith Bresnahan, “‘An Unused Esperanto’: Internationalism and Pictographic Design, 1930–70,”
Design and Culture 3, no. 1 (March 2011): 5–24.
65
Frank Gilbreth and Lillian Gilbreth, Process Charts: First Steps in Finding the One Best Way to Do Work (New
York: The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1921).
68
paper making with roots in second-century China. This saga unfolds over the course of sixty-five
illustrated pages, culminating with CCA’s “Modern Paperboard Processes.” A two-page
illustration of these operations by Chicago designer Edgar Miller echoes the visual logic of
Cassandre’s 1937 advertisement, organizing CCA’s production processes into interconnected
tiers (fig. 1.19).
66
“Though the fundamentals of papermaking remain unchanged,” the book
explains, “the processes have become complex and enormously accelerated, requiring multiple
operations and vast machines. […] These arts in their most modern phases may be seen in the
company’s mills and plants.”
67
The book promotes integration as both a serious business and a
spectacular art form. This doubling is evident in Miller’s illustrations, which, through consistent
color schemes and sequential layouts, combine interconnected production processes into visually
integrated compositions. A foldout at the back of the book illustrates a particular example of
integrated production too great and complex to be contained on a single page (fig. 1.20). A
diminutive group of factory hands stands idle in the foreground as a vast Fourdrinier paper
machine carries out the largely automated processes of molding, pressing, drying, calendering,
trimming, and rolling large spools of paperboard. Miller’s illustrated machinery displays in
microcosm the macrocosmic spectacle of CCA’s impressively coordinated operations, carried
out by countless machines that spanned multiple mill and factory floors across the country.
Paepcke and Jacobson also commissioned local artists to create murals for its plants and
offices, a promotional tactic that other companies, such as Ford and Curtis Publishing, employed
throughout the early twentieth century. By monumentalizing CCA’s production methods, these

66
Miller was one of Chicago’s most prolific designers in the mid-twentieth century. Known for his versatility, he
pursued a multifaceted career as an artist, craftsman, and industrial designer. See Richard Cahan and Michael
Williams, Edgar Miller and the Hand-Made Home: Chicago’s Forgotten Renaissance Man (Chicago: CityFiles
Press, 2009).
67
Alexander Weaver, Paper, Wasps and Packages: The Romantic Story of Paper and Its Influence on the Course of
History (Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1937), 80.
69
murals established vertical integration as central to the company’s self-image. In the conference
room of CCA’s Lake Shore Mill, a mural by local artist Katherine O’Brien pictured production,
laboratory, and shipping work (fig. 1.21).
68
O’Brien employs a visual rhetoric consistent with
CCA’s advertisements and other printed publicity, depicting interconnected machinery and
facilities to show how the company combined manufacturing processes to create paperboard
containers. In her aim to encapsulate the entirety of CCA’s production and distribution system,
O’Brien makes little effort to represent spatial or mechanical relationships accurately. Indeed,
her sprawling apparatus resembles a Rube Goldberg machine.
69
The numerous parts, only
roughly based on actual paper-making machinery, connect in illogical ways as they transform
lumber and straw into spools of paperboard that workers then load onto semi-trailer trucks for
delivery to customers. O’Brien thus forfeits fidelity in order to create visual flow.
CCA’s murals fit seamlessly into the company’s overall publicity program. In some
cases, the murals provided imagery that reappeared in other formats; in other instances, they
reproduced existing visual material. In 1936, Jacobson installed an International Packaging
exhibition in the reception room of CCA’s New York offices. In addition to shelves filled with
cartons and containers, the display also included a mural by commercial artist Wayne Colvin that
depicted, “in diagrammatic technique the sources of raw material, the processes of manufacture,
and the eventual destination of the company’s paperboard” (fig. 1.22).
70
Jacobson included a
reproduction of this mural in CAA’s 1936 annual report, transforming Colvin’s work into the
medium of print (fig. 1.23). That image, in turn, likely served as the basis for Miller’s illustration

68
In contrast with the world-renowned designers who contributed to CCA’s institutional advertising campaigns, the
local designers who created these murals were relatively unknown. Biographical information on figures these
designers is scant, save for a few passing references in the pages of regional publications and advertising annuals.
69
Rube Goldberg’s inventive cartoons were wildly popular during the 1930s, arguably the peak of his career as a
cartoonist. For a discussion of how Goldberg’s cartoons influenced the incorporation of technology into art, see
Peter C. Marzio, “Art, Technology and Satire: The Legacy of Rube Goldberg,” Leonardo 5, no. 4 (1972): 315–24.
70
“Container Opens Package Exhibit,” The American Box Maker (February 1937).
70
in the 1937 Paper, Wasps and Packages. A similar yet inverted type of re-mediation occurred
when CCA reproduced the flowchart from its 1936 annual report—versions of which appeared in
annual reports through the 1950s—in a striking, sculptural wall display in the reception room of
its Chicago headquarters (fig. 1.24). As these examples show, integrated design was capable of
not only reproducing CCA’s identity, but also translating it into different media and formats.
CCA’s annual reports, publications, and murals were part of a burgeoning visual culture
of modern industrial production.
71
Much of this imagery was deliberately satirical. In 1936, the
same year that Colvin’s mural appeared on the walls of CCA’s New York office, Charlie Chaplin
released Modern Times, a slapstick comedy that mocked the purported efficiencies of modern
industry. In an early sequence, Chaplin, in his bumbling Tramp persona, struggles to keep pace
with the rapid tempo of an assembly line. He eventually tumbles headfirst into the machinery,
which resembles the arrangement of rollers and pulleys employed in CCA’s paper-making
process, throwing the entire system into chaos. To get back on track, the gears run in reverse,
ejecting Chaplin from the finely tuned machinery. While Modern Times ridiculed the repetitive,
interminable, and dehumanizing motions of industrialized mass production, CCA’s promotional
materials celebrated similar activities as part of an organized industrial apparatus. The figures in
Miller’s, O’Brien’s, and Colvin’s designs appear as productive cogs operating in tandem with the
hulking machinery. These images aimed not to satirize industrial production processes, nor even
to clarify them. Instead, CCA created visual designs that portrayed vertical integration as a
spectacular experience. By incorporating not only the iconography of continuous machinery,
conveyor belts, and assembly lines, but also the more abstract concepts of production flow,

71
Terry Smith refers to this visual culture as an iconology of modernity, a powerful visual order that functions as
more than an iconography—or repetition of images—by organizing particular ways of seeing and by actively
producing meanings and knowledge in its social reception. See Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and
Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 6–8.
71
command chains, and managerial maneuvers— that is, both the mechanics and the principles of
integrated industrial production—these images promoted vertical and visual integration as
effective ways to manage the increasing complexity of economic and visual modernity.

Managing the Flow of Office Work
Murals may have been among the most spectacular features of CCA’s offices, picturing
the full scope of its integrated operations. But the spaces themselves and the furnishings they
contained also served a central role in managing the flow of work, resources, and information
through the corporation. Paepcke himself described the office as “a kind of package or container
for an organization,” capable of accommodating a range of interconnected work processes and
conveying an image of organized efficiency to visiting clients.
72
This description was more than
a convenient turn of phrase. It expressed the aim of office design in general, but also the
particularities of CCA’s approach to integrated design, in which an office became modern not by
the inclusion of fashionable furnishings or up-to-date equipment, but rather by its capacity to
contain the corporation’s increasingly complex image and workflow.
Jacobson himself was responsible for designing CCA’s early office interiors, including a
series of angular wooden desks and display cabinets for the company’s Chicago headquarters
(fig. 1.25). According to reporters, these items reflected “modern trends in design and create[d]
the immediate impression on visitors that ‘here is a modern company with modern ideas.’”
73

This preoccupation with projecting an image of “modernity” suffused American industrial and
commercial culture in the first half of the twentieth century.
74
At CCA, modernity held specific
connotations. To be a modern corporation at midcentury meant to be able to manage the entire

72
“Many Combinations Easy with Bergson ‘Unit’ Furniture,” American Business, December 1947, 50.
73
“How Container Corporation Forecasts Profits,” American Business, August 1937, 44.
74
See Smith, Making the Modern.
72
flow of production and distribution. As the center of corporate management—the site from
which executives oversaw the company’s entire sequence of operations—the office served a
critical role in rendering the corporation modern.
In the 1940s, Jacobson began to dedicate greater attention and resources to designing
CCA’s office interiors with the aim of increasing staff productivity. The study and optimization
of workplace efficiency dates to the 1880s, when Frederick Taylor began to apply techniques of
scientific management to routine factory work.
75
These methods soon spread to offices, which
managers divided into departments staffed by clerical workers, each responsible for a separate
stage of the work process. As Adrian Forty has observed, the pressure to maximize productivity
in the early twentieth-century workplace fueled changes in the design of office desks, chairs, and
other furniture and equipment.
76
In pursuit of finding “the one best way to do work,” early
proponents of scientific management advocated the use of standardized furniture in prescribed
arrangements that curbed atypical work habits while facilitating surveillance and control.
77

Similar, if somewhat less stringent, ideals of economy and efficiency guided office
design in the years after World War II, when Jacobson employed designer Maria Bergson to
create complete interiors for CCA’s headquarters and branch offices. After emigrating from
Austria in 1940 and working as a secretary for Time, Inc., Bergson transitioned into office design
with the aim of improving white-collar working conditions (fig. 1.26). Unsatisfied with existing
conventions, including the use of outdated and uncomfortable furniture in fixed arrangements,
Bergson designed a line of unit furniture that aimed to balance comfort, utility, and efficiency.
Her first clients were Time and Fortune, and Jacobson first encountered Bergson’s unit furniture

75
See Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper, 1911).
76
Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 120–55.
77
The term comes from Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who sought to improve on Taylor’s techniques. See Gilbreth and
Gilbreth, Process Charts.
73
while visiting the offices of the latter.
78
Similar in appearance to the pieces Jacobson had created
years earlier, Bergson’s designs also earned praise from critics, who described them as “simple,
clean-cut, straightline” (fig. 1.27).
79
Yet it was not simply that Bergson’s designs were boxy, like
paperboard containers themselves. The furniture line was also modular, meaning that its nine
basic component parts—including desk tops, storage units, leg units, and three different types of
chairs—fit together into numerous configurations that suited “90 to 95 per cent of all office jobs,
whether executive, clerical, conference, or machine-operating.”
80
This ability to accommodate
almost any type of work made Bergson’s unit furniture indispensable to CCA’s integrated design
program, which aimed to encapsulate and promote the full scope of the company’s operations.
In addition to its flexibility, Bergson’s unit furniture was also notable for its storage
capabilities (fig. 1.28). Designers of early twentieth-century office furniture had eliminated
pigeonholes and drawers that they feared might accumulate important papers, delaying their
progress through the office and therefore impeding the flow of work.
81
Yet in the midcentury
workplace, similar storage features contributed to an important impression of organization by
reducing visible clutter. Bergson’s furniture helped direct the movement of documents through
CCA’s offices, reinforcing the company’s ability to control the flow of not only paperboard and
packages, but also the paperwork that facilitated the circulation of knowledge, information, and
capital within the corporation.
82

CCA’s business papers were among the first items that Jacobson redesigned as company
art director (fig. 1.29). Each check, letterhead, invoice, and remittance advice follows the same

78
Recall that Fortune was one of the main carriers of CCA’s institutional advertisements.
79
“Many Combinations Easy,” 14.
80
Ibid., 15.
81
Forty, Objects of Desire, 125–26.
82
See Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham: Duke University Press
Books, 2014).
74
basic typographic principles. Vertical and horizontal rules organize lines of text, which are set in
a single sanserif typeface and spaced generously for legibility. Large headers clearly indicate the
purpose of each form, in addition to the name and address of the corporation. According to one
major business journal, the clarity of CCA’s business papers served a dual purpose as both “a
business necessity and an advertisement of the company’s ability to design modern packages.”
83

Business papers were important receptacles of financial data, expediting everyday tasks of
accounting, reporting, and projecting profits—mundane yet crucial areas of business in which
CCA purportedly excelled. Yet these forms contained other kinds of information about CCA, as
well. Like the drawers and filing cabinets that contained them, they showed clients that CCA was
invested in principles of modern design, and also capable of managing complex flows of data.
Bergson’s unit furniture was only one component of a comprehensive interior design
process. Like Taylor and other management consultants, Bergson pursued a systematic approach
to planning work environments. After observing personnel and administering questionnaires
about their work habits, Bergson proceeded to specify “color schemes, floor coverings, draperies,
lamps, and pictures, as well as the most suitable combination of units of her furniture.”
84
This
approach to office planning supported the concept of integrated design as a total process that
encompassed the entirety of the corporate visual environment (fig. 1.30).
85
A photograph of
CCA’s Chicago headquarters from 1954 represents a culmination of the techniques of office
planning that Bergson first implemented a decade earlier (fig. 1.24). In addition to the wall-
mounted display of CCA’s integrated flow of production, the office also contains framed

83
“How Container Corporation Forecasts Profits,” 38.
84
“Many Combinations Easy,” 50.
85
In her comprehensive approach to office design, Bergson may have drawn inspiration from the work of Florence
Knoll, who established the Knoll Planning Unit, a full interior design service, as an extension of husband Hans
Knoll’s furniture company in 1943. See Bobbye Tigerman, “‘I Am Not a Decorator’: Florence Knoll, the Knoll
Planning Unit and the Making of the Modern Office,” Journal of Design History 20, no. 1 (2007): 61–74.
75
advertising art and shelves of paperboard packaging. Even the furnishings reinforce the
company’s identity. Chairs designed by Jens Risom for Knoll and screens designed by Alvar
Aalto and marketed through Artek—both manufactured from wood and seductively supple in
form—indicate CCA’s roots in the lumber industry and its idealization of fluid production
processes.

Building Brand Identity
In many of CCA’s advertisements and other publicity, the factory appears as one link in
the chain of paperboard package production, somewhere between raw materials and finished
containers (see figs. 1.1, 1.14, and 1.15). Yet with deliberate planning, the factory was also
capable of occupying a more commanding position within CCA’s design program. With the end
of World War II and a return to peacetime prosperity, CCA was able to pursue construction of
new facilities, treating them as key components of its integrated design program.
86
The forms
and layouts of these new factories supported CCA’s concept of integrated design as a way to
manage the flow of materials, people, and information through the company.
By the 1940s, CCA had already begun to assemble an ever-expanding network of paper
mills and package plants through a continuous series of acquisitions and mergers that began in
the late 1920s (fig. 1.31). These factories followed an approach to industrial architecture that
Albert Kahn and other leading industrial architects popularized in the U.S. at the beginning of
the twentieth century, in which the use of reinforced concrete allowed for unobstructed interiors
and facades dominated by bays of large, steel-frame windows.
87
The result was a building type,

86
During World War II, new building had been postponed indefinitely due to material and labor shortages. See
Andrew M. Shanken, 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
87
See Grant Hildebrand, Designing for Industry: The Architecture of Albert Kahn (Cambridge: The MIT Press,
1974); Claire Zimmerman, “Albert Kahn in the Second Industrial Revolution,” AA Files, no. 75 (2017): 28–44.
76
known as the “daylight factory,” which architects and industrialists associated with productivity,
rationality, and modernity.
88
Since most of the plants and mills that CCA acquired through
mergers were already equipped for the production of pulp and paperboard, they continued their
normal operations, simply under new management. Others, however, required preparation, and
sometimes considerable effort, before they could meet CCA’s manufacturing requirements.
Careful planning was necessary, for instance, when CCA leased a plant in Philadelphia for the
cutting and folding of cartons. The company’s hulking machines barely fit between the existing
supporting columns, leaving little room in which workers could maneuver (fig. 1.32). CCA also
had to adapt each of these buildings to fit its visual identity. Applied lettering, squeezed into
whatever space was available on the factories’ facades or wrapped around the bellies of water
towers, helped identify these repurposed buildings with CCA, but they competed for visibility
with architectural details and, in some cases, the residual signage of past owners (fig. 1.33).
New construction, on the other hand, allowed CCA to integrate its architecture into its
visual identity more seamlessly. In 1944, Paepcke hired architect and Bauhaus founder Walter
Gropius, who had immigrated to the U.S. in 1937, to design a brand new packaging plant in
Greensboro, North Carolina. Paepcke had met Gropius through László Moholy-Nagy during the
formative years of the New Bauhaus in Chicago.
89
Gropius was a logical choice to design CCA’s
new plant given that he had achieved fame in part through his work with Adolf Meyer on a
factory for the German shoe last manufacturer Fagus between 1911 and 1913. It was this very

88
See Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989); Lindy Biggs, The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology and Work in
America’s Age of Mass Production (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and Michael Osman,
Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2018). This industrial aesthetic remained ubiquitous for decades, influencing the design of CCA’s first new
construction, a factory that opened in Fernandina Beach, Florida, in January 1938.
89
Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture, 73. Paepcke and Gropius often commiserated with each other
about their struggles to help Moholy-Nagy realize his ambitious plans for the design school.
77
building that art historian Nikolaus Pevsner cited not simply as an innovation in factory design,
but also as an exemplar of the modern movement in architecture. “It is the creative energy of this
world in which we live and work and which we want to master,” Pevsner claimed, “a world of
science and technology, of speed and danger, of hard struggles and no personal security, that is
glorified in Gropius’s architecture.”
90
While Pevsner’s praise for Gropius and the Fagus factory
may seem overdetermined, the design likely shaped Paepcke’s regard for the German architect.
The respect was mutual. In 1945, during the Greensboro project, Gropius wrote to Paepcke:
“You represent for me the rare exception of a man in power and leadership who seriously tries to
fuse business with cultural progress.”
91
The CCA plant was no ordinary commission for Gropius,
then, but rather a unique opportunity to realize his concept of architecture as a “collective art”
that required cooperation between “businessmen, technicians, and artists.”
92

Paepcke conceived the Greensboro Plant as a building that could house a range of related
services, accommodate many individuals with specialized knowledge of the packaging business,
and facilitate the continuous production and shipping of cartons on a single floor (fig. 1.34).
These requirements, according to CCA publicity, formed “a background for the modern lines of
brick and steel in the Greensboro Plant,” which helped “bring a rounded and efficient service to
customers.”
93
The form of the plant was meant to express its function as a container for an array
of interconnected processes, personnel, and information. Indeed, the rectangular configuration of
the building, split down the center by a dark band of windows and emblazoned with the

90
Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1975), 217. See also the model factory that Gropius and Meyer designed for the
Werkbund exhibition in Cologne in 1914.
91
Quoted in Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture, 74.
92
Walter Gropius et al., Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar 1919–1923, ed. Lars Müller, Facsimile, Bilingual,
Translation edition (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2019).
93
“A Rounded Service to Customers,” Box 38, Folder 7, Maryette Charlton papers, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution.
78
company’s name, resembles the folding cartons that CCA produced, as well as the forms used to
order them and the trucks that carried them to customers (fig. 1.35).
Jacobson took a special interest in the appearance of CCA’s trucks early in his tenure as
company art director. He rarely expressed his views on design publicly, especially during the
years before World War II. Yet in 1936, he penned a short article about the importance of trucks
as carriers of corporate identity. “When we stand on a street corner today,” observed Jacobson,
“we are conscious mainly of great lumbering machines so painted as to be indistinguishable, so
lettered as to be illegible, so poorly planned as to leave no impression except of noise and
size.”
94
Unrecognizable, unclear, and unappealing—these were the perils of unintegrated design.
Poorly painted trucks not only failed to fulfill their marketing potential, but also contributed to
the decline of civic spaces by adding noise—visual as well as aural—to the environment.
Jacobson aimed to integrate CCA’s trucks with the rest of its identity by incorporating the same
trademark, lettering, and color scheme (fig. 1.36). Eschewing the period craze for slick,
streamlined forms, the simple geometry and flat colors of Jacobson’s design instead emphasized
the boxiness of the trailer and the packages inside it. Trucks contained and transported goods, but
they could also divulge the nature of the products they carried and the corporations they served.
Like delivery trucks, folding cartons, and order forms, the factory building was also a
container, but of a different magnitude, one that enclosed and coordinated all the other containers
in CCA’s ambit. And like these other containers, the exterior of the factory also served as a
valuable surface for promoting the corporation whose production processes it contained. By
contrast with CCA’s other factories, the lettering on the facade of the Greensboro Plant appears
more deliberate (fig. 1.37). Designed by Jacobson, the raised aluminum letters fill generous

94
Egbert Jacobson, “Modernizing, without Benefit of Streamlining,” Advertising Arts Section of Advertising &
Selling, January 1936.
79
expanses of brick that seem to demand, rather than simply accommodate, applied signage. Initial
drawings show the letters floating above the factory roof, fixed to the plant by steel supports. Yet
at some point in the design process, perhaps in conversation with Jacobson, Gropius re-
conceived the lettering as integral with the building facade. Combined with the trademark that
Jacobson had redesigned in 1935, the exterior signage announces the packaging services
contained within the building.
Gropius also planned the layout of the Greensboro Plant with specific operations and
machinery in mind. Bays measuring fifty by twenty feet, instead of the twenty by twenty feet
typical of similar factories, easily accommodated CCA’s equipment (fig. 1.38). While the
machines in CCA’s repurposed factories cramped their human overseers, Gropius’s new plant
provided ample space for employees to navigate and operate their tools. Due to the hot southern
climate, Gropius replaced the typical grid of floor-to-ceiling glazing with a strip of windows at
eye level, which supplemented overhead lighting while curbing claustrophobia. In the space of
the Greensboro Plant, materials and people—not to mention air and light, or even vision and
information—appeared to move freely.
Visitors to the Greensboro Plant seized on this sense of carefully contained flow as a
critical feature of the building. In August 1948, Architectural Forum published a story on the
factory that demonstrated how materials and personnel moved through the facility (fig. 1.39). In
a so-called “flow sketch,” the movement of materials, marked by a dotted line, appears “simple,
direct,” according to the article.
95
After unloading pallets of paperboard from railroad cars on the
building’s south side, employees cut and form cartons on machine presses arranged at intervals
across the factory floor before loading the finished containers onto waiting trucks at the east end

95
“Container Plant: Finely Composed Masonry Encloses an Efficient Factory,” Architectural Forum 89, no. 2
(August 1948): 93.
80
of the building. The flow of personnel, indicated by a solid line, appears similarly rational, if
somewhat more circuitous. From the adjacent parking lot, employees enter the west end of the
building through the locker rooms before heading to their machine stations. After breaking for
lunch in the nearby dining room, they head back to the factory floor before returning through the
locker rooms to their waiting cars at the end of the workday.
The lines of movement that snake through the plant, passing through open spaces,
doorways, and even walls, make the flow of people and products seem smooth and frictionless.
Yet in reality, the production and personnel facilities occupied separate floors of the Greensboro
Plant. A set of plans on the facing page, reproduced from Gropius’s architectural renderings,
show that the dining room and locker rooms were located on the ground floor, while the shipping
and receiving, manufacturing, and storage areas occupied the floor above (fig. 1.40). By omitting
the physical barriers that separate these spaces, the drawing portrays Gropius’s plant as more
integrated than it actually was. While CCA was not itself responsible for the flow sketch, which
Architectural Forum produced at the suggestion of John Alcott, head of the Department of
Architecture at the University of North Carolina, the image supported the company’s own efforts
to visualize its integrated flow of production through graphic design. It serves as evidence that
the ideal of integration—whether economic, visual, or spatial—had gained broad purchase on
midcentury design in the U.S.
Unlike CCA’s institutional advertising program, which engaged prominent artists and
designers continuously into the 1980s, the company’s architecture program was less methodical.
In the late 1940s, Paepcke attempted to build on the architectural identity that Gropius had
established for CCA in Greensboro. One new factory in Fernandina Beach, Florida, and another
in Muskogee, Oklahoma, mimicked the proportions, color scheme, and facade treatment of the
81
Greensboro Plant (fig. 1.41). In later years, the company even commissioned major architecture
firms to design new facilities, such as a carton plant in Carol Stream, Illinois, that Bruce Graham
of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill designed in the early 1960s. Yet because these projects
required considerable planning and resources, CCA undertook them only sporadically. Five
years after the Greensboro Plant’s completion, Jacobson identified factory architecture as a core
component of the integrated design program despite the fact that Gropius was still the only well-
known architect with whom CCA had worked. Jacobson nevertheless insisted that “if you engage
top-notch architects to design a plant, not only do your plant managers assume new stature, but
the local community is introduced to stimulating ideas in building which those in it never before
imagined.”
96
Within the integrated design program, the plant had to do more than facilitate
production or present an attractive facade. It also had to raise up employees and stimulate the
general public to see their visual environment in new ways. Even in the service of industry, then,
visual experience was an important agent of social interactions and group relations.

Conclusion
This interpretation of CCA’s early engagement with art, architecture, and design helps to
reframe the company’s later corporate imagery, which has captured the interest of critics and
historians because of its alleged association with fine art and avant-garde culture.
97
Attention has
centered in particular on CCA’s final three advertising campaigns: the United Nations (1944–
1946), United States (1946–1950), and Great Ideas of Western Man (1950–1984) series.
Scholars have argued that these campaigns exemplified a form of advertising that prioritized the
visual appeal of fine art over direct corporate messaging, and which lent coherence to corporate

96
Catherine Sullivan, “The Artist and Industry, A Report from Aspen,” American Artist (September 1951), 81.
97
See Allison, “Perception and Pedagogy,” 169–249.
82
publicity by uniting advertisements around specific themes.
98
Yet these campaigns cannot be
considered independently of CCA’s early advertising, the rest of its design program, and its
policies of integrated production and management. The overarching corporate ideology of
“contained flow” remained operative, I argue, in the company’s postwar advertising.
Like CCA’s propagandistic wartime images, which promoted packaging as central to the
war effort, the postwar campaigns were not just thematic, but also topical and opportunistic.
With the war shifting in the Allies’ favor and an end to hostilities imminent, the UN series
capitalized on an ethos of diplomacy and the ongoing efforts to form a unified world
government.
99
Instead of military action, designers depicted scenes of reconstruction, community
building, and cultural enrichment—anticipations of a postwar return to peace and prosperity.
100

The U.S. series evoked a different postwar sentiment. Instead of international cooperation, it
reflected a nascent nationalism that soon developed into America’s Second Red Scare.
101
CCA’s
pivot from the UN to the U.S. was a canny response to this shifting political climate, but it also
managed to preserve an optimistic spirit at odds with political reality. While McCarthyism sowed
fear and distrust in its aim to safeguard national security, CCA’s U.S. series instead conveyed a
sense of mutual understanding by disseminating visions of the nation as a patchwork of people,
landscapes, and customs. Finally, the Great Ideas series expressed a postwar preoccupation with
humanism and liberal learning, most evident in the Great Books movement from which CCA’s

98
See Harris and Norelli, Art, Design, and the Modern Corporation, 48, 58, 70–72; Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and
the Borders of Art, 259–69.
99
The UN was not officially formed until 1945, but plans to replace the League of Nations with a new organization
first emerged in 1942, when the Allies and twenty-two other countries signed the Declaration of the United Nations.
100
Each month CCA devoted an advertisement to a different member of the UN. Whenever possible, CCA
commissioned artists native to the country in question.
101
Incidentally, George F. Kellan’s Long Telegram, which structured America’s Cold War diplomacy and hardline
stance against the Soviet Union, arrived in Washington in February 1946, just months before CCA’s U.S. campaign
began. It is reasonable to conclude that Cold War tensions helped motivate CCA’s visual return to the homeland.
83
campaign took its name.
102
While individual advertisements occasionally alluded to current
events and issues, the series as a whole portrayed humanity’s progress as the result of a
transhistorical and transnational civilizing process.
Yet CCA’s postwar advertising campaigns were not simply avant-garde, thematic, and
topical. They were also coextensive with the company’s early integrated design efforts and its
overarching concern with controlling flows of resources and information. In the later campaigns,
integration appeared as a way to unite not only disparate industrial operations or visual designs,
but also different cultures and ideas. Even more than its early advertisements, CCA’s later
publicity relied on the seriality of the advertising medium and the viewer’s ability to perceive
interrelations between stylistically divergent images. For the individual advertisements —like the
nations, states, and ideas that they represented—were less important than the cohesive wholes
they helped form. Recurring typographic cues facilitated this mode of integrative vision: the
company’s name; an icon of a paperboard package, open and filled with smaller containers; and,
in the final campaign, the words “Great Ideas of Western Man…one of a series.” CCA further
capitalized on a midcentury desire for wholeness by compiling its advertisements into complete
portfolios of reprints, which it marketed to institutions and members of the general public.
According to Paepcke, “hundreds of universities, colleges, art institutes, business schools,
cultural clubs, and individuals” used these reprints as “discussion material in their
institutions.”
103

CCA’s continuing postwar preoccupation with integrated design is especially evident in
the traveling exhibitions that it organized to aid the circulation of its advertising art across the

102
For more about the Great Books movement, see Alex Beam, A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and
Curious Afterlife of the Great Books (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008).
103
Walter Paepcke to F. W. La Croix, January 24, 1953, Box 23, Folder 5, WPPP.
84
U.S. The first exhibition, “Modern Art in Advertising,” opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in
April 1945.
104
Designed by Bayer, the show included original artworks, advertisements, and
billboard-sized reproductions, calling attention to the numerous ways in which corporate images
circulate. The exhibition presented advertisements from different series side-by-side,
undercutting their original thematic emphasis so that visitors could draw connections of their
own between seemingly unrelated images. Bayer devised a system of wooden scaffolding that
encouraged interpenetrative viewing (fig. 1. 42).
105
The resulting display exemplified Lynes’s
1950 definition of integrated design as the “interrelation of parts,” in which “spaces fit and flow
into spaces, planes into planes, and functions into functions.”
106
Bayer even included a visual
guide to this type of integrative vision at the exhibition entrance (fig. 1.43). A series of
intersecting strings render visible the invisible lines of sight that form when one makes visual
connections.
107
This technique also proved effective in other media. In a 1941 advertisement for
CCA, Bayer used intersecting lines to emphasize the comparison between a cardboard box and a
house of cards, both made from seemingly flimsy materials that belie the structures’ actual
strength (fig. 1.44). Other designers commissioned by CCA, such as Cassandre and Zepf, used
lines in their compositions to similar effect (fig. 1.45). Bayer’s exhibition thus demonstrated in
three dimensions a mode of integrative looking that CCA had cultivated through its publicity
over the course of a decade.
Integration was not simply a theme in CCA’s corporate image making, then, nor the basis
for a tenuous connection between strategies of industrial and visual production. Instead, it served

104
Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture, 75–6.
105
Bayer’s display apparatus, an integral part of the CCA show, traveled with the exhibition to subsequent locations.
106
Lynes, “‘Functional’ Is Out.”
107
Several years later, Will Burtin would employ a similar technique in his exhibition, “Integration, the New
Discipline in Design.”
85
as an ideology or point of view, a way of seeing and experiencing the world as a constant flow of
materials and information. Midcentury executives and designers alike subscribed to this
worldview, believing these flows could prove profitable if properly contained and controlled. But
their perceptions of prosperity and progress were also nuanced, taking into account the changing
imperatives and politics of midcentury corporate culture. While integration appealed as an
economic solution during the Great Depression and a patriotic duty during the Second World
War, it served in the postwar period as a way to navigate a volatile political climate and the
alternating concerns with national, international, and transhistorical cohesion.
CCA played a central role in visualizing and operationalizing the logic of integration. By
managing flows of goods and capital, the containers it created helped shape the forms, pathways,
and aesthetics of integrated industrial production. But integration was a style of organization that
transcended any particular corporation or industry. Paepcke and Jacobson recognized that
techniques of visual integration were broadly applicable to the problems of corporate culture, and
they believed that the possibility of a more harmonious economic order rested on the widespread
adoption of these techniques. In the post-World War II period, they became key advocates for
integrated design, urging other corporations to put these practices to work for the purposes of
economic and social improvement. They therefore propelled integrated design from a relatively
narrow set of practices to the center of postwar debates about the purpose of design within
capitalist societies.
86
CHAPTER 2:
Discordant by Design: Reanimating the International Design Conference in Aspen

In June 1951, a group of 250 designers, educators, and executives gathered in the
secluded mountain town of Aspen, Colorado, to discuss “Design as a Function of Management.”
This first meeting of what was later known as the International Design Conference in Aspen
(IDCA) was the brainchild of Egbert Jacobson, director of design for the Chicago packaging
company Container Corporation of America (CCA).
1
Jacobson proposed the conference as an
extension of the summer program initiated in Aspen by CCA’s president, Walter Paepcke, who
sought to rehabilitate the former mining town as a recreational and cultural destination beginning
in the mid-1940s.
2
In his efforts to convince Paepcke of the need for a design conference,
Jacobson reasoned “that questions of design are as vital to humanism as music, literature and
philosophy, and would perhaps attract a new and different kind of visitor” to Aspen.
3
The
questions that occupied early IDCA participants centered on the concept of “integrated design,”
which Jacobson defined as a way to interrelate all components of an organization’s visual
identity.
4
According to the minutes of the first planning session, the IDCA’s mission was to
explain “‘integrated design,’ what it is, what it can do. The discussion at Aspen would therefore

1
Although the conference, convened under the theme “Design as a Function of Management” from 1951 to 1953,
did not assume the name “International Design Conference in Aspen” until its formal incorporation in October 1954,
I use the abbreviation “IDCA” throughout this chapter for the sake of consistency and clarity.
2
What began as a speculative redevelopment project took a cultural turn in 1949, when Aspen hosted the Goethe
Bicentennial Convocation. Paepcke built on this event’s success in 1950, when he established the Aspen Institute for
Humanistic Studies to continue the advancement of humanistic ideals among corporate executives. The Institute’s
operations centered on an executive seminar series—modeled on Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler’s Great
Books seminar at the University of Chicago—that sought to reform business culture through liberal education. In its
aim to cultivate well-rounded and enlightened business leaders, the Institute also supported local cutlural initiatives,
including the Aspen Music Festival and School and a national photography conference. For an in-depth discussion
of the Aspen project, see James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and
the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
3
Egbert Jacobson to Walter Paepcke, August 22, 1950, Box 103, Folder 5, Walter P. Paepcke Papers, Special
Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library [hereafter WPPP].
4
See Egbert Jacobson, “Good Design: An Important Function of Management,” Graphis 6, no. 30 (February 1950):
136–47, 199–204.
87
include every aspect of design in business, from the graphic arts through industrial design,
furniture, interiors and architecture.”
5
This concept took on new meanings and forms in Aspen,
where conference participants debated the merits of integrated design, including the nature and
efficacy of integration as a visual, social, and communicative ideal. Through this discourse, the
IDCA produced an emerging field of design theory and practice that was reflexive, dynamic, and
widely applicable to the problems of postwar U.S. society.
6

Midcentury theorists and contemporary scholars alike have considered conferences as
important forms of social organization and knowledge production.
7
Derived from the Latin word
conferre, meaning “to bring together,” conferences perform a particular kind of organizational
function by drawing individuals into common conversations.
8
This was especially true of the
IDCA, which Jacobson and Paepcke envisioned as a forum for exchange between designers and
other professionals. In addition to discussing the particulars of integrated design, attendees also
took part in a more wide-ranging discourse, combining disparate ideas and viewpoints to create
whole systems of design thinking. In his welcome address at the 1951 conference, Paepcke
described the IDCA as a place where participants from different professional backgrounds could
“meet with each other, talk with one another, listen to one another, yes, and disagree with one
another.”
9
Crucially, Paepcke’s description of the conference emphasized dissent over consensus

5
Egbert Jacobson, “Committee on Plans for Design Conference,” February 19, 1951, Box 1, Folder 2, International
Design Conference in Aspen records, 1949–2006, The Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 2007.M.7. [hereafter
IDCA-GRI]
6
Beginning in 1953, and with varying degrees of success, the conference sought to address integrated design as an
international concern. See Robert Gordon-Fogelson, “Becoming the International Design Conference in Aspen,” in
International Design Organisations: Histories, Legacies, Values, ed. Jeremy Aynsley, Alison J. Clarke, and Tania
Messell (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming in 2022).
7
See Mary Capes, ed., Communication or Conflict: Conferences: Their Nature, Dynamics, and Planning (London:
Tavistock Press, 1960); and Margaret Mead and Paul Byers, The Small Conference: An Innovation in
Communication (The Hague: Mouton, 1968).
8
The conference is a timely object of study given the recent shift, necessitated by a global pandemic, from in-person
meetings to virtual formats. It is significant that the rise of a midcentury conference culture occurred alongside
innovations in televisual media and communications.
9
Walter Paepcke, Welcome address at the Conference on Design, June 28, 1951, Box 103, Folder 5, WPPP.
88
and process over resolution. While he hoped designers and executives would eventually develop
a form of mutual understanding and “a spirit of confidence,” he saw these not as fixed endpoints,
but rather as ongoing pursuits that extended far beyond Aspen and the design conference.
This chapter establishes the IDCA as a mechanism of communicative integration, that is,
as a multimedia communications experience intended to bring participants into constructive, if at
times contentious, conversations about key issues in design. This approach to studying the IDCA
requires attending to the entire conference environment through analyses of transcribed talks,
administrative records, printed publicity, built structures, and documentary photography and
film. Despite efforts to periodize the Aspen talks dating back to British critic Reyner Banham’s
1974 The Aspen Papers, there have been few comparable attempts to make sense of the IDCA’s
visual identity.
10
Media theorist Justus Nieland has examined the IDCA’s use of film, which he
describes as a “uniquely humane, even universal medium of international communication and
understanding.”
11
The emphasis on film, however, obscures the IDCA’s own focus on integrated
design as a multi-mediated approach to designing the total visual environment. Indeed, more
than one participant voiced the opinion that design thinking was best expressed and advanced
through visual rather than verbal means.
12
The IDCA’s promotional materials establish debate as
a key conference technique, but also as a visual mode, a way to work through competing ideas
through formal juxtapositions and stylistic diversity. They manifest important disagreements
over the character, focus, and scope of the conference, which are essential to understanding its

10
Reyner Banham, ed., The Aspen Papers: Twenty Years of Design Theory from the International Design
Conference in Aspen (London: Pall Mall Press, 1974). For a later attempt to periodize the conference, see Joanne
Leigh George, “The Functions of Graphic Design: Sociologies, History, and the International Design Conference in
Aspen” (Ph.D., State University of New York at Binghamton, 2002).
11
Justus Nieland, Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2020), 195.
12
In 1959, for instance, CBS art director William Golden criticized his colleagues who abandoned their drafting
tables for typewriters and lecture platforms. “For my part,” he proclaimed, “I’m convinced that designers shouldn’t
talk—about design.” William Golden, “Visual Environment of Advertising,” 1959, Box 5, Folder 2, IDCA-GRI.
89
discursive function.
13
By reading these visual materials in relation to the speakers’ papers, I seek
to recover a sense of the critical debates that were integral to the conference format and to
changing ideas about design. Although conceived as a forum for verbal communication and
exchange, I interpret the IDCA as a visual archive of midcentury design thinking.
Considering the IDCA itself as an integrative form also means recognizing that the
conference was not simply susceptible to ideological collision; it was in fact designed for debate.
While Banham and later scholars have treated the conference primarily as a collection of formal
lectures, these prepared papers did not constitute the full Aspen discourse. They were joined by
small seminars, discussion sessions, and informal conversations in which audience members
posed questions, challenged speakers, and expressed their own opinions about the conference
themes. This type of debate was, according to postwar theorists, a key instrument for achieving
social change. “The essence of integration in any human society is a ‘dramatic transaction,’”
sociologist Robin M. Williams remarked in the late 1950s, “that is, a matter of dialogue, of
debate, of transformation of issues by discussion and events.”
14
He defined integration not as an
outcome, but rather as the process by which individuals and social groups with distinct, or even
opposing, values enriched their thinking through communication. Conferences such as the IDCA
fulfilled important integrative functions in their respective fields, transforming issues through
dynamic discussion rather than through the establishment of fixed resolutions.
15

13
I draw from Lisa Gitelman, who in turn draws from Bruno Latour, to argue that the visual and material properties
of documents reveal as much about historical shifts and knowledge production as the information they contain. See
Bruno Latour, “Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,” in Knowledge and Society: Studies in the
Sociology of Culture Past and Present, ed. Henrika Kuklick (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1984), 1–40; and Lisa
Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
14
Robin M. Williams, Jr., “Unity and Diversity in Modern America,” Social Forces 36, no. 1 (1957): 8. [Emphasis
original]
15
The Macy Conferences, organized under the auspices of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation from 1941 to 1960, are
perhaps the best-known examples of this type of interdisciplinary exchange. Particularly well known as a hub of
cybernetic and systems thinking, they brought together scholars from numerous disciplines to foster communication
across the sciences. See Claus Pias, ed., Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences 1946–1953 (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2016).
90
My characterization of the IDCA as discordant by design runs counter to the way most
scholars have portrayed the conference as a futile or misguided experiment in consensus-
building. Design historian Alice Twemlow, for instance, insists that the IDCA’s organizers
“advocated debate as a strategy for ultimate understanding and consensus.”
16
Operating under
the assumption that agreement and unanimity are necessary outcomes of any conference, most
studies of the IDCA interpret the conflicts between participants as evidence of a failed attempt to
control design discourse.
17
There was a strong midcentury culture of consensus in the U.S., to be
sure, evidenced by the rise of consensus theory and history in the 1950s.
18
Yet “consensus” was
itself a contested term. “[It] is not so much agreement on all issues,” wrote one sociologist in
1948, “or even on the most essential substantive issues, among all members of society, as it is the
established habit of intercommunication, of discussion, debate, negation and compromise.”
19
The
IDCA’s organizers understood the conference in similar terms, as a form of intellectual exchange
that preserved difference and diversity of viewpoints. I characterize the resulting and inevitable
conflicts of interest as constructive rather than destructive. And while most studies focus almost
exclusively on a single meeting of the IDCA in 1970 that proved especially contentious, I
examine the period from 1951 to 1969 to show how the “ideological collision” at IDCA 1970
was the culmination of two decades of sustained efforts to cultivate debate in Aspen.

16
Alice Twemlow, “I Can’t Talk To You If You Say That: An Ideological Collision at the International Design
Conference at Aspen, 1970,” Design and Culture 1, no. 1 (2009): 27. See also the chapter on the IDCA in Alice
Twemlow, Sifting the Trash: A History of Design Criticism (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2017).
17
In addition to Twemlow’s work, see also Felicity D. Scott, “Shouting Apocalypse,” in Architecture or Techno-
Utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007), 209–45; Martin Beck, ed., The Aspen
Complex (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012); Andrew Blauvelt, ed., Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia
(Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015) [especially the essays by Alison J. Clarke, Greg Castillo, and Simon
Sadler]; and Wim de Wit, ed., Design for the Corporate World, 1950–1975 (London: Lund Humphries, 2017)
[especially the essays by Wim de Wit and Greg Castillo].
18
See John Higham, “The Cult of the ‘American Consensus’: Homogenizing Our History,” Commentary 27, no. 2
(February 1959), 93–100.
19
Louis Wirth, “Consensus and Mass Communication,” American Sociological Review 13 (February 1948): 9.
91
The aim of this chapter, then, is not simply to recuperate the importance of the IDCA,
which is already well established, but rather to reframe our understanding of design itself as a
professional and social practice. This requires complicating the definition of integrated design—
as a way to interrelate all aspects of the corporate visual environment—established in the
preceding chapter. For if CCA’s integrated corporate identity seemed to emerge through a
smooth, aggregative design process that resembled the corporation’s allegedly frictionless flow
of production, the discourse of integrated design that the IDCA cultivated was plainly, even
deliberately, fraught. Attending to these frictions allows for an important shift in design history
scholarship, away from the straightforward analysis of canonical design objects and toward the
interrogation of transformations in design thinking. This change in perspective is evident already
in contemporary design studies, in which designers and critics have emphasized in recent
decades a vision of design not simply as a tool for producing new and better objects, but also as a
way to stimulate debate and discussion about the future.
20
This chapter looks back to the past, to
the emergence of the IDCA in the 1950s and 1960s as the center of a speculative discourse about
the possibilities and directions of design practice.

Framing Design Discourse
The IDCA’s organizers had two models to choose from when determining the purpose
and mission of the design conference. One approach posited the conference as a means to an end,
that is, discussion as a path to general agreement. This model was ascendant in the years after
World War II, which had demonstrated the catastrophic effects of international discord. Indeed,

20
See Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 2013); Matt Malpass, Critical Design in Context: History, Theory, and Practice (London:
Bloomsbury, 2017); and Bruce M. Tharp and Stephanie M. Tharp, Discursive Design: Critical, Speculative, and
Alternative Things (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2019).
92
the 1945 United Nations Conference on International Organization, which resulted in the Charter
of the United Nations, was one of the clearest examples of the conference as a tool for cultivating
cooperation and unity. Yet even before the war, social scientists pursued the development of
what semanticist S. I. Hayakawa called “techniques of agreement,” which aimed to counteract
the aggressive verbal and interpersonal habits that often resulted in group conflict.
21
According
to this view, the purpose of a conference, or any other form of discourse, was to create conditions
that encouraged consensus.
22
Others, however, viewed the conference as an end in itself. When
recounting her experiences organizing and participating in conferences, anthropologist Margaret
Mead expressed a concern with “how to persuade the groups to discuss and not pass resolutions,
how to convince them that what they were doing mattered, and yet must not, in the sense of
action, matter at all.”
23
What mattered most to Mead, in other words, was that disparate groups
be brought into common conversation. Whatever else followed was incidental, if not quite
inconsequential, to the primary task of fostering communication. This is not to say that this type
of discursive conference had no purpose, but rather that its proponents viewed discussion itself
as a legitimate goal, even when it resulted in ambivalence or disagreement.
The organizers of the IDCA conceived their conference with the understanding, perhaps
even the expectation, that it might not result in firm resolutions. The invitation promoted the
meeting simply as an opportunity for participants “to become better acquainted.”
24
The main

21
S. I. Hayakawa, “New Techniques of Agreement,” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 8, no. 1 (1950): 3–12.
These social scientific techniques were closely related to what public relations experts called “the engineering of
consent.” See Edward L. Bernays, “The Engineering of Consent,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science 250 (1947): 113–20.
22
This concept of the conference as part of an administrative or decision-making process was particularly prevalent
in the area of business. See Martin Kriesberg and Harold Guetzkow, “The Use of Conferences in the Administrative
Process,” Public Administration Review 10, no. 2 (1950): 93–98.
23
Margaret Mead, “A Meta-Conference: Eastbourne, 1956,” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 15, no. 2 (1957):
149. Mead was a prominent theorist of the midcentury conference. See also Margaret Mead and Paul Byers, The
Small Conference: An Innovation in Communication (The Hague: Mouton, 1968).
24
Invitation to “Design as a Function of Management,” 1951, Box 1, Folder 5, IDCA-GRI.
93
objectives—to “explore the potential contribution of the artist to industry, and present to artists
the requirements of business”—were similarly open-ended. The IDCA differed in this respect
from professional design associations, whose meetings typically centered on the passage of
resolutions related to formal training, best practices, and other means of regulating the design
professions.
25
The IDCA pursued no such regulatory function, at least not explicitly, and aimed
to expand rather than constrain the possibilities of design. Speakers at the 1951 conference were,
in fact, discouraged from making dogmatic pronouncements. Art historian Charles H. Sawyer,
who served as conference co-chairman, prepared a tentative schedule that instructed speakers to
“not make statements, but open up problems, which might be solved in discussion.”
26
This
directive posited clear-cut solutions as only one possible outcome of a conference that focused
on the formulation of provocative, and often polemical, questions. This was, on the one hand,
simply good business, for it was only through ongoing debate and irresolution that the
conference remained necessary. But IDCA participants also understood confusion and conflict as
fundamentally generative and essential to the function of design discourse. When design critic
Alexander Ebin, in his summary of the 1951 conference, described the “verbal confusion at
Aspen” as the “raw material from which we would ultimately create constructive order,” he
therefore struck at the heart of the IDCA’s discursive approach to design thinking.
27
By debating
and disagreeing with one another, participants could create, if not consensus, then at least new
frameworks for broadening and clarifying their perspectives on design.

25
See Arthur Pulos’s discussion of design training and professionalization in the U.S., which he describes in such
terms as “seeking consensus,” “finding common cause,” and “national convergence.” Arthur J. Pulos, The American
Design Adventure (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990), 164–221.
26
Charles H. Sawyer, “Tentative Suggestions for Discussion Groups at Aspen Design Conference,” February 28,
1951, Box 1, Folder 2, IDCA-GRI. [Emphasis original]
27
Alexander Ebin and R. Hunter Middleton, Impressions from the Design Conference Held at Aspen, Colorado,
June 28 through July 1, 1951, 1951, Box 1, Folder 6, IDCA-GRI.
94
In 1952, the discussions in Aspen were even more indeterminate. There were only four
invited speakers, each tasked with addressing the philosophy of design, rather than its mechanics
or techniques.
28
Master of ceremonies Robert B. Johnson, the sales manager at Chicago’s
Merchandise Mart, reminded participants that the aim of the conference was “not to solve
problems but to clarify them through discussion and to stimulate thinking.”
29
Reflecting on the
first two meetings of the IDCA and looking ahead to its future, designer Burton Cherry argued
that the conference could not be evaluated in terms of any immediate or measurable gain.
Instead, he proposed that “the result should be inspirational and spiritual to a great degree.”
30

The atmosphere was much the same at the 1953 meeting, where, according to Herbert Pinzke,
“problem statement rather than solution was sought after in the discussions,” so that participants
could “go back to their respective occupations with a broader viewpoint, and a more
encompassing attitude.”
31
Time and again IDCA participants remarked that conversations
oriented around questions and problems, rather than answers or solutions, were critical to the
expansion and enrichment of design thinking.
The IDCA’s early visual identity helped construct this notion of the design conference as
a discursive form of communication. The IDCA’s first symbol, which Herbert Bayer originally
designed in 1950 for the Aspen Institute, depicts a classical male nude standing beside a large
aspen leaf (fig. 2.1). Identifiable by its spade-like shape, toothed margin, and pinnate venation,
the leaf denotes the conference’s location in Aspen, a town named after its trademark “trembling
aspen” trees. The male figure, set in contrapposto with one arm raised above his head, is a less

28
The four speakers were R. Buckminster Fuller, publisher Alfred A. Knopf, retailer Richard Gump, and industrial
designer Walter Dorwin Teague.
29
Quoted in “Aspen Conference on Design,” Fortune 46, no. 3 (September 1952): 114.
30
Burton Cherry to Leo Lionni, December 12, 1952, Box 30, Folder 10, WPPP.
31
Herbert Pinzke, “1953 International Design Conference,” Box 30, Folder 10, WPPP.
95
straightforward signifier. It appears initially as a general reference to a Polykleitan ideal of
masculine beauty with emphasis on order and unity of parts.
32
But the particular body language
can be construed in multiple ways. On the one hand, the upraised fist can be seen as a confident
gesture of victory, proclaiming human potential and, more specifically, the designer’s capacity to
solve human problems and fulfill human needs. On the other hand, this motion might be
perceived as an oratorical gesture, what the Romans called adlocutio, in which the forward step
and outstretched hand signal a moment of address; and perhaps not just any form of speech, but
particularly the pause before an excursio, or digression.
33
In the ancient art of public speaking
such flourishes—both verbal and physical—demonstrated the orator’s eloquence, competence,
and wisdom. In these moments of nonlinear, circuitous oration, speakers skillfully displayed the
persuasive power of public discourse.
This dual reading of Bayer’s symbol aligns with the conflicted nature of the Aspen
Institute for which he first created it. Founded in 1950 in a spirit of confidence and consensus, by
the end of the decade, the Institute was beset by a climate of criticism and doubt. Yet this shift
was evident already at the second summer seminar series in 1951, which proved so contentious
that one witness remarked, “the only thing the participants ‘had in common was that they all
needed a haircut.’”
34
By the end of the decade, the change in tone was even more pronounced.
This critical attitude was symptomatic of a broader shift in American intellectual culture,
propelled in part by Russia’s launch of the Sputnik satellites in 1957 and the crisis of confidence

32
Gwen Chanzit has shown how classical sculpture was a recurring motif in Bayer’s graphic design work. In 1935,
for instance, Bayer included an image of Polykleitos’s Doryphoros in his cover design for the Das Wunder des
Lebens exhibition catalog. See Gwen F. Chanzit, From Bauhaus to Aspen: Herbert Bayer and Modernist Design in
America (1987; reis., Boulder, CO: Johnson Books, 2005), 59.
33
For a discussion of this sculptural technique, see John Pollini, “The Augustus from Prima Porta and the
Transformation of the Polykleitan Heroic Ideal: The Rhetoric of Art,” in Polykleitos, the Doryphoros, and Tradition
(Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 262–82.
34
Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture, 249.
96
this engendered in the U.S.
35
If the intellectuals and executives who gathered in Aspen could
agree on one thing, it was that cultural and economic progress required constant debate, what
Paepcke called the “cross-fertilization of ideas,” rather than hardline policies or doctrines.
Whether or not the IDCA’s organizers truly shared the Aspen Institute’s initial “ideology
of consensus,” as some scholars have claimed, they came to an even more rapid realization that
critical dissent could serve as an effective form of knowledge production.
36
The encouragement
of differing viewpoints was particularly apparent at the fifth conference in 1955, which program
chairman Will Burtin organized around the theme, “Crossroads: What Are the Directions of the
Arts?” This was the first IDCA meeting since its incorporation as a permanent organization in
October 1954. Although newly consolidated, the conference was perhaps more discordant than
ever. In his opening remarks, Burtin described the IDCA as an opportunity to raise questions, test
ideas, and come to agreements, but with the understanding that these “may carry in themselves
the seeds of new questions already.”
37
He advised attendees that oversimplified or one-sided
conversations presented “dangers of uniformity” and that controversy was therefore a key feature
of any productive discussion. “If this conference develops to be the most argumentative of all
conferences we have attended so far,” Burtin remarked, “we should look upon our discussions as
a most satisfying and useful social experience.”
38
Finally, he characterized visual design as a
mechanism, rather than simply an object, of discourse. Mirroring Ebin’s claim that “verbal
confusion” could lead to “constructive order,” Burtin described the design professions as “key
tools of thought and morale that can convert confusion into purposeful direction.”
39

35
Ibid., 255–59.
36
The term is James Sloan Allen’s: see Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture, 265. Alice Twemlow has
connected it to the IDCA: see Twemlow, “I Can’t Talk to You if You Say That,” 28.
37
Will Burtin quoted in “International Design Conference,” Print 9, no. 6 (July 1955): 8.
38
Ibid.
39
Ibid., 64.
97
Following Burtin’s welcome address, Hayakawa delivered a talk that helped clarify the
role of conferences such as the IDCA. “The purpose of the International Design Conference is
the exchange of ideas,” he declared, “the enrichment of our own views through the support of the
challenge provided by the views of others.”
40
This seemingly simple mission was complicated,
however, by what Hayakawa called the “terminological tangle,” which arises when “discussion
is stalemated by conflicting definitions of key terms.” Artistic terminology was particularly
perilous, according to Hayakawa, because its mutability—when compared, for example, with the
perceived precision of scientific language—created opportunities for misunderstanding.
This confusion was evident at the very first conference, when designer Charles Eames
presented a critique of integrated design. “Some things can be so integrated and so ‘attractive,’”
he warned, “that they completely fail in the specific function which they should perform.”
41

Eames was responding to a statement from Paepcke reproduced in the conference invitation,
which insisted that competitive merchandising relied on the visual appeal not only of products,
but of every facet of the corporation. Eames likely viewed this reference to visual appeal within
the context of a period concern that form had become detached from function, fomented by the
1930s preponderance of streamlining and product styling.
42
He therefore interpreted the
conference theme of “integrated design” as a superficial attempt to make products more
attractive with little consideration for their utility or potential to enrich the lives of their users. In

40
S. I. Hayakawa quoted in “International Design Conference” Print 9, no. 6 (July 1955): 10. Hayakawa’s paper
was reread at the beginning of subsequent design conferences, and it was also republished as a general guide for
conference participants: S. I. Hayakawa, “How to Attend a Conference,” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 13,
no. 1 (Autumn 1955): 5–9.
41
Quoted in Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., “Design, Designer and Industry,” Magazine of Art, no. 44 (December 1951): 321.
42
There is an extensive literature dealing with these debates over streamlining and product styling, especially in the
area of industrial design. See Jeffrey L. Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925–
1939 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979); Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Knopf, 1986); Jeffrey L.
Meikle, Design in the USA (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and David A. Hanks and Anne H. Hoy,
American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow (Paris: Flammarion, 2005).
98
reality, his alternative design ethic—wanting “the materials to be good, the package to be good,
the delivery to be good, the printed matter, the office, the plant”—was entirely consistent with
the ideas of Jacobson and most other conference participants, who framed integrated design as a
structural organizational process, rather than as an attempt simply to beautify consumer goods.
This confusion suggests that the term integrated design was particularly susceptible to debate
depending on the ideas and ideals each speaker associated with the concept of integration.
The idea of the terminological tangle, or “verbal traffic snarl,” assumed visual form in the
printed publicity for the 1955 design conference. In one double-sided mailer designed by Louis
Danziger, the terminological tangle appears to be decipherable (fig. 2.2). On one side, a series of
multicolored speech bubbles indicates an array of disparate viewpoints. On the reverse, these
idiosyncratic ideas resolve into four multicolored arrows directed inward to the same central
point. In Aspen, the mailer seems to suggest, people with different professional backgrounds and
philosophical perspectives could nevertheless reach consensus on the future direction of the arts.
A separate anonymously designed pamphlet for the 1955 conference denies the clean geometry
and resolution of Danziger’s mailer. Two hastily scrawled stars, one a deep burgundy and the
other a pale blue, appear together on the front of the pamphlet, their points and interstices all
hopelessly entangled (fig. 2.3). Rendered in crayon, the two scribbles end in arrows that point in
different directions. In contrast to Danziger’s design, this illustrated crossroads implies that the
arts are drawn in so many different directions as to preclude the possibility of consensus.
These two graphic “traffic snarls” resonated with Hayakawa’s argument about what a
conference should be and the mode of discourse it should engender. Rather than try to agree on
fixed definitions, Hayakawa encouraged IDCA participants to “understand at the outset that there
is no ultimately correct and single meaning” for words such as “organic” and “functionalism,” or
99
any “other items in the vocabulary of art and design criticism.”
43
The impossibility of reaching
consensus was not the conferees’ main issue, then; rather, it was the very illusion that consensus
was a goal worth pursuing. While the mutability of artistic language posed a challenge, it also
provided an opportunity for attendees to apprehend, debate, and assimilate views other than their
own. To argue this point, Hayakawa emphasized the design conference’s discursive potential:
[L]et us discuss not for victory but for clarification. If we do so, we shall find, I believe,
that ultimately agreement and disagreement, approval and disapproval, are not very
important after all. The important thing is to come away from the conference with a fund
of information—information about what other people are doing and thinking and why.
[…] It is only as we fully understand directions other than our own and the reasons for
them that we better understand our own place in the scheme of things.
44

Hayakawa reiterated the IDCA’s earlier directives to seek knowledge rather than answers. The
conference’s printed materials manifested this notion of discourse as a mode of knowledge
production, rather than a way to solve problems or achieve consensus. The two 1955 mailers
staged this debate in visual terms, as a centripetal search for common ground and a centrifugal
openness to new directions. By combining these two impulses, the IDCA offered a platform for
evaluating the functions of postwar design, thus helping designers better understand their place
in the scheme of capitalist society.
The communicative importance of design was especially apparent in 1959, when the
topic of visual communication served as the theme for the ninth Aspen design conference,
“Communication: The Image Speaks.” Program chairman Morton Goldsholl framed the potential
collapse of modern society as the result of miscommunication, or the failure of “men’s minds
and hearts” to merge. He questioned, “why the links of communication that demonstrate man’s
interdependence and his common destiny have broken down, resulting in confusion and anarchy

43
S. I. Hayakawa quoted in “International Design Conference,” Print 9, no. 6 (July 1955): 10.
44
Ibid., 11.
100
in the relationships of man to his environment and between man.”
45
Goldsholl touched on a
period anxiety over text-based language, a concern exacerbated by rapid globalization. Late
nineteenth-century efforts to create international auxiliary languages, such as Esperanto, were
joined in the twentieth century by the development of universal pictographic languages, which
sought to facilitate the dissemination of knowledge across geographic and professional borders.
46

Indeed, Goldsholl discussed communication in specifically spatial terms, as “the bridge of
civilization.” Images, whether printed on a page or projected onto a screen, contributed to a
“kinetic landscape” capable of breaking down language barriers and transmitting ideas and
information between individuals.
47

The concept of visual communication as a “link between man and man” motivated Bruce
Beck’s design for the 1959 conference materials, which included everything from information
booklets to posters and reply cards (fig. 2.4). The proverbial terminological tangle appears once
again as a central element, constituted in Beck’s design by two unconnected disks inscribed with
webs of wildly ricocheting lines. These forms embody two separate and entirely insular spheres
of discourse; in the poster, their difference is marked further by a contrast in color—one blue, the
other yellow. Within these discursive fields, ideas appear to hurtle through space before crashing
against the periphery and rebounding inward, ultimately forming an unintelligible mass. Yet a

45
Morton Goldsholl, “Communication: Bridge of Civilization,” Print 13, no. 2 (March 1959): 53.
46
There exists an extensive literature on Otto Neurath’s well-known International System of Typographic Picture
Education, or Isotype, developed during the 1920s in the context of Red Vienna. For an examination of how Isotype
spread to the United States during the decades around World War II, see Keith Bresnahan, “‘An Unused Esperanto’:
Internationalism and Pictographic Design, 1930–70,” Design and Culture 3, no. 1 (March 2011): 5–24. Neurath
subscribed to the oft-quoted dictum, “words divide, pictures unite.” The Aspen design conference’s investment in
the communicative value of visual design arose from similar impulses. In the 1950s, as in the 1920s, universal
communication was perceived as a potential safeguard against the threat of future diplomatic failure and global
conflict.
47
Herbert Bayer argued a similar point at the first Aspen design conference: “It is my own contention that we find
ourselves today suffering from an acute case of poisoning by too many words, which cruelly invade our minds every
second of the day. Too many words can act like a screen between us and our visible world.” Quoted in Kaufmann,
“Design, Designer and Industry,” 324.
101
two-way arrow succeeds in slicing through these hermetic chambers, thereby demonstrating how
communication—defined as the multidirectional exchange of information—can overcome
discursive borders and integrate previously unconnected ideas. A similar visual logic is evident
in the cover design for Margaret Mead and Paul Byers’ 1968 The Small Conference: An
Innovation in Communication (fig. 2.5). Here the lines of communication that travel between
cuboid conference participants exhibit a coherent geometric structure, an organized scaffolding
on which to build mutual understanding.
Reactions to the IDCA’s discursive and discordant nature were split. Many participants
appreciated the meandering discussions. “What was achieved at the Aspen Design Conference?”
Michael Farr asked rhetorically in his report of the 1955 meeting: “Nothing, of course, that could
be set down in three neat sentences, such as a couple of resolutions or a code of practice. Instead
there was everything to be gained from five days of conversation between architects, designers,
educators, painters and businessmen.”
48
Interior designer Adele Faulkner echoed this sentiment
in her summary of the 1956 meeting, stating that, “the purpose of the conference is to resolve
nothing. It is merely a forum, but the results of this international exchange of philosophy and
ideals will undoubtedly have a profound effect on the future of man.”
49
Others, however, grew
frustrated by the IDCA’s irresolution and criticized the conference for its lack of consensus. One
audience member, operating under the assumption that a conference should lead to “at least some
tentative conclusions,” claimed snidely that the 1955 meeting was “part fiesta, part formaldehyde
[…] but it was really not a conference.”
50
Rather than yield to such criticisms, Burtin reaffirmed
his commitment to an inconclusive mode of discourse. “Why conferences? Why do we meet?”

48
Michael Farr, “The International Design Conference at Aspen: A Glimpse of Design in America,” Design,
October 1955.
49
Adele Faulkner, “Design Conference Summary,” n.d., Box 103, Folder 10, WPPP.
50
Samuel Hershey to Will Burtin, January 24, 1956, Box 101, Folder 7, WBP.
102
he asked his fellow board members in 1956. “To ‘think aloud’ with people in related professional
disciplines, to exchange ideas, to listen, to learn, and in general to spend our time on subjects
which provide us with inspiration.”
51
Burtin thus described the design conference as a form of
communicative integration, that is, as an ongoing process in which participants shared,
questioned, and assimilated competing ideas about design.

Formatting the Design Conference
In addition to clarifying the objectives of the design conference, the IDCA’s organizers
also spent a great deal of time discussing its form, which they viewed not as fixed, but rather as
something that could itself be designed and re-designed. Scholars have characterized the IDCA
as ineffectual due in large part to its structure. They argue that the conference format, in which
invited speakers read prepared papers from a raised stage, offered little opportunity for
spontaneity or interaction and remained the same throughout the IDCA’s history.
52
Such
interpretations portray the IDCA as an unimaginative forum for outmoded ideas, against which
dissatisfied designers articulated alternative, even radical, approaches to design. In other words,
scholars contend that the IDCA was significant only as a foil for the development of more
experimental postwar design activities. Yet the conference was far from the immutable, lifeless
event portrayed in these accounts. Like other ephemeral performances and events, conferences
pose significant interpretive challenges, especially regarding their forms and processes (as
opposed to their stated missions and recorded content, which are easier to access and assess). As
Mead observed, efforts to reproduce conferences in either written or photographic form
inevitably prove unsatisfactory because they fail to encapsulate the totality of the conference

51
Will Burtin, “Thoughts and plans for the Sixth International Design Conference in Aspen,” n.d., Box 101, Folder
6, WBP.
52
Twemlow, “I Can’t Talk To You If You Say That,” 27.
103
experience.
53
This was certainly true of the IDCA, a typically weeklong event that consisted of
numerous discussion formats and activities—much more, in other words, than the recitation of
papers from a podium. Existing administrative records and visual documentation evidence a
complex planning process and a keen interest in issues of presentation and participation. Most
importantly, studying the design of the IDCA—the composition of sessions, coordination of
displays, and creation of visual publicity—discloses how its organizers understood integrated
design in ontological terms: its properties, relations, and limits.
The program, or schedule of events, was a key mechanism for expressing the form of the
conference and rendering it intelligible. Rudimentary and tentative program outlines circulated
before each conference in an attempt to attract prospective participants. The IDCA’s organizers
used these programs not only for publicity purposes, but also as graphic tools for planning the
conference format. The invitation to the IDCA’s first meeting, for instance, included a “Program
of Panel Discussions” that showed how organizers had divided the four-day conference into
morning and evening sessions, each with its own topic and panel of experts (fig. 2.6). The use of
terms such as “artist-designer” and “artist-architect” demonstrates an attempt to describe
practices of integrated design that crossed traditional boundaries between art, architecture, and
design. A separate session devoted to “The Art Director and Consultant,” however, suggests a
division between creative and managerial professions—that is, art direction as fundamentally
distinct from art practice. Meanwhile, individual session themes—such as “Design, an Element
of Our Business” and “Integrated Design, a Concept of Order and Vision”—indicate an effort to
bring design and business into conversation. Yet with few exceptions, the conference organizers
assigned designers and executives to different sessions, thereby signaling an abiding boundary

53
Mead and Byers, The Small Conference, v–vi.
104
between the two professional pursuits. The design of the 1951 program therefore reveals a key
paradox in the IDCA’s integrative mission: a desire to bring disparate ideas into conversation
that was at odds with a residual belief in professional and operational differences.
Beginning in 1953, an elected program chairman, sometimes aided by a program
committee, oversaw a conference design process that involved articulating a theme, distilling it
into sessions, and selecting speakers. Art director Leo Lionni, the first official program chairman
in 1953, recalled that, “the mere putting together of a program, and selecting speakers and
dealing with them on an international scale, turned out to be a far greater undertaking than I had
expected.”
54
Burtin was the only individual to hold the position of program chairman more than
once—in 1954 (co-chairman with Carl Maas and György Kepes), 1955, and 1956. He saw the
task of program planning as a major commitment, as well as a collaborative and potentially
contentious process. In a memo to his fellow IDCA board members, Burtin described his
provisional schedule for the 1955 conference as the result of “several months of study and debate
with professional groups and many leading personalities in the fields of architecture, art, design,
education, science and business.”
55
Burtin noted that although the IDCA’s executive committee
had approved the schedule, it nevertheless remained subject to criticism and change. In fact, he
had already revised it substantially from an earlier tentative program (fig. 2.7). Though the five
sessions remained the same, Burtin changed their order and radically altered the slate of
speakers; only eight of the original twenty-three remained in the updated program. This process
of revision was a natural part of conference planning, as invited speakers either accepted or
declined to participate. Certain changes, however, show that the program was also susceptible to
outside criticism. In direct response to one Denver-based company’s complaint that the program

54
Leo Lionni, Between Worlds: The Autobiography of Leo Lionni (New York: Knopf, 1997), 194–5.
55
Will Burtin, “IDCA Program Outline—Conference June 13–18, 1955,” n.d., Box 1, Folder 13, IDCA-GRI.
105
featured no representatives from business management, Burtin decided to include Sol Cornberg,
director of studio and plant planning at NBC, in the first session on “Communication.”
56

In comparison with the 1951 program, Burtin’s schedules for the 1955 and 1956 meetings
represent more successful attempts to create integrated sessions with speakers from different
countries and professional backgrounds. Business executives were conspicuously absent, a
testament to the difficulty of creating a truly comprehensive program, but also a signal of the
IDCA’s expanding definition of integrated design, no longer constrained to “design as a function
of management.” Instead, Burtin, who was personally invested in connections between design,
science, and communication, organized sessions that combined architects with marine biologists,
cartoonists with cyberneticists, and painters with publishers. The session themes, which focused
on topics such as communication, leisure, management, and education, were both more
straightforward and more conceptually expansive. They therefore lent themselves to more
diverse panels of speakers. As the IDCA grew in size and complexity, its organizers relied on
charts and tables to help visualize not only the composition of individual panels, but also their
interspersion with other types of conference activities, such as meals and film viewings (fig. 2.8).
The program thus served as a critical conceptual and practical tool for conference design.
Aside from planning the schedule of events, program chairmen also specified how the
conference discourse should unfold. Burtin’s 1955 program charged the speakers, identified
collectively as the “Panel of Critics,” with establishing “an initial critical approach” through pre-
circulated papers, to which conference participants could react.
57
The aim was to move away
from formal lectures and instead to “facilitate discussion and criticism” between speakers and

56
“Minutes of Executive Committee meeting of the International Design Conference in Aspen,” April 2, 1955, Box
1, Folder 12, IDCA-GRI.
57
Burtin, “IDCA Program Outline,” Box 1, Folder 13, IDCA-GRI.
106
audience members. This tendency to regularly re-imagine the conference format became deeply
ingrained in the IDCA, such that no two meetings followed quite the same structure. It also
resulted in great diversity in the ways in which conference participants interacted. A photograph
of Paepcke speaking at the first conference in 1951, his arm raised in an oratorical gesture
reminiscent of the IDCA symbol pinned to his lapel, is indicative of the way many scholars have
characterized the conference: an individual stands at the podium, lecturing to an invisible,
passive audience (fig. 2.9). Similar images circulated throughout the IDCA’s history, a
seemingly endless series of speakers pontificating from on high, most of them white men (fig.
10). Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) curator Mildred Constantine, active in the IDCA for
decades, was one important exception. A photograph from the 1954 conference captures her—
one hand on hip, the other mid-gesticulation—as she responds with characteristic sharp wit to a
question from Russell Lynes (fig. 2.11).
Although lectures in the conference tent were certainly central features of the IDCA, they
formed only a fraction of the programming. Just as analyses that consider only the IDCA’s
published papers fail to encapsulate its entire discourse, images focusing solely on the speakers
miss the moments between talks, when speakers debated with each other and fielded questions
from the audience (fig. 2.12). A photograph of the 1956 conference taken from the stage, looking
out over the panel of speakers toward the audience with whom they interact, records more
accurately what actually transpired in the conference tent (fig. 2.13). After reading excerpts from
their prepared and pre-circulated papers, the panelists (many in casual dress) engaged in loosely
moderated conversations that allowed for spontaneous interactions and impromptu remarks.
Beginning with the second conference in 1952, these main sessions were accompanied by
smaller group seminars that enabled a more participatory “exchange of views with a moderator,
107
where everyone could get into the act” (fig. 2.14).
58
Fortunately, the 1956 seminar discussions
exist in photographic and transcribed form (fig. 2.15). One exchange from an afternoon seminar
session, part of the third and final cycle on “Education and Design,” is particularly revealing of
the IDCA’s discordant nature. Mortimer Adler, a professor at the University of Chicago and a
founder of the Great Books of the Western World program, cited John Dewey’s polemical claim
that “vocational training is the training of animals or slaves” to support his own assertion of the
need for universal liberal arts education.
59
His remarks prompted sharp criticism from British
inventor Bernard S. Benson. “I am opposed to Mr. Adler,” Benson stated, before suggesting that
the effort to impose mass liberal education ran counter to the individual pursuit of human
happiness. Mathematical psychologist Anatol Rapaport defended Adler, arguing that all humans
shared fundamental needs and that liberal education could help fulfill them. Graphic designer
Saul Bass countered that it would be difficult to convince the country’s African American
population that educational institutions were in fact contributing to a classless society.
60
His
wife, Ruth Bass, sought to strike a more agreeable tone with the relatively innocuous point that
“we should re-evaluate how children learn best.” Yet Peter J. B. Stevens, editor of Design News
in Engineering, kept the debate alive. “I do not agree with either Mr. Adler or Mr. Rapaport,” he
stated, questioning why it was necessary that an aspiring fireman, for instance, receive a liberal
education. Adler simply retorted, “We must remember that we have to produce a man.”
This type of lively back-and-forth, typical of the IDCA discourse, allowed participants to
engage actively in the creation and circulation of ideas about design, broadly construed. The

58
Walter Paepcke to Peter Sachs, February 15, 1952, Box 49, Folder 13, WPPP.
59
“June 30—Afternoon Sessions in Small Seminar Room,” June 30, 1956, Box 3, Folder 3, IDCA-GRI.
60
Bass’s remarks were apt in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent landmark decision, Brown vs. Board of
Education of Topeka (May 17, 1954), which established racial segregation in public schools as unconstitutional but
failed to provide methods or a timeline for desegregation.
108
debate over mass liberal education is especially useful for understanding the contested nature of
integrated design at the IDCA, because it shows that many conference participants questioned
the efficacy of universal knowledge or a unified worldview. The IDCA’s enlarged scope was not
so much a deviation from its initial focus on integrating design and business, as it was an
indication that corporations, especially those concerned with controlling their public imagery,
were assuming ever more dominant roles in shaping all aspects of life in the U.S. A midcentury
design discourse that stemmed from the topic “Design as a Function of Management” could not
help but engage with the prevailing political and social issues of the day.
To facilitate debate, the IDCA’s organizers did more than simply plan different
discussion formats. Burtin, in particular, sought to transform the conference into a dynamic and
engaging event by treating it as a total media experience. “The conference itself is being looked
upon as a problem of design,” he informed his fellow board members in advance of the 1956
meeting. “The interspacing of discussions, lectures, demonstrations and exhibits, the physical
environment itself, and necessary leisure, should be component parts of a design.”
61

Visual displays were central to the IDCA from its inception. At the planning meeting for
the first conference, Lionni volunteered to prepare an exhibition, called “Integrated Design,”
devoted to the Italian manufacturer Olivetti. The planning committee agreed that Olivetti was
“perhaps the most complete example of integrated design in business” and had “given the idea its
most logical and artistic expression.”
62
The following month, however, conference organizers
decided to include “some American examples of integrated design” from companies such as
Johnson Wax, Martin-Senour, and CCA (fig. 2.16).
63
The display was therefore comparative,

61
Will Burtin, “Thoughts and plans for the Sixth International Design Conference in Aspen,” n.d., Box 101, Folder
6, WBP.
62
Jacobson, “Committee on Plans for Design Conference,” February 19, 1951, Box 1, Folder 2, IDCA-GRI.
63
Jacobson, “Committee on Plans for Design Conference,” March 30, 1951, Box 1, Folder 2, IDCA-GRI.
109
unlike the monographic exhibition, “Olivetti: Design in Industry,” which Lionni organized at
MoMA the following year (fig. 2.17). The former approach to exhibition design, which
compared examples of integrated design from different companies, supported the IDCA’s aim to
accommodate differing perspectives in its design discourse, whether verbal or visual. Later
exhibitions, which drew comparisons between various fields of design or different national
contexts, were necessarily makeshift given the IDCA’s limited resources and often used the
structure of the conference tent as a ready-made surface for displays (fig. 2.18). Given that talks
and discussions were typically unillustrated (the open-air conference tent was ill suited to slide
projection), these exhibitions provided valuable opportunities for participants to examine
practical applications of the topics under discussion (fig. 2.19).
Leisure time was another critical component of the IDCA. Even more than the scheduled
talks and seminars, participants often noted that the informal gatherings and conversations “gave
the conference its unique quality—an opportunity for free and frank exchange of ideas beyond
the inevitable semantic merry-go-round.”
64
Opportunities for casual conversation abounded
during welcome parties, between sessions, and over meals (fig. 2.20). They might also have been
catalyzed by displays and demonstrations, such as the light sculpture that Harry Bertoia brought
with him in 1955, when he participated in a panel on “Light and Structure” (fig. 2.21). The kite
festival, a popular feature of the IDCA that continued at least through the 1960s, fostered
connections during the conferences and long after they ended, as participants exchanged notes
and, in some cases, the kites themselves (fig. 2.22). These fleeting interactions, recorded through
film and photography and promoted in conference publicity materials, contradict descriptions of
the IDCA as a staid, spiritless event (fig. 2.23). They facilitated the cross-disciplinary exchange

64
“Aspen Conference on Design,” Fortune 46, no. 3 (September 1952): 113.
110
that was often difficult to achieve within the scheduled conference sessions, which preserved
professional and operational distinctions as often as they challenged them.
These ongoing efforts to rethink, redesign, and reinvigorate the conference format show
that the IDCA actively courted criticism and debate. Indeed, the conference organizers were
perhaps its most vehement critics. During executive committee meetings—meta-conferences that
often mimicked the contentious tone of the design conference itself—board members reflected
on everything from the performance of individual speakers (often a point of major disagreement)
to the sequencing of cycles and sessions. They debated when and how to pre-circulate papers and
whether speakers should read them in full. They discussed possibilities for visual displays and
musical events, the need for audio-visual and translation equipment, and the logistics of meals,
lodging, and childcare. They spent most of these meetings, however, analyzing the nature of the
discussions and how they could be improved, not by making them run more smoothly, but rather
by amplifying the sense of discord. On the final day of the 1956 conference, for example, Burtin
was joined by fellow board members George Culler and Dan Defenbacher in the opinion that
“conflict,” “opposition,” and “controversy” produced a more engaging discourse.
65

According to Burtin, Culler, Defenbacher, and others, continuous evaluation and
experimentation were necessary in order to develop an effective conference format. To help fuel
these changes in conference design, the IDCA’s organizers invited feedback from participants. In
1956, they circulated a questionnaire that gave IDCA members a voice in shaping the format of
the conference. Suggestions ranged from the desire for a more visual conference to the need for
more women speakers. The most frequent responses—both positive and negative—addressed the
discussion formats. Respondents praised “the high level of ideas discussed,” especially during

65
“Executive Committee meeting,” July 1, 1956, Box 101, Folder 5, WBP.
111
the afternoon seminars when they were able to engage with the invited speakers. Yet the most
frequent criticism was that too much audience participation spoiled the morning sessions, during
which many participants wished for “more argument among the panelists.”
66
These comments
demonstrate the complexity of conference design, of creating a discourse that satisfied the often-
contradictory desires and expectations of IDCA constituents. Given the impossibility of reaching
consensus on a conference structure, the IDCA’s organizers instead leaned into these differences
of opinion. By designing discord into the IDCA, they encouraged participants to engage in the
conference as a critical and fundamentally contestable form of communication.

Assembling an Audience
In order to cultivate the kind of debate they deemed critical to design discourse, the
IDCA’s organizers aimed to construct a conference membership that was professionally and
ideologically heterogeneous, with the belief that differences of opinion and perspective created
valuable opportunities for disagreement. When targeting prospective participants, they focused
on groups that they perceived as traditionally separate and in need of integration. Foremost
among them were designers and business executives. While designers had long contributed to the
production of industrial goods and commercial imagery, the IDCA’s organizers sought to
establish a stronger basis of mutual understanding among the designers and executives who
gathered in Aspen. This initial focus on business leaders served as a foundation for assembling a
much broader audience. Over time, the design conference attracted educators, scientists, social
scientists, and civil servants, among others. Yet this wide variety of participants begs the
question: Who, exactly, were the IDCA’s target members? Who, in other words, was the
ambiguous figure in Bayer’s IDCA symbol (fig. 2.1)? A business-savvy designer, a design-

66
“Report on IDC Questionnaires,” 1956, Box 101, Folder 6, WBP.
112
conscious executive, or someone else entirely? The design conference confronted these questions
by facilitating debate over the identity of the midcentury designer and their position within a
network of professionals engaged in issues of design, broadly construed. I argue that the IDCA
contributed to a vision of the designer not simply as a whole individual—a concept with roots in
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European modernism—but also as a networked
figure able (and obligated) to forge dynamic relationships with other professionals.
67
The IDCA
thus established the practice of integrated design, like its discourse, as necessarily collaborative
and contestable, a matter of debate among numerous members of society, rather than simply a
point of agreement between designers and business executives.
With financial and administrative support from CCA, Jacobson, Paepcke, and Bayer
worked together to establish the IDCA as a forum for interrogating existing relations between
design and business. To accomplish this task, it was essential to bring designers and corporate
executives together to participate in a shared discourse. Yet the precise composition of this target
audience was a matter of some negotiation. In his attempt to win Paepcke’s support, Jacobson
proposed a conference “announced and directed by businessmen” rather than designers to ensure
that it attracted participants from industry.
68
This program deviated from Jacobson’s initial
proposition, which entailed discussions between museum, architecture, and graphic design
professionals under the leadership of architect and former Bauhaus master Walter Gropius.
69

Bayer diplomatically suggested a synthesis of these two plans, arguing that in order to avoid a

67
For literature on how the idea of the network has shaped twentieth-century art and visual culture, see Lawrence
Alloway, “Art and the Communications Network,” Canadian Art, no. 100 (June 1966): 35–37; Lawrence Alloway,
Network: Art and the Complex Present (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984); Bruno Latour, Reassembling
the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Vanessa R.
Schwartz, “Networks: Technology, Mobility, and Mediation in Visual Culture,” American Art 31, no. 2 (June 2017):
104–9; and Nadya Bair, The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (Oakland:
University of California Press, 2020).
68
Egbert Jacobson to Walter Paepcke, October 23, 1950, Box 103, Folder 5, WPPP.
69
Egbert Jacobson to Walter Paepcke, August 22, 1950, Box 103, Folder 5, WPPP.
113
discussion only between artists, the conference should target business and advertising executives
in addition to art critics, architects, industrial designers, graphic artists, painters, sculptors,
photographers, and filmmakers. “The consumer,” he supposed, “would be represented by the
audience.”
70
Bayer’s proposal was ambitious, a vision of what the conference would eventually
become. Jacobson, however, pursued a more modest and pragmatic approach for the 1951
meeting. He believed that a strict emphasis on business would give the conference a stronger
focus and distinctive character. “The important thing about Aspen is that businessmen will be
part of the audience and will take part in the discussions,” Jacobson stated. “We want a large
portion of the audience to consist of sales and production men and policy-making executives.”
71

Few opportunities for this kind of discussion existed, according to Jacobson. Normally these
groups convened and conversed only amongst themselves, thereby inhibiting cross-disciplinary
communication.
Paepcke encouraged Jacobson’s efforts to tailor the design conference to businesspeople.
He regularly rebuffed potential speakers whom he considered too far removed from issues of
commerce and industry, and therefore incapable of engaging the IDCA audience, a full eighty
percent of whom he believed should be corporate executives.
72
When Bayer suggested inviting
art historian Alexander Dorner, one of only a small group of scholars engaged in research on the
relationship between art and industry, Paepcke questioned whether such a speaker would appeal
sufficiently to businesspeople.
73
“We have to be careful,” he warned, “that the speakers will
attract, or at worst not discourage, the business man from coming because, I repeat, he must be

70
Herbert Bayer to Egbert Jacobson, November 9, 1950, Box 1, Folder 2, IDCA-GRI.
71
Egbert Jacobson to Art Directors, April 20, 1951, Box 103, Folder 5, WPPP.
72
Walter Paepcke to F. Peter Sachs, February 15, 1952, Box 49, Folder 13, WPPP.
73
See Alexander Dorner, The Way Beyond “Art”: The Work of Herbert Bayer (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz,
1947).
114
our target.”
74
Jacobson ruled out British art historian Herbert Read, well known for his 1934
book Art and Industry, on similar grounds.
75

Paepcke’s persistent attempts to attract executives to the IDCA were perhaps influenced
by his struggles organizing the Aspen Institute. The Institute’s first summer program in 1950
failed to attract a large audience and those in attendance were mainly educators and academics,
most of whom presumably already appreciated the value of liberal learning. At the suggestion of
magazine magnate Henry Luce, Paepcke re-conceived the Institute as a humanistic boot camp for
businesspeople, a place where executives and intellectuals could go “to understand each other
better and to have a simple and unforced method of communication develop between them.”
76

Targeting executives served a dual purpose for both the Aspen Institute and the IDCA. On the
one hand, it carried the potential for corporate sponsorship, thereby rendering the organizations
more solvent. But putting designers in dialogue with businesspeople and other management
professionals would also allow the conversations in Aspen to reverberate beyond the confines of
design and into other areas of American life. In some cases, this dialogue even had material
consequences. After attending the first design conference in 1951, Harry Baum, Jr., president of
the Denver-based cosmetics manufacturer Noreen, Inc., hired Bayer to redesign his company’s
visual identity.
77
Bayer ultimately endorsed Jacobson and Paepcke’s vision for the IDCA with
the belief that cooperation between designers and executives could serve as a foundation for
other forms of professional and interpersonal collaboration. “We must inspire everybody with
the visual experience in which we—artists and businessmen—can cooperate,” he claimed in his

74
Walter Paepcke to Herbert Bayer, February 27, 1952, Box 49, Folder, 13, WPPP.
75
Egbert Jacobson to Walter Paepcke, October 23, 1950, Box 103, Folder 5, WPPP. See Herbert Read, Art and
Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design (London: Faber & Faber, 1934).
76
Walter Paepcke quoted in Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture, 233.
77
H. L. Baum, Jr. to Walter Paepcke, November 28, 1951, Box 103, Folder 5, WPPP.
115
talk at the first Aspen conference. “Our future well-being depends on the concrete interchange of
all human energies.”
78

This utopian vision of interdependence was still a vexed ideal, however, at the outset of
the Aspen design conference in 1951. Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., director of MoMA’s Industrial
Design Department and a speaker at the 1951 meeting, perceived basic differences between the
views of executives and designers. “Businessmen considered design a good gambit in the contest
for profits,” he observed of the Aspen speakers, “while responsible designers argued that
competitive advantages was a poor goal compared to the full development and wide distribution
of human satisfactions, both spiritual and physical.”
79
George Nelson voiced a related concern
that designers and businesspeople often spoke entirely different languages. In order to achieve an
effective collaboration, he believed they must learn to communicate on each other’s terms.
80

Even if design and business converged in practice, then, there remained a linguistic and
ideological gulf that hindered the kind of collaborative relationships Bayer envisioned.
In order to overcome this divide, the organizers of the IDCA pictured design and business
as mutually constitutive. A preliminary announcement for the 1952 design conference combined
symbolic elements in a sequential arrangement to convey a sense of dialogue between designers
and executives (fig. 2.24). Three industrial chimneys anchor the composition, positioning
industry as a foundation for design practice. Two of the chimneys belch out the location and date
of the conference, while a larger smokestack at the center spews pitch-black smog from its brick
and mortar maw. The smoke billows upward, around the silhouette of an aspen leaf, and into the
nib of a fountain pen, whose flared shoulders mirror the spade-like shape of the leaf below. More

78
Herbert Bayer, quoted in Kaufmann, “Design, Designer and Industry,” 325.
79
Kaufmann, “Design, Designer and Industry,” 320.
80
Sullivan, “The Artist and Industry,” 81.
116
than a paintbrush or a pencil, the steel point pen held particularly modern connotations as a
product of machine manufacture and an instrument of business. The introduction of the metal nib
in the nineteenth century accompanied a revolution in artistic production that, according to one
scholar, involved the “supplanting of patronage by free enterprise.”
81
Advertisers even marketed
different nibs for specific types of work; there were tips to suit the writing styles of executives,
secretaries, and clerical workers, but also musicians and artists. The design of the 1952
announcement portrays these types of industrially produced implements as the basis for new
modes of creative practice. The IDCA, symbolized by the aspen leaf, mediates this transaction;
positioned between the smokestack and the pen, it transmutes crude oil into refined ink.
Viewers might also interpret this sequence of images in the opposite direction. Viewed
from the top down, the nib of the broad-tipped fountain pen appears to hover in the air, an
instrument, perhaps, of divine creation. The pool of ink released from the point of the pen spills
downward, around the silhouette of the aspen leaf, and into the flue of the industrial chimney
below. The leaf, which is to say the IDCA, acts as a conduit, channeling the designer’s creative
energies into the industrial apparatus. This reading of the pamphlet’s cover underscores the
generative power of the designer, whose creative faculties match, or perhaps even eclipse, the
industrialist’s productive capacities. By creating enticing publicity materials, the commercially
employed designer helped corporations sell themselves to their publics. In addition to depicting
the designer’s reliance on industry, then, the 1952 pamphlet also showed how executives could
employ art and design, not through a benevolent act of patronage, but as a matter of economic
necessity. Similar images circulated throughout the period. A design by British illustrator Eric
Fraser for the magazine Art & Industry, for example, depicts the tip of a pencil as a dazzling

81
Seymour Howard, “The Steel Pen and the Modern Line of Beauty,” Technology and Culture 26, no. 4 (1985):
792.
117
point of contact between the artist’s hand and the wheel of industrial production (fig. 2.25). The
image emphasizes a tension not only between art and industry, but also between the hand and the
machine or mechanized factory as producing agents. One of the designer’s challenges, this
iconography seems to suggest, is to balance hand skills with mastery of the machine, as well as
aesthetic discernment with business acumen.
The IDCA’s symbolic vision of integrated design-business relations recurred in a final
announcement for the 1952 conference (fig. 2.26). On the cover of this pamphlet, the nib of a
pen points to a chain, which travels the length of the page to link up with a pocket watch. Set
against the backdrop of a train schedule, the timepiece appears as an implement of the train
conductor and emphasizes the pamphlet’s directive to reserve travel for the upcoming design
conference. The pocket watch was also a tool of factory foremen and office managers, however,
members of a managerial class that, in addition to systematizing time, also attained a dominant
role in the administration of twentieth-century corporations.
82
The hand-held stopwatch became a
prominent symbol of Taylorism and other experiments in scientific management that sought to
maximize workplace efficiency through such methods as time-and-motion studies. As creative
professionals entered the administrative apparatuses of large corporations, assuming positions as
consulting or in-house designers, they became the subjects, and in some cases even the
supervisors, of corporate timetables and regulatory tactics. The pen and the pocket watch were
the basic equipment of corporate management, but also of this new caste of managed and
managerial designers, who completed their tasks according to strict standards and schedules.
83

82
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge:
Belknap Press, 1993).
83
John Harwood identifies a similar transformation of the postwar designer into a managerial professional in his
study of IBM’s design program. See John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate
Design, 1945–1976 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
118
Midcentury designers often used the tools of their trade as symbols with which to
communicate the nature of design, specifically its status as an integrated, comprehensive process.
On the inside cover of the 31
st
Annual of National Advertising and Editorial Art, published by
the Art Directors Club of New York, a two-page spread by artist Jack Wolfgang Beck reveals an
assemblage of tools (fig. 2.27). The display indicates the broad range of technical skills required
to produce advertising and editorial art. To create “paste-ups”—the camera-ready mechanical
drawings that art directors used to lay out publication pages—designers utilized pens, pencils,
and brushes to render design components, scissors and razor blades to cut them out, and
compasses and adhesives to compose them on the page. The IDCA’s 1952 publicity expanded
this iconography, combining pens with smokestacks and pocket watches in order to picture
integrated design as both a creative and managerial endeavor, in addition to a comprehensive
process.
Designers also used symbols to characterize themselves as integrated individuals. A 1951
Graphis cover by Swiss designer Donald Brun shows an array of artistic implements erupting
from a designer’s head, thereby picturing the individual as the master of a range of graphic
media and techniques (fig. 2.28). This notion of the designer as a whole individual—skilled in
many areas of design, but also cognitively and emotionally fit—was common in design thinking
throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Gropius, for instance, argued that in order to
fulfill the Bauhaus’s “aim to bring together all creative effort into one whole,” it was necessary
through as “comprehensive a technical and artistic training as possible” to produce “artist-
craftsmen” with the knowledge “to design buildings harmoniously in their entirety.”
84
Moholy-
Nagy warned that specialized training threatened to restrict human growth and claimed that, “the

84
Walter Gropius, “Programme of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar,” in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-
Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads, trans. Michael Bullock (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1975), 49–53.
119
future needs the whole person.”
85
He later elaborated that it was one of humanity’s primary tasks
“to arrive at an integrated life […] through a synthesis of the intellectual and the emotional,
through the coordination of penetrative thinking and profound feeling.”
86
Meanwhile, Kepes
promoted a “language of vision” that could “re-form man into an integrated being.”
87

Bayer reiterated these ideas during his talk at the first Aspen design conference in 1951.
He argued against specialization, defining design not as a discrete area of practice, but rather as
“one principle which can be the basis of integrated activity and also of one individual.”
88
This
integrated designer would be capable of resolving the “unfortunate split between fine art and
commercial art; between thinking and feeling.” Industrial designer Don Wallance framed the
issue in more concrete terms when he discussed the increasing influence of individual craftsmen
on industrial firms. He cited the example of an American luggage manufacturer, “where all
designing down to the most minute hardware detail was the work of one man—the president of
the firm.”
89
Wallance’s example typified an ideal that many midcentury designers embraced:
total command over design techniques and total control over the design process.
In Aspen, both the practicality and the efficacy of this ideal of the designer as integrated
individual were subject to intense debate. Like Wallance, many speakers idealized the figure of
the individual craftsman, skilled in all stages of a given production process. Swedish designer
Arthur Hald discussed his country’s efforts to assert “handcraft” production, understood as a
form of manufacture “controlled by one man or a small group from start to finish,” as a central

85
László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur (München: Albert Langen Verlag, 1929), 11. Original
German: “die zukunft braucht den ganzen menschen.”
86
László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947), 10–11.
87
György Kepes, Language of Vision (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1944), 13.
88
Quoted in Kaufmann, “Design, Designer and Industry,” 325. Bayer even quoted directly a recent article by
Gropius, in which the founder of the Bauhaus stated: “The term ‘design’ broadly embraces the whole orbit of man-
made, visible surroundings, from simple everyday goods to the complex pattern of the whole town.” See Walter
Gropius, “Design Topics,” Magazine of Art 40, no. 8 (December 1947): 299.
89
Paraphrased in Ebin and Middleton, “Impressions from the Design Conference,” 10.
120
feature of its economic system.
90
Sociologist C. Wright Mills, who gained recognition during the
1950s for his critiques of social alienation and bureaucratic culture in the U.S., spoke in 1958
about the importance of craftsmanship as a basis for human development. “Craftsmanship stands
for the classic role of the independent artisan,” he claimed, “who is in close interplay with the
public for his work.”
91
His characterization of the craftsman as “master of the activity and of
himself in the process” resonated strongly with the modernist notion of the designer as a whole
individual. At the 1964 design conference, Dwight MacDonald, a fierce critic of mass culture,
argued that “it was once possible to create great works in committee,” such as Homeric epics or
Gothic cathedrals, only “because the culture was unified.”
92
Twentieth-century American culture
was, by contrast, so fragmented and contentious that creative individuals could only turn inward
for the unity of method and purpose necessary to create integrated works.
These optimistic visions of the designer as an independent master of his or her craft were
at odds with the direction in which many midcentury social critics perceived American culture to
be moving. In The Lonely Crowd, published in 1950, a year before the first design conference,
David Riesman argued that “inner-directed” individuals, who lived according to their own
internalized codes, values, and attitudes, had been replaced by “other-directed” people, who
sought direction and validation in the actions of others. One consequence of this shift was the
rise of a managerial class skilled in techniques of social manipulation and the consequent erasure
of the “craft-oriented professional or businessman.”
93
The “other-directed” personality type was
particularly suited to the social dynamics of large organizations and exhibited similarities with

90
Arthur Hald quoted in “Ideas on the Future of Man and Design, IDC Aspen 1956,” Print 10, no. 4 (August 1956):
31.
91
C. Wright Mills, “The Man in the Middle,” 1958, Box 4, Folder 8, IDCA-GRI.
92
Dwight MacDonald quoted in “IDCA ’64,” 1964, author’s collection.
93
David Riesman, Reuel Denney, and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American
Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).
121
William H. Whyte’s “organization man,” who forsook individual advancement in favor of an
unwavering commitment to the corporation.
94
At the same time that Mills and MacDonald
advised IDCA participants to recuperate craftsmanship and individual expertise as guiding
principles in their work, Riesman and Whyte observed fundamental changes in American
character and social relations that precluded such efforts.
Other IDCA speakers, less concerned with issues of creative freedom and independence,
speculated about how designers could adapt to, rather than resist, the rise of corporate culture
and bureaucratic working arrangements. At the 1955 design conference, Michael Farr, editor of
the British magazine Design, argued that craftsmanship was a relic of the eighteenth century,
incompatible with the commercial realities of contemporary life. He instead envisioned a design
process worked out via committee. In such a system, “the design idea grows or withers according
to the effort made by each member of the team to communicate with the others. An original view
introduced by one member disturbs the balance, becomes a fresh standpoint to be reached by his
colleagues, each of whom is able to reject it, modify it or accept it according to his ability to
communicate.”
95
This team approach to problem solving was reminiscent of prevailing styles of
organizational management; a shift from small, family-owned businesses to large, decentralized
corporations meant that business decisions were no longer made by individuals, but rather by
executive committees. Farr’s vision of a collective approach to design also echoed Hayakawa’s
description of the conference process; both relied on communication between individuals and the
buildup of knowledge and information through exchange of viewpoints. The IDCA realized this
ideal of a networked design process by amassing an audience not of whole, like-minded
individuals, but rather of participants with widely varying backgrounds and areas of expertise.

94
William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956).
95
Michael Farr quoted in “International Design Conference,” Print 9, no. 6 (July 1955): 26.
122
Beginning in the mid-1950s, IDCA promotional materials identified three core groups of
constituents, each of which was broadly inclusive. The first, “creative professionals,” included
designers, architects, and artists, but also musicians, writers, scientists, and engineers. The
second, “educators,” consisted of philosophers, librarians, and museum directors in addition to
professors and art teachers. The last group, “executives,” encompassed not only the
businesspeople whom Jacobson and Paepcke had first sought to attract, but also representatives
from cultural foundations and municipal, state, and national governments. According to
conference publicity, it was “the attempt to present and integrate ideas expressing the differing
viewpoints of these three groups that makes the Aspen meetings unique.”
96

In 1955, the IDCA began to excise the image of the individual, integrated designer from
its visual identity, replacing Bayer’s original symbol with a logo comprised of the letters “idc”
and a stylized image of a globe. That year, the IDCA developed a promotional slide presentation
illustrated by CCA design director Albert Kner, which regional chairmen used to attract sponsors
and conference participants. The second slide depicts the scope of the IDCA in human terms (fig.
2.29). Its constituents—art directors, design directors, industrialists, educators, artists, designers,
consumers, and students—are identifiable by the tools of their trades. The accompanying script
notes that the art director and design director, both bespectacled and with slicked-back hair, are
“so close to each other” that they can only be differentiated by the implements they wield: an art
gum eraser for the art director and a hard eraser for the design director.
97
Soft and imprecise, art
gum erasers could be used to rework pencil drawings, removing large amounts of graphite
without damaging the paper. Hard erasers, or typewriter erasers, were, as the name suggests,

96
“6th International Design Conference” pamphlet, 1956, Box 3, Folder 5, IDCA-GRI.
97
“Comments on IDCA Organization Slides,” Box 3, Folder 25, Herbert Pinzke papers, Special Collections and
University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago.
123
harder and consequently more precise. They could also be used to remove ink and were therefore
useful in the revision of design renderings. In Kner’s image, the art and design director literally
oversee the artist and designer below. These, too, are nearly identical, distinguishable mainly by
their drafting tools: the paintbrush, which artists used to create gestural works of art, and the
compass, which enabled designers to achieve the precise measurements and line work necessary
for graphic, product, and architectural design drawings. The remaining constituents are more
readily identifiable. The industrialist, cradling a factory in his arm, looks down on the consumer,
who holds a coin in his hand. And the educator, immersed in a book, presides over the student,
outfitted in cap and gown. Using symbols to identify individuals by occupation, Kner indicates
the IDCA’s effort to bring a broad range of participants with different skills and backgrounds
into conversation. Crucially, these figures remain separate in Kner’s scheme, masters of their
tools and tasks, but not masterminds of the entire integrated design process.
At this point in the mid-1950s, the IDCA’s visual identity revealed a tension between the
effort to assemble a professionally and ideologically diverse audience and the desire to integrate
participants into a cohesive body. The cover of a membership pamphlet for the 1956 conference
depicts an assortment of figures—their bodies mere marks of graphite, their shadows faint
perpendicular lines—grouped around the number “6” (fig. 2.30). Overlaid with a world map so
faint as to appear almost indistinguishable, this numeral approximates the image of a globe, one
populated by members of a networked international community. Although their identities and
professions are indiscernible, they do not seem like the self-possessed integrated designers,
unified in thinking and feeling, that Bayer and other IDCA speakers described. Instead, they
appear alienated and unassuming, together yet apart, an evocation perhaps of Riesman’s “lonely
crowd.” Some even hover around the margins, unsure of their positions within the social matrix.
124
This self-consciousness is apparent in other IDCA imagery, such as a summary of events from
the 1957 conference (fig. 2.31). The eleven speakers, posed in front of the Aspen Institute’s
newly constructed seminar building, exhibit differing levels of ease—some engage cheerfully in
conversation, while others appear distant and introspective. A later announcement for the 1969
conference includes a photomontaged image by Tony Palladino, in which tiny effigies of the
twenty-one speakers populate a surreal landscape of cloth-covered objects (fig. 2.32). Once
again, the figures appear oddly ill at ease. Several are entirely isolated, but even those clustered
together appear disconnected, facing away from each other and avoiding eye contact.
These images conveyed a new challenge for midcentury designers; in addition to striving
for a state of individual integration by mastering the total design process, they also had to learn
how to engage in productive discussions and working relationships with other professionals. In
an image for the 1967 conference, Robert Miles Runyan set fire to the very idea of the integrated
designer. The multimedia work comprises a human figure covered in clippings from an array of
international newspapers (fig. 2.33). An alphanumerical grid on the left side of the figure’s chest
suggests an attempt to transform the human into a rational, computational machine. Meanwhile,
the right side of the chest has been cut open to reveal a heart hooked up to various wires in an
effort, perhaps, to jumpstart the body’s emotional equipment. Overwhelmed by the arduous task
of integrating—that is, maximizing and unifying its capacities for thinking and feeling (in dozens
of different languages, no less)—the figure’s mind is literally blown as flames erupt from its
brain. Despite its provocative implications and distinctly non-modernist aesthetic, Runyan did
not design this image in opposition to the IDCA. Rather, the IDCA’s organizers commissioned
the work as the official symbol for the 1967 conference, which was devoted to the theme “Order
and Disorder.” Reproduced on posters, folders, and other publicity materials, Runyan’s design
125
represented the organization’s official position and point of view: its embrace of disorder and
dissensus, and its theorization of integrated design as a vexed, unattainable, and perhaps even
undesirable ideal. After all, it was the very intractability of the IDCA’s audience members, their
refusal to cohere into a unified body, that fueled Aspen’s incendiary design discourse.

Exploiting Aspen’s Environment
It may seem strange that designers, educators, and executives would gather in a location
as remote as Aspen to discuss topics that centered on corporate culture, consumerism, and urban
life. Yet aside from, or perhaps because of, its great beauty and recreational possibilities, Aspen
allowed IDCA participants to engage in animated discussions about an increasingly contentious
issue in midcentury design: the concept of “environment” and the designer’s role in shaping it.
Do designers, especially those working for large corporations, produce synthetic environments
entirely separate from the natural world (and potentially harmful to it)? Or might design serve as
a bridge between man and nature, that is, as a way for people to absorb, emulate, and safeguard
their natural surroundings? These were not, as existing scholarship sometimes suggests, new hot-
button issues for designers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the environmental movement
reached its zenith.
98
Rather, they were present in IDCA discourse from its inception in 1951. The
leaf in Bayer’s symbol announced Aspen and its natural landscape as central to the identity of the
conference. Even after IDCA leadership replaced the symbol in 1955, the aspen leaf remained a
recurring motif in the organization’s publicity (fig. 2.34). The designers who contributed to the
IDCA’s visual identity combined this symbol of Aspen with striking photographs depicting the
local scenery and promotional language extolling the virtues of the Colorado wilderness. Yet

98
The environmental movement in general is often understood as a product of the 1960s, with Rachel Carson’s 1962
book Silent Spring one early indicator of a rising environmental awareness. See David Stradling, ed., The
Environmental Moment: 1968–1972 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012).
126
these evocations of nature formed only one facet of the IDCA’s notion of “environment.” As
Bayer’s human-leaf dyad suggests, the experience of Aspen’s natural landscape was mediated by
the built forms and constructed images that the IDCA used to stage and publicize its discussions.
Through a range of media—including photographs, graphic design, architecture, and film—the
IDCA used its setting in Aspen to facilitate debates about the nature of the visual environment.
Located on the ancestral lands of the Ute people, Aspen has a long history as a setting for
human encounters with, and violent conflicts over, the natural landscape.
99
Attracted by the
area’s rich ore deposits, prospectors drove the Utes from their lands and established Aspen
(originally named Ute City) as a mining camp in the 1880s, extracting valuable resources from
the land that could be converted into goods and the money used to buy them. The collapse of the
silver market in the 1890s reversed the town’s fortunes, but the rise of Alpine skiing in the early
twentieth-century refocused attention on Aspen as a potential ski resort. Paepcke’s rediscovery
of Aspen in the 1940s led to the formation of the Aspen Skiing Corporation in 1946, which
helped transform the area into a recreational destination. Under Paepcke’s direction, Aspen later
emerged as a major cultural center, first as the site of the 1949 Goethe Bicentennial Convocation
and then, in the 1950s, as the home of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, the Aspen
Music Festival and School, and other cultural events and organizations. The geology, climate,
scenery, and seclusion of the Aspen environment nurtured a wide array of human endeavors.
In Jacobson’s mind, Aspen was a logical setting for the development of an integrative
design discourse, one that would bring together diverse minds to confront shared problems. The

99
For more on the history and culture of the Ute people, including a traditional respect for the land that remains
central to their lives and beliefs today, see Sondra G. Jones, Being and Becoming Ute: The Story of an American
Indian People (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019). For histories of the forced removal of the Utes from
their homeland, see Virginia McConnell Simmons, The Ute Indians of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico (Boulder:
University Press of Colorado, 2001); and Robert Silbernagel, Troubled Trails: The Meeker Affair and the Expulsion
of Utes from Colorado (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2011).
127
Goethe Bicentennial had been a great success, and if Paepcke’s other organizational efforts
proved similarly fruitful, Aspen promised to become a permanent destination for the creative,
intellectual, and business leaders that Jacobson hoped to include in his proposed design seminar.
Other members of the conference planning committee were less certain. In 1950, the mountain
town was still difficult to reach, especially from the major metropolitan centers on the east and
west coasts. Many doubted whether America’s leading executives and designers could be lured
to such a remote location, beautiful and bustling as it may be. The Cranbrook Academy of Art,
part of a small educational community located in the Detroit suburbs, appeared to some as a
better option.
100
Led by the Finnish-American architect Eliel Saarinen, the school had developed
a reputation for excellence in design, which, combined with its proximity to the heart of the U.S.
automobile industry, made it a perhaps more suitable setting for a conference on design and
business. Yet as Lionni recalled of the IDCA planning efforts, Jacobson’s “behind-the-scenes
diplomacy” ultimately curbed his colleagues’ skepticism and established Aspen as the home of
the design conference. “I am happy that my doubts were ignored,” Lionni later conceded.
101

With its setting secured, the IDCA’s organizers capitalized on the appeal of Aspen’s
natural landscape to help promote the conference. The invitation to the first meeting in 1951 used
textual and visual evocations of nature to attract prospective participants. Yet these visions of the
natural world were in every instance yoked to another overarching “‘vision of greatness’—the
greatness of the human spirit and the works of man” (fig. 2.35). Three photographs, incorporated
into the mailer’s sections on transportation and accommodations, depict scenes of outdoor
recreation: a fly-fisher casting his line out into the Roaring Fork River, a group of horseback
riders galloping through an open field, and a crowd of people lounging around the pool of the

100
Egbert Jacobson, “Committee on Plans for Design Conference,” February 19, 1951, Box 1, Folder 2, IDCA-GRI.
101
Lionni, Between Worlds, 193.
128
Hotel Jerome, their gazes fixed on a diver caught mid-leap.
102
A pamphlet for the following
year’s conference reproduces a cropped version of the latter image as part of a triptych alongside
two other photographs of people wading through river rapids and sunbathing on a deck (fig.
2.36). Below, a sequence of pictographs advertises the range of activities—fishing, horseback
riding, square dancing, swimming, and music—that visitors could enjoy in Aspen, described as
“a unique oasis in the heart of the Rocky Mountains.” These promotional materials show visitors
harvesting and harnessing Aspen’s natural landscape for the purposes of sport and leisure. They
also reinforce the suggestion that visitors combine participation in the conference with a
regenerative family vacation.
103

The IDCA’s organizers perceived the natural environment not simply as a diversion for
attendees. The conference invitation claimed that “the setting of this program in the mountain
village of Aspen, Colorado, does more than provide the beauty and grandeur of nature, and the
joys of outdoor life, as an accompaniment to thought and discussion.” Instead, Aspen’s natural
landscape and the opportunities for recreation it afforded were meant to stimulate, direct, and
enhance professional conversation. Such connections between nature, recreation, and liberal
learning were longstanding and, by the middle of the twentieth century, had become a subject of
historical study and philosophical speculation. Indeed, the IDCA invitation referenced English
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, a well-known proponent of process philosophy whose
1934 Nature and Life argued that “the body requires the environment to exist,” and that human

102
These photographs were taken by Ferenc Berko, a Hungarian photographer who, at Moholy-Nagy’s invitation,
immigrated to the U.S. in 1947 to teach at the Chicago School of Design (formerly the New Bauhaus). In 1949,
Paepcke persuaded Berko to settle in Aspen and document its cultural life. Many of the Berko photos used in
conference publicity materials also appeared in the printed matter of other local organizations, such as travel service
brochures. Cynthia Fredette, “Ferenc Berko,” in Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of
Photography Collection, ed. Handy et al. (New York: Bullfinch Press, 1999), 208.
103
Operating under the period assumption (and unfortunate reality) that most executives and designers were male,
the IDCA’s organizers encouraged participants to bring their wives, who could attend the conference sessions at no
additional charge, or else participate in separate programming.
129
life is therefore inseparable from nature.
104
Other midcentury intellectuals took up Whitehead’s
proposition. Educational historian Thomas Woody, for example, sought to revive the humanistic
belief that “nature promotes growth and nutrition in man,” encouraging public authorities and
educational leaders to reaffirm play, rest, and leisure as central elements of a liberal education.
105

In his summary of the 1951 Aspen conference, Ebin waxed poetic on this subject. “The mountain
air stirs laggard hearts and rouses brains to think the thoughts,” he declared.
106
According to Ebin
and others, the quality of discourse at the design conference relied on the restorative and
recreational activities Aspen’s natural environment provided. The IDCA’s design discourse was
therefore inseparable from the environment in which it took shape.
To accommodate the influx of visitors to Aspen and to support their interactions with
each other and with nature, it was necessary to update the town’s infrastructure by creating new
housing and municipal facilities. Paepcke approached redevelopment as an opportunity to design
a built environment that would attract visitors to Aspen as effectively as the natural landscape.
Even before the first meeting of the IDCA, Paepcke envisioned Aspen as a site for modernist
architecture and design. In the 1940s, the town, which had entered a period of decline after its
first major boom and bust in the late nineteenth century, was still dominated by Victorian-era
architecture, much of it in disrepair. As part of his efforts to rehabilitate Aspen, Paepcke invited
Gropius to visit the town with the idea of creating a master plan.
107
While this initial scheme
yielded little fruit, Paepcke continued to harbor ambitious plans for Aspen throughout the final
years of his life. After persuading Bayer to relocate to Aspen in 1946, Paepcke sought to
convince George Nelson, Charles Eames, and Buckminster Fuller to do the same in the early

104
Alfred North Whitehead, Nature and Life (London: Cambridge University Press, 1934), 81.
105
Thomas Woody, Liberal Education for Free Men (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951), 236.
106
Ebin and Middleton, Impressions from the Design Conference.
107
Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture, 141–3.
130
1950s. In addition to major civic architectural projects by Fuller and Bayer, Paepcke also
imagined a city populated by “interesting houses” designed by “different outstanding architects,
including [Richard] Neutra, [Marcel] Breuer, [Josep Lluís] Sert, etc.”
108
These plans resurfaced
in 1959, when Paepcke solicited seventeen architects to create a “museum of living architecture
in Aspen.”
109
Many of the invited architects eagerly accepted Paepcke’s offer, and plans
progressed to the point that a ground-breaking was scheduled for Spring 1960. When Paepcke
succumbed to cancer in mid-April, however, his dream of transforming Aspen into a major
architectural center died with him.
110

While the full scope of Paepcke’s ambitions for Aspen went unrealized, he facilitated
numerous architectural projects before his untimely death. In 1949, he hired architect Eero
Saarinen (the son of Eliel Saarinen) to design an amphitheater that could safely and affordably
house the Goethe Bicentennial’s lecture and music programs.
111
Saarinen’s large, circus-like tent
spanned a concrete bowl carved out from the middle of a field (fig. 2.37). Inside, tiers of wooden
benches surrounded a wedge-shaped stage complete with pleated sounding boards. The space
was acoustically perfect for concerts and lectures alike. It was also suited to Aspen’s temperate
summer climate. The tented amphitheater garnered significant attention from the press, both for
its unconventional design and for the identity of its designer. Saarinen’s involvement led
reporters to draw comparisons between Aspen and Tanglewood, a music venue located among
the hills of Western Massachusetts that featured a fan-shaped “music shed” designed by Eero’s
father, Eliel. According to critics, if Aspen sported less glamorous accommodations and nightlife

108
Walter Paepcke to George Nelson, August 7, 1952, Box 49, Folder 13, WPPP.
109
The project was similar in spirit to the Weißenhof Estate that had been built for the Deutsche Werkbund
exhibition in Stuttgart in 1927. Two of the Weißenhof architects, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, were among
those Paepcke invited to take part in the Aspen project.
110
Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture, 287–9.
111
Ibid., 166.
131
than its Berkshire counterpart, the dramatic natural setting nevertheless “provided its own
surprising and delightful charm.”
112

Saarinen’s tent, like Bayer’s symbol, was not created for the IDCA, but it nevertheless
became an early emblem of the design discourse that emerged in Aspen. Despite good acoustics,
the open-air tent was ill-suited to slide presentations, film screenings, and other visual displays.
And while Aspen summers were typically temperate, thundershowers, brisk evenings, and
morning frosts occasionally dampened the participants’ spirits. Saarinen’s design was, however,
symbolically potent. Nestled into the earth and surrounded by snow-capped mountains, the tent
evidenced an attempt to mine Aspen for its natural beauty and recreational potential, while at the
same time using the lush landscape to help stage design’s transformative potential. The cover for
the unofficial summary of the 1951 conference proceedings featured a photograph of Saarinen’s
tent, seen from above and at a distance (fig. 2.38). The image draws a contrast between the stark
white canopy of the man-made structure and the variegated greenery of its natural surroundings.
At the same time, the gentle pitch of the tent mimics the slope of the snow-capped mountains in
the background. Saarinen’s structure therefore symbolized designers’ attempts both to emulate
and to intervene in the natural world.
The concept of nature as the quintessential example of intelligent design, whether in a
scientific or theological sense, increasingly entered the IDCA discourse once organizers began to
invite speakers from outside the worlds of design and business.
113
In 1955, marine biologist
Albert E. Parr suggested that designers look to nature as a model for their work. Warning against
undue emphasis on “harmony” as a panacea for design, he noted that the so-called “harmony of

112
“Goethe in Colorado,” Newsweek (July 11, 1949): 64.
113
In his curriculum for the New Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy had developed a new science of “bio-technique,” which
held that the ingenious forms found in nature could be technologically useful when applied to human modes of
production. See László Moholy-Nagy, “Why Bauhaus Education?” Shelter, March 1938, 8–21.
132
nature” was in fact based on a great “diversity of forms.”
114
Parr argued against “adherence to
uniformity” and encouraged architects and planners to pursue instead a “harmonious integration”
of elements that would endow the cityscape with “an architectural character of its own,” thereby
enriching the lives of its inhabitants. Parr’s notion that environmental integration, whether
organic or architectural, was predicated on diversity rather than uniformity, aligned with the type
of discourse that IDCA leadership pursued. The following year, Dennis Flanagan also identified
examples of design in nature—from the “architecture of molecules” to “whole galaxies in
collision”—that had the potential to transform human perception.
115
The designer’s task, he
argued, was to propagate these perception-altering examples of natural design by incorporating
them into “our daily environment.” Saarinen’s tent, which reproduced forms found in Aspen’s
mountainous landscape at the scale of the built environment, exemplified this effort to translate
the natural world into everyday lived experience, endowing Aspen with a unique architectural
character in the process.
Saarinen’s tent was only the first of a series of experimental architectural interventions
into the Aspen landscape. After hearing Fuller speak in Aspen about the principles of geodesics
in 1952, Paepcke suggested that replacing Saarinen’s amphitheater with a “Bucky Fuller dome”
could help transform Aspen into a “most exciting and stimulating” destination.
116
Paepcke’s idea
was partly realized the following year when a group of architecture students from the University
of Minnesota assembled a trussed geodesic dome beside Saarinen’s tent, under the direction of
Fuller and with the help of conference participants (fig. 2.39).
117
The event was reminiscent of a

114
Albert Eide Parr quoted in “International Design Conference,” Print 9, no. 6 (July 1955): 23. Parr later served as
president of the IDCA.
115
Dennis Flanagan quoted in “Ideas on the Future of Man and Design: IDC Aspen 1956,” Print 10, no 4 (August
1956): 45.
116
Walter P. Paepcke to George Nelson, August 7, 1952, Box 75, Folder 4, R. Buckminster Fuller papers, M1090.
Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA. [hereafter RBFP]
117
Draft of a telegram from R. Buckminster Fuller to Leo Lionni, n.d., Box 79, Folder 6, RBFP.
133
barn raising, bringing together members of the conference community to cooperatively erect the
nearly five-hundred-pound, stainless-steel and aluminum frame. Thirty-six feet in diameter with
a square footage of over one thousand feet, the dome, when covered by a plastic skin, served as a
dormitory for students and other attendees (fig. 2.40).
118
The semi-transparent barrier sheltered
occupants from the elements while at the same time offering a blurred view of the countryside.
At night the structure appeared otherworldly, like a half moon tethered to the earth (fig. 2.41).
The dome therefore mediated an encounter between human and nature, bringing visitors out of
Aspen’s inns and lodges and into a closer relationship with the environment.
The geodesic dome became a familiar motif in Aspen as various iterations of its
hemispherical form cropped up around the conference grounds. In 1955, Bayer designed a more
permanent dome to cover a pool at the Aspen Chalets (fig. 2.42). A partial wall of corrugated
steel provided additional protection from the sun and wind while still leaving the swimming area
open to the outdoors. This dome and others like it appeared regularly in IDCA publicity (fig.
2.43). A summation of the 1957 proceedings showed a plywood geodesic structure built to
accommodate seminar sessions. Yet another geodesic frame, this one uncovered and with a
slighter curvature, appeared on a poster for the 1961 conference. The hemispherical shapes of
these domes recalled forms found in nature, especially that of Earth itself. But they also evoked a
particular type of interconnective vision that was central to integrated design. The geodesic
dome’s structural integrity relied, often visibly, on a constellation of nodes connected by rigid
struts. Like the reticulated imagery that Bruce Beck used to picture the 1955 conference theme,
“Communication: The Image Speaks,” geodesic domes helped visualize the connections forged
through communication.

118
Thanks to an arrangement between Fuller and the IDCA’s organizers, those students who took advantage of the
makeshift accommodations had their conference fees waived.
134
While Parr and Flanagan identified nature as a model for designers to emulate, other
speakers presented the natural world as something to be tamed, controlled, and altered. In 1955,
architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock argued that man’s relation to the environment,
whether natural or man-made, should be a central consideration of the postwar designer. Only by
having “faith in the power of human control,” Hitchcock claimed, could architects and urban
planners avert the “horrors that ensue” from the spontaneous development of landscapes and
cityscapes.
119
The geodesic domes, in addition to emulating natural forms, also exerted a level of
control over the Aspen landscape. Derived from geodesy, a branch of mathematics concerned
with the shape and area of the earth, the geodesic dome was an attempt to understand and harness
the natural world.
120
Each dome carved out a circular plot of land on the conference grounds,
transforming untamed fields into habitable spaces. As IDCA members occupied the structures
Saarinen and Fuller devised, they inhabited the debate over design’s environmental implications.
A 1961 promotional film, “International Design Conference in Aspen: The First Decade,”
dramatized these interactions between conference participants and the Aspen environment.
Written and directed by CCA employee Rhodes Patterson, the twenty-minute film combines
narration and lecture recordings with scenes from the design conference in order to convey the
overall “feeling” of the event. This elusive aura flourished “among the rocks and rills of Aspen,”
according to the film, which opens with an alternating sequence of melting ice and smoking men
(fig. 2.44). From a contemporary perspective, this montage might appear to be a commentary on
climate change and the hazards of man-made pollutants. Yet at the time, this imagery was still
relatively innocuous; tobacco control was in its early stages, and the environmental movement

119
Henry-Russell Hitchcock quoted in “International Design Conference,” Print 9, no. 6 (July 1955): 22.
120
Lloyd Steven Sieden, Buckminster Fuller’s Universe: His Life and Work (Cambridge: Basic Books, 2000), 305.
135
did not gain momentum until later in the decade.
121
Instead, the film sequence, in which ice melt
precedes pollutant, signals a specific transformation in Aspen, where each spring thaw ushers in
scores of cigarette-smoking intellectual, cultural, and business elites. The crowds pictured grow
steadily larger—from small seminar to full panel to packed audience—as the drip transforms into
a trickle, a stream, and, finally, a full flood of cascading water (fig. 2.45). The accompanying
music transforms, too, from a gentle blend of wind and string instruments to a barrage of brass
and percussion. As the opening sequence reaches its crescendo, a rushing river merges with a
procession of conference participants through the magic of film editing (fig. 2.46). By likening
conference members to a torrent of water, the film asserts the designers’ generative potential.
And like an open sluice, the IDCA helps direct this creative energy towards the design of the
visual environment.
The following year, in 1962, CCA design director Ralph Eckerstrom served as IDCA
program chairman for a conference devoted to the theme “Environment.” Apropos of Fuller’s
view that “Earth,” “World,” and “Universe” refer to single entities and are therefore proper
names, conference publicity treated “Environment”—defined as “the totality of man’s
experience”—in a similarly honorific way by omitting the article “the,” which would suggest
others exist.
122
In typical IDCA fashion, the panels of speakers included sculptors, designers,
architects, and landscape architects, but also a philosopher, a theologian, and a geo-chemist,
among others. Environment therefore appeared as a fully interdisciplinary concern, impossible
for any individual or single discipline to encapsulate in its entirety. In his opening remarks,

121
While the film postdated the First National Conference on Air Pollution, held in Washington, DC, in 1958, these
issues did not capture public attention until the following decade. In 1962, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring,
which detailed the environmental effects of DDT, raised public concern and helped trigger the establishment of the
United States Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Meanwhile, a 1964 report of the Advisory Committee to
the Surgeon General disclosed evidence of the health consequences of cigarette smoking, leading to a gradual shift
in public opinion and to increased efforts at tobacco control.
122
Sieden, Buckminster Fuller’s Universe, xv.
136
Eckerstrom discussed man’s growing “ability to re-shape his environment to suit his needs and
tastes,” but acknowledged that this newfound power brought with it greater “responsibility for
decisions affecting environment.”
123
This seemingly contradictory notion of environment—as
something to be both shaped and conserved—eventually led to a schism between environmental
planners, on the one hand, who sought to create totally controlled living environments that could
fulfill all human needs, and ecological designers, on the other hand, who aimed to create totally
sustainable environments that preserved natural order. Yet both pursued a form of integration by
addressing the perceived disjunction between human and nature. Aspen, a landscape transformed
first by the mining industry in the 1880s, and then by the design conference seventy years later,
served as an important stage for discussing and testing design’s ability to achieve various forms
of environmental integration. The 1962 speakers, for instance, discussed issues of precipitous
population growth, poverty, and extinction, in addition to urban renewal.
124
All fell within the
ambit of integrated design.
While scholars have argued that the IDCA’s organizers understood environment simply
as the context in which designed objects exist, in contrast to the environmental activist’s view
that it was a dire political issue, the discourse in Aspen was much more complex. The IDCA
brought together competing visions of the relationship between man and nature, often with
tumultuous results. Rather than seek to resolve this collision, the conference preserved Aspen as
a setting that participants could return to again and again for debates about the environmental
implications of integrated design.
125

123
Ralph Eckerstrom, quoted in “International Design Conference Aspen 1962,” Box 15, Folder 741, International
Design Conference in Aspen papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago.
124
Aspen remains an important site for studying nature and environment. In 1968, Elizabeth Paepcke founded the
Aspen Center for Environmental Studies, which continues to provide programs in ecology and the natural sciences.
125
See Twemlow, “I Can’t Talk To You If You Say That,” 33–4; and Greg Castillo, “Establishment Modernism and
Its Discontents: IDCA in the ‘Long Sixties,’” in Design for the Corporate World: 1950–1975, ed. Wim de Wit
(London: Lund Humphries, 2017), 55.
137
(In)Conclusion
The IDCA often culminated with an attempt, or sometimes several attempts, to
summarize the proceedings with concluding remarks. Despite their intention to bring closure to
the week’s meandering conversations, these synopses were often haphazard and hastily prepared,
providing little in the way of resolution or a plan of action. At the end of the 1951 conference,
Charles Sawyer presented a brief summary. He began by stating vaguely that there was “great
value in the opportunity for designers, business men and retailers to meet each other,” before
observing simply that the bond between these groups had been “strengthened” in Aspen.
126
In
1959, Russian-American photographer Roman Vishniac offered an optimistic summary, amazed
that “panelists from all corners of the world with such unequal approach[es]” could join “as a
team in full harmony.”
127
The discussions, he claimed, had resulted in “a clear-cut definition” of
the theme, visual communication. Yet Vishniac’s summary was far from clear. “The image is a
living, ever changing concept,” he explained, “exposed to deliberations, exchange of ideas.” This
notion of the image as susceptible to constant debate suggested that, like the discourse in Aspen,
visual communication itself was difficult, even impossible, to pin down. So, too, were its effects
on everyday life. “From the infinite variety and diversity of images is constructed our present
civilization,” Vishniac observed. “For good or bad—it is the world we live in.” Despite praising
the IDCA’s “complete unity,” Vishniac offered a summary that was vexingly inconclusive.
Sawyer’s and Vishniac’s ambivalent remarks were, however, entirely in keeping with the
spirit of the IDCA, whose organizers designed opportunities for deliberation and disagreement
into every facet of the conference, from its mission and format to its audience and setting. The
resulting lack of consensus may appear dissatisfying from a contemporary perspective, thwarting

126
Paraphrased in Ebin and Middleton, “Impressions from the Design Conference,” 1951.
127
Roman Vishniac, “Summary Statement,” Box 5, Folder 2, IDCA-GRI.
138
scholarly efforts to explain and historicize the conference, the nature of its discourse, and its
material effects on the trajectory of postwar design and business. Some participants expressed
precisely these frustrations. In 1953, Burtin informed Paepcke that the conference’s lack of
direction, combined with an excessive amount of talk, had left some participants unsatisfied.
128

Art historian Nikolas Pevsner conveyed similar grievances, plying Paepcke with suggestions for
a more structured format that “could have a real result.”
129
Exasperated by the discussions in
1959, CBS art director William Golden felt certain about only one thing. “For my part,” he
proclaimed, “I’m convinced that designers shouldn’t talk—about design.”
130

Yet as the deliberate variety of visual materials and viewpoints in Aspen indicates, the
IDCA’s organizers viewed irresolvable debate as an important end in itself. The theme and
imagery for the 1964 conference reiterated this spirit of exploration. Under the chairmanship of
designer Eliot Noyes, “Design ’64: Directions and Dilemmas” arose from the perceived lack of a
“unifying discipline” in midcentury design. Rather than prescribe a newly unified point of view,
the conference instead seized on this uncertainty as an opportunity for critical evaluation. “The
IDCA promises no definitive answers,” its organizers claimed, “but predicts a lively exploration
of the subject, with the conviction that clarification through broad discussion may lead to new
insights in the search for a better balance.”
131
The conference symbol, designed by Chermayeff
& Geismar, pictured this search in the form of a question mark (fig. 2.47). The glyph’s curve is
comprised of five arrows aimed at a bullseye. Crucially, the route consists of many pathways.
The multiple destinations, composed of concentric rings, remain perpetually beyond reach. The
symbol thus emphasizes the importance of open-ended inquiry over firm answers and results.

128
Will Burtin to Walter Paepcke, July 16, 1953, Box 30, Folder 10, WPPP.
129
Nikolaus Pevsner to Walter Paepcke, July 7, 1953, Box 30, Folder 10, WPPP.
130
William Golden, “Visual Environment of Advertising,” 1959, Box 5, Folder 2, IDCA-GRI.
131
“IDCA Preliminary Statement,” January 23, 1964, Box 11, Folder 20, IDCA-GRI.
139
On the final day of the 1964 conference, Noyes enlisted Reyner Banham to summarize
the proceedings. After drawing connections between several of the papers, Banham addressed
the form of the conference. He observed that while the IDCA had started in 1951 as an “informal
summer camp at which management and design were supposed to rub off great thoughts on one
another by interdisciplinary communion,” the conference had begun to change, “as indeed it had
to if it is to survive.”
132
Banham attributed this supposed shift to gradual changes in the audience,
setting, and mission of the IDCA. With a higher proportion of students and a growing “desire to
make some impression on the real world over the mountains,” the conference appeared to be
straining against its established professional and geographic boundaries. Most importantly,
Banham believed IDCA participants were now prepared to “make statements, take action […] to
march on Washington, to applaud a sit-in as a triumph of design.” In the context of the 1960s—a
decade marked by social revolution, radical protests, countercultural activity, and alternative
design—it was perhaps no longer feasible for the IDCA to remain ambivalent or apolitical.
To demonstrate the organization’s apparent new resolve, Banham proposed a series of
resolutions, which conference members passed by a hand vote and the IDCA board of directors
subsequently endorsed. They called for “a lively interchange of well-informed critical opinion;”
the repeal of any “restrictive rules” that hampered “public discussion of design in all its aspects;”
support from corporations in fostering “the most free and uninhibited public critical discussion of
their products;” and participation of “the press, television and other mass-media” in facilitating
“public criticism.”
133
In keeping with IDCA tradition, Banham’s resolutions aimed simply to
safeguard opportunities for discussion and debate, amplifying and broadcasting beyond Aspen
the critical tone that already characterized the IDCA. What had changed, however, was the

132
Reyner Banham quoted in “IDCA ’64,” 1964, author’s collection.
133
Ibid.
140
expectation that this discourse was merely a prelude to something more. Banham’s call to “take
action” directly contrasted Mead’s claim that conference proceedings “must not, in the sense of
action, matter at all.” By calling on the IDCA to act, Banham set expectations that the conference
could not hope to fulfill through its customary open-ended interchange of ideas and opinions.
As further indication that design discourse was an ever-moving target, Banham became
the recipient of harsh criticism six years later, when he helped organize the twentieth meeting of
the IDCA, “Environment by Design.” As numerous scholars have observed, the 1970 conference
was especially contentious, marked by heated exchanges between members of the IDCA and
radical student, countercultural, and foreign groups, who viewed the conference as complicit in
the socially and environmentally damaging policies of corporate America. “It immediately
became clear,” Banham recounted, “that the conference was liable to polarize into irreconcilable
factions and split as the tensions of the week came to the surface.”
134
Yet even at their most
scathing—even when they threatened to silence the conference altogether—these criticisms
merely fueled IDCA discourse, bringing sharply contrasting viewpoints into conversation. By
contesting the value of the IDCA and the efficacy of integrated design, critics participated in the
cross-fertilization of ideas that IDCA leadership viewed as its key legacy.
This account of the IDCA shows that the conference and the ideal of integration on which
it was founded were subject to increasing debate throughout its history. The IDCA’s form of
communicative integration was not synonymous with consensus, and its concern with unity
should not be confused with a desire for unanimity. By inviting, combining, and recombining
disparate viewpoints, the conference cultivated a mode of discourse that was dynamic and
experimental. This speculative spirit was on full display in the 1965 conference materials, which

134
Reyner Banham quoted in Twemlow, “I Can’t Talk To You If You Say That,” 37.
141
included a cover by Giulio Cittato and Bob Noorda of the design firm Unimark International; a
corporate membership booklet by Jim Lienhart and Hans Graff, also of Unimark; and a symbol
and invitation by John Massey, design director at CCA and founder of the Center for Advanced
Research in Design (fig. 2.48). Created not only by different designers, but also by designers
from competing firms, each piece of publicity employs different motifs, typographic principles,
color schemes, and paper stocks. The resulting visual and material diversity suggest that IDCA
leadership was invested more in experimentation than uniformity, in bringing together designers
with varying skills and styles but not merging their work into a cohesive whole. This was not a
rejection of integrated design, but rather a shift of emphasis—away from the result and toward
the process of combining separate parts. The IDCA was an important crucible for midcentury
design precisely because it deferred wholeness, resolution, and consensus, consigning these to a
future that conference participants were eager to envision yet ambivalent about inhabiting.
The indeterminism of the IDCA suited the purposes of a midcentury discourse fixated on
design’s future. Aspen provided valuable space for designers to pose and ponder questions that
had no clear answers, but which brought them into productive dialogues with other professionals
outside their usual networks. These discussions compelled attendees to contemplate the identity
of the designer, the socioeconomic functions of design, and its impact on the visual environment.
Corporations concerned with reaping profits in the present, however, could not afford to defer
the benefits of integrated design to an uncertain future. They sought to operationalize the lessons
learned in Aspen by subjecting the designer’s creativity to the regulatory rules of management,
creating standards and systems of integrated design practice that were broadly applicable to the
needs of corporate culture.
142
CHAPTER 3:
Creativity and Control: Unimark International and a Systems Theory of Design

While the International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA) cultivated a form of design
discourse that was deliberately indeterminate, corporations simultaneously sought practicable
ways to implement principles of integrated design. In the 1950s and 1960s, the same designers
who met annually in Aspen to share their often-utopian visions of design’s role in capitalist
society worked to develop clearly circumscribed and replicable design methods that could fulfill
the needs of modern corporations. Much of this work was accomplished by in-house design units
like the one Walter Paepcke founded at Container Corporation of America (CCA) in 1935. Yet
the postwar period also saw the rise of new types of design consultancies that were larger, more
complex, and conducted more expansive operations than their prewar predecessors.
1
Firms such
as Lippincott & Margulies and Chermayeff & Geismar organized and operated as corporations,
transforming design into not only a lucrative business, but also a professional discipline capable
of managing any corporation’s identity. At issue, however, was whether integrated design could
be systematized without inhibiting the designer’s freedom or the corporation’s distinct character,
an urgent question given mounting postwar critiques of corporate culture and conformity.
2

The design firm Unimark International, active from 1965 to 1979, assumed a key role in
transforming integrated design from a nascent practice into a systematic discipline. Led by Ralph
Eckerstrom, Unimark’s founding partners included a combination of accomplished designers and
shrewd business managers. Some corporations pursued design programs in the first half of the
twentieth century, and a few even developed manuals to manage these programs as early as the

1
Penny Sparke, Consultant Design: History and Practice of the Designer in Industry (London: Pembridge, 1983).
2
See David Riesman, Reuel Denney, and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American
Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1956); and William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956).
143
1930s.
3
Unimark pursued integrated design at an unprecedented scale, however, employing a
system of design research, implementation, and management that was, in theory, universally
applicable to any organization. In order to sell its services to other companies, Unimark adopted
the language of corporate management, evident in the project proposals, production schedules,
and progress reports that were central to its operations. It used organization charts, for instance,
to establish a hierarchal structure that promised to streamline and standardize the design process
(fig. 3.1). Yet for all their managerial rhetoric, Eckerstrom and his colleagues remained
committed to understanding integrated design as a fundamentally creative process.
This chapter explores the fate of creativity in corporate design from the 1950s through the
1970s, a period marked by the rise of systems theory, cybernetics, and other modes of regulatory
thinking.
4
As these ideas permeated business management and design practice, they contributed
to the emergence of a pervasive and seemingly inexorable corporate visual style that subjected
corporate image making to allegedly universal principles and graphic standards.
5
I argue that by
transforming integrated design into a system of its own—complete with carefully developed and
maintained graphic standards, operating procedures, and usage restrictions—designers
reimagined creativity not only as the conception of new forms or ideas, but also, perhaps even
primarily, as the controlled combination of existing elements.
6

3
Carma Gorman cites the manuals Sunoco created in the 1930s, which it distributed to licensed dealers in an effort
to establish uniformity of design, colors, signs, and equipment. Carma Gorman, “The Role of Trademark Law in the
History of US Visual Identity Design, c.1860–1960,” Journal of Design History 30, no. 4 (2017): 379–80.
4
See Steve Joshua Heims, Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group, 1946–1953
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993); and Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of
Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997).
5
For period discussions of the influence of systems theory on business management, see Richard A. Johnson,
Fremont E. Kast, and James E. Rosenzweig, “Systems Theory and Management,” Management Science 10, no. 2
(1964): 367–84; and David B. Smith, “Systems Engineering: Implications for Management,” Financial Analysts
Journal 21, no. 3 (1965): 119–27.
6
American sociologist Hornell Hart, author of the 1941 New Gateways to Creative Living, defined human invention
as the “new combination of old elements.” Hornell Hart, “Social Theory and Social Change,” in Symposium on
Sociological Theory, ed. Llewellyn Gross (Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson and Company, 1959), 208. For corporate
designers, however, novelty was largely inessential to the task of creating effective corporate identification systems.
144
Unimark’s main product was the corporate design manual, a compendium of graphic
standards—including a trademark, logotype, and corporate color—that a company’s in-house
design department could combine in prescribed configurations to maintain a consistent corporate
identity. The differences between early handbooks, such as Radio Corporation of America’s
1946 Trade-marks: Usage, Practices and Procedures, and later manuals, such as Ford’s c. 1965
Corporate Identity Manual, reveal changing attitudes and approaches to corporate design (figs.
3.2 and 3.3). The later manual’s expanded scope and higher production value indicate design’s
larger remit and heightened value within corporate culture. The imposition of more extensive and
exacting design standards also evidenced a growing postwar concern with the need for systems
capable of managing the unprecedented economic and visual complexity that large corporations
engendered. The result of this systematic approach to design was not only the production of a
series of individual corporate identities, or “house styles,” but also the creation of an overarching
corporate visual style that came to define the experience of corporate culture in the U.S. The
organizations that contributed to this style by adopting comparable design standards surrendered
some of their individuality in the process. They gained access, however, to a system of visual
communication capable of combining and controlling a wide array of information and media. In
a postwar culture that condemned conformity even as it yearned for the benefits of cohesion and
unity, the ability to control creativity through integrated design was invaluable.
7

Unimark’s attempt to institutionalize the use of standards and systems in design was part
of a broader postwar effort to reconceptualize the creative act as the systematic recombination of
existing elements, rather than the invention of new forms. This project challenged the concept of

7
For a discussion of the tensions between creativity and conformity in midcentury American culture, see Amy F.
Ogata, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2013), 10–16.
145
artistic autonomy by subjecting design to the same kinds of organizational principles operative in
other systematic disciplines, such as marketing, operations research, and computer science. The
change in design practice paralleled a concurrent “shift of sensibility” in artistic practice, as art
critic and curator Lawrence Alloway termed it.
8
In 1966, a year after Unimark’s formation, the
Guggenheim Museum presented Alloway’s exhibition Systemic Painting, which codified an
alternative version of American avant-gardism.
9
Moving away from the “drama of creativity”
that critics identified with American abstraction, Alloway described a mode of art making that
prioritized replicable concepts over original objects, predictive power over invention, and
“repetition and extension” over “ingenuity and surprise.”
10
Alloway rejected the notion that a
shift from violent, impulsive gestures to neat, highly finished systems indicated a corresponding
shift from individuality to anonymity or conformity. A system is, he insisted, no less human than
“a splash of paint.”
11
In its routinization, the gesture becomes in fact more human, which is to
say more symptomatic of the planned, habitual motions of daily life.
12

Despite a significant body of literature devoted to contemporary practices of visual
identity design, there are few critical studies that consider it as a historical phenomenon. The
scholarship on trademarks is substantial, but the trademark is only one aspect of an identity
program.
13
Literature on branding better addresses the array of elements that comprise visual

8
Alloway was scheduled to speak at the 1965 IDCA but pulled out.
9
Earlier artists also developed systemic, or proto-systematic, approaches to art making. Robert Brain, for example,
has argued that late-nineteenth-century European artists developed proto-systematic aesthetics that operationalized
graphic techniques and experimental physiology for the purposes of artistic creation. Robert M. Brain, The Pulse of
Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015).
10
Lawrence Alloway, “Introduction,” in Systemic Painting (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,
1966), 19.
11
Ibid., 17.
12
Marie Dumett has identified a related convergence of avant-garde and corporate culture in the artists’ collective
Fluxus, which founder George Maciunas organized as a multinational corporation engaged with issues of
organization, mediatization, routinization, automation, commoditization, and systematization. See Mari Dumett,
Corporate Imaginations: Fluxus Strategies for Living (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017).
13
In addition to Carma Gorman’s study of trademark law, see also: Frederic J. Schwartz, “Commodity Signs: Peter
Behrens, the AEG, and the Trademark,” Journal of Design History 9, no. 3 (1996): 153–84; and Jennifer M. Black,
146
identity, but it often lacks historical specificity.
14
The word “branding” actually declined in use
in the mid-twentieth century, before exploding in the 1990s.
15
By contrast, “integrated design,”
“graphic standards,” and “corporate identification systems” are historically specific terms that
evidence period preoccupations with integration, standardization, and systems thinking. John
Harwood’s study of corporate design at IBM is more attentive to the specificities of midcentury
culture, especially the concerns with computer science and cybernetics.
16
He shows how the
concept of the “interface” helped designers conceive of media as interrelated and corporate
design as a system of objects. The case of Unimark shows that this systems approach to design
was not limited to a particular kind of company or industry; instead, designers saw it as a
universally applicable method for managing visual identity. More than any other single designer
or design firm, Unimark helped correlate integrated design with the principles of standardization
and systematization. Unimark’s approach thus became easily reproducible, transforming
integration into the predominant postwar style of corporate visualization.

The Unimark Network
Unimark was a direct outgrowth of the social networks and ideological commitments of
CCA and the IDCA. This institutional trajectory hinged on Ralph Eckerstrom, an intrepid and by
all accounts irresistibly charismatic designer and businessman who began his career as art
director at the University of Illinois Press. In 1956, Paepcke hired Eckerstrom to replace the

“‘The Mark of Honor’: Trademark Law, Goodwill, and the Early Branding Strategies of National Biscuit,” in We
Are What We Sell: How Advertising Shapes American Life…and Always Has, ed. Danielle Sarver Coombs and Bob
Batchelor (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2014), 262–84.
14
See David Cabianca, “An Examination of the 1960s Attempt at a New Brand Identity for the General Post
Office,” Journal of Design History 31, no. 2 (May 2018): 121–37; and Paul Cleveland, “Curwen Press, Early
Adapters of Brand Strategy,” Journal of Design History 31, no. 1 (February 2018): 66–82.
15
“Branding,” Google Books Ngram Viewer, July 21, 2021, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=
branding&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=28&smoothing=3.
16
John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
147
retiring Egbert Jacobson as CCA’s new director of design. Eckerstrom soon became closely
involved in the IDCA, first as an audience member and then as a moderator (1959), executive
committee member (1961–1966), program chairman (1962), and president (1963–1965).
17

Around these key institutional nodes, Eckerstrom built a professional network and a system of
concepts that underpinned Unimark’s integrative approach to corporate identity design.
During his tenure as CCA’s director of design from 1956 to 1964, Eckerstrom forged key
connections with business executives and managers, several of whom later joined Unimark’s
upper management. Frederick McFarland, the general manager of CCA’s West Coast division,
became the vice president of Unimark’s Palo Alto office. Wallace Gutches, formerly the head of
CCA’s packaging division, joined Unimark as executive vice president in charge of business and
marketing. Eckerstrom also enlisted one of his former classmates at the University of Illinois,
Robert Moldafsky, who left his position as director of merchandising for Sara Lee to join
Unimark as vice president and director of marketing services. Together, McFarland, Gutches,
and Moldafsky brought a level of business acumen and managerial expertise that set Unimark
apart from most other postwar design studios and firms.
Eckerstrom’s presence in Chicago, a major center of design activity in the U.S., also
allowed him to build important relationships with other designers. Through his involvement in
Chicago’s Society of Typographic Arts, he met Larry Klein, an independent designer who joined
Unimark as a vice president and director of the Chicago office’s design services. Eckerstrom also
became acquainted with Jay Doblin, director of the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of
Technology (IIT). Doblin, who retained his position at IIT until 1969, joined Unimark in an

17
Eckerstrom was actually present at the first two Aspen design conferences in 1951 and 1952, while still working
as art director at the University of Illinois Press. It is possible that his participation in Aspen contributed to his later
appointment as CCA’s design director.
148
initially discreet yet critical capacity as one of the company’s leading design experts.
18
He also
introduced Eckerstrom to Massimo Vignelli, an Italian designer who came to the U.S. with his
wife, Lella, on a fellowship in 1957.
19
During a visit to Chicago in 1958, the Vignellis met
Doblin, who offered Massimo a position teaching corporate identity at IIT.
20
Shortly thereafter,
Massimo took a part-time job at CCA, where he worked in the design department creating
booklets and other promotional materials, befriending Eckerstrom in the process.
21
When the
Vignellis returned to Italy in 1960, Massimo pursued projects with Dutch-born designer Bob
Noorda, who later joined Unimark as a founding partner. Massimo served as design director for
Unimark USA, while Noorda remained in Milan to oversee the firm’s projects in Europe.
22

The IDCA was another key networking site for Eckerstrom. There he met Robert Craig, a
scholar, mountaineer, and management consultant who served as the first executive director of
the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies from 1953 to 1963. Craig gained insight into the
design world as one of the IDCA’s regional chairmen and as a member of its board of directors
from 1963 to 1966. It was also in Aspen that Eckerstrom met Jim Fogleman, director of design
for the U.S. subsidiary of Ciba, a pharmaceutical company headquartered in Basel, Switzerland.
Fogleman was a fixture in IDCA management for over a decade. After serving as vice president
from 1962 to 1963, he remained on its board of directors until 1973. Craig joined Unimark as a
vice president with valuable planning, management, and marketing expertise. Fogleman joined

18
Doblin was also one of the first founding members to leave Unimark. In 1971, he resigned from Unimark to found
his own design consultancy, taking the lucrative JC Penney account with him.
19
Massimo’s fellowship was at Towle Silversmiths, a silver manufacturer based in Newburyport, Massachusetts.
Lella simultaneously took a fellowship at MIT. See Jan Conradi, Unimark International: The Design of Business
and the Business Design (Baden: Lars Muller, 2009), 27.
20
Bruce Graham of Skidmore Owings & Merrill hired Lella to join the architecture firm’s interiors department. Oral
history interview with Massimo Vignelli, 2011 June 6–7. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
21
The Vignellis also accompanied Eckerstrom to the IDCA in 1959.
22
A company ban on the involvement of spouses contributed to the fact that Unimark, or at least its upper echelons,
remained predominantly male. This thinly veiled chauvinism did not, however, prevent Lella Vignelli, a designer as
prolific as her husband Massimo, from participating in Unimark projects as a contractor.
149
as vice president of the firm’s New York office. Eckerstrom’s involvement in the IDCA also
allowed him to meet designers from abroad, several of whom became instrumental in Unimark
by opening international offices. Australian designer Arthur Leydin, who attended the IDCA in
1957, opened Unimark/Melbourne in June 1965. Swedish designer Jan Staël von Holstein, who
was part of the Swedish student group that CCA sponsored in 1964 to attend the IDCA, joined
Unimark shortly after its formation. In 1970, he opened Unimark/London as a sales and
marketing outpost for the Milan office.
Herbert Bayer, whose history with CCA and the IDCA ran even deeper than
Eckerstrom’s, was a less active yet nonetheless influential member of Unimark’s founding
group. After emigrating from Germany to the U.S. in 1938, Bayer contributed to CCA’s award-
winning advertising campaigns beginning in 1939.
23
In 1946, Paepcke engaged Bayer as a design
consultant to CCA and as the designer-architect in charge of rehabilitating Aspen, where Bayer
took up permanent residence with his wife Joella. Instrumental in the founding of the IDCA,
Bayer remained active as a board member and advisor of the design conference until his death in
1985. At Eckerstrom’s invitation, Bayer joined Unimark in a similar advisory capacity,
reinforcing its institutional lineage and offering critical design insights.
24

The connections and experience that Eckerstrom gained through his positions at CCA and
the IDCA proved critical not just to the formation of Unimark, but also to its design philosophy.
When Eckerstrom replaced Jacobson as head of CCA’s design department, he also took up his
predecessor’s mission to cultivate and disseminate the idea of design as an integrative endeavor,

23
See Gwen Finkel Chanzit, From Bauhaus to Aspen: Herbert Bayer and Modernist Design in America (Boulder,
CO: 3D Press, 2005).
24
Bayer also helped spearhead the creation of Dot Zero, Unimark’s short-lived house organ, which published essays
on a wide range of design-related subjects by such eminent thinkers as Marshall McLuhan, John Kenneth Galbraith,
and Umberto Eco.
150
one that resisted specialization, reinforced industrial organization, and encapsulated the entirety
of the corporate visual environment. For Eckerstrom, this conception of design remained rooted
in a humanistic notion of the designer, what László Moholy-Nagy once referred to as “the whole
man,” balanced in his “intellectual and emotional power.”
25
In order to contribute to the
administration of corporate culture, Eckerstrom argued that the designer required “the curiosity,
desire, and initiative to broaden and enrich himself intellectually and aesthetically. His
continuing education, along with that of the manufacturer and the consumer, can successfully
guide the integration of art and industry.”
26

Eckerstrom’s engagement with the concept of integrated design strengthened throughout
his time at CCA, especially once he began to participate in the Aspen conferences. Unimark
shared with the IDCA strong, yet often unfulfilled, international ambitions.
27
Over the course of
its fifteen years in business, Unimark had offices in Milan, Johannesburg, London, Melbourne,
and Copenhagen. Most of these international ventures were relatively short lived. The London
office closed in 1972 after two years in operation. Leydin closed the Melbourne office in 1966,
after only a year, in order to replace Klein as director of design at Unimark/Chicago. The
Copenhagen office, launched by Danish designer Niels Hartmann in 1969, lasted only a few
weeks due to failed business negotiations.
28
Although plagued with organizational challenges,
these international ventures conformed to Unimark’s concept of corporate identity design as
having universal applicability, irrespective of regional or national particularities.

25
László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist, trans. Daphne M. Hoffmann (New York:
Wittenborn, Schultz Inc., 1947), 15. [Emphasis original]
26
Ralph Eckerstrom, “Industry: Watching over Its Fragile Association with Art: The Graphic Designer at Work,”
Print 12, no. 3 (November 1958): 36.
27
CCA was also a model of internationalization. After establishing its International Division in 1944 with a push
into Latin America, CCA expanded its overseas presence in 1955 with the formation of Europa Carton, A.G. in
Germany. This expansion escalated in the 1960s with additional acquisitions in Latin America and Europe. See
Susan Black, ed., The First Fifty Years, 1926–1976 (Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1976).
28
Conradi, Unimark International, 110–113.
151
Participating in the IDCA also amplified Eckerstrom’s commitment to the concept of
integrated design. In 1960, he discussed the importance of creating “a fully integrated design
program” that encompassed every designed manifestation of a company, from printed forms and
stationery to displays, films, and architecture. Referring back to the title of the first three Aspen
design conferences, “Design as a Function of Management,” Eckerstrom claimed:
As a function of management, design must be an integrated part of over-all company
operation and directly related to the company’s business and sales activities. It must have
continuity as a creative force. It must reflect total corporate character. Unless it meets
these requirements, the company image it seeks to create will never coalesce into a
unified whole, but will remain a mosaic of unrelated fragments.
29

Eckerstrom’s comments echoed many of those from the first Aspen conference in 1951. Bayer,
for instance, had argued that in order to contribute to “the visual improvement of life […] art and
business must converge and co-operate in the new visual experience towards total integration.”
30

Eckerstrom’s involvement with the IDCA also reinforced his belief in research and
marketing as critical to integrated design programs. Numerous marketing experts participated in
the conference during the 1950s, including Burns W. Roper, an expert in market research and
public opinion polling; social psychologist Myron J. Helfgott, the vice president of marketing
research at the design firm Lippincott & Margulies; and William Capitman, a market research
consultant and president of the Center for Research in Marketing. This activity increased in the
1960s, just as Eckerstrom was becoming more involved in IDCA management. The presence of
marketing experts at the IDCA reflected the interest its members took in how design principles
could be combined with psychoanalytic techniques, public opinion polling, and other market and
motivational research methods to promote an organization and its products.

29
Ralph Eckerstrom quoted in “Container Corporation of America,” Print 14, no. 6 (November 1960): 45.
30
Herbert Bayer quoted in Edgar J. Kaufmann, Jr., “Design, Designer and Industry,” Magazine of Art, no. 44
(December 1951): 325.
152
The marketing experts who spoke in Aspen emphasized creativity as the common ground
upon which corporate design and market research converged. At IDCA 1960, Eckerstrom would
have witnessed a panel on “The Future of Design in a Technological Society,” which addressed
the status of creativity in large organizations and included a talk by Capitman’s colleague, Paul
A. Fine, an executive vice president at the Center for Research in Marketing. In his talk, Fine
identified a set of prevailing notions: on the one hand, creativity as “a highly individualistic act,”
and, on the other, the corporation as fundamentally manipulative and therefore inimical to
“interpersonal relations, personality, and individuality.” According to this logic, there was little
room for creativity, or the creative individual, within large corporations. Yet Fine challenged
these assumptions, arguing that “the corporation simply to meet the demands of its own survival
is now evolving forms of interrelationships which stimulate and demand individuality and
creativity.”
31
The convergence of design and marketing was one form of this “interrelationship.”
Unimark’s interrelated design and marketing services might be viewed, therefore, as an aid to the
creative and collaborative work of designing corporate identification systems.
Edward C. Bursk, a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School,
also identified creativity as essential to business in his 1961 IDCA talk. He described “planned
risk-taking” as “an integral part of marketing” and the reason for its unique “leverage” within a
company, the economy, and society. “Problem-solving in business is the disciplining of
creativeness,” Bursk argued, “where disciplining means not just bringing creativeness down to
earth, or not that at all, but giving creativeness a stronger foundation from which to […] ‘blast
off’ for richer worlds.”
32
The notions of planned risk-taking and disciplined creativity signaled a

31
Paul A. Fine, untitled paper in “The Corporation and the Designer: An inquiry into the opportunities and limits of
action for innovators in the Twentieth Century Technological Society,” 1960, Box 6, Folder 1, IDCA-GRI.
32
Edward C. Bursk, untitled paper, in “Man/Problem Solver: The dynamics of man’s development as a problem
solver and an inquiry into the problem solving process,” 1961, Box 7, folder 3, IDCA-GRI. [Emphasis original]
153
growing postwar interest in strengthening relations between design and business by making
design more businesslike, that is, more structured and systematic. This impetus was apparent in
Will Burtin’s 1948 exhibition “Integration, the New Discipline in Design,” which asserted the
need for a “natural discipline” capable of exerting “human control over the at present largely
accidental effects of creative impulses.”
33
Burtin thus promoted the concept of integration as a
form of discipline capable of reining in the seemingly intractable realm of creativity.

Theorizing Systems in Aspen and Beyond
Postwar designers found a compelling framework for their efforts to systematize design
in the burgeoning field of systems theory, an inter-discipline centered on the study of systems as
cohesive conglomerations of interrelated parts. Systems theorists aimed to provide methods for
analyzing and organizing interacting components that were theoretically applicable across
disciplines. This mode of inquiry, together with related theories of cybernetics, automation, and
computerization, became so influential in the postwar period that it soon made its way to Aspen,
where it captured the interests of designers and executives alike. Systems theory was among the
most speculative strains of thinking at the IDCA, which served as a meeting point for designers
and systems theorists in the 1950s and 1960s. This discourse proved central to the transformation
of integrated design into a systematic discipline, an effort in which Unimark played a key role.
Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy was a leading proponent of systems theory,
but his work was an extension and clarification of a broader, early twentieth-century Unity of
Science movement.
34
This movement was based on the proposition, articulated in the 1920s and

33
Will Burtin, “Integration, The New Discipline in Design,” Graphis 5, no. 27 (July 1949): 233.
34
Pamela Lee has discussed the Unity of Science movement as the basis for a midcentury visual sensibility she calls
“think tank aesthetics” after the organizations that helped construct and operationalize it. See Pamela M. Lee, Think
Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020).
154
1930s by German philosopher Rudolf Carnap, among others, that all scientific statements and
concepts could be expressed in a universal physical language.
35
According to Bertalanffy, the
unity of science relied not on the reduction of all scientific disciplines to physics, but rather on “a
structural uniformity, manifesting itself by isomorphic traces of order in its different levels or
realms.”
36
He identified a shift from atomistic thinking, which involved the study of elementary
units, to systems thinking, which emphasized the observation of dynamic interactions (evident in
such fields as structural chemistry, organismic biology, and gestalt psychology). By focusing on
similar types of interactions that occur within organized systems, rather than on the differences
between individual units, scientists could identify laws governing diverse systems irrespective of
their component parts. General system theory allowed for the deduction of principles and models
that could be transferred easily from one field to another, thereby functioning as a universalizing
means of integration, a way to perceive all manner of phenomena in terms of their interrelations.
Although he conceived general system theory as a specifically scientific discipline,
Bertalanffy extrapolated further, noting that systems thinking was evident in the social sciences
and humanities as well. Historical inquiry, for example, appeared to have shifted from a focus on
individual decisions and actions to socio-cultural forces, be they “prejudices, ideologies, pressure
groups, social trends, growth and decays of civilizations.”
37
Almost any discipline, it seemed,
could be submitted to the explanatory and predictive power of the system. It was no surprise,
then, that designers also found in systems theory a model for how to render their work more
methodical. The implications for corporate design were twofold. First, systems thinking

35
See Rudolf Carnap, The Unity of Science (London: Kegan Paul, 1934).
36
Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, “An Outline of General System Theory,” The British Journal for the Philosophy of
Science I, no. 2 (August 1950): 165. This was Bertalanffy’s first English-language publication, but earliest writings
on the subject date to the 1940s.
37
Bertalanffy German historian Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918; 1922) and British historian Arnold J.
Toynbee’s A Study of History (1934–61) as representative of this shift.
155
reinforced the concept of design not as a series of discrete objects or images, but rather as a total
visual environment, or visual identity, that could be managed with a set of transferrable design
principles. Second, it legitimized efforts to identify structural correlations, or isomorphisms,
between the operations of designers and corporations. If approached as a systematic discipline,
design could be made more intelligible to the corporate manager and more easily applicable to
the work of corporate management.
The systems theorists who visited Aspen took up these themes in their discussions with
corporate executives and designers. Will Burtin introduced systems theory to the IDCA as
program chairman of the fifth conference in 1955. In addition to Canadian-American semanticist
S. I. Hayakawa and British inventor Bernard S. Benson, Burtin also invited Lancelot Law
Whyte, a Scottish philosopher and physicist engaged in the development of a “unitary principle”
capable of uniting theory across the sciences.
38
Whyte delivered a crash course on the current
state of scientific inquiry that must have appealed to the conference participants, for it earned
him another invitation to speak in 1959. In his 1955 talk, Whyte discussed a shift in the sciences
from atomistic to systematic thinking. While the doctrine of atomism advanced a view of natural
design as the summation of the movements of individual particles, Whyte argued that scientists
were becoming increasingly concerned “with the collective properties of complex systems
containing many entities, and have found themselves emphasizing the importance of symmetry,
structure, pattern, order, organization, form.”
39
Whyte sought to make general system theory
more accessible and germane for his audience in Aspen by framing principles of pattern, order,
and organization specifically as matters of design. “Art and science, philosophy and religion,
engineering and medicine, indeed all cultural activities are based on the ordering of experience

38
See Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unitary Principle in Physics and Biology (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1949).
39
Lancelot Law Whyte quoted in “International Design Conference,” Print 9, no. 6 (July 1955): 25.
156
and the exploitation of the resulting design,” he argued. This definition of design as “the ordering
of experience” was consistent with the IDCA’s founding concept of “integrated design” as a
means of interrelating all aspects of the visual environment. Furthermore, Whyte framed design
not simply as a matter of invention, but also one of organization. And he established this duality
as a universal law, claiming that “aesthetic spontaneous components and deliberate systematic
components are both present in nearly all human activities.”
40

Later IDCA speakers took up these themes, discussing the relationship between art and
science and the place of creativity in a systematized world. In 1957, Jacob Bronowski, a Polish-
British mathematician who worked as a military analyst during World War II, identified three
factors that govern the creative process: tools, materials, and functions. “If the designer has any
freedom,” Bronowski argued, “it is within this triangle of forces or constraints.”
41
In other words,
creativity was shaped rather than stymied by the systems that constrained it. That same year,
Bruce MacKenzie, editor of the IBM Journal of Research and Development, expressed a concern
that “truly creative designers are not being somehow supplanted or left to one side, to play only
with the superficial manifestations of real design in our increasingly automated society.”
42

Speaking again in 1959, MacKenzie reiterated the “dark and deepening suspicion that even man
can be replaced in the order of things.” To avoid this fate, the designer would have to become a
“bridge,” he claimed, as attuned “to the immense complex of the sciences, as to the rich artistic
traditions he has inherited.”
43
Such a transformation would allow the designer to transition from
the creation of objects to the configuration of systems capable of establishing “connections

40
Ibid., 25.
41
Jacob Bronowski, “The Evolution of Values,” in “7th International Design Conference in Aspen,” 1957, Box 3,
Folder 11, IDCA-GRI.
42
Bruce MacKenzie, “Contemporary Design: What does it Mean to the Industrial Scientist and Engineer?” in “7th
International Design Conference in Aspen,” 1957, Box 3, Folder 11, IDCA-GRI.
43
Bruce MacKenzie, “Design, Science and the Future,” in “Communication: The Image Speaks,” 1959, Box 5,
Folder 2, IDCA-GRI.
157
between neurology and electronics, between sociology and psychology, between mathematics
and anthropology, between linguistics and logic and between diagnostics and statistics.”
44

MacKenzie thus promoted a vision of designers as professionals who transcended disciplines and
integrated different forms of knowledge in order to become systems thinkers.
By the time Eckerstrom took over as IDCA program chairman in 1962, scientific inquiry
in general, and systems thinking in particular, had become staples of the design conference.
Eckerstrom, however, produced the most thoroughly interdisciplinary conference in the IDCA’s
history. Only a few years after having emphasized the differences between artistic and scientific
activity, he brought the two into close dialogue around the theme of “Environment.” Understood
in a sprawling sense as “the totality of man’s experience,” this theme reached “so deeply into so
many of the academic disciplines” that it seemed to call explicitly for the wholistic perspectives
of systems thinkers, individuals “who know no boundaries.”
45
Seven of the twenty-three
speakers at the 1962 conference were scientists or social scientists, each one at the forefront of
his respective field. They included American nuclear chemist Harrison Brown; British physicist
and military intelligence expert Reginald V. Jones; American anthropologist Oscar Lewis;
American psychiatrist Karl Menninger; American geneticist Theodore Puck; American virologist
and medical researcher Jonas Salk; and Austrian-American physicist Heinz von Foerster.
46

Von Foerster’s was both the most theoretically challenging and potentially generative
talk that the designers gathered in Aspen heard that summer. He opened with a brief overview of
game theory, the science of logical decision making, which was closely aligned with systems

44
Ibid.
45
Ralph E. Eckerstrom quoted in “International Design Conference Aspen 1962,” 1962, Box 15, Folder 741,
International Design Conference in Aspen papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of
Illinois at Chicago. [hereafter IDCA-UIC]
46
This impressive cast likely contributed to the major spike in attendance, which necessitated changes in the usual
conference format.
158
theory.
47
In particular, he argued that coalition structures are more strategically advantageous
than competitive structures because, “by joining, each element gets more out of the deal than if it
remains single.”
48
From this basic premise, von Foerster moved into an extended analysis of “the
old saying that ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts,’” demonstrating that while the saying
itself “clearly is nonsense,” it refers to a more profound and mathematically verifiable principle
of “super-additivity,” which holds that “by taking the mutual interaction of elements in a system
into consideration, the system as a whole indeed presents a more valuable entity than the mere
sum of its independent parts.”
49
In other words, it is through interactions among elements that the
“Environment-Environmentee” totality (von Foerster’s more dynamic substitute for the term
“environment”) generates value in the form of ordered relationships.
Von Foerster took this principle a step further, however, by insisting that “order presents
itself in the form of constraints on a system that is not free to do what it would do if it were not
subjected to these constraints.”
50
He thus demonstrated in a much more circuitous, yet empirical
and therefore compelling, fashion the basic premise at the heart of Bronowski’s earlier talk: that
constraints, even small ones, are not only conducive but in fact necessary to the creative act. Von
Foerster illustrated these principles at work in both natural and man-made systems. He exhibited,
on the one hand, the highly organized yet infinitely diverse snow-crystals produced by water
molecules, whose bonds are limited to specific angles; and on the other, the regular, repeating
patterns that an electron beam on a television screen can produce when submitted to a series of
simple constraints (fig. 3.4).

47
Hungarian-American polymath John von Neumann introduced game theory in 1928 with his paper “On the
Theory of Games of Strategy.” Although not referenced in his earliest articulations of general system theory,
Bertalanffy included game theory among its important advances in his later writings.
48
Heinz von Foerster quoted in “International Design Conference Aspen 1962,” 1962, Box 15, Folder 741, IDCA-
UIC.
49
Ibid.
50
Ibid.
159
These were highly complex theories, which, even in illustrated form, were undoubtedly
difficult for many designers to grasp, let alone apply to their work. It is unlikely that designers
employed general system theory in the methodical manner in which Bertalanffy conceived it as a
potentially operative scientific method. Instead, they likely performed the cursory conceptual
transpositions that concerned systems theorists such as von Foerster, reducing verifiable concepts
such as super-additivity to the realm of nonsensical platitudes. Even this process took time as
designers grappled with the implications that core systems concepts—such as the primacy of
ordered relationships over individual parts, or the existence of universal, transferrable laws and
principles—might have for design practice.
Eckerstrom’s thinking from this period is characteristic of the incremental, roundabout
way in which designers assimilated systems theory. He worked through these ideas while on the
conference circuit during the early 1960s. In April 1962, while organizing the Aspen conference
in which systems theorists made up nearly a third of the speakers, Eckerstrom spoke at the Art
Directors Club of New York’s Visual Communications Conference. After arguing that the key to
a successful corporate design program lay in the relationship between design and management,
he urged companies to approach design as they did science. “While industry may recognize the
advantages stemming from creative research and subsequent application of science,” Eckerstrom
observed, “it too often ignores the tangible results which can accrue from the creative research
and subsequent application of art.”
51
He identified the need for a concerted, systematic approach
to corporate design, similar to that taken in the area of scientific research.
Several months later, when speaking at Anderson College in Indiana, Eckerstrom seemed
to backtrack. Whereas von Foerster had argued that our experience of environment, like human

51
Ralph Eckerstrom, speech at the Visual Communications Conference organized by the Art Directors Club of New
York, April 19, 1962, Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, RIT. [hereafter VCDS]
160
consciousness itself, is produced by the “together-knowledge” of a rapport between individuals,
Eckerstrom espoused the view that, “esthetic experience is a personal thing. It is a singularly
human experience limited to a specific individual member of the human race.”
52
He maintained
that art and science were fundamentally incompatible. “If esthetics were a science,” Eckerstrom
argued, “we could assign a numberical [sic] rating of 4, 5 or 6 to a particular experience.”

He
therefore refuted the crux of general system theory: the existence of universal, transferrable laws.
Indeed, the following year Eckerstrom told students at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art
that those who wished to become designers would need to learn the language of business, which
“is quite different from the language of art.”
53

Yet by 1964, Eckerstrom seemed to have further internalized some of the core principles
of systems theory, particularly the concept of isomorphisms. That May he delivered a talk at the
University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, which explored the relationship between “Design
and Management.” Despite minor differences in viewpoint, Eckerstrom argued that designers
and managers shared a common goal of “maximum product success.” He also identified a more
abstract yet critical operational affinity between design and management, both “concerned with
the process of organization.”
54
“Design is synthesis,” Eckerstrom claimed. “It is the organization
of a mass of details, elements, features, and processes. […] Similarly with management—which
is concerned with the organizing of functions—manufacturing, sales, purchasing, merchandising,
distribution.”
55
Eckerstrom believed that by embracing this basic correspondence, designers
would be able to assert their influence more strongly in areas of engineering, communications,
and marketing, which had become increasingly dominated by technical experts.

52
Ralph Eckerstrom, address at Anderson College in Anderson, Indiana, September 1962, VCDS.
53
Ralph Eckerstrom, address at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art, June 10, 1963, VCDS.
54
Ralph Eckerstrom, “Design and Management,” May 5, 1964, VCDS.
55
Ibid.
161
The influence of systems theory on postwar design thinking was not confined to Aspen.
Lester Beall, a designer based on the East Coast and far removed from the IDCA network,
nevertheless participated in the discourse around systems, automation, and visual integration.
56

Beall’s attitude towards integrated design was conflicted. “Integration is a wonderful word,” he
confessed, but he also believed that it failed to capture the more nebulous yet vital elements of
the creative process. “If he just makes things work without any spark, without any fire, or fails to
equip his visualization with wings,” Beall argued, “then he’s only an integrator and not a
designer.”
57
This anxiety towards integration arose in part from its increasing association with
ideas of standardization and systematization. At the 1964 Visual Communications Conference,
Beall delivered a talk teeming with references to a postwar intellectual milieu dominated by the
rise of systems theory, cybernetics, and computerization. He conjured up the image of “an
automatic ‘think-world’ that will erase the individual as a sensory perceptive apparatus,” thus
casting corporations such as IBM, with its famous slogan “THINK,” as the architects of a new
world order in which computers replaced human brains as the nerve centers overseeing social
interactions.
58
Beall warned that a “growing dependence upon the digitizing of our living
processes” would “inevitably create a society of ‘look-alikes.’”
59
He thus translated the discourse
of social conformity into the digital age, warning that corporations and humans would be subject
to stifling uniformity under the new regime of computer-aided capitalist aesthetics.
Instead of simply observing these transformations, Beall urged designers to intervene, not
by resisting the rise of systems thinking, but rather by fusing it with the combinatory logic of

56
R. Roger Remington and Massimo Vignelli, Lester Beall: Space, Time, & Content (Rochester: RIT Cary Graphic
Arts Press, 2003). Eckerstrom considered Beall a leader in corporate design, listing him among those who grasped
problems of salesmanship as well as they understood design. See Eckerstrom, “Design and Management,” VSDC.
57
Lester Beall, “The Designer’s Contribution to Business,” May 2, 1952, Box 102, Folder 2, Lester Beall Papers,
Cary Graphic Arts Collection, RIT. [hereafter CGAC]
58
Lester Beall, “A Plea for the Individual and Individuality,” May 28, 1964, Box 102, Folder 27, CGAC.
59
Ibid.
162
integrated design. Just as earlier designers had sought to control rather than reject machines,
Beall envisioned a synthesis of human and computer that would transform the designer into a
sort of cyborg, “a wandering sensory apparatus, detecting experiences, absorbing some,
deflecting others, but building up a wealth of human phenomena.”
60
In other words, designers
had to assimilate and thereby humanize the language of systems if they hoped to maintain
control over creative decision-making in the computer age.
Regardless of the rigor (or lack thereof) with which designers applied systems theory, I
argue that these principles, even at their most dilute, helped designers navigate the convoluted
and seemingly contradictory relationships between art and science, creativity and control, and
individuality and cooperation. The designers and marketing experts at Unimark took an active
interest not only in the principles of systems theory, but also in translating them into practicable
tools and methods.

From Style Books to Identification Manuals
Despite his skepticism about systematizing design, Beall was an early contributor to the
development of corporate standards and identification systems. In the 1950s, he joined a team of
architects and designers that Frazar Wilde, president of the Connecticut General Life Insurance
Company, hired to update the company’s identity. Initially tasked with designing a new symbol,
Beall ultimately produced a complete integrated design program, published in the 1958
Connecticut General Style Book (fig. 3.5). This style book was a relatively early example of the
corporate design manual, an object type that became indispensable for organizations seeking to
implement and maintain comprehensive visual systems. The term “style book” became outdated
as corporate designers gravitated toward more technical terminology to describe their work. The

60
Ibid.
163
Connecticut General Style Book also differed from later manuals in its materiality. Like other
early examples, it was a slim, spiral bound volume, whereas later manuals were typically housed
in thick plastic binders with mechanical bindings, capable of expansion as the company and its
design program grew. The Connecticut General Style Book and other early manuals demonstrate
how designers sought to introduce ideas about systematization into the design process, and how
corporations increasingly embraced the resulting techniques of visual identification.
One of the main ways in which Beall’s Connecticut General Style Book differed from
later manuals was its use of an authorial voice to legitimize its contents. The book contained not
just Beall’s name, but his entire biography. This text included information about his design
training, career trajectory, clientele, and honors. It also referenced his publications, talks, and
exhibitions, as well as the professional associations in which he was involved. It portrayed him,
in other words, not simply as a skilled designer, but also as a highly active and well-connected
professional, characteristics that might have held particular value for the organization men and
women who used the style book to maintain Connecticut General’s visual identity.
Beall’s style book also had a strong pedagogical component—evidence, perhaps, of the
designer’s effort to establish underlying principles for an area of practice that was still largely
absent from design school curricula. Recall, for instance, that 1958 was also the year in which
Jay Doblin invited Massimo Vignelli to teach corporate identity at IIT at a time when, according
to Vignelli, “nobody was teaching corporate identity.”
61
Beall’s style book aimed “to encourage
and stimulate a better appreciation of the importance of consistently conceived printed material
within the accepted integrated corporate design concept.”
62
In addition to sections detailing the

61
Oral history interview with Massimo Vignelli, 2011 June 6–7. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
62
Connecticut General Style Book and Some Notes on Typographic Design (Bloomfield, CT: Connecticut General
Life Insurance Company, 1958), unpaginated.
164
components of a corporate style—including trademarks, typography, and color—the style book
also contained an introduction that theorized how design functions optically. Beall identified
three basic visual properties—form, texture, and color—inherent in every graphic design. By
carefully manipulating these essential elements, the designer creates the illusion of “planes,”
which, if properly interrelated, determine “the workability of the whole design.”
63
To clarify his
meaning, Beall included a “hypothetical cross-section of a design,” in which the gaze of a
disembodied eye appears to penetrate two red planes—marked “A” and “B”—along its path to
the black plane of the paper (fig. 3.6). Altering the size, color, or texture of either red plane
threatened to dissociate them from each other or from the page, jeopardizing the communicative
efficiency of the design as a whole. This kind of speculative, pseudoscientific design pedagogy
was entirely absent from later manuals, which focused on pragmatic solutions to corporate
design problems rather than abstract visual theory.
Perhaps most importantly, Beall’s style book was significantly less restrictive than later
corporate design manuals. Despite noting that “a company symbol must be consistently applied
within the framework of an accepted trademark policy,” Beall presented the “CG” symbol in a
wide array of sizes, configurations, and color schemes, and against a variety of grounds (fig.
3.7).
64
Although he discouraged its indiscriminate application, urging readers to carefully
consider the trademark as a “completely integrated” element of “the over-all design solution,”
Beall’s guidelines allowed for considerable flexibility. They also gave designers wide latitude to
choose from a startling array of eighteen colors, rather than the one or two colors typical of most
corporate identity programs (fig. 3.8). Finally, whereas most identity programs prescribed one or,
at most, two corporate typefaces, Beall specified three: two serif (Century and Clarendon) and

63
Ibid.
64
Ibid.
165
one sans-serif (Inland Gothic) (fig. 3.9). He argued that type design should be determined not by
“fixed rules,” but rather by “careful consideration” of legibility. He also acknowledged that
different paper stocks and printing processes (such as offset versus letterpress) might affect the
appearance of printed type. Effective type design therefore required the designer’s discerning
and expert eye. Beall’s style book thus allowed, or rather required, designers to make creative
decisions when implementing Connecticut General’s design program.
Paul Rand’s work for the Westinghouse Electrical Corporation also demonstrates how
ideas about corporate identity changed over time. In 1955, prior to hiring Rand, Westinghouse’s
advertising department printed a short pamphlet that sought to establish graphic standards while
at the same time permitting a relatively wide variety of permutations in the appearance of its
trademark and logotype (fig. 3.10). In 1961, Rand produced the spiral-bound Westinghouse
Graphics Identification Manual, which, in addition to presenting a new corporate identity, also
enforced greater restrictions around its implementation (fig. 3.11). In contrast to the company’s
earlier manual, Rand prescribed only four permissible iterations of the “W” symbol (fig. 3.12).
He also designed a custom gothic typeface notable for its distinct “st” ligature, which could not
be used in any word other than “Westinghouse” (fig. 3.13). Finally, Rand specified a single
primary color, “Westinghouse blue,” which could, however, be combined with a secondary color
to suit specific design problems (fig. 3.14). Rand’s Westinghouse manual was similar in form to
the Connecticut General Style Book and retained the designer’s signature. The manual, however,
enforced tighter protocols around the use of the Westinghouse trademark, logotype, and
corporate color. It even contained a section called “Use of the Manual,” which emphasized the
need for “standards and practices” in order to unify and strengthen the company’s image.
65

65
Westinghouse Graphics Identification Manual (Pittsburgh: Westinghouse Electric Corporation, 1961), 4.
166
Despite its rhetoric of standardization, the Westinghouse Graphics Identification Manual
resisted associations with conformity and uniformity, which postwar critics attached to corporate
culture.
66
“These few elements are merely tools for creating a cohesive corporate identification,”
the manual claimed. “They are not meant to hamper individual initiative and creative thinking
but to encourage it.”
67
The Connecticut General Style Book contained a similar statement,
advising readers that: “It is not practical or, for that matter, advisable to attempt to limit the use
of company accepted visual elements, such as type, trademark, colors, to confined areas of
design.”
68
This kind of language became ubiquitous in corporate design manuals after 1960. It
aimed not simply to maintain the possibility of creativity within a corporate design program, but
also to establish the system itself as a stimulus to creative thinking. While operating within the
constraints of the identification system, in-house designers could nevertheless exercise their
creative thinking by combining prescribed elements into workable configurations.

Researching the Problem
The corporate design manuals that Beall and Rand created served as early models for
those Unimark and other design firms produced from the mid-1960s onward. The manual was
Unimark’s main product, but it was only the most tangible result of a rigorous design process
that included distinct phases of research, development, and implementation. In order to manage
this multifaceted process, the company produced organizational charts and diagrams similar to
those that other large corporations employed (figs. 3.15 and 3.16). Although these charts differed
in certain particulars, changing as the firm grew and its services expanded, Unimark consistently

66
See William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956); and Herbert Marcuse,
One Dimensional Man (London: Sphere Books, 1968).
67
Westinghouse Graphics Identification Manual, 2.
68
Connecticut General Style Book, unpaginated.
167
portrayed research as a necessary preliminary stage of the corporate design process. In the
language of systems, charting a corporation’s design requirements constituted a form of data
input that was essential to the development and output of design standards. The notion of design
research was not new in the 1960s. It was necessary, to some extent, in any situation in which a
client commissioned an outside consultant designer. At its most basic, design research meant
familiarization with a problem, that is, learning about the client’s needs and how to meet them.
As design became more closely associated with science and management, however, it
assimilated more methodical research techniques. Unimark’s methods included comparative
analyses, interviews with company personnel, market research and public polling, and
observational studies.
Unimark’s research process commenced with a written proposal based on preliminary
discussions with the client’s upper management about the needs of the organization. These
proposals, which followed a more or less standard format, elaborated each phase of the design
process. But they also included prefatory statements that reveal how preoccupied Unimark was
with the language of systems thinking. One passage from a proposal for the Chicago Tribune is
characteristic and worth quoting at length:
The development of a corporate identity program such as this deals first with the overall
system which defines the corporate attitudes, objectives and design criteria, and secondly
with the subsystems which articulate this into its many, varied applications. These
subsystems of a well-developed corporate identity program should reflect order. Order
requires a system, and when a system is applied to a company such as the Tribune, the
benefits are significant:
1. It promotes effective communication and impact through consistency.
2. A system allows significant economies through standardization.
3. A systematized program can largely be implemented internally because it is
organized and easily understood.
4. A systemized approach is efficient for it provides maximum amount of control
with minimum amount of management supervision.
69

69
“The Chicago Tribune Corporate Identity Program,” n.d., Unimark International records, VCDS.
168
This type of language, present in all Unimark’s project proposals, joined the discourse of systems
theory to notions of consistency, economy, and control that appealed to the practical sensibilities
of business managers. Often circular in logic, the proposal communicated little concrete
information about the design process, but it did convey a sense of confidence, conviction, and
authority. In other words, the system was perhaps most operative in design research as a general
idea or aspiration, rather than as a workable method.
Unimark translated this form of systems thinking into graphic visualizations and tools.
One chart, likely intended as a reference guide, reveals an attempt to evaluate and compare the
corporate identities of sixty corporations (fig. 3.17). The system of analysis is based on sixteen
signifiers, ranging from the positive (“high quality” and “exciting”) to the neutral (“formal” and
“ordinary”) to the negative (“weak” and “low quality”). The extent to which each signifier
applies to a given corporation is indicated by dots of varying sizes; the larger the dot, the more
applicable it is. Finally, the chart arranges the corporations into nine sets, each of which includes
a number of shared signifiers. The corporations included in Set 103, for instance, are marked as
“dull, complex, old fashioned,” while those in Set 107 are considered “modern, strong, unique.”
By submitting the subjective experience of corporate imagery to the empirical logic of the chart,
Unimark aimed to systematize the work of corporate identification, rendering it more formulaic
and predictable, and therefore more conducive to the logic of corporate management.
Unimark emphasized its comprehensive approach to the preliminary planning stage of the
design process, also sometimes referred to as the “indoctrination period,” in order to distinguish
itself from competing design firms. One proposal, for instance, claimed that in comparison with
most other firms, at Unimark, “[m]ore time is spent in planning the program, establishing the
priorities and determining decision points of approval before extensive work in design is
169
undertaken.”
70
In addition to building a rapport between Unimark and its clients, this planning
phase also promised to provide substantial long-term savings in both time and money by
boosting efficiency further down the line and reducing the possibility of costly mistakes.
One of the first steps in Unimark’s research process was the graphic inventory of existing
materials, compiled in the form of design specimens and photographs. These materials might
include logotypes, trademarks, color schemes, typefaces, letterheads, signatures, product names,
corporate slogans, advertising themes or techniques, stationery, packaging, signage, vehicles, and
facilities. Unimark personnel categorized these materials in order to set the parameters for the
development of design criteria. They then developed a “master plan” that established the scope
of the program and the amount of time necessary for individual design tasks.
While Unimark’s staff members took graphic inventory, its senior management and
executive designers conducted in-depth interviews with the client’s top managers to better
understand their attitudes and objectives. Interviewers (or in some cases written questionnaires)
asked corporate management to list positive and negative qualities associated with their
organization’s image; to name its greatest assets and liabilities; to identify major problems in
need of immediate resolution; to speculate on possible ways to achieve change; and to cite
particularly successful or respected competitors. Since Unimark typically restricted these
interviews to upper management, its data were highly skewed, offering a top-down view of the
organization that glossed over the perspectives of lower-level employees.
In addition to surveying company personnel, Unimark also employed market research,
public polling, and observational studies to ascertain public perceptions. Clients often had market
research and polling data at hand from management consulting firms like Gallup Organization,

70
“Proposal for a Corporate Identity Program for Alitalia,” February 27, 1969, Unimark International records,
VCDS.
170
the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, or the Institute for Motivational Research.
Indeed, it was often after having obtained the results of these studies that corporate managers
decided to pursue design and marketing programs in the first place. When a corporate identity
program entailed the design of interiors, such as dealerships or retail stores, Unimark also
conducted studies of existing facilities to understand how customers moved through and used
these spaces. The firm even developed a marketing research service for retailers called “Instant
Market Analysis,” which used optical scanning equipment to obtain sales and distribution
information. Unimark executives and designers used the information obtained through these
various techniques to tailor the aims and limits of the master plans they devised.
Occasionally Unimark’s research methods proved ineffective or insufficient. In a 1971
audit of General Electric’s advertising program, Unimark’s marketing experts conceded that the
breadth and diversity of “GE’s total advertising effort defied the development of a measuring
tool that would provide a clear means of comparison.”
71
Despite conducting an exhaustive
inventory of slogans, themes, color schemes, and more, Unimark failed to find “a universal
means of evaluating the performance of this material.” The firm therefore relied more heavily on
“a collection of intuitive opinions” culled, correlated, and reviewed through interviews and
questionnaires.
72
When the systematic approach to design research failed, Unimark personnel
resorted to the more specious realm of opinion and intuition, glossing over the fact that even
allegedly “universal” measuring tools were contingent on subjective processes of selection and
evaluation. The point was not whether design could be made truly objective, then, but rather
whether Unimark could convey an adequate sense of certainty through the rhetoric of the system.

71
“Audit and Analysis of General Electric’s Current Advertising Program,” November 2, 1971, Unimark
International records, VCDS.
72
Unimark even stated that these interviews were “less investigative than confirming” given that the design firm
learned little it had not already anticipated finding.
171
It is perhaps unsurprising that Unimark failed to land the General Electric account after revealing
the fallibility of its systematic research methods.
Despite these shortcomings, Unimark executives remained confident in their research
methods, even submitting themselves to similar forms of scrutiny. In 1969, corporate planning
specialist Willner Park drafted “An Approach to Corporate Planning for Unimark International.”
In his attempt to establish an overall corporate philosophy for Unimark that encouraged growth,
innovation, and positive impact, Park argued it was necessary to approach design as a dynamic
organizational process, rather than as a static array of objects. This kind of systematic approach
to design was predicated on the view that, just as “mankind is beginning to realize that all things
exist in relation to each other,” so too was it necessary to consider design in the broadest way
possible as a way to organize the visual environment, breaking down the barriers that separated
different areas of design activity.
73
This logic had been central to Unimark’s founding. “It is
entirely natural,” Park observed, “that a group of individuals concerned about design as an
environmental discipline should join together as an organization such as Unimark, so that the
whole may be greater than the sum of its parts.”
74
In order to achieve “total design capability,”
Park urged Unimark executives to reinvest a portion of the company’s profits in the creation of a
general research division, similar to the research and development arm of a corporation. Such
research, he proposed, would generate universal principles adaptable to the needs of any client.
In fact, Unimark did occasionally reuse proposals to pitch similar design concepts to
different clients. This worked particularly well if the clients were in the same type of business. In
1972, for instance, Unimark adapted a 1971 report for JCPenney, entitled “JCPenney, Focal

73
Willner Park, “An Approach to Corporate Planning for Unimark International,” January 24, 1969, Unimark
International records, VCDS.
74
Ibid.
172
Points, Environmental Design Concept,” to create a proposal for one of the retailer’s main
competitors: Target. In the recycled document, every instance of “JCPenney” is simply scratched
out and replaced with “Target” (fig. 3.18). Some areas required more extensive edits. Instead of
JCPenney’s “eight or ten” merchandise categories, Target had only “three or four” that required
Unimark’s design services. And whereas the JCPenney brand, founded in 1902, held “historic”
value, Target, established in 1962, was characterized as “consistent.” The fact that Unimark
reused substantial portions of these proposals suggests that the firm identified a more or less
standard set of organizational and marketing needs. This way of thinking supported Unimark’s
conception of integrated design as something that could be standardized and systematized. For if
organizations posed a standard set of problems, then designers could conceivably develop a
standard set of solutions.

Developing Graphic Standards
Once a client had approved Unimark’s master plan, the design team commenced phase
two of the design process: the development of graphic standards. These standards, which might
be understood as the basic units of a corporate design system, included symbols, type, and
colors. Unimark designers subjected each to a process of standardization by making them
conform to certain formal, compositional, and chromatic specifications. Unimark then compiled
these graphic standards into corporate design manuals, which the client’s in-house design
department used to implement and maintain its corporate identity in the final phase of the
corporate design program. Yet even before being combined into an identification system, each
graphic standard served as an important mechanism of visual integration. Through repetition,
these standards helped interrelate distinct components of a corporation’s visual and material
culture, from letterheads and trucks to uniforms and signage.
173
The pursuit of standards in postwar corporate design followed earlier standardization
efforts that were central to the development of industrial mass production and the rise of
corporations during the nineteenth century.
75
In the early twentieth century, countries established
national associations to support the creation of standards relating to products, services, processes,
and personnel.
76
Increasing globalization and the perceived need for internationally applicable
standards led to the creation of the International Federation of the National Standardizing
Associations in 1926, which, after a hiatus during World War II, was reorganized as the
International Organization for Standardization in 1947. These organizations provided benefits to
industry by boosting productivity and minimizing errors, and to consumers by raising the quality
of goods and services. At the international level, they also facilitated trade and communication.
Graphic standards functioned similarly within the corporate environment by rendering the design
process more efficient, accurate, and replicable.
Standardization became a major interest of European designers in the early twentieth
century. In the 1920s, Herbert Bayer developed a universal alphabet that dispensed with capitals
and maximized differences between letterforms in an attempt to increase legibility. Although the
alphabet was never cast into type, Bayer advocated typographic standardization as director of the
Dessau Bauhaus’s printing and advertising workshop from 1925 to 1928, and he continued to
promote these ideas in the U.S. after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938.
77
The Gesellschafts- und
Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna was another key site for the creation of graphic standards. From
1926 to 1933, Otto Neurath led a group of economists and designers in the development of the

75
See David Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of
Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
76
For example, the Standardization Committee of German Industry (now the German Institute for Standardization)
was founded in 1917. A year later, a group of engineering societies and government agencies in the U.S. formed the
American Engineering Standards Committee (now the American National Standards Institute).
77
See Herbert Bayer, “Towards a Universal Type,” Industrial Arts 1, no. 3 (Autumn 1936): 238–244; and Herbert
Bayer, “On Typography,” Print 14, no. 1 (January 1960): 86.
174
Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics.
78
Later known as Isotype (an acronym for International
System of Typographic Picture Education), this systematic approach to the visual representation
of information sought to establish a universally legible pictographic language.
79
The Vienna
Method spread to the U.S. almost immediately, but garnered renewed attention in the 1960s. In
1966, Rudolf Modley, one of Neurath’s collaborators who had immigrated to the U.S. in the
1930s, partnered with anthropologist Margaret Mead to form Glyphs, Inc., an organization that
aimed to establish a universally comprehensible language of graphic symbols.
80

The corporate symbol, or trademark, which served as the cornerstone of every visual
identity program, was based on a related attempt to establish a universally recognizable corporate
impression.
81
Due to their prominent role in corporate image making, trademarks have received a
disproportionate share of scholarly attention relative to other areas of corporate design.
82
While
scholars have examined the symbolic and legal functions of trademarks, far less has been written
on their standardizing functions. For Unimark, a corporate symbol could only fulfill its role in
identifying an organization through consistent and accurate application. Since even the slightest

78
See J. A. Edwards and Michael Twyman, Graphic Communication through ISOTYPE (Reading: Department of
Typography and Graphic Communication, University of Reading, 1975); Eve Blau, “Isotype and Architecture in
Red Vienna: The Modern Projects of Otto Neurath and Josef Frank,” Austrian Studies 14 (2006): 227–59.; W. Boyd
Rayward, ed., European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008); and Christopher Burke, Eric Kindel, and Sue Walker, eds. Isotype: Design and
Contexts, 1925–1971 (London: Hyphen Press, 2013). For a discussion of how Isotype spread to the United States
during the decades around World War II, see K. Bresnahan, ‘“An Unused Esperanto”: Internationalism and
Pictographic Design, 1930–70,’ Design and Culture 3, no. 1 (March 2011): 5–24.
79
See Otto Neurath, International Picture Language: The First Rules of Isotype (London: Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trubner & Co., 1936).
80
Margaret Mead and Rudolf Modley, “Communication among All People, Everywhere,” Natural History, 77, no. 7
(August/September 1968): 56–63. See also Charles R. Crawley, “From Charts to Glyphs: Rudolf Modley’s
Contribution to Visual Communication,” Technical Communication 41, no. 1 (February 1994): 20–25.
81
See G. M. Ellwood, “Trade Marks That Tell,” Commercial Art, January 1925, 50; Clarence P. Hornung,
“Modernizing the Trade-Mark,” Advertising Arts, January 1930, 43; and Clarence P. Hornung, “The German Trade-
Mark: A Work of Genius,” Advertising Arts, April 1930, 39–40.
82
See Schwartz, “Commodity Signs”; Sherwin Simmons, “‘Hand to the Friend, Fist to the Foe’: The Struggle of
Signs in the Weimar Republic,” Journal of Design History 13, no. 4 (2000): 319–39; and Gorman, “The Role of
Trademark Law.”
175
variation in shape or color threatened to change a symbol’s basic character, design manuals
included precise guidelines for reproduction.
Occasionally the manuals that Unimark produced explained how designers had created,
or updated, a particular corporate symbol. For the South African communications conglomerate
Hortors Limited, Unimark’s Johannesburg office included a section in the corporate design
manual called “Symbol Development.” Using text and images, the manual explained how
rotating and tilting the seemingly “solid and immovable” letter “H” produced “a feeling of flux,
motion, dynamism and energy” that captured the company’s “forward movement” (fig. 3.19).
Such explanations were, however, inessential, and perhaps even inhibitive, to the standardizing
functions of corporate design manuals. It was precisely this ideational work—involving the
conception and rationalization of a particular design element—that graphic standards aimed to
obviate. Indeed, extensive descriptions and records of particular design concepts, often abundant
in the records of individual designers, rarely appear in design manuals or in the Unimark archive.
It is as if these standards materialized fully formed through immutable laws and principles, rather
than through the conceptual and material labor of designers and marketing experts. Without the
distractions of numerous options or justifications, clients would ideally view Unimark’s
proposed design standards as the only logical solutions to their identification needs.
More often, manuals showed how a symbol might be reconstructed. A corporate design
manual for the South African Mondi Valley Paper Company, for instance, included a section on
“Symbol Construction,” which showed how, using basic principles of geometry, designers could
recreate the corporate symbol by hand (fig. 3.20). Yet this, too, was extraneous to the logic of the
graphic standard as a device that could, and should, simply be reproduced (from master negatives
or specimens, or else from other printed matter) rather than recreated from scratch. The design
176
manual for Truman Limited, an East London brewery, demonstrated the corporate symbol’s
“correct proportion and relationship of elements” in the event that it had to be hand drawn, but
specified that, “as far as possible the symbol should be reproduced photographically from one of
the official master negatives” (fig. 3.21). Unimark thus specified not only the forms of corporate
symbols, but also their means of reproduction. These reproductive technologies saved time and
money, but they also permitted greater consistency, which meant improved recognizability.
Unimark designers approached type as a similarly standardizable graphic element that
contributed to the visual consistency of a corporate identity. Late nineteenth-century advances in
typesetting technologies, such as continuous casting and hot metal typesetting, enabled the
pursuit of typographic standards.
83
By the early twentieth century, these mechanized production
processes resulted in a profusion of available typefaces, which drew the disapproval of modernist
typographers such as Jan Tschichold. “The enormous number of typefaces available today […]
express only an absence of creativity and are the result of the feebly eclectic nature of the pre-
war period,” Tschichold argued in 1928 in The New Typography.
84
The ease and speed with
which designers could create new typefaces resulted not only in poorly conceived designs, but
also in careless combinations. Tschichold viewed the growing abundance of typefaces as a
distraction, since “all the innumerable things that can be expressed in writing, of whatever kind,
at any time, are set down in one—or at most two—kinds of lettering or type.” This preference for
a minimum of typefaces became a core tenet of midcentury typography and graphic design.
85

83
Companies such as the Monotype Corporation helped drive typographic innovations. See Lawrence W. Wallis, A
Concise Chronology of Typesetting Developments, 1886–1986 (London: Humanities Press, 1988); and Jesse Adams
Stein, Hot Metal: Material Culture and Tangible Labour (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).
84
Jan Tschichold, The New Typography, trans. Ruari McLean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 77.
85
See Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style (Point Roberts, WA: Hartley & Marks, 1992), 98, 107.
I am grateful to Amelia Hugill-Fontanel, Associate Curator at the Cary Graphic Arts Collection, RIT, for her
insights into this question of typefaces and contemporary design pedagogy.
177
Unimark’s designers adhered to this principle in their establishment of typographic
standards for corporate identity systems. According to Ford’s Corporate Identity Manual, for
instance, the number of typefaces available for corporate communications was theoretically
unlimited, but “the uniform application of typographic elements to emphasize sections of body
copy is much more effective than the haphazard use of several typefaces or other graphic
devices.”
86
The manual for Memorex, a computer tape and disk drive manufacturer, was even
more explicit: “The Helvetica family of typefaces should be specified for all graphics” (fig.
3.22). By selecting a standard typeface for its graphic communications, a company strengthened
the visual consistency and memorability of its visual identity. Like Tschichold and other early
modernists, Unimark designers had a strong preference for Grotesk, or sans-serif, typefaces, such
as Univers, Standard, and Folio, which they believed were inherently more legible and pleasing
to the eye.
87
Sans-serif typefaces were also more viable as standards because they were cheaper
to produce. Helvetica was by far Unimark’s most prescribed typeface.
88
Its “simple” letterforms
fulfilled the requirements of a standard or preferred typeface, such as scalability and adaptability.
It was also less likely to become outdated, according to Unimark, which meant it was suited to
costly visual identity systems that were supposed to be relatively permanent. Unimark designers
held a set of potentially competing beliefs. On one hand, they believed every message required
its own typographic solution; on the other, they maintained that sans-serif typefaces in general,
and Helvetica in particular, were exceptionally effective at communicating almost any message.
Helvetica therefore became the typographic standard of choice for most of Unimark’s clients.

86
Ford Corporate Identity Manual, Volume 1: Corporate Systems, n.d., Unimark International records, VCDS.
87
Unimark’s designers were not dogmatic, however, and occasionally prescribed serif typefaces if they felt a project
called for the qualities this type of lettering provided. For a discussion of legibility in typography and graphic design
as historically constructed, and for Tschichold’s position in this history, see Jessica D. Brier, “‘Typophoto’ and the
Reinvention of Photography in Weimar Germany” (Ph.D., University of Southern California, 2020).
88
Created by Swiss designer Max Miedinger, Helvetica was originally introduced by the Haas Type Foundry in
1957 as Neue Haas Grotesk.
178
Finally, Unimark maintained that colors, like symbols and typefaces, could contribute to
the visual cohesion of a corporate identification system. Fulfilling this organizational function
required adherence to strict color standards on the basis that a slight change in value, chroma, or
hue could disrupt a color’s identifiability. Unimark based its specification of color standards on a
robust field of color theory dating back to the optical observations of Isaac Newton. Important
advances in color theory came with the creation of the Munsell and Ostwald color systems in the
1910s and the formation in 1931 of the Inter-Society Color Council, whose members pursued
applied color research.
89
Egbert Jacobson’s Color Harmony Manual, which CCA published in
1946, was among the reference guides that allowed companies to standardize the selection and
application of color for, among other things, the creation of consistent corporate imagery.
90
Other
systems soon followed, including the Pantone Matching System (PMS), introduced in 1963. By
assigning colors numerical identifiers in addition to names, and by organizing them according to
value, chroma, and hue, these systems helped standardize color selection and matching. Unimark
used these systems to specify corporate colors, which, if used properly and with frequency, could
even become associated with a particular corporation. Upon seeing the combination of PMS 300
Blue with white and black, for instance, an image of Volvo might come to the viewer’s mind
(fig. 3.23). To maintain symbol, type, and color standards, corporate design manuals typically
included reproduction proofs and color swatches (fig. 3.24). Using such samples reduced the
amount of hand drawing or interpretation required of a client’s in-house design department,
which might result in deviations from the graphic standards. In some case, manuals even
specified the precise lighting conditions under which color matching should occur.

89
See Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012); and Laura Anne Kalba,
Color in the Age of Impressionism (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2017).
90
Egbert Jacobson, Color Harmony Guide (Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1946).
179
The corporate designer’s main role, I argue, was to conform to existing graphic standards,
rather than to create new graphic forms. Even Unimark’s designers, who wielded control over
the initial development of a corporate identity system, engaged chiefly in the specification, rather
than the creation, of design elements, such as typefaces or colors. One might even argue that the
trademarks they designed were simply reconfigurations of fundamental graphic forms. Yet
Unimark’s designers characterized standardization as a boon rather than a barrier to creativity.
Graphic standards, they argued, actually freed corporate designers to devote their energy to other
tasks, namely the combination of graphic elements to create effective visual communications.
For Unimark, the issue was not so much one of creativity versus conformity, but rather of where
creativity resided in the corporate design process. The concept of visual integration, of bringing
together existing graphic standards to create new identification systems, became the crux of the
corporate designer’s creative freedom.

Implementing Identification Systems
The individual standards that comprised a visual identity were less critical to corporate
identification than how they connected to create cohesive visual systems. The design manuals
that Unimark produced contained or referenced numerous organizational tools to assist with the
combination of graphic standards. These tools—such as subsystems, grids, and computer-aided
design software—helped produce systems that were essentially self-regulating, thereby reducing
the amount of time, labor, and repetition required for corporate design. By automating the design
process, the introduction of systems raised serious questions about where creative agency resided
in the implementation and maintenance of a corporate design program. Yet because Unimark and
other design firms characterized systems as frameworks rather than substitutes for the integrative
work of the designer, they operationalized systems as a new form of disciplined creativity.
180
The corporate design manual was the most essential tool for maintaining a corporate
design system. Its sections addressed not only design standards, but also how to combine these
standards into subsystems, such as corporate signature, stationery, and signage systems. For
instance, the Graphic Identification Standards for The Wickes Corporation, a Michigan-based
home improvement retailer, contained a section on “Signature Systems” that showed how to
combine the company’s trademark (in the preferred corporate colors) and logotype to create four
versions of a corporate signature (fig. 3.25). This signature was, in turn, one component of the
company’s “Stationery Systems,” which demonstrated how to combine the signature with other
typographic elements when laying out letterheads, envelopes, business cards, and other printed
matter (fig. 3.26). Applying standards to signage required additional considerations of size and
placement (fig. 3.27). As these nested subsystems grew in complexity—from symbol to
signature to stationery to signage—they approximated more and more closely the complexity of
the overall identification system and the visual experience of corporate culture itself. While
graphic standards were the essential building blocks of corporate identification, viewers most
often encountered corporations not as isolated symbols, but rather as conglomerations of many
visual (and perhaps other sensory) components.
The grid was one key mechanism for combining and organizing graphic elements. It was
a highly operative concept in art and art criticism of the 1960s and 1970s. Alloway, Lucy
Lippard, John Elderfield, Rosalind Krauss, and others discussed the grid variously as a “factual
display,” “structure,” “framework,” “armature,” and “emblem of modernity.”
91
Challenging this
latter point, Hannah Higgins has shown how the grid, a “dominant mythological form of modern

91
See Lawrence Alloway, “Introduction,” in Systemic Painting (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation,
1966); John Elderfield, “Grids,” Artforum 10, no. 9 (May 1972); and Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (Summer
1979): 50–64. See also Lucy Lippard’s exhibition “Grids” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (January 27—March 1, 1972).
181
life,” actually has a long history dating back to Neolithic brick building.
92
Yet if the grid was not
a specifically modern form, twentieth-century designers nevertheless found it to be especially
useful for organizing visual information in an increasingly complex and image-saturated world.
The logic of the grid was evident, for instance, in Tschichold’s The New Typography, which, in
addition to the use of standard paper sizes, also advocated for the standard sizing and placement
of text and image blocks on the page (fig. 3.28). Paired with the principle of asymmetry, the grid
for Tschichold was a way both to impose visual order and to give designers greater freedom. Le
Corbusier’s Modulor, a “universal harmonious measure” developed in an effort to unite the
seemingly irreconcilable European metric and U.S. customary systems of measurement, aimed to
strike a similar balance between order and freedom. Based on mathematical principles and the
effort to regulate space, the Modulor was, according to Corbusier, “a tool for those who create
[…] and not for those who execute.”
93
In a series of “panel exercises,” Corbusier demonstrated
the “infinity of combinations” possible with the Modulor, and thus its potential role as an
“inestimable boon” for planners and designers in many fields (fig. 3.29).
Building on these principles of modular organization, postwar corporate designers in the
U.S. employed the grid as a way to systematize the corporate visual environment. Grid systems
were particularly effective for the layout of two-dimensional printed matter, and designers often
prescribed them as tools for the implementation of institutional advertising programs. In 1966,
Unimark created the Alcoa Print Advertising Coordination Program, which used a modular grid
system to guide the design of all magazine and newspaper advertisements. According to the
manual, the grid made it possible “to integrate all of the communicative elements of design into a

92
Hannah B. Higgins, The Grid Book (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009). See also Jack H. Williamson, “The Grid:
History, Use, and Meaning,” Design Issues 3, no. 2 (Fall 1986): 15–30.
93
Le Corbusier, The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture
and Mechanics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 178. [Emphasis original]
182
more formal relationship with each other.”
94
It provided a visual reference, or formula, for the
design of a printed page (fig. 3.30). Yet Unimark’s designers were careful to point out that “the
grid does not inhibit individual creativity,” but rather offered a basis for a form of “design
discipline” that was necessary for the coordination of an extensive advertising program. Other
Unimark manuals included similar disclaimers. For Halle Brothers, a Cleveland-based
department store chain, Unimark created the Newspaper Advertising Control Document, which
noted that, “while the grid system is discipline, it is by no means intended to restrict one’s
creative effort. Maximum flexibility and variation can still be achieved within the system.”
95

Unimark designers conceived the grid system as an organizational constraint within
which creativity was not simply possible, but also encouraged and essential. Indeed, Higgins has
identified these qualities of constant flux and variation as intrinsic to the grid as such, a form
“endowed with a most human contradiction: a vigorous free spirit and a propensity to control.”
96

According to Ken Hiebert, who collaborated with Rand on Westinghouse’s corporate identity,
the grid may be formulaic, but it was no “magic formula” or “substitute for inventiveness.”
“Although disciplinary in nature,” he conceded, “the modular grid is not as restrictive as it may
at first seem. Rather, it is a guide which frees the designer from the need to make tiresome and
often arbitrary decisions, so that he may work logically and methodically, while he explores the
possibilities of choice and chance.”
97
This ability to merge creativity and control made the grid
an even greater preoccupation for designers from the late 1960s onward.
98

94
Alcoa Print Advertising Coordination Program (Pittsburgh: Aluminum Company of America, 1966), 8.
95
The Halle Brothers Co. Newspaper Advertising Control Document (Cleveland: The Halle Brothers Co., 1967).
96
Higgins, The Grid Book, 11.
97
Paul Rand and Ken Hiebert, A Modular Grid System in Graphic Design (Pittsburgh: Westinghouse, 1969).
98
See Allen Hurlburt, The Grid: A Modular System for the Design and Production of Newspapers, Magazines, and
Books (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1978); Massimo Vignelli, Grids: Their Meaning and Use for Federal
Designers (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, 1978); and Josef Müller-Brockmann, Grid Systems
in Graphic Design: A Visual Communications Manual for Graphic Designers, Typographers and Three
Dimensional Designers (Niederteufen: Niggli, 1981).
183
The hand-drawn grid also prefigured and inspired computer-based drafting systems that
became indispensable to Unimark and other design firms.
99
Unimark’s designers took an early
interest in computer-aided design (CAD) software, a technology that first became commercially
available in the mid-1960s.
100
Before the advent of CAD, designers relied on the painstaking
process of manually drafting camera-ready mechanicals or “paste ups”—completed designs
ready to be photographed by a stat camera and subsequently printed. Even a simple letterhead
required the careful measuring, rendering, and composition of typographic elements. This labor
is evident in Will Burtin’s process for creating a page of typographic standards for Upjohn’s
Corporate Identity Manual (fig. 3.31). After organizing the letters on a page of tracing paper,
Burtin (or more likely an assistant), cut up sections of type and pasted them carefully onto a
piece of construction paper. This paste up was then photographed to create the final page of
typographic standards for Upjohn’s manual. Even though CAD software did not immediately or
entirely eliminate hand drafting, it significantly accelerated certain stages of the design process
by offering designers an alternative problem-solving and time-saving tool.
In the late 1960s, Unimark established an Information and Design Systems Division
under the direction of Richard Branham to explore CAD as an “opportunity for the creation and
application of design systems and techniques in a variety of fields.”
101
According to Branham,
designers were adept at creating objects but often “failed at the systems level where design must
be considered as an integral function within the marketing/merchandising/management
system.”
102
In order to operate on this systems level, Unimark partnered with Cyphernetics, a

99
See the final chapter, “Network,” of Higgins, The Grid Book, 235–55.
100
Computer-aided design software grew out of the utility programs that software designers created in the 1950s for
use in the maintenance of the US Air Force’s Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense network.
Ivan Sutherland’s SKETCHPAD, a “man-machine graphical communication system,” marked a turning point in the
application of computer science for the development of design tools.
101
Unimark International Annual Report, 1969, Unimark International records, VCDS.
102
Richard Branham, “The Case for Computerized Design,” Industrial Design (March 1970): 23.
184
computing company engaged in the development of a time-sharing computer network called the
Cyphernet System. The partnership’s goal was to develop computer-aided design programs for
use by Unimark and its clients (fig. 3.32). One initiative input graphic standards into computer
programs to help manage the tedious task of laying out pages. After setting up the program, the
designer simply input text and the computer automatically formatted the pages according to the
stored standards (fig. 3.33). Another program, called Advanced Remote Graphic Display Scope
(ARDS), was capable of transforming product design from a “handicraft procedure” into an
accelerated sketching system. Using a “‘mouse’ drawing instrument,” designers could input XY
coordinates onto a gridded computer screen and could even view the resulting forms in three-
dimensional perspective (fig. 3.34). A high-speed plotter at Cyphernet’s computer center then
plotted the computer-generated designs. Other applications included the development of signage
systems and the analysis of marketing information. All promised to save time and resources
while elevating the quality of Unimark’s output.
These automated computer programs concerned many designers, who were skeptical of
computer programming as a technology and the changes to design practice that it heralded. Yet
Branham argued that while designers often perceived the very phrase “computer design” as a
threat to creativity, they should instead view computers as tools that only become operative in
the hands of capable designers. “The computer creates nothing,” he observed, “but forces logical
and more careful organization of problems to which creative design can be applied.”
103
Branham
applied the same logic to computerized design that Unimark designers applied to analog methods
of standardization and systematization. “Instead of a relatively crude intuitive approach,” he
claimed that “the computer forces the designer to acquire a disciplined approach to his work.”
104

103
Ibid., 29.
104
Ibid., 23.
185
The issue was not whether computers, or any other type of system, posed a credible threat to the
designer as a creative individual, but rather how these systems transformed the very nature of
creativity from an intuitive to a disciplined endeavor.

Family Resemblance: Creating “A unilook for Unicorp”
Despite Unimark’s emphasis on research as a way to assess the particular design and
marketing needs of its clients, the graphic standards and identification systems that it developed
for different corporations were often similar. Viewed together and alongside the work of other
major design firms, these corporate identities signal the emergence of an overarching corporate
visual style. As evidence of Unimark’s international ambitions, this style shared much with the
International Typographic Style. Based on typographic principles developed in Germany, Russia,
and the Netherlands during the 1920s and 1930s and further codified in Switzerland during the
1950s, this style was characterized by asymmetry, gridded layouts, the use of san-serif typefaces
(especially Helvetica after its introduction in 1957), and the subordination of personal expression
in favor of allegedly universal and scientific approaches to design. As design historian Philip
Meggs has observed, “corporate design and the International Typographic Style were linked into
one movement” in the U.S.
105
As a result of this close association, the postwar corporate visual
environment was increasingly dominated by a set of standards and systems that was surprisingly
limited relative to the profusion of graphic design technologies and techniques.
Corporate designers had a vexed relationship with the term “style.” On the one hand, they
associated it with fleeting trends subject to the whims of executives and consumers, rather than
to empirically deduced design principles and laws. Czech designer Ladislav Sutnar, for instance,
hoped that the “development of mechanical devices for information processing, integration and

105
Philip B. Meggs, A History of Graphic Design (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1983), 396.
186
transmission” would spell the end of the graphic designer’s reliance on “the smart gimmicks, the
short-lived effects of contradictory modes, the emotional style revivals, the speculative new false
styles.”
106
These notions of evanescence, emotionalism, deception, and uncertainty seemed to
contradict an approach to design as systematic and therefore secure, logical, and even inevitable.
Yet style could also function on other registers as a practiced way of doing something or as a
means of achieving visual coherence. In these capacities, “style” served as an operative concept
for designers engaged in the development of corporate identification systems. Indeed, Sutnar,
among others, employed the term “house style” to refer to individual institutional identities, as
well as the practice of merging companies into legally, but also visually, affiliated corporations.
“A planned integration of the house style of related companies with an easy to recognize family
resemblance represents a further extension of an individual house style,” he argued. “Even when
each company is in a different field a unified design solution should be considered.”
107
Unimark
took this concept of the house style a step further by developing universal design standards and
systems that could potentially be applied to all companies, whether or not they were related.
Based on their conviction that certain standards were particularly, or even universally,
applicable, Unimark’s designers often reused graphic standards in part or in their entirety. Their
trademark designs display what me might call in the period lingo a strong “family resemblance.”
Taking a methodological cue from Unimark itself, I have inventoried and aggregated a selection
of these designs in order to analyze and compare their formal properties (fig. 3.35). The marks
consist of a relatively uniform set of geometrical forms—circles, semicircles, and arches, on the
one hand; triangles, arrows, and parallelograms, on the other (though relatively few squares or

106
Ladislav Sutnar and Contemporary Arts Center, Ladislav Sutnar: Visual Design in Action (Hamilton, OH:
Champion Papers, 1961).
107
Ibid.
187
rectangles). They are, for the most part, symmetrical (whether reflectional or rotational). And
most exhibit radial directionality, emanating out from, or converging onto, a central point. There
are outliers, to be sure (such as Ford’s cursive emblem). Yet the corpus as a whole coheres
around a formal language that is distinctive and tied to this period of trademark design.
Unimark’s fixation on specific typefaces was even more apparent than its periodic return
to certain symbolic forms. By the mid-1970s, Helvetica had become one of the most popular and
best-selling typefaces in the U.S., an unofficial standard for everything from newspapers to
multinational corporations. Designers viewed Helvetica’s letterforms as particularly easy to read,
but also as uniquely expressive of certain modern values, such as neutrality, authority, and
cleanliness. These qualities were not inherent in the typeface, as most corporate design manuals,
and some designer-writers and critics, claimed.
108
Instead, they stemmed from, and helped
mitigate, anxieties endemic to a contemporary culture that seemed to be bursting at its seams.
109

“The perfect balance of push and pull in Helvetica characters reassures us that the problems
threatening to spill over are being contained,” one reporter claimed, elaborating that the
widespread use of Helvetica “expresses our need for security, for visual proof—if nothing else—
that the world’s machinery still runs.”
110

Given Helvetica’s remarkable popularity and increasing ubiquity, some critics wondered
whether the typeface actually undermined a company’s aim to establish a unique public image.
In their efforts to distinguish themselves through costly corporate identity programs, corporations
ironically began to look “more and more alike—almost like one big corporation. A unilook for

108
Ford’s Corporate Identity Manual, for instance, stated: “Because of their different design characteristics, some
sizes and styles are inherently more readable and pleasing to the eye than others.”
109
For an excellent study of the historical and cultural contingency of graphic legibility, see Michael J. Golec,
“Graphic Visualization and Visuality in Lester Beall’s Rural Electrification Posters, 1937,” Journal of Design
History 26, no. 4 (November 2013): 401–15.
110
Leslie Savan, “This Typeface is Changing Your Life,” The Village Voice (June 7, 1976).
188
Unicorp.”
111
Others were even more critical. James Wines, founder of the environmental design
firm SITE, condemned Helvetica not simply as the symbol of a homogenizing consumer culture,
but also as an instrument of subjugation. “Helvetica is part of a psychological enslavement,” he
argued. “It’s a subconscious plot: getting people to do, think, say what you want them to.”
112

Helvetica’s ubiquity was most apparent on the ground, at the level of the street, the exhibition
hall, and the shopping mall (fig. 3.36). The typeface was at its most visible in such public spaces,
where it could slip easily into the minds of passersby, lubricating their “grooves of thought and
taste, making the product whose name it bears easier to accept.”
113
Helvetica was also a product,
marketed and sold by the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, a Brooklyn-based subsidiary of the
German company Linotype Gmbh, and it was perhaps most effective at selling itself.
114

Meanwhile, the colors Unimark prescribed often became associated not with a particular
company, but rather with broad notions of desire and salability. Perhaps the clearest example was
Pantone Super Warm Red, a favorite of the Vignellis and a color that Unimark often specified
for clients (fig. 3.37).
115
At Unimark, Massimo used it for the New York City Transit Authority,
Knoll, and American Airlines, among others (fig. 3.38). After forming their own design firm, the
Vignellis continued to use Super Warm Red for clients such as Du Pont and Brookstone, as well
as for their own printed matter and publications (figs. 3.39 and 3.40). In fact, the Vignellis used
Super Warm Red so often that it became known in the design field as “Vignelli Red,” associated
most closely with the designers themselves. Yet more than any specific color, it was the color-
matching capabilities of the Pantone Matching System that endeared it to corporate designers.

111
Ibid.
112
Ibid.
113
Ibid.
114
Type foundries also had a role, as well as a clear stake, in defining the parameters of typographic legibility. See
Mergenthaler Linotype Company, The Legibility of Type (Brooklyn: Mergenthaler Linotype Company, 1935).
115
After Pantone discontinued Super Warm Red, the Vignellis opted for PMS Warm Red and, later, PMS 172.
189
The emergence of a postwar corporate visual style relied not on any individual standard,
but rather on the identification systems, laid out in corporate design manuals, that almost every
major corporation employed. For once corporations began to implement graphic standards in the
same ways, then even if the individual standards differed, they produced similar overall visual
effects. The fact that Unimark used the same grid systems to lay out advertisements for different
companies meant that the resulting designs, though different in content, shared an underlying
structure that linked them on a perhaps subconscious level (fig. 3.41). The same could be said of
the signage, stationery, and packaging designs that Unimark produced (fig. 3.42).
Unimark was not the sole architect of this visual style. The techniques it employed were
consistent with those of other design firms, large and small, which shared a concept of design as
a systematic process. Designers such as Beall, Rand, and Burtin, and firms such as Lippincott &
Margulies, Chermayeff & Geismar, and the Center for Advanced Research in Design, produced
manuals that were similar in form, content, and concept (fig. 3.43). They shared standards and
sections, but also principles that were central to a systems theory of design. First, they asserted
the collaborative nature of corporate design, which required interdepartmental cooperation, that
is, for the organization to work as a system. Second, almost all manuals emphasized corporate
design as a necessarily integrative process capable of managing the corporation’s structural and
visual complexity. Creating a legible and recognizable image required the interrelation of
numerous parts into a single visual system. Finally, many manuals insisted that standardization
and systematization supported rather than inhibited the designer’s freedom and creativity. By
combining, codifying, and reiterating these basic ideas, corporations and corporate designers
produced a veritable systems theory of design that reconfigured designers’ attitudes toward
creativity and control and reaffirmed their roles in shaping the corporate visual environment.
190
Conclusion
The corporate visual style that Unimark helped create extended far beyond any single
corporation. Many of Unimark’s clients were municipalities and transportation agencies, which
tasked the firm with designing “environmental graphic systems” that consisted of all the same
standards employed in corporate identification systems, including symbols, typefaces, and
colors. These projects were not dissimilar from the environmental designs—such as office, retail,
and dealership spaces—that were part of many corporate identity projects, and which contributed
in crucial ways to the development of a pervasive corporate visual style. By extending this style
to all kinds of commercial, civic, and cultural spaces, Unimark helped shape the broader postwar
American visual environment in the image of the corporation.
Some of the first corporate identity programs were for transportation agencies. Transit
systems were prime targets for identification systems long before the term existed. Unimark’s
application of standards and systems to transportation, way-finding, and other environmental
graphics was not so much a new development, then, as it was a return to origins. Beginning in
1908, British transport administrator Frank Pick instituted a cohesive visual identity for the
London Underground, employing designer Edward Johnston, among others, to develop typeface,
poster, and signage designs.
116
Fifty years later, a similar type of project proved formative for
Unimark. In the early 1960s, Bob Noorda gained fame for his total design program for the Milan
Metro, a project that earned him Italy’s prestigious Compasso d’Oro award for design (fig. 3.44).
This project inspired the well-known work that Noorda and Massimo Vignelli developed for the
New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA) beginning in the mid-1960s, which helped establish

116
See Justin Howes, Johnston’s Underground Type (Harrow Weald, Middlesex: Capital Transport, 2000); Mark
Ovenden, London Underground by Design (London: Particular Books, 2013); and David Ashford, London
Underground: A Cultural Geography (Liverpool: University Press, 2013).
191
Unimark’s reputation as a leading design firm worldwide. In 1970, Unimark completed the New
York City Transit Authority Graphic Standards Manual, which established a comprehensive
system of identification, directional, and information signage in order to orient passengers and
direct them to their destinations (fig. 3.45).
117

Unimark’s work for the NYCTA coincided with a broader, international preoccupation
with transportation infrastructure as an area in critical need of systemic improvement. In 1967,
designer George Nelson and Museum of Modern Art curator Mildred Constantine organized the
symposium, “Transportation Graphics: Where Am I Going? How Do I Get There?,” which
addressed problems of information design for transit and some of the solutions then underway.
118

“In a travel-oriented society we are lost,” the symposium announcement claimed. “The problem:
too many signs,” and too many of them unintelligible.
119
In his opening remarks, Nelson noted
that, “the need which has been created by the mass of travelers and by the speed of movement is
not universal.”
120
Yet the principles that the international panel of speakers offered were highly
similar. Again and again, they spoke of the requirements for simplicity and brevity, legibility and
intelligibility. They identified a need to codify patterns of mass behavior and to develop
scientific research techniques. They subordinated affect and aesthetics to logic and practicality.
They advocated unified and integrated approaches over piecemeal solutions. And they insisted
on consistency and uniformity of standards and systems at both national and international levels.

117
See Paul Shaw, Helvetica and the New York City Subway System: The True (Maybe) Story (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 2011); and Peter B. Lloyd and Mark Ovenden, Vignelli Transit Maps, (Rochester: RIT Cary Press, 2012). In
addition to the NYCTA, Unimark also created signage systems for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit
Authority, the Regional Transportation District/Colorado, and the Sao Paolo Subway.
118
One of the speakers was Unimark’s own Bob Noorda, who presented his work on the Milan Metro. As an
indication of its commitment to the subject, Unimark published the symposium’s proceedings in its quarterly house
organ, Dot Zero. For more information on Dot Zero, see the short interview between Michael Beirut and Massimo
Vignelli, “Dot Zero,” Design Observer (September 15, 2010), https://designobserver.com/feature/dot-zero/11547. In
1972, Unimark also sponsored another seminar in Chicago called “Environmental Systems: Planning and Control.”
119
Mildred Constantine, “Editorial,” in Dot Zero no. 5 (Fall 1968): 2.
120
George Nelson, “Introduction,” in Dot Zero no. 5 (Fall 1968): 2.
192
The graphic systems they presented revealed that these widely accepted principles resulted in
striking, if predictable, similarities in terms of typefaces, symbols, and formatting (fig. 3.46).
Perhaps less well known than Unimark’s work for the NYCTA is the fact that this project
coincided with an experiment in aboveground environmental graphics. In 1967, New York City
Mayor John Lindsay tasked Unimark with producing “a uniform guide for street layout and
design.”
121
The project commenced with a study of 53
rd
Street and encompassed everything from
signage and lighting to benches, bus shelters, and telephone booths (fig. 3.47). Members of the
City Planning Commission worried that in lieu of a concerted approach, each city department
would conduct its own study and implement its own graphic standards, creating an environment
that was no less visually cluttered, “even if it was good clutter.” Lindsay hired Unimark in part to
maintain a consistent approach since the firm was already involved with the NYCTA. Although
abandoned, the 53
rd
Street project was a logical extension of the corporate identification system,
integrating all aspects of the urban environment through coordinated environmental graphics.
Unimark applied the same systematic approach, and often the same standards, to other
environmental graphics projects. In 1971, the firm completed an interior signage system for
Denver General Hospital (fig. 3.48). Through research on typestyles, colors, legibility, materials,
and economics, Unimark claimed to have created “a clear, clean and concise system which can
be easily applied to hospitals of any size or speciality [sic].”
122
In fact, it had first developed the
signage system for Chicago’s Mercy Hospital.
123
The use of sans-serif type and standard symbols
within a typographic grid meant that this signage system closely aligned with others that
Unimark developed for municipal, commercial, and cultural institutions.

121
Steven V. Roberts, “Mayor Hires Consultants to Study Street Design,” New York Times (November 14, 1967).
122
“Analysis of Signage Requirements for Denver General Hospital: Preliminary Report,” August 18, 1970, VCDS.
123
The ease with which Unimark’s designers reused signage standards can be attributed partly to its use of CAD
software, which allowed them to simply plug in information into preexisting programs.
193
Beginning in 1972, this corporate visual style reached further into public life when Nancy
Hanks, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts under Presidents Richard Nixon and
Gerald Ford, formed the Federal Design Improvement Program.
124
Under this program, forty-
five agencies, from the Department of Transportation to the Environmental Protection Agency,
received new identities by design firms such as the Center for Advanced Research in Design and
Chermayeff & Geismar.
125
In 1977, Massimo Vignelli created the Unigrid System for the
National Parks Service to standardize its promotional materials, and in 1978 the NEA published
Grids: Their Meaning and Use for Federal Designers, based on a seminar for federal graphic
designers that Vignelli led in 1976 (fig. 3.49).
126
And in 1980, Vignelli coauthored with Peter
Laundy a handbook that outlined best practices in graphic design for non-profit organizations.
127

Through these projects and publications, corporate designers disseminated the logic of systems
design into almost every sector of the visual environment.
While the systems approach to design became dominant in the 1960s and 1970s, it was
neither infallible nor absolute. For this was also the period in which postmodern thinking entered
design practice. In 1966, a year before Nelson and Constantine invited designers and public
servants to MoMA to discuss systematic solutions to the problem of transportation graphics, the
museum had published architect Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.
Venturi’s “gentle manifesto” offered a distinctly nonsystematic vision of design as “hybrid rather

124
Diana Budds, “Nixon, NASA, and How the Federal Government Got Design,” Fast Company (March 6, 2017),
https://www.fastcompany.com/3068659/nixon-nasa-and-how-the-federal-government-got-design. This program
included the Federal Graphics Improvement Program (active from 1972 to 1981) and the Federal Architecture
Project (active until 1977).
125
See Neil Kleinman, “Design and the Federal Government,” Print 27, no. 4 (July 1973): 54–9; Rose DeNeve,
“Federal Design Gets Off the Ground,” Print 29, no. 1 (January 1975); and Robert A. Propper, “Fedgraphics
Revisited,” Print 31, no. 6 (November 1977): 33–39, 84, 86, 88.
126
Massimo Vignelli, Grids: Their Meaning and Use for Federal Designers (Washington, D.C.: National
Endowment for the Arts, 1978).
127
Peter Laundy and Massimo Vignelli, Graphic Design for Non-Profit Organizations (New York: American
Institute of Graphic Arts, 1980).
194
than ‘pure,’ compromising rather than ‘clean,’ distorted rather than ‘straightforward,’ ambiguous
rather than ‘articulated,’ […] redundant rather than simple, vestigial as well as innovating,
inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear.”
128
The following year, simultaneous with
the “Transportation Graphics” symposium, Venturi, together with Bruce Adams and Denise
Scott Brown, conducted a studio project on the subway under the auspices of Yale University’s
School of Architecture and the New York City Planning Commission, which they called “Mass
Communication on the People’s Freeway, or Piranesi Is Too Easy.” In contrast to MoMA’s
transportation symposium, Venturi, Adams, and Scott Brown argued that the subway’s “despised
clutter is not so much chaotic as dynamic: we did not set out to neaten public images.”
129
They
insisted that the signage systems employed in the interiors of civic buildings would not work
underground, that “life is too complex for a one-medium approach.” And they reframed the
transit system not as a space to move through as quickly and efficiently as possible, but rather as
a space to experience and inhabit, “an acculturating, educating and civilising medium.”
130
They
thus spotlighted the limits, or blindspots, of a systems theory of design.
Unimark’s attempt to systematize design was one manifestation of a wide-ranging
postwar preoccupation with integration, in which the system appeared as a useful mechanism for
comprehending as whole areas of modern life that specialized professionals formerly sought to
analyze into their component parts. In corporate design, as in other disciplines, integration served
as a style of organization that prioritized unity and consistency without, in theory, sacrificing
creativity or freedom. At the time of Unimark’s founding in 1965, this systems theory of design
was still fully operational, offering a measure of predictability that appealed to executives and

128
Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 22.
129
Robert Venturi, Bruce Adams, and Denise Scott Brown, “Mass Communication on the People Freeway: Or
Piranesi Is Too Easy,” Perspecta 12 (1969): 49.
130
Ibid., 50.
195
designers alike. Yet towards the end of the decade, postmodern thinkers increasingly viewed the
environment as something that could not, and should not, be controlled, at least not by any
universal principles or practices. Designers such as Venturi, Adams, and Scott Brown developed
a style of integration that ran parallel to the corporate visual style. Although similarly concerned
with combining forms, media, and techniques, it diverged in significant ways: it was situational,
incongruous, and ambiguous, rather than universal, consistent, and clear.
131
The concept of
integration thus served in the 1960s as a hinge between two world views that approached the
complexity of modern life as something to be either controlled or extolled, but which, in either
case, required the designer’s integrative faculties.
Given its ties to CCA and the IDCA and the nature of its business in corporate design and
marketing, Unimark was a logical legatee and champion of integrated design principles. It used
methods of visual integration and the combination of media to support the same kinds of visual
identity programs that earlier corporations created, though with greater consistency, at a larger
scale, and with the added virtue that its methods, by design, could be applied to any organization.
Less self-evident, though perhaps no less logical, was the fact that this style of corporate
visualization garnered interest outside of corporate culture. Indeed, Unimark itself demonstrated
the variety of applications to which design systems could be put. Capitalist aesthetics was not
simply a visual style that characterized the images and spaces of industry and commerce, then. It
was also a pervasive managerial sensibility, cultivated through the activities of in-house and
consultant designers, which promised control over all kinds of visual environments.

131
The literature on postmodernism in design is extensive. See Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern
Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977); Rick Poynor, No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt, eds., Postmodernism:
Style and Subversion, 1970–1990 (London: V & A Publishing, 2011).
196
CHAPTER 4:
Recycling Capitalist Aesthetics: The Ecology and Economics of the Integral Urban House

By the early 1970s, the corporate visual style that Unimark and other design firms had
established in the preceding decades was besieged not only by postmodernists, but also by
groups of counterculturists who rejected the spirit of conformity and compliance that American
corporations allegedly cultivated. Environmentalists and ecologists were especially critical of the
wasteful systems of industrialization and commercialization this aesthetic regime supported. It
was not only that a glut of seemingly uniform corporate imagery had come to saturate the visual
environment, but also that these visual communications endorsed cycles of overproduction and
overconsumption that threatened to exhaust the planet’s natural resources and flood the physical
environment with an endless stream of discarded goods. In other words, the economic systems
humans devised to generate and circulate capital had come at the expense of the natural systems
that ecologists argued were critical to sustaining human life. Ecological designers proposed the
“whole system” as a solution to this schism: as a practical way to combine existing technologies
and information to support sustainable lifestyles, but also as a utopian worldview that privileged
the perception of interdependencies between humans and their natural surroundings.
1
They
promoted these repackaged technologies and perceptual schemes as alternatives to corporate
culture’s myopic focus on progress and profitability.
2
Yet by privileging interconnectivity, the

1
Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog is perhaps the best-known countercultural effort to foster holistic thinking; it
was also an example of how visual materials could be juxtaposed to promote the perception of interrelationships.
See Caroline Maniaque-Benton, ed., Whole Earth Field Guide (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016); and Simon
Sadler, “An Architecture of the Whole,” Journal of Architectural Education 61, no. 4 (2008): 108–29.
2
The boundaries between dominant and alternative cultures are rarely as secure or impermeable as they may appear.
Building on the concept of cultural hegemony that Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci developed in the early
twentieth century, cultural historians such as Raymond Williams and T. J. Jackson Lears have theorized the way in
which dominant cultures incorporate aspects of alternative or oppositional cultures in order to maintain power and
control. See Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” New Left Review I, no. 82
(November/December 1973): 3–16; and T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and
Possibilities,” The American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (1985): 567–93.
197
whole system (and the linked concept of the ecosystem) upheld an ideal of integration that also
underpinned corporate identification systems.
3
Instead of managing the corporate environment,
ecological designers adapted techniques of integrated design to manage the relationship between
humans and nature. I argue that the resulting visual regime, a pervasive style of interpenetrative
seeing and thinking that I call “integral aesthetics,” was a recycling rather than an outright
rejection of midcentury capitalist aesthetics.
During the mid-1970s, a crumbling Victorian house in Berkeley, California, became a
nationally publicized example of the type of whole system that ecologists promoted as a solution
to the threat of environmental degradation.
4
The Integral Urban House, an experiment in urban
homesteading administered by the non-profit Farallones Institute, was part commune, part
research laboratory, and part education center. The Institute’s founding members included
architect Sim Van der Ryn, psychiatrist Sterling Bunnell, itinerant carpenter Art Boericke,
photographer Barry Shapiro, and entomologists Bill and Helga Olkowski. A staff of biologists,
designers, and engineers shared administrative responsibilities and house chores while providing
classes, tours, and data to the public.
5
Alongside other ventures in self-reliant living—such as the
Ouroboros House in Minneapolis and the New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod—the Integral
Urban House combined scientific knowledge, business acumen, and design expertise in order to
transform domestic habits and rescue industrialized society from self-destruction.

3
Brothers Eugene P. Odum and Howard T. Odum, drawing on general system theory, were largely responsible for
developing a systems approach to the study of natural ecosystems. See Eugene P. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology
(Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953); and Howard T. Odum, Systems Ecology: An Introduction (New York: Wiley, 1983).
4
Local and regional newspapers reported on the project even before it was completed. See Howard Goodman, “An
Organic House Grows in Berkeley,” The Daily Californian (March 4, 1975): 3, 6; and Blackbird, “Berkley’s Model
Home: Urban Self-Sufficiency,” Berkeley Barb (September 19–25, 1975): 7.
5
This interdisciplinarity was central to the concept of ecological design, which Van der Ryn later defined as “an
integrative, ecologically responsible design discipline” that helped “connect scattered efforts in green architecture,
sustainable agriculture, ecological engineering, and other fields.” Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan, Ecological
Design (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996), x.
198
The experimental nature of the Integral Urban House enthralled reporters, but most of the
practices and technologies employed there were relatively well-established among agriculturists,
environmentalists, and other ecological thinkers. “There’s nothing new about this house,”
conceded resident manager Tom Javits. “It’s all old stuff that’s been put in new packages. It’s all
been brought together.”
6
Aquaculture, for instance, had existed for millennia, but the Integral
Urban House’s fishpond lay strategically beneath a beehive that produced one hundred pounds of
honey each year and thousands of protein-rich bee carcasses to help feed the fish below. (Never
mind that the pond, despite being a major point of interest, was disappointingly unproductive.)
Flowering herbs could be used in cooking but also helped cultivate an army of wasps, which
preyed on aphids and caterpillars, thus serving as a natural insecticide for the garden. Indoors, a
Swedish-made dry composting toilet generated dramatic savings in water consumption; after two
years, its thoroughly decomposed contents could be used as fertilizer in the back yard.
The Integral Urban House teemed with similarly entwined examples of ecological design.
It had, as one reporter described, “too much useful space, too much going on, to be contained in
an old frame building of its dimensions.”
7
In other words, the house was miraculously more than
the sum of its parts, a container for a whole ecosystem of technologies. It contained more utility,
or “performance per pound” (one of Buckminster Fuller’s basic criteria), than seemed possible
for a typical urban dwelling.
8
Lofty ecological ambitions also strained against the confines of the
6,000-square-foot lot. “The impact of this place is too small,” Javits lamented, “considering the
quality of the ideas encompassed here.”
9
These concepts eventually spilled over into a book, The
Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the City. Published by the Sierra Club in 1979, this

6
Kenneth Brower, “The Urban Farm,” The Atlantic Monthly, January 1978, 61.
7
Ibid.
8
Reinhold Martin, “Crystal Balls,” ANY: Architecture New York, no. 17 (1997): 36.
9
Brower, “The Urban Farm,” 61.
199
do-it-yourself manual promoted “integral design” as a synthesis of architecture and ecology.
Using diagrams and other data visualization techniques, the manual taught urban dwellers how to
adapt and manage their homes to accommodate a high yet sustainable quality of life.
10

This vision of the house as a container for sustainable living is evident in a diagram from
The Integral Urban House book (fig. 4.1). The silhouette of a gable-front house encloses an
array of illustrated technologies organized into four categories: solar energy, food raising, waste
recycling, and humans. The resulting “life support system,” its interrelations indicated by a series
of arrows, fills every corner of the building envelope. The human inhabitant appears simply as
another apparatus in a crowded ecosystem, albeit one specifically designed to sustain human life.
Like the overall book, the diagram promotes the integral urban house not as a building, but rather
as an idea, or, more specifically, as the container for an entire network of ideas. By following the
instructions contained in the book, any urban dweller could create a similarly efficient habitat for
self-reliant living, transforming herself or himself into an integral urban dweller. This concept of
the house as an integrated life support system was meant to be replicable and, once replicated, to
endow people with a sense of control over their increasingly fragmented lives.
11

A desire to package and promote ecological solutions to urgent socioeconomic problems
brought the Integral Urban House into dialogue with a broader postwar ideal of integration. The
discourse around ecological design typically positions economics and ecology as opposing
branches of knowledge and professional pursuits.
12
Whereas economists, who are often cast as
mercenary profiteers, “mistake money for wealth” in their efforts to monitor and manage the

10
Sim Van der Ryn, “Introduction,” in The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the City, by the Farallones
Institute (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979), x.
11
The book lists “famine, poverty, disease, and human conflict” among the global crises that ecological living was
designed to combat. News of an impending energy crisis broke in 1973, quickly followed by the stock market crash
of 1973–1974. Work on the Integral Urban House began in 1974. Farallones Institute, The Integral Urban House, 3.
12
See Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature (Washington, D.C.: American Museum of Natural History, 1969); Victor
Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).
200
movement of goods and capital, ecologists appear as heroic outlaws, redefining wealth in terms
of biodiversity and redistributing resources to maintain the planet’s natural order.
13
At the height
of the environmental movement in the 1970s, however, environmentalists observed that ecology
and economics shared etymological origins in the Greek word oikos, meaning “environment” or
“house.”
14
Ecologists—those who studied the “household” of Earth—and economists—those
who sought to manage this household—were equally concerned with how energy flows through
the environment, and both sought to optimize this flow through methods of research, analysis,
and management. The Integral Urban House affirmed this correlation between economics and
ecology. In its attempt to model “a totally integrated example of energy- and resource-efficient
living,” the house employed processes similar in concept to those corporations first developed a
century earlier.
15
By growing and harvesting their own food, minimizing energy consumption,
and publicizing their activities, the managers of the house mimicked the modern corporation’s
efforts to control all levels of industry, from the extraction of raw materials and the reduction of
overhead costs to the creation of public relations departments.
Like economics and ecology, corporate culture and counterculture were also closely
aligned. Some scholars have already challenged the putative opposition between technocracy and
counterculture in the U.S. Thomas Frank has shown how postwar American business culture, a
more dynamic force than counterculturists imagined, viewed the counterculture not as a threat,
but rather as a potential ally in the struggle against procedure, bureaucracy, and hierarchy.
16
Fred
Turner, in his discussion of the Cold War research laboratory, has identified a similarly flexible,

13
Chris Zelov and Phil Cousineau, eds., Design Outlaws on the Ecological Frontier (Philadelphia: Knossus, 1997).
Period critics also identified disparities between ecology and economics. See Harold Hostetler, “U.S. Economy
Outweighs Ecology,” Honolulu Advertiser (September 28, 1973).
14
See Kenneth Watt, “Ecology, Economics and Our Dwindling Resources,” The Washington Post (August 8, 1971).
15
Lee Foster, “A Better Energy-Saving Idea: The Integral Urban Home,” The Plain Truth (September 1978): 16.
16
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
201
collaborative, and nonhierarchical style of research and management that actually appealed to
certain segments of the counterculture.
17
Neither, however, considers in great depth the aesthetic
dimensions of these convergences—that is, the shared visual techniques that corporations and
countercultural groups used to organize their operations. I argue that it was precisely a shared
aesthetic that allowed technocrats and counterculturists to perceive their mutual imbrications and
opportunities for cooption. While architecture and design historians have produced significant
scholarship on countercultural design, most of this literature preserves political, ideological, and
formal distinctions between corporate and countercultural design.
18

I argue that ecological design, understood as an attempt to manage the total environment,
extended the organizational efforts of earlier corporate designers who championed integration. In
my analysis, corporations and countercultural groups therefore appear as part of a common
culture concerned with ideals of wholeness. The organizers of the Integral Urban House and
other ecological activists expanded the definition of design to include a broader and more
socially relevant array of practices. Instead of creating new and better objects, they sought to
devise systems of resource management, food production, and waste recycling that would help
reintegrate humans with their natural surroundings, as well as with each other. For in the Integral
Urban House, the task of ecological integration—of designing systems that operated together to
conserve resources and support human life—was a fundamentally cooperative endeavor that
required the sharing of knowledge and responsibilities.

17
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of
Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
18
See Steven Heller, “The 1960s: Mainstream And Counterculture,” Print 43, no. 6 (November 1989): 112–37,
197–200; Reinhold Martin, “Environment, c. 1973,” Grey Room, no. 14 (2004): 79–101; Felicity D. Scott,
Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010); Simon Sadler,
“Diagrams of Countercultural Architecture,” Design and Culture 4 (November 2012): 345–67; Andrew Blauvelt,
ed., Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015); and Greg Castillo,
“Salvage Salvation: Counterculture Trash as a Cultural Resource,” in The Routledge Companion to Architecture and
Social Engagement, ed. Farhan Karim (New York: Routledge, 2018).
202
The Convergence of Corporate Culture and Counterculture in Aspen
In June 1970, several years before the genesis of the Integral Urban House project, Van
der Ryn led a delegation of West Coast students and environmental groups to Colorado to take
part in the twentieth International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA). Devoted to the topic
“Environment by Design,” the conference explored connections between design, technology, and
nature in order to promote ecologically sound solutions to environmental degradation. Program
chairman William Houseman, editor and publisher of The Environment Monthly, predicted the
theme would “set off some of the rhetorical fireworks” and ideological skirmishes that had
characterized the conference since its inception.
19
The topic proved even more controversial than
anticipated. The students and environmentalists acted more as agitators than participants, staging
a riotous counter-conference in opposition to the IDCA, which they viewed as pedantic, anemic,
and apathetic to pressing environmental issues.
Scholars have interpreted the conflict between IDCA organizers and West Coast activists
as evidence of an “ideological collision,” situating the conference within a normative discourse
on ecological design in which radical environmentalists regularly clashed with the members of a
complicit and apolitical design establishment.
20
There was indeed an ideological collision in
Aspen, but the designers and ecologists were, in fact, on the same side. On the other stood the
French Group, a delegation of French designers and social scientists who, in a statement penned
by sociologist Jean Baudrillard, characterized “the entire theory of Design and Environment” as
a false ideology, a myth, a utopian delusion that distracted from the atrocity of degraded social

19
William Houseman, “Introduction,” in “International Design Conference in Aspen, June 9–14, 1970, Environment
by Design,” 1970, Box 28, Folder 1, IDCA-GRI.
20
See Alice Twemlow, “I Can’t Talk To You If You Say That: An Ideological Collision at the International Design
Conference at Aspen, 1970,” Design and Culture 1, no. 1 (2009): 25–50; Greg Castillo, “Hippie Modernism,”
Places Journal (October 2015); and Greg Castillo, “Establishment Modernism and Its Discontents: IDCA in the
‘Long Sixties,’” in Design for the Corporate World: Creativity on the Line, 1950–1975, ed. Wim de Wit (London:
Lund Humphries, 2017), 40–59.
203
relations.
21
Whereas governments once used wars and natural disasters to “unify a disintegrating
society,” Baudrillard believed the “mise en scène” of environmental catastrophe served the same
role in the present.
22
It was no coincidence, he argued, that environmentalism emerged parallel to
(and as a diversion from) the Vietnam War. Aspen, which Baudrillard called a “Disneyland of
Environment and Design” that enthralled designers and ecologists alike, projected an illusion of
environmental design as a “Universal therapy” or “opium for the people.”
23

The French Group recognized that American designers and ecologists shared a set of
basic assumptions: that the environment, however it might be construed, was in a dire state of
disintegration, and that design, broadly defined, could help reintegrate it. The conflict between
professional designers and environmental activists was therefore primarily caused by strained
relations and miscommunication. As a result of these tensions, the conference participants failed
to discern connections between the activities of the IDCA and those of the counter-conference.
Although they would likely never admit it, counterculturists found in Aspen an economically
sanctioned tradition of integrative thinking that ratified their own ideas about ecological design.
The concept of integrated design thus superseded polarizing political disputes, proving equally
applicable to the organization of corporate and countercultural environments.
In June 1970, in addition to the usual influx of IDCA members, Aspen also witnessed the
arrival of a caravan of Bay Area countercultural groups, including the alternative architecture
collective Ant Farm, the environmental non-profit group Ecology Action, and the experimental
construction company Zomeworks. IDCA president Eliot Noyes delegated the supervision of this

21
For an overview and critical analysis of the environmental movement in the U.S., see David L. Sills, “The
Environmental Movement and Its Critics,” Human Ecology 3, no. 1 (1975): 1–41.
22
“Statement made by the French Group,” in “International Design Conference in Aspen, June 9–14, 1970,
Environment by Design,” 1970, Box 28, Folder 1, IDCA-GRI.
23
Irish-American conceptual artist Les Levine, a special guest at IDCA 1970, published a similarly scathing critique
of the design conference and the broader preoccupation with “environment.” See Les Levine, “Artist Les Levine
Comments on the Design Conference,” The Aspen Flyer (June 19, 1970): 1–5.
204
West Coast contingent to Van der Ryn, an assistant professor of architecture at the University of
California, Berkeley, who was immersed in both the pedagogy of design and the politics of
environmental activism.
24
In reality, there was little oversight as students and environmentalists
proceeded to mount a series of disturbances and interventions. Michael Doyle, a young
landscape architect in the firm of Lawrence Halprin & Associates, was one of the IDCA’s special
guests. He was also one of its most outspoken critics. During the final day’s summation, he
forced the conferees to vote on a series of uncirculated resolutions, which called on the IDCA to
take a firmer stance on environmental protections, but also on issues more peripheral to the
conference, such as healthcare, demilitarization, racial discrimination, and abortion rights.
Drained and demoralized by the events of the week, Noyes resigned as IDCA president on the
last day of the conference, questioning “whether at this moment in our national history and our
state of emotional disrepair a conference on design can or should be held at all.”
25

Yet Doyle’s animus grew out of a desire not to shutter the IDCA entirely, but rather to
transform it into a more dynamic organization. He had attended the conference for the first time
in 1969, perhaps at the request of Lawrence Halprin, who had signed on tentatively as program
chairman for IDCA 1970.
26
Doyle subsequently composed a critical evaluation of the IDCA in
which he urged Halprin to institute sweeping changes in the conference format. In particular, he
proposed “scoring” the conference as one might arrange a piece of music or a dance. Doyle
likely learned about scoring from the workshops of Halprin and his wife Anna, an avant-garde

24
A year earlier, on May 22, 1969, Van der Ryn witnessed the events of “Bloody Thursday,” when law enforcement
officers outfitted in riot gear used shotguns and tear gas to subdue protests at People’s Park in Berkeley. There, too,
Van der Ryn had found himself in the hapless position of middleman, mediating in vain between the representatives
from Peoples’ Park and the administrators from UC Berkeley. Sim Van der Ryn, Design for Life: The Architecture
of Sim Van Der Ryn (Salt Lake City: G. Smith, 2005), 31–4.
25
Eliot Noyes, “Conclusion,” n.d., Box 27, Folder 10, IDCA-GRI.
26
Halprin ultimately withdrew from the program chairmanship, citing other commitments and a lack of time.
“Minutes of Meeting of the Board of Directors of the International Design Conference in Aspen,” October 11, 1969,
Box 27, Folder 1, IDCA-GRI.
205
dance pioneer.
27
The Halprins’s workshops used written and visual guidelines called “scores” to
direct the movement of participants (fig. 4.2).
28
For Doyle, scoring consisted of interrelating four
elements: time, space, activities, and people. The result was “a total approach to education—
sensory awareness training, encounter groups, rituals, fantasy, sound and visual materials, words,
feedback, dialogue, conclusion.”
29
Most importantly, Doyle envisioned scoring as an intrinsically
visual process suited to the purposes of a design conference. He believed that by focusing greater
attention on its visual identity, the IDCA could improve its organizational capabilities while
simultaneously communicating the importance of design itself. “Thus the graphics become an
integral part of [the] message of the conference,” he explained. “The graphics of the conference
become the conference—a very intriguing idea.”
30
Doyle even suggested capitalizing on the
IDCA’s longstanding relationship with Container Corporation of America. Since the Chicago
packaging company excelled in the production of three-dimensional containers, he believed the
conference score could be made engagingly three-dimensional as well.
What Doyle proposed was a form of integrated design, the same process that countless
corporate designers employed throughout the midcentury. Rather than outfit corporations with
total institutional identities, this comprehensive design process could be used to orchestrate a
total conference. The idea of reinventing the conference through design was not new. In 1960,
IDCA president Bill Tara, concerned that the organization was not achieving its full potential,
urged his fellow board members to “invent and design an ideal conference, its function and its
form. Describe it in words, draw some pictures of it.”
31
For IDCA management, reinventing the

27
Alexandra Lange, “Q&A: An Alliance of Dance and Design,” The New York Times (September 25, 2014).
28
Alison B. Hirsch, “Scoring the Participatory City: Lawrence (& Anna) Halprin’s Take Part Process,” Journal of
Architectural Education 64, no. 2 (2011): 127–40.
29
Michael Doyle, “Aspen 1970,” June 29, 1969, Box 27, Folder 12, IDCA-GRI.
30
Doyle, “Aspen 1970.”
31
Bill Tara, “Post Conference Memorandum,” July 15, 1960, Box 5, Folder 7, IDCA-GRI.
206
conference meant a new logo design; for Doyle it entailed an entire overhaul of the organization.
Although he sought to dispense with conventional formats by accommodating opportunities for
fun, fantasy, and participation, however, Doyle’s scored conference would have been more
systematically organized and professionally managed than ever before.
When the West Coast counterculturists arrived in Aspen in 1970, they organized a series
of activities that approximated the kind of immersive experience Doyle proposed a year earlier.
Presented under the guise of radical insurgency, many of the interventions recalled earlier IDCA-
sanctioned activities. On the first day, a group of students organized a “Favorite Foods Picnic” to
foster interaction and communication among attendees. The impromptu picnic recalled the casual
al fresco meals for which the IDCA was well known: barbecues at the Hotel Jerome, packed
lunches in the meadows, and the annual fish fry. Ironically, the picnic left an enormous amount
of waste scattered across the grounds, a spectacle Houseman described as “ecological havoc.”
32

Similar scenes ensued throughout the week. IDCA 1970, a film by Claudia Weill and Eli Noyes
(Eliot Noyes’s son), shows members of the Moving Company, a Berkeley-based guerrilla theater
troupe, cavorting around the conference tent (fig. 4.3). At one point, the actors appear on stage;
toilet paper in hand, they mime wiping themselves in protest of America’s throwaway culture. At
another point, they march through the audience, calling out prices in mockery of the mercenary
salesman. Eighteen years earlier, at the second Aspen conference, Buckminster Fuller and San
Francisco retailer Richard Gump engaged in a similarly riotous vaudeville-like act. The frenzied
performance, which featured Fuller dancing across stage and Gump singing in Russian, poked
fun at the miscommunication between a designer and his boss.
33
These resonances call into

32
William Houseman, “A Program Chairman’s Diary of Sorts,” n.d., Box 28, Folder 1, IDCA-GRI.
33
“Play at Aspen Design Conference,” June 29, 1952, Series 2, Box 75, Folder 4, R. Buckminster Fuller papers,
M1090. Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA. [hereafter RBFP]
207
question the common critique of the IDCA as a staid organization. Instead, the conference served
as a useful straw man for avowed radical designers seeking to accrue countercultural cachet.
IDCA 1970 also revealed glimpses of a series of inflatable shelters beside the conference
tent (fig. 4.4). Erected by Ant Farm as alternative gathering spaces, these vinyl inflatables were
part of a period preoccupation with pneumatic architecture. In 1965, several years before Chip
Lord and Doug Michels founded Ant Farm, British design critic Reyner Banham proposed
inflatables as alternatives to conventional residential architecture.
34
Having first spoken at the
IDCA in 1963, Banham soon became a fixture of the conference and a member of its board of
directors. By 1970, he had become, despite a penchant for irreverent design criticism, one of the
figureheads of the IDCA and a target of countercultural animosity.
35
Yet his 1965 essay, “A
Home Is Not a House,” anticipated a growing fascination with inflatables as an anti-architectural
challenge to the notion of building as monumental form.
36
In Banham’s vision, illustrated by
French-American architect François Dallegret, the plastic dome would serve as a barely-there
covering for the dwelling’s mechanical innards (fig. 4.5). The structure, dubbed “The Power-
Membrane House,” was, like Ant Farm’s inflatables, a transportable, self-contained package that
could be chained to the back of a truck or trailer home and hauled across the country.
The autonomous bubble-environments that Banham and Ant Farm envisioned had roots
in the Dymaxion and geodesic inventions of Buckminster Fuller.
37
This architectural genealogy
was evident in Aspen, where Ant Farm’s inflatables recalled the temporary dome that University
of Minnesota architecture students had erected during the 1953 conference (fig. 4.6). Assembled

34
The health and environmental side effects of vinyl chloride and other plastic polymers were not yet apparent in
1970.
35
See Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002); and
Jeremy Aynsley and Harriet Atkinson, eds., The Banham Lectures: Essays on Designing the Future (New York:
Berg, 2009).
36
Reyner Banham, “A Home Is Not a House,” Art in America 53, no. 2 (April 1965): 70–79.
37
Fuller conceived the Dymaxion house and the geodesic dome as self-sustaining solutions to housing shortages.
208
under the supervision of Fuller himself, the dome was covered in a plastic skin and served as a
dormitory for students. The IDCA supported the construction of similar domes, some temporary
and others permanent, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, displaying a willingness to experiment
with the conference premises and format. During a planning meeting for IDCA 1970, board
member Jack Roberts even suggested renting inflatable structures to accommodate small seminar
sessions. The idea appeared to gain traction when architect and fellow board member Peter Blake
offered to supply information on “sources for inflatable structures.”
38
Months later, however,
when members of Ecology Action and Environmental Workshop proposed using inflatables to
stage their counter-conference, the Graham Foundation (a regular sponsor of IDCA projects)
rejected the proposal.
Despite ongoing generational disputes in Aspen, the establishment and countercultural
designers who convened in 1970 were not so ideologically mismatched. These groups shared
more than a penchant for picnics, theatrics, and plastic inflatables. They also held similar views
about the problems facing contemporary society and how to solve them. In Aspen, speakers with
distinct professional backgrounds and philosophical views described the threat of environmental
catastrophe in strikingly similar ways. Architect Carl Koch, a proponent of prefabrication and
industrialized housing, cited a “ferment in our society that is splitting apart families, institutions,
values and beliefs. Increasingly, large numbers of our youths and the more perceptive of our
elders are concerned with the widening integration gap between work and play, art and use,
money and satisfaction, community and individual.”
39
Cliff Humphrey, a leading environmental
activist and one of the founders of Ecology Action, described a “survival crisis” resulting from

38
“Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Directors of the International Design Conference in Aspen,” October 11,
1969, Box 27, Folder 1, IDCA-GRI. The executive committee ultimately abandoned the plan for unknown reasons.
39
Carl Koch, “Industrialized Housing: A Pure Necessity,” in “International Design Conference in Aspen, June 9–14,
1970, Environment by Design,” 1970, Box 28, Folder 1, IDCA-GRI.
209
efforts to satisfy human desires by “exploding the atmosphere,” a clear reference to the threat of
atomic holocaust. But modern life was fracturing along other lines, as well. Humphrey believed
that increasing rates of poverty, hunger, and violence reflected peoples’ inability “to find enough
stability in their social and physical environment to maintain humaneness.”
40
Atmospheric
physicist Walter Orr Roberts sounded similar notes of alarm, arguing that “clashes of richness
and poverty, of freedom and authority, of quality and trash” drove escalations “of violence,
degradation, of discontent.”
41
Architect, activist, and atmospheric physicist alike diagnosed
America’s problems in terms of physical, psychological, and social disintegration.
The proposed solutions to these problems, though different in their particulars, shared a
belief in design’s integrative potential. Keynote speaker Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior
under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, discouraged specialization in favor of
“planetary” thinking and collaborative processes. “Environment and design must lock arms and
fight for balance and a future that is ecologically sound and esthetically right,” Udall argued. By
cooperating, he believed ecologists and designers could achieve “an overall environment that is
life-giving and whole.”
42
Richard Farson, a psychologist who transitioned into a career in design
education after speaking at the IDCA in 1966, shared Udall’s belief in a life-affirming, total
design process. He emphasized the importance of teamwork and interdisciplinarity, speculating
that, “if we can learn to ask the right questions of people, if we can become truly comprehensive
designers, […] then I think there is a chance we might succeed.”
43

40
Cliff Humphrey, “An Ecological Foundation for Environment,” in “International Design Conference in Aspen,
June 9–14, 1970, Environment by Design,” 1970, Box 28, Folder 1, IDCA-GRI.
41
Walter Orr Roberts, “Man on a Changing Earth,” in “International Design Conference in Aspen, June 9–14, 1970,
Environment by Design,” 1970, Box 28, Folder 1, IDCA-GRI.
42
Stewart Udall, “The Environment Revolution: What It’s About. Where It’s Going,” in “International Design
Conference in Aspen, June 9–14, 1970, Environment by Design,” 1970, Box 28, Folder 1, IDCA-GRI.
43
Richard Farson, “The Democratization of Design,” in “International Design Conference in Aspen, June 9–14,
1970, Environment by Design,” 1970, Box 28, Folder 1, IDCA-GRI.
210
Even the IDCA’s fiercest critics supported the basic pursuit of integration through design.
Cora Walker, an influential Harlem lawyer and the conference’s only black or female speaker,
berated the audience for having “the arrogance to feel that you can solve vast national problems,
involving the life and life style of masses simply by remaining in your own little comfortable
world of design. Do we wonder why this country is more divided today than it has ever been in
its history!”
44
Walker drew a direct connection between the dissociation of design from everyday
life and the disintegration of American values. She nevertheless appealed to designers for help,
urging them to combat socioeconomic issues by working with the underprivileged communities
that needed them most.
45
“Any genuine and meaningful environmental movement of today must
and does mean the inclusion of people and human resources on all levels of our society,” she
argued. “It is more than abating air pollution, clean water, better waste disposal. It must include
all life, all men, all activity. It is vital that it be geared in the direction of meaningful change in
the environmental quality of life for all.”
46
Walker espoused a holistic view of the designer’s
role, extending it not only to all areas of design practice, but also to all areas of human life.
The Janus-faced nature of Walker’s talk, which condemned designers even as it sought
their help, was symptomatic of a broader paradox at the heart of IDCA 1970, where corporate
designers and countercultural activists clashed while expressing similar aims. Having arrived in
Aspen already convinced of the incompatibility of their views, these groups struggled to see past

44
Cora T. Walker, “Pioneering in Co-Op Programs,” in “International Design Conference in Aspen, June 9–14,
1970, Environment by Design,” 1970, Box 28, Folder 1, IDCA-GRI. Walker was the only female speaker, but
Gloria Steinem, a leader of America’s feminist movement, was among the special guests.
45
For more on the racial disparities involved in ecology and the environmental movement, see Sylvia Washington,
Heather Goodall, and Paul Rosier, Echoes from the Poisoned Well: Global Memories of Environmental Injustice
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006); Steven Conn, “Back to the Garden: Communes, the Environment, and
Antiurban Pastoralism at the End of the Sixties,” Journal of Urban History 36, no. 6 (November 1, 2010): 831–48;
and Simon Sadler, “Mandalas or Raised Fists? Hippie Holism, Panther Totality, and Another Modernism,” in Hippie
Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, ed. Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015), 120.
46
Walker, “Pioneering in Co-Op Programs.”
211
their differences. Yet despite the professional and ideological (if not racial and gender) diversity
of the IDCA’s 1970 speakers, they shared a commitment to the integration of design and
environment. Van der Ryn was one of the participants most capable of achieving this synthesis.
Trained as an architect, experienced as an educator, and involved as an activist, he displayed not
only the ability to perceive patterns of environmental degradation, but also the desire to work
towards collaborative and actionable alternatives through design.

Van der Ryn’s Spiral Meditations
To achieve the changes their fellow conference speakers endorsed, Humphrey and Van
der Ryn both prescribed a “cultural transformation” rooted in new forms of personal behavior,
social organization, and governmental support. In a talk entitled “Persistence of Form,” Van der
Ryn positioned this requisite transformation within a “broader spectrum of history.” He used
geometry as a metaphor to interpret the historical relationship between cultures and their modes
of shaping the environment (fig. 4.7).
47
The circle signified the mythic unity of early tribal
cultures, which existed in “a state of total participation between self and surroundings,” a social
condition reflected in the centripetal orientation of early villages and buildings.
48
This tribal
formation eventually gave way to the imperial logic of the triangle, a shape with a top and a
bottom that represented the hierarchical systems and pyramidal structures erected by expanding
empires. Finally, democracy presented as a square, or rather a series of endlessly repeatable
squares, which created a network of liberated yet isolated individuals not bound by any common

47
Van der Ryn’s Aspen talk included passing critiques of the design conference. Like other IDCA dissidents, he
claimed that the format of the conference was no longer functional and characterized corporate design and
communications as intrinsically meaningless. Doubtful that existing institutions were capable of the reform needed
to achieve a more ethical design practice, he pursued the idea of the enclave as an alternative cultural space.
48
Sim Van der Ryn, “Persistence of Form,” in “International Design Conference in Aspen, June 14–19, 1970,
Environment by Design,” 1970, Box 28, Folder 1, IDCA-GRI.
212
belief.
49
“We live in cubes,” Van der Ryn exclaimed, “and our lives are marked off with the right
angle, and the square linear grid.”
50
This type of segmentation occurred at all levels of modern
experience, he observed, from the reticulated urban plan to the compartmentalized mind.
Van der Ryn identified the circle as the most appealing of these cultural forms and
considered a growing fascination with domes as evidence of an attempt to return to the simplicity
and unity of tribal cultures. “We can’t, however, go back to the tribe,” he argued, “because we
can’t go back to an earlier consciousness.”
51
Instead, he proposed a new form, the spiral or helix,
as a metaphor for a contemporary culture in transition. Unlike the static, two-dimensional forms
of circles, triangles, and squares, spirals exist in four dimensions, changing through time and
space, evolving and growing. While mass industrial culture partitioned human experience into
“rectilinear fragments” of “work, family, and learning,” Van der Ryn proposed recuperating the
old utopian idea of the “enclave” as a “unified setting” in which to “work and learn together and
from each other.”
52
A spiral culture would manifest not as spiral buildings and spiral cities, but
rather as dynamic settings in which people could participate in personal and social change.
The spiral, which scholars have traced as far back as Neolithic rock art, was also a vital
modernist form. Two seemingly disparate examples are relevant to Van der Ryn’s prescription of
the spiral as a way to achieve revolution through the environment: Russian Constructivist
Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International and American landscape artist Robert
Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Tatlin designed his ultimately unrealized monument in 1919 as the
headquarters for the Communist International, an organization that promoted the worldwide

49
Van der Ryn’s simplified framework collapses thousands of years of history by merging historical epochs—
Antiquity, the Renaissance, and Modernity—into a single cultural form. The Middle Ages are conspicuously absent
from this continuum of democracy, science, and rationalism. He does, however, acknowledge the possibility of
“transition states” and hybrid forms. The “modern industrial state,” he argues, is “an Empire of democratic layers.”
50
Van der Ryn, “Persistence of Form.”
51
Ibid.
52
Ibid.
213
overthrow of capitalist bourgeois culture. Like Van der Ryn, art critic Nikolai Punin contrasted
the dynamism and depth of the spiral with “the stasis of the pyramid” and the surface quality of a
bourgeois lifestyle “based on the urban squares.”
53
The monument’s concentration of legislative,
executive, and informative initiatives even anticipated the synthesis of “work, family, and
learning” that Van der Ryn believed could be achieved within the communitarian enclave of a
spiral culture. Although separated by fifty years, Tatlin and Van der Ryn articulated similar
conceptions of the spiral as a formal metaphor for revolutionary action.
Spiral Jetty was an even more topical point of reference for Van der Ryn’s IDCA talk.
Smithson constructed the monumental earthwork along the shore of the Great Salt Lake in April
1970, only a few months before and a few hundred miles away from the Aspen conference. The
1,500-foot-long coil, composed of 6,650 tons of basalt rock, magnified the spiraling molecular
structures of the salt crystals so abundant in the lake. Scholars have interpreted the work either as
the heroic gesture of an ever-expanding pattern of growth or as its opposite, a bleak symbol of
entropy and environmental destruction.
54
In either case, the site-specific work also operated as a
form of institutional critique. By retreating to the wilds of Utah, it denied the paths to viewership
and ownership that the coastal art world facilitated. The resonances between Van der Ryn’s idea
of the spiral enclave and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty seem apparent, arising from their similar helical
forms, critical vantage points, and physical isolation. Yet the relationship is more complex.
Architectural historian Reinhold Martin has analyzed Spiral Jetty as an example of technocratic
organicist thinking shared by Hungarian-born designer György Kepes, who maintained frequent

53
Nikolai Punin, “Monument to the Third International,” in Art in Theory, 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing
Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 314.
54
See Lynne Cooke and Karen J. Kelly, eds., Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty: True Fictions, False Realities
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Kathleen Merrill Campagnolo, “Spiral Jetty through the
Camera’s Eye,” Archives of American Art Journal 47, no. 1/2 (2008): 16–23.
214
and fraught communications with Smithson in the years around Spiral Jetty’s construction.
55

Although Kepes and Smithson disagreed about the artist’s role within the context of the postwar
military-industrial complex, Martin argues that both were captivated by the “organicism of
integrated, modular systems,” which took as a model the flexible architecture of postwar
corporations.
56
In other words, the spiral forms that preoccupied Smithson, Kepes, and Van der
Ryn were inextricably entangled with the logic of industrial and corporate organization.
I add to Martin’s formulation of a Cold War organizational ethos an earlier episode in the
coiled convergence of design, business, and environment. Nearly thirty years before Smithson
and Van der Ryn began their meditations on the spiral, Kepes designed a 1939 advertisement for
Container Corporation of America (CCA) that likened the “beauty and protective strength” of
paperboard packaging to the chambered nautilus (fig. 4.8).
57
In Kepes’s design, an isometrically
rendered box sits at the center of a radiographed shell, drawing a visual analogy between the two
containers, one man-made and the other natural. The shell’s coiled form also approximates the
components of CCA’s paper-making machinery—the cylinders and reels used to press, smooth,
and spool rolls of paperboard. A later advertisement by designer Leo Lionni further emphasizes
the whorled arrangement of CCA’s production process (fig. 4.9). Once again, an object from
nature serves as a visual model for an industrial process. In this instance, the cross section of a
log symbolizes the gyrating machinery that transforms wood into paper and paper into packages.
The concentric tree rings convey a sense of growth over time, alluding to the continuous
assembly of cardboard containers but also to the growth of the corporation itself.

55
See John Blakinger’s discussion of Kepes’s fascination with patterns found in nature. John R. Blakinger, Gyorgy
Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2019).
56
Reinhold Martin, “Organicism’s Other,” Grey Room, no. 4 (2001): 48.
57
Smithson’s spiral is Archimedean, its form determined by point moving with constant speed and angular velocity
from a fixed center. It is a form based on ancient mathematics rather than nature. By contrast, the spirals chosen by
Kepes and Van der Ryn are logarithmic, the distance between each turning increasing in geometric progression. The
former indicates constant growth while the latter suggests exponential growth.
215
In CCA’s visual rhetoric, the spiral operated not only as a symbol for the strength of
paperboard boxes and the movements of paper-making machinery, but also as a more abstract
economic metaphor. The growing distance between each of the spiral’s turnings expressed the
corporation’s concern with financial gain, on the one hand, and economic collapse, on the other.
One American economist even described this double helix of progression and regression as “the
economist’s spiral,” for it was economists who divined the course of human affairs by predicting
periods of progress and decline.
58
In Van der Ryn’s own rhetoric, spirals served simultaneously
as symbols for environmental and economic growth. Decades after IDCA 1970, he looked back
upon the midcentury pursuit of progress as “a cornucopian spiral of material, technological, and
economic expansion.”
59
In his critique of capitalist society, Van der Ryn transformed the horn of
plenty, a mythic symbol of perpetual nourishment, into a token of greed and excess.
Van der Ryn may not have been as entangled as Kepes in the commercial logic and
economic imperatives of the U.S. military-industrial complex.
60
Yet like Smithson’s Spiral Jetty,
which evidenced a grim fascination with “the establishment” and the degenerative environmental
effects of industry, Van der Ryn’s spiral meditations constituted an alternative or peripheral form
of integrative thinking.
61
Though displaced from the capitalist fixation on production and profits,
his vision of cultural transformation circled around similar themes of growth and cohesion.

58
Jacob H. Hollander, “The Economist’s Spiral,” The American Economic Review 12, no. 1 (1922): 1–20. Hollander
also described economists as being caught in their own historically contingent professional spirals, moving in and
out of positions of cultural authority, which suggests that economists did not always operate as cogs in the capitalist
system; at times they stood outside of it.
59
Van der Ryn and Cowan, Ecological Design, 5. In The Integral Urban House book, he also positioned “spiraling
populations” alongside unfettered technological progress as a primary cause of environmental destruction.
60
But neither was he so far removed from the establishment as one might expect of a leader in the countercultural
movement. During the mid to late-1960s, he collaborated with California’s Office of Economic Opportunity and
prefabricated housing companies to develop low-cost housing camps for migrant workers. California Governor Jerry
Brown later appointed him State Architect. In this position, he developed the United States’ first government-
initiated energy efficient office building program. Van der Ryn, Design for Life, 27–30; 60–69.
61
See Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments (1966)” and “The Establishment (1968),” in Robert
Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack D. Flam, The Documents of Twentieth Century Art (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996), 10–23; 97–99.
216
Instead of a belief in economic progress, the spiral contained for Van der Ryn the promise of
environmental metamorphosis. Considered in this way, the spiral enclave, like the pyramidal
structure of the hierarchical corporation or the rectilinear grid of the urban plan, was simply
another geometrical formulation of the search for an integrated environment or “unified setting.”
Van der Ryn’s experience in Aspen was not simply an occasion for combating dominant design
discourses, but also an opportunity to assimilate ideas about integration and to incorporate them
into an emergent conception of what he called “ecologically integrated” or “integral” design.

The Ecotectural Enclave
In the mid-1970s, Van der Ryn translated his concept of the spiral enclave as a site of
revolutionary environmentalism into a series of proposals for sustainable and communal living.
The Integral Urban House, one such experiment in self-reliance, applied integrative thinking to
the problem of living in cities, where humans had become disconnected from nature, from each
other, and even, Van der Ryn worried, from themselves. Through a synthesis of ecology and
architecture, referred to as “ecotecture” and “integral design,” urban dwellers would be able to
transform their homes into self-sustaining life support systems akin to those found in nature.
Like the spiral enclave, these urban homesteads would be cyclical not in form but in function,
collecting, transforming, and recycling resources in an endless loop. Van der Ryn contrasted this
experiment in household management with the technocratic control large corporations exerted,
especially the utility companies that had monopolized America’s energy and resource supplies.
Yet an examination of the processes and systems that comprised the Integral Urban House reveal
structural and operational affinities with the modern integrated corporation.
An unpublished proposal to build an “ecotectural house,” which Van der Ryn drafted in
November 1972, is perhaps the earliest record of what would later become the Integral Urban
217
House. The document laid out the dangers of America’s fixation on economic and technological
progress in sobering terms. “Our high standard of living is dependent upon an ecological suicide
technology,” Van der Ryn warned. A “mighty war establishment” may have helped the nation
achieve its status as a global superpower, but “this military and technological might contain[ed]
the seeds of a fatal weakness: its insatiable and non-regenerative appetite for resources including
people.”
62
Van der Ryn described humanity as a suicidal, cannibalistic organism that consumed
natural and human resources only to disgorge cataclysmic technologies. Convinced that the
environmental crisis, which was above all a crisis in energy conservation, could not be solved
through new “hardware and techniques” of construction, Van der Ryn instead tasked designers
with creating new patterns of consumption, new lifestyles, and new human values. He proposed
the ecotectural house not as “the solution for the future, but rather as a unique laboratory to study
and become aware of the pattern of energy use, its inputs and outputs.”
63

Van der Ryn anchored his proposal for an ecotectural house in the scientific language of
economics and ecology, both of which employed methods of input-output analysis.
64
For
instance, he observed that the U.S., home to only six percent of the global population, consumed
over a third of the world’s energy. Residential dwellings accounted for a full twenty-five percent
of the country’s energy consumption.
65
Moreover, much of this energy, after being consumed,
was simply released as human and organic waste—some 1.5 billion tons annually in the early
1970s.
66
In addition to polluting air, soil, and water supplies, modern methods of waste disposal
also squandered nutrient-rich refuse, which Van der Ryn considered a “misplaced resource.”

62
Sim Van der Ryn, “Abstract of Proposal to Build an Ecotectural House,” (unpublished, November 1972): 9.
http://revolution.berkeley.edu/assets/AbstractofProposaltoBuildEcotecturalHouse.pdf
63
Ibid., 10.
64
See Russian-American economist Wassily Leontief’s Input-Output Economics, published in 1966, which earned
him the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1973.
65
Van der Ryn, “Abstract of Proposal to Build an Ecotectural House,” 9, 11.
66
Ibid., 13.
218
American society was thus based on a defective input-output cycle, which exhausted the earth’s
resources much faster than they could be replenished. According to Van der Ryn, these wasteful
patterns of consumption and disposal resulted from a lack of knowledge about how energy and
waste move through a “high consumption urban technocratic society.”
Since scientific analyses and statistical figures could only go so far toward educating the
public, Van der Ryn included in his proposal a pair of diagrams that demonstrated two different
approaches to energy use. The first, entitled “Tecno-Fantacy House-Hold,” was a critique of the
existing, exploitative approach to resource management (fig. 4.10). It attributes environmental
destruction to the centralized control of “energy flows, functions and operating systems” in the
hands of a few predatory power companies and service providers. Sun, soil, water, and wind (the
latter wryly labeled “not in use”) enter into the ecosystem, but the capitalistic motives inherent in
agribusiness and food processing, strip mining and oil refining, reservoirs and pump stations,
result in resource exploitation and pollution at all levels of the environment. This is a fantasy, or
more likely a nightmare, of control gone wrong. At the center of this vision of ecological suicide
sits a typical urban dwelling. Hooked up to various energy sources through pipelines and power
cables, the house appears as a gluttonous monstrosity, gobbling up resources to satisfy the
consumer-oriented lifestyles of its inhabitants. By rendering the problem of energy conservation
in visual form with the home at its center, the “Tecno-Fantacy House-Hold” confronted
homeowners with a striking image of their complicity in the environmental crisis.
Van der Ryn proposed that by disengaging from technocratic regimes of environmental
control and designing living environments in tune with natural systems, people, even those living
in large cities, could achieve more sustainable lifestyles. An accompanying diagram, entitled
“Eco-Tecture House-Hold,” offered an ecologically sound alternative to the destructive fantasy
219
of technocratic control (fig. 4.11). The image is oriented in a similarly circular configuration.
Sun, soil, water, and wind feed into this ecosystem, too. Even the building is identical to that of
the “Tecno-Fantacy House-Hold,” emphasizing that ecological design called for new ways of
living rather than new building forms. Yet in this instance, oil tankers, power generators, and
treatment plants are replaced by solar collectors, windmills, and water catchment areas. These
alternative energy transformers collect and convert only those resources necessary to sustain the
home’s shelter functions. The landfills, outfall pipes, and other disposal systems that contribute
to air, water, and soil pollution have also disappeared. In their place, compost privies, methane
generators, and other methods of reuse and recycling recirculate energy and resources through
the ecosystem, filling it with not only clean air and water, but also “peace,” “nature,” and “joy.”
Most importantly, the ecotectural house’s processes were all interrelated, a critical
distinction from the technocracy’s supposed tendency to establish specialized industries to solve
societal problems. Yet although Van der Ryn’s illustrations distinguished between technocratic
control and the “individual responsibility and control” of ecotectural dwellers, the ecotectural
house’s life support system recalled strategies of industrial integration, albeit on a much smaller
scale. The three general systems that comprised the ecotectural house—energy and resource
collection, food production, and waste recycling—aligned with the operations of many large
businesses, including resource extraction, product manufacturing, and reclamation. Whether as
part of an integral house or an integrated corporation, these systems fulfilled similar goals of
economy, efficiency, and cohesion.
Resource independence, a primary objective of the ecotectural house, was also a central
pillar of corporate integration. While early industrial enterprises purchased materials in bulk to
secure lower prices, later integrated corporations achieved even greater economic advantage by
220
controlling their supply chains.
67
Access to raw materials became more urgent as corporations
grew in size because the cost advantage of a large industrial enterprise depended on the constant
flow of materials through its factories.
68
In times of resource scarcity, integrated corporations
were also better insulated from fluctuations in the price and availability of raw materials. With a
continuous flow of resources, a corporation could, in theory, operate perpetually. Despite Van
der Ryn’s critique of big business as woefully myopic, concerned only with immediate financial
gain, most industrial enterprises sought to erect systems that were durable and long-lasting.
The Integral Urban House pursued energy and resource independence for similar reasons:
to save money, to safeguard its methods of food production, and, above all, to sustain itself in
perpetuity. Rainwater catchment areas, roof-mounted solar panels, and windmills were among
the technologies that could reduce a household’s reliance on utility companies, which not only
charged a premium, but also occasionally failed, leaving residents without power, water, or a
way to dispose of wastes. Other technologies enabled the conversion of raw energy into usable
forms. Solar-powered ovens and heating systems could be used to cook food and heat water. A
dry composting toilet could reduce both water consumption and sewage output. And by using an
adapted bicycle called an “energy-cycle,” inhabitants could grind grain, centrifuge honey, and
sharpen knives through muscle power alone. These technologies enabled residents to circumvent
the companies that regulated access to water, gas, electricity, and other utilities. So long as the
sun kept shining and the rain kept falling, the ecotectural house could continue to operate.
The ecotectural house’s system of food production differed in many ways from the large-
scale, industrialized methods of agribusiness, which critics refer to as “corporate farming.” Aside

67
Alfred D. Chandler, “The Beginnings of ‘Big Business’ in American Industry,” The Business History Review 33,
no. 1 (1959): 4.
68
Alfred D. Chandler, “The Beginnings of the Modern Industrial Corporation,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 130, no. 4 (1986): 386.
221
from operating on a much smaller scale, the ecotectural house also developed alternatives to the
agrochemicals, mechanized labor, and dispersed distribution networks of industrial agriculture.
Most importantly, the Farallones Institute rejected monocropping, a high-yield agricultural
practice popularized in the 1950s, which produced large amounts of a single crop efficiently but
with greater susceptibility to pests and disease. Instead, they revived age-old methods of
polyculture, a form of intercropping that cultivates multiple species in close proximity.
Van der Ryn’s ecotectural house shared an emphasis on holistic rather than high-yield
production with other ecological organizations, such as the New Alchemy Institute, a research
center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, founded by John Todd and Nancy Jack Todd in 1969.
Beginning in 1973, the Journal of the New Alchemists published essays on four topics: “energy,”
“land and its use,” “aquaculture,” and “bioshelters.” Yet its editors were keen to point out that by
combining practical instructions with “scientific and philosophical overtones,” the Journal
would be more than the sum of its parts. “Even more important than the divisions that we have
created is the underlying unity of the work and the ideas,” they wrote in the first issue. “The view
we wish to share is wholistic rather than fragmented.”
69
Like Van der Ryn, they sought to “stem
the tidal wave of western technocracy” by resuscitating traditional methods of harnessing energy
and raising food. Yet these individual methods were less important than the ways in which they
interrelated. The Journal—like Van der Ryn’s diagrams or the educational programs sponsored
by the Farallones Institute—was part of this multi-pronged strategy to develop and disseminate
alternatives to the entrenched systems of a consumer-oriented urban technocratic society.
The efforts of large food processors to monopolize American agricultural production may
appear antithetical to the aims of ecological organizations, which sought to reassert individual

69
“Introduction,” The Journal of the New Alchemists (1973): 4.
222
responsibility and control over household management. Yet as business historians have shown,
these industrial enterprises grew through methods of integration that, like the whole life systems
urban homesteaders employed, relied on the consolidation and interrelation of previously distinct
operations. Instead of mass, nationwide food-processing networks, these strategies of integration
could, in the hands of urban homesteaders, be used construct and popularize small-scale,
sustainable systems of food production. Indeed, Van der Ryn sought not to reject principles of
integration and cohesion, but rather “to design in terms of the smallest coherent system,” that is,
to apply them at the household level.
70

For the ecotectural house to achieve complete coherence, methods of energy collection
and food production had to be linked to methods of energy and resource recycling. The resulting
system would be not just coherent, but also cyclical and sustainable. Rainwater collected from
catchment areas, for instance, cycled through sinks and baths before being recycled as “grey
water,” or wastewater, which inhabitants used to irrigate the gardens. In addition to reducing
water consumption, the composting toilet also produced fertilizer, which, combined with
composted food wastes, supplied a nutrient-rich energy base for the gardens. These methods of
reuse were part of a larger movement to alleviate pollution and climate change by reducing
human-generated wastes. Van der Ryn’s fellow 1970 Aspen speaker, Cliff Humphrey, was a
leader in this recycling movement. Having formed the Berkeley-based nonprofit Ecology Action
in 1968, Humphrey and his wife Mary worked with volunteers and other local organizations to
implement America’s first solid-waste curb-side recycling program.
Methods of reuse and reclamation have existed throughout human history, even, or rather
especially, in pre-industrial times. Historian Susan Strasser has shown how, long before the

70
Van der Ryn, “Abstract of Proposal to Build an Ecotectural House,” 10.
223
ecological awakening of the 1960s and the energy crises of the 1970s fueled an environmentalist
push to recycle, practices of reuse and repair were integral to everyday life in early America.
71

As the U.S. industrialized, generating larger quantities of goods and byproducts, reclamation also
became an integral part of certain cycles of production, distribution, and consumption. Strasser
has identified rags as “the most important household waste products” of the nineteenth century
and the “driving force of other recycling collection systems.”
72
A vital raw material in paper
production, rags were collected by ragpickers, but also newspapers, bookstores, stationers, and
printers, which used rags to pay the paper mills that supplied them. An entire industry therefore
grew up around the reclamation of rags and their conversion into paper.
According to Strasser, these early industrial systems of recycling collapsed around the
turn of the twentieth century, when waste disposal developed into its own industry, separate from
production and consumption.
73
Yet even in the twentieth century, some industries continued
efforts to institutionalize recycling. Container Corporation of America (CCA), for instance, made
the reclamation central to its business strategy beginning in the 1920s. Having underestimated
the importance of forestry and logging in the paper-making supply chain, CCA president Walter
Paepcke turned to the reclamation of wastepaper to sustain his business. A 1939 advertisement
by Herbert Bayer pictures tattered boxes funneling through an industrial plant (fig. 4.12). The
result is an array of pristine cardboard containers. A ring of text—“new containers into old
containers into new containers”—underscores the cyclical nature of this process. The heading—
“the industry that thrives on itself”—suggests that reclamation served as a self-sustaining engine
of efficient industrial production.

71
Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999), 12.
72
Ibid., 80.
73
Ibid., 109.
224
CCA’s official corporate history overdetermines the altruism of these efforts: “Just as
Paepcke foresaw the need for paperboard packaging, he must have envisioned the growing
importance of wastepaper as a raw material—not only from an ecological standpoint (a
philosophy which in those early years had not yet been conceived), but also from a pragmatic
view of using a commodity that people freely threw away.”
74
Paepcke was most likely motivated
not by feelings of environmental responsibility, but rather by pragmatic concerns over the
sustainability of his business. A 1941 advertisement by Herbert Matter demonstrates CCA’s
ignorance of its environmental impact (fig. 4.13). Featuring a box hovering over a roiling body
of water, the advertisement celebrates the fact that “200 tons of water are used to make one ton
of paperboard—the most important packaging material for American goods today.” This
freewheeling attitude toward water usage goes against present-day wisdom about the finitude of
water as a resource and the ecological attitude toward energy conservation.
Even if environmental sustainability was not Paepcke’s main concern, the sustainable
practices CCA and other companies institutionalized around the mid-twentieth century laid the
foundations for the ecological design initiatives that arose in the 1960s and 1970s. Scholars have
chronicled at length CCA’s role in creating the recycling logo. In short, the packaging company
sponsored a student competition in 1970 for a logo to be used on all its recycled products. Gary
Anderson, a student at the University of Southern California, earned a prize of $2,500 and a
fellowship to attend IDCA 1970. When CCA neglected to trademark Anderson’s design, other
companies appropriated the logo, turning it into the ubiquitous symbol for recycling it is today.
75

74
Susan Black, ed., The First Fifty Years, 1926–1976 (Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1976), 10.
Ecological thinking did in fact exist before the 1920s; the word, coined by German scientist Ernst Haeckel in 1866,
had developed into a rigorous science by the turn of the century. It is true, however, that the ecological concepts of
adaptation and natural selection were not firmly linked with a concern for the environment until the environmental
movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
75
Peder Anker, From Bauhaus to Eco-House: A History of Ecological Design (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2010), 67.
225
Yet the recycling logo is only the most visible manifestation of a decades-old commitment to
reclamation that gave the recycling movement not simply a symbol, but also an infrastructure.
This meant not only the machinery and techniques to process recycled material, but also forms of
community engagement that naturalized recycling as a civic duty and social activity (fig. 4.14).
Technocratic leaders and ecological thinkers shared more than strategies of conservation,
production, and reclamation. More importantly, they shared a belief in integration, in designing
systems whose parts were interrelated. Like CCA, whose ability to procure pulp and reclaimed
wastepaper fueled the production of packages, the Integral Urban House harnessed solar energy
and recycled wastewater to support its system of food production. The cyclical and interlocking
images produced by CCA’s designers in the 1940s and by Van der Ryn in the 1970s were not
only similar in form, but also in their underlying logic (fig. 4.15). Both assigned design the task
of combining and connecting existing technologies to create self-supporting system.

The Garden as a Machine
Van der Ryn pursued his ecotectural vision through two projects sponsored by the
Farallones Institute: the Farallones Rural Center in Occidental, California, and the Integral Urban
House in Berkeley.
76
The former was more closely aligned with the ethos of the back-to-the-land
movement, popularized in the U.S. by activist Bolton Hall and agrarian theorist Ralph Borsodi
with his 1933 book Flight from the City. Borsodi’s experiments with modern homesteading and
self-reliant living led a generation of Americans devastated by the Great Depression to seek new
lives in the countryside. Decades later, counterculturists rediscovered Borsodi’s theories and
incorporated them as part of an anti-urban revolt against the materialism and profligacy of city

76
The Farallones Institute was, in turn, principally funded by Harlow Daugherty, a rancher from Santa Cruz and one
of Van der Ryn’s former students.
226
life. Van der Ryn himself abandoned his home in Berkeley for a small cabin in Inverness after
the violent suppression of the People’s Park in May 1969, which opened his eyes to the dangers
of centralized authority.
77
In 1972, he drew on the experience of building his new home to devise
a living-learning course called “Making a Place in the Country,” in which students designed a
temporary community that engaged with the local ecology.
78
This “outlaw builder studio”
served, in turn, as the basis for the Farallones Rural Center, where staff and students shared
“experience and skills towards developing a simpler, more integrated way of life.”
79

These experiments in rural living fulfilled Van der Ryn’s desire for enclave-like settings
in which people could learn and work together, contributing to the pursuit of “personal growth
and professional competence” that he called for in his 1970 Aspen talk. Van der Ryn viewed the
Rural Center as a step beyond the Integral Urban House, applying similar methods at the scale of
an entire village. Yet despite Van der Ryn’s personal affinity for these rural projects, something
of the ecological enclave’s transformative potential was lost in its displacement from the urban
center. Recall Cora Walker’s reproach of designers in Aspen for retreating to their “comfortable
world of design” rather than engaging with the challenges faced by urban communities.
Surrounded by freeways and industrial ruins, rather than open fields and farmhouses, the
Integral Urban House adhered more closely to the idea of an enclave than its rural counterpart.
The house was located not just in a city, but in a part of West Berkeley that suffered from many
of the issues that plagued America’s most depressed urban neighborhoods, such as redlining and
racial segregation, postindustrial decline, and gentrification disputes.
80
Environmental writer

77
Van der Ryn, Design for Life, 34.
78
Timothy Stott has connected this experimental pedagogy to a bottom-up approach to environmentalism centered
on play. See Timothy Stott, “Ludic Pedagogies at the College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley, 1966 to
1972,” in The Culture of Nature in the History of Design, ed. Kjetil Fallan (London: Routledge, 2019), 58–71.
79
Van der Ryn, Design for Life, 53.
80
For a history of racial segregation and housing discrimination in Berkeley, see Jesse Barber, “Redlining: The
History of Berkeley’s Segregated Neighborhoods,” Berkeleyside (September 20, 2018),
227
Kenneth Brower described the area thus: “The young black men of the neighborhood called this
section of Berkeley ‘the Front,’ short for waterfront, with a nod to frontier too, I think, for the
neighborhood was the wildest in several counties. It was, as it remains, a black ghetto peppered
with Mexican-Americans and salted with a very few whites and Chinese.”
81
The Integral Urban
House occupied a site in West Berkeley that was not at all integrated racially. Like other
organizations engaged with the idea of integrated design, including those invested in ecological
causes, the Farallones Institute was largely detached from issues of racial integration; at least, it
did not make these issues central to its mission.
82
Instead, its members viewed the Integral Urban
House as an opportunity to pursue a different form of integration that sought to heal the divisions
not between social groups, but rather between urban residents (a single, undifferentiated social
group in the Institute’s parlance) and the natural environment.
At a time when many environmentally conscious people were abandoning cities to pursue
alternative lifestyles in the country, the Integral Urban House instead sought to embed ecological
thinking at the heart of urban America. While Van der Ryn had personally renounced city living,
his colleagues at the Farallones Institute argued that an urban demonstration project would better
serve the country’s primarily urban population.
83
Bill and Helga Olkowski, entomologists at UC
Berkeley who had begun to experiment with ecological design in their own home and garden,

https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/09/20/redlining-the-history-of-berkeleys-segregated-neighborhoods. For a
broader history of these topics, see Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our
Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017).
81
Brower, “The Urban Farm,” 58.
82
For community planning projects that were concerned with desegregation, see the work of developer-turned-civic-
activists such as Morris Milgram and James Rouse. Joshua Olsen, Better Places, Better Lives: A Biography of James
Rouse (Washington, D.C: The Urban Land Institute, 2003); and Amanda Kolson Hurley, “‘Housing Is Everybody’s
Problem,’” Places Journal, October 10, 2017, https://placesjournal.org/article/housing-is-everybodys-problem/.
83
By 1970, roughly seventy-three percent of the U.S. population resided in urban centers. That statistic remained
largely unchanged throughout the decade, a sign of the environmental response against urbanization. United
Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects: The
2018 Revision, (New York: United Nations, 2019), 26.
228
believed that humanity’s survival depended on the education of city dwellers.
84
In a federal grant
application, Helga argued that “the special needs of urban residents have been repeatedly ignored
in proposed environmentally sound lifestyle alternatives,” which were often prohibitively costly
and oriented toward rural living.
85
The Olkowskis feared that if city dwellers continued to retreat
to the country, then eventually there would be no country left.
86
To stem the exodus and at the
same time improve urban living conditions, they sought to construct a model “of low cost,
alternative energy and food production methods suitable for adoption by urban residents.”
87

The Integral Urban House was not the only, or even the first, model of self-reliant city
living in the U.S. A year earlier, in 1973, Dennis Holloway, assistant professor of architecture at
the University of Minnesota, led a class on the construction of an experimental energy-efficient
house.
88
Dubbed Project Ouroboros in reference to the mythical dragon that survived by feasting
on its constantly regenerating tail, the house, located at the university’s suburban Rosemount
campus, was a laboratory for energy conservation technologies.
89
Like the Integral Urban House,
it combined wind-generated electricity, solar-powered heating, and a compositing toilet to fulfill
all its energy needs.
90
A follow-up project in St. Paul even more closely resembled the Integral
Urban House. Unlike its purpose-built predecessor, Ouroboros East involved the renovation of
an existing building in the middle of the city. Holloway considered it “a more important
demonstration of energy conservation” because, he predicted, “the large central city would be

84
In 1975, the Olkowskis published a guide to urban farming based on their experience raising food at their home in
Berkeley. See Helga Olkowski and William Olkowski, The City People’s Book of Raising Food, (Emmaus, PA:
Rodale Press, 1975).
85
Helga Olkowski, Proposal for the “Integral Urban House Environmental Education Program,” November 1975,
http://who1615.com/ecology_iuh.php.
86
Stewart McBride, “Farming the Asphalt Jungle,” The Christian Science Monitor (April 29, 1980).
87
Olkowski, Proposal for the “Integral Urban House Environmental Education Program.”
88
The project was funded through a combination of federal grants and corporate donations. Honeywell Inc. offered
to provide an analysis of the solar-collection system.
89
Martha Rose, “Sun, Wind to Power ‘Energy-Crisis’ Home,” The Minneapolis Star (September 19, 1973), 6C.
90
This was the same Swedish-made composting toilet, called a Clivus Multrum, used in the Integral Urban House.
229
one of the first casualties of fuel shortages.”
91
Like the Olkowskis, Holloway recognized the
need for an urban demonstration of ecological living, one that city dwellers could apply to their
existing homes. John Shuttleworth, founder of The Mother Earth News, lauded Project
Ouroboros. He believed that through such efforts, “soft technology,” that is, appropriate,
renewable technology, could become a major force in American life.
92

The Integral Urban House, like Holloway’s experiments in Minnesota, quickly captured
the attention of reporters, who struggled to find words to encapsulate the contents of the urban
homestead. In a description of his visit in 1977, Brower resorted to a popular nineteenth-century
literary trope: “The morning sun peeked over the far hills and shone obliquely down rows of
alfalfa, catching here and there the blue of the flowers. A cock crowed. A distant train whistle
blew mournfully.”
93
This recurring image of nature interrupted, which historian Leo Marx
referred to as “the machine in the garden,” centered on the intrusion of technology into the
natural landscape.
94
Perhaps best exemplified by the whistle of a locomotive as it cut through the
countryside, this literary trope revealed, according to Marx, a contradiction in America’s
commitment to an old pastoral ideal, on the one hand, and its aspiration to industrial power, on
the other. In Brower’s narration, the shocking sounds of train whistles, freeway traffic, and
wailing sirens encroached on his experience of the Integral Urban House, whose lush gardens,
populated by roosters, rabbits, and honeybees, seemed to offer a retreat from normal city life.
Brower’s apparent use of a bygone literary trope was, perhaps, no mere coincidence. In
an afterword to the 2000 edition of The Machine in the Garden, Marx identified an “ideological

91
John Shuttleworth, “Ouroboros Not Just Myth In Minn. Energy Experiments,” The Cincinnati Inquirer (January
11, 1976), 1–5.
92
Ibid.
93
Brower, “The Urban Farm,” 58.
94
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1964).
230
continuity between nineteenth-century pastoralism and the radical Movement (or counter-
culture) of the 1960s.”
95
He likened the rhetoric of the Berkeley student rebellion to that of
Henry David Thoreau; both sought to mobilize human bodies against the machine, which, in the
context of the 1960s, no longer meant simply the mechanisms of industrialization, but the whole
network of technocratic forces that comprised the postwar military-industrial complex.
96
While
modern ecology, like the machine-in-the-garden trope, emerged in the nineteenth century, art
historian Simon Sadler has argued that “the ecological worldview was in large part brought to
design through the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, which was dedicated to the overthrow
of technocracy.”
97
Yet it was not simply that ecological designers sought to supplant technical
expertise through a return to pastoral idealism. Instead, something akin to a contradictory
consciousness was evident among the proponents of ecological design, who synthesized
ecological and technocratic thinking in order to counteract the environmental destruction that
unfettered technological progress caused.
98

The Integral Urban House exemplified this oscillation between technophobia and techno-
utopianism, or between an aversion and an attraction to the city. Indeed, one reporter referred to
the project as “a rather bizarre marriage of ‘new age’ technology and traditional farm life.”
99

This contradictory consciousness allowed Van der Ryn to decry humanity’s total dependence on
“‘artificial,’ centralized technology” in the same breath that he asserted the need for a “center to

95
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, Second Edition (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 384. Marx claimed that unlike the dissident politics of the pre-World War II
era, the 1960s countercultural movements did “not arise from, or centrally involve, antagonistic economic interests.”
96
Nineteenth-century transcendentalism and the 1960s counterculture shared a belief in self-reliance. Yet whereas
Thoreau sought a life of solitude and spirituality, the Integral Urban House was an experiment in collectivity.
97
Simon Sadler, “Design’s Ecological Operating Environments,” in The Culture of Nature in the History of Design,
ed. Kjetil Fallan (London: Routledge, 2019), 19.
98
Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci defined “contradictory consciousness” as a mental state characteristic of
subordinate groups. Mixing resistance and resignation, this mental condition helped Gramsci explain how dominant
cultures maintain hegemony in the face of opposition. See Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony.”
99
McBride, “Farming the Asphalt Jungle.”
231
develop urban-scale appropriate technology.”
100
Such distinctions between artificial and natural,
high and low, or fast and slow technologies masked more fundamental consistencies between the
views of technocrats and ecologists, who shared a belief in technology’s power to manage the
environment. While the figure of the outlaw designer gained currency within the counterculture
of the 1960s and 1970s, the Integral Urban House asserted that cultural change could be achieved
most effectively by working within “the omnipresent constraints of the urban environment.”
101

Whereas nineteenth-century writers had been content to expose industrialization’s intrusion on
the countryside, thereby setting up a basic tension between city and country, twentieth-century
urban homesteaders sought to resolve this tension by reconciling the machine and the garden.
While the incongruous image of “the machine in the garden” may capture the shock of
encountering the seemingly out-of-place inner-city farm, I argue that the Integral Urban House
might be better understood as an inversion of Marx’s literary trope, “the garden as machine,” so
to speak. By the 1970s, mechanization had become such a pervasive feature of American life that
it could no longer be considered an intrusion. Yet if the machine had successfully invaded the
garden, the Integral Urban House, rather than withdraw to the country, instead recolonized the
city and appropriated its technologies of management and control.
102
Indeed, the house occupied
a central, panoptic position in Brower’s narration; from it, he monitored the sounds and motions
of nature and machine alike. “Outside, the sun was setting through leaves of corn,” he observed

100
Van der Ryn, “Introduction,” in The Integral Urban House, viii–x.
101
“Integral Urban House Correspondence flyer,” undated, http://who1615.com/ecology_iuh.php. For more on this
idea of the “outlaw designer,” see Chris Zelov and Cousineau, Design Outlaws on the Ecological Frontier. Greg
Castillo has argued that many of Van der Ryn’s projects “straddled inlaw and outlaw realms.” See Greg Castillo,
“Counterculture Terroir: California’s Hippie Enterprise Zone,” in Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, ed.
Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015), 91.
102
We might question whether the machine and the garden were ever truly separate, such that one could invade the
other. Recent scholarship on the material culture of gardening, for instance, has asserted its reliance on machine
tools and processes, resulting in non-natural environments designed, made, and managed by humans. See Jette
Lykke Jensen, “Design for the Garden: Questioning Gardening as Environmentalism,” in The Culture of Nature in
the History of Design, ed. Kjetil Fallan (London: Routledge, 2019), 161–74.
232
at the end of his visit. “The rabbits were huddling against the approaching cool, and the bees had
retired to their hives. An evening wind stirred the alfalfa. Traffic droned on the freeway. A siren
wailed from the street.”
103
The ecological enclave collapsed distinctions between the machine
and the garden, or between the inside and the outside of establishment design.
The affinities between establishment and ecological design reveal a fine, at times even
imperceptible, line between the environmental visions of the technocracy and the counterculture.
In an analysis of the visual culture of what he calls “Hippie Holism,” Simon Sadler misidentifies
Van der Ryn’s “Tecno-Fantacy House-Hold”—the visual critique of resource mismanagement
included in the 1972 proposal for an ecotectural house—as a “diagram of Integral Urban House.”
By conflating these two images, Sadler inadvertently shows how a concern with technology
dominates both technocratic and ecological regimes of control (figs. 4.10 and 4.11). The energy
sources and flows that sustain the two systems differ, but many of the technologies appear
similar. Like its technocratic equivalent, the ecotectural house features an array of tentacle-like
pipelines that connect it to energy transformers, including a methane generator not unlike the
power generator that fuels the technocratic house. The greenhouse, though much smaller than
any food processing plant, is nevertheless based on a similar concept of environmental control.
Despite the irrigation system needed to support its mono-cultivated fields, the crops sown by
agribusiness still appear almost identical to those in the ecotectural garden. It is difficult, even, to
distinguish between the mound of waste expelled by the compost privy and the garbage heap at
the landfill. To help identify the “Tecno-Fantasy House-Hold” as a critique, Van der Ryn fills the
image with dollar signs, universal symbols of capitalist greed. That his hopeful ecotectural vision
so closely resembled its nightmarish technocratic counterpart was no coincidence. For if techno-

103
Brower, “The Urban Farm,” 63.
233
utopia and ecotopia were simply two sides of the same coin, then it would be simple to flip from
one to other, to transform a culture based on rampant technological change and consumerism
into one based on responsible conservation.
Flipping the switch between overconsumption and conservation required familiarity with
the mechanisms of technocratic operating systems. By adapting these technologies to support his
ecological agenda, Van der Ryn aimed to create a system that could reprogram existing systems
of environmental control from within. Co-opting the combative language of the counterculture,
Brower described the Integral Urban House as “a counterattack behind enemy lines.”
104
It was
not only located within the city limits, but also used methods of resource and waste management
already employed by corporations. Reports suggest the counterattack was successful. Unlike
other environmental design initiatives that were strongly anti-establishment, the Integral Urban
House was “seriously studied and in some ways copied by government officials and foreign
observers.”
105
Visitors included groups from the Swiss International Farming and Organic
Agriculture Movement and the federal Energy Research and Development Administration
(ERDA), which called for similar demonstration projects in other cities around the U.S.
106

This vision of ecological design as urban, organized, and technologically advanced was at
odds with the popular perception of environmentalism as an idealistic movement confined to the
countryside. “But it is neither rural nor wishful,” insisted one reporter during the construction of
the Integral Urban House. “It is soon to happen in a small lot in northwest Berkeley, where a
group of pragmatic biologists, architects, engineers and students is busily building a model live-
in laboratory, hoping to prove that people can live in harmony with nature and not leave the

104
Ibid.
105
Brad Knickerbocker, “Living Off the Land—In the City,” The Christian Science Monitor (December 2, 1977).
106
The Ouroboros House attracted similar interest from Minnesota’s government officials. “State Officials to Tour
Energy House of Future,” Minneapolis Tribune (November 11, 1973).
234
city.”
107
Years later, visitors to the Integral Urban House were still surprised to find that “all the
concepts had been carefully worked out in this practical environment by competent realists rather
than utopian dreamers. If there is an antidote to environmental pessimism about our ability to
adapt and survive, this is it.”
108
At the same time that they decried technocratic corporations, the
organizers of the Integral Urban House—a self-described “enthusiastic group of ‘doers’”—
salvaged from these organizations the tools necessary to counteract environmental degradation.

Integral Aesthetics
The Integral Urban House book, published in 1979 by the Sierra Club, was the most
pivotal of the Farallones Institute’s counterattacks against environmental mismanagement. The
nearly five-hundred-page, multi-authored manual was the product of four years of experience
constructing, operating, and refining the systems that comprised the Integral Urban House. It
applied strategies of data visualization and technical instruction to the accessible format of a do-
it-yourself handbook, its pages packed with textual and visual materials instructing readers in the
principles and practices of ecological urban living. At the core of this ambitious project, linking
all the book’s data and directions together, was the idea of the integral urban house as a total life-
support system capable of improving urban living conditions. But beyond teaching readers how
to build integral houses of their own, the book also operated more covertly, yet crucially, as a
lesson in how to see the world integrally. In other words, The Integral Urban House cultivated a
form of what I call “integral aesthetics” by facilitating a sensitivity to and appreciation for visual
interrelationships. If environmental degradation resulted from the failure of organisms to cohere
in a functioning ecosystem, integral aesthetics would train people to perceive possibilities for

107
Goodman, “An Organic House Grows in Berkeley,” 3.
108
Foster, “A Better Energy-Saving Idea.” 43.
235
greater coherence in their surroundings and, as a result, would encourage them “to come together
in constructive groups to reform their communities.”
109
The integral urban dweller, trained in the
rudiments of ecological design, was to become a key agent of environmental change.
The ecological designer’s propensity to see things whole has been linked to a tradition of
hippie environmentalism rooted in the ideology of whole systems.
110
Stewart Brand’s Whole
Earth Catalog, the most widely read and influential of the counterculture’s sourcebooks, helped
nurture this form of holistic thinking. Scholars have shown how the goal of “understanding
whole systems,” perhaps best exemplified by the view of Earth from outer space that graced the
first catalog’s cover, suffused both the content and the structure of the publication.
111
This
principle of holistic thought, evident in the assembled, encyclopedic, and collaged layout of the
catalog itself, was picked up by an impressive cast of contributing authors, such as Buckminster
Fuller, Scottish biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, and American ecologist Howard T.
Odum. These eminent theorists explored holistic thinking “across a range of metaphors, from the
geological and cartographic view of the world, to the analysis of fundamental economic and
biological systems, to the structure of human thought.”
112
Yet as an explicit play on the mail-
order catalogs produced by Montgomery Ward, Sears, and other retailers since the middle of the
nineteenth century, the Whole Earth Catalog also tethered the ideology of whole systems to the
pragmatic, participatory, and distributive format of the manual. It helped spawn an entire corpus
of countercultural “cookbooks” that offered recipes for alternative living structures and

109
Helga Olkowski, “Beginnings,” in The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the City, by Farallones
Institute (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979), 3.
110
See Andrew Blauvelt, ed., Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015).
111
“Understanding Whole Systems” was the title of the first of nine sections included in The Last Whole Earth
Catalog. See Andrew G. Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism
(Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007); Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart
Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008);
and Simon Sadler, “An Architecture of the Whole,” Journal of Architectural Education 61, no. 4 (2008): 108–29.
112
Caroline Maniaque-Benton, ed., Whole Earth Field Guide (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016), 55.
236
systems.
113
The Integral Urban House book joined this body of literature, putting the tools
necessary to construct whole living systems into the hands of everyday people.
Like the Whole Earth Catalog, The Integral Urban House book promoted not simply a
collection of solar and energy-saving devices, but rather a total “bioethic,” defined as “a system
of moral concepts that deal with the relationship of humans to all other living organisms.”
114
In
the most speculative of the book’s chapters, entitled “Integral Design” and “Design Processes,”
its authors outlined a system of “design organization” that approximated the features of a natural
ecosystem, including “economy, efficiency, and simple elegance.”
115
This design process was
“integral,” meaning “essential to completeness,” in two main ways. Methodologically, it required
interrelating principles from numerous disciplines, including but not limited to architecture and
ecology. In practice, it involved combining many complementary systems and pathways—from
solar collection to waste elimination—into one integral, human-managed ecosystem.
To persuade readers to adopt these strategies in their own homes and everyday lives, Van
der Ryn and Bunnell outlined the benefits of integral design. “In terms of human purpose,” they
explained, “integral design produced value in three spheres: (1) economy, (2) energy use, and (3)
aesthetics.”
116
Greater economy, understood not as short-term monetary gain, but rather as long-
term resource savings, and improved energy use, oriented not toward maximum production, but
rather maximum efficiency, were seen as key advantages of the integrally designed system. But
it was aesthetics, too often neglected yet “without which neither economy nor the efficient use of

113
Among these countercultural “cookbooks” were Ant Farm’s Inflatocookbook, Ken Isaac’s How to Build Your
Own Living Structures, Victor Papanek and James Hennessey’s Nomadic Furniture books, Lloyd Kahn’s dome book
series, and Steve Baer’s Dome Cookbook and Dome Primer. See Andrew Blauvelt, “Preface,” in Hippie Modernism:
The Struggle for Utopia, ed. Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015), n20.
114
Helga Olkowski, Bill Olkowski, and Tom Javits, “Design Processes,” in The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant
Living in the City, by Farallones Institute (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979), 45.
115
Sim Van der Ryn and Sterling Bunnell, “Integral Design,” in The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in
the City, by Farallones Institute (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979), 16.
116
Van der Ryn and Bunnell, “Integral Design,” 32.
237
energy have any meaning,” that underlay Van der Ryn and Bunnell’s concept of integral design.
After all, what was the point of an ecological fixation on economy and efficiency if it resulted in
deadeningly uniform environments akin to those achieved through industrial, mechanized design
processes? If integral design’s task was “to recreate opportunities for people to derive meaning
and satisfaction” from their surroundings, then aesthetic considerations were crucial.
117

In integral design, however, and especially in discussions of the Integral Urban House,
the form of an environment was impossible to disentangle from the life support processes that
shaped it. Van der Ryn and Bunnell reminded readers that “integral design has as much to do
with process as it does with realized form.”
118
Harking back to Van der Ryn’s 1970 Aspen talk
about spiral cultural forms, they quipped that “a house shaped like a nautilus shell” is not
inherently “‘organic’ or ‘natural.’” Form accrued meaning not in fixed shapes or permanent
structures, but rather as the congelation of evolving processes.
Integral aesthetics involved the perception and appreciation of integral processes as they
manifested in the visual world. To help cultivate this synthetic worldview, The Integral Urban
House book relied heavily on graphic aids. Its dense textual information was accompanied by a
dizzying array of visual supplements, including photographs, architectural plans and elevations,
construction schedules, technical and mechanical drawings, infographics, flowcharts, scientific
illustrations, comparative diagrams, maps, contact lists, interactive worksheets, and step-by-step
instructions. These data visualization techniques all have their own histories, several of which
are indicative of the book’s perhaps inadvertent reliance on strategies of information design
developed within the context of the military-industrial complex.
119

117
Ibid., 35.
118
Ibid., 16. [Emphasis original]
119
For a thorough account of post-World War II data visualization, see Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of
Vision and Reason since 1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2015). For a longer and more global
238
While “hippie modernism” has been interpreted as a “nonprogrammatic” movement
concerned with simply “being,” or “realizing the flow of energy in the now,” the creators of the
Integral Urban House advocated long-range planning and provided aspiring urban homesteaders
with the diagrammatic tools necessary to design integral houses of their own.
120
To organize the
tasks involved in planning such an ambitious project, The Integral Urban House book promoted
the use of a graphic organizing system called PERT, short for Planning (or Program) Evaluation
Review Technique.
121
PERT diagrams compiled a project’s job components in a table, assigned
each a time to completion, and graphed them onto a grid to facilitate time allocation, material
purchases, and job sequencing (fig. 4.16). Aside from initial construction, PERT diagrams could
also be used to manage ongoing household chores. Yet the authors of The Integral Urban House
either failed to grasp or failed to mention the tool’s institutional roots. Developed jointly by the
Navy Special Projects Office and the consulting firm Booz-Allen-Hamilton, the PERT system’s
first users were defense contractors and its first application was in the development of the Polaris
missile, a submarine-launched ballistic missile that served as the cornerstone of the U.S. Navy’s
nuclear force from 1961 to 1996.
122
Scholars have interpreted the practice of co-opting military
techniques to support alternative lifestyles as a subversive act, but it also calls attention to the
operational affinities between organized warfare and ecological design. Architectural historian
Beatriz Colomina has shown how postwar architects adapted techniques and materials developed
for the military to domestic use.
123
Just as these wartime innovations underpinned postwar

account of technical imagery, see Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, eds., The Technical Image:
A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
120
This is the interpretation of art historian Simon Sadler, who has contrasted the nonprogrammatic nature of hippie
modernism with the political engagement of the Black Panther movement. Sadler, “Mandalas or Raised Fists?,” 120.
121
Olkowski, Olkowski, and Javits, “Design Processes,” 43.
122
United States Department of the Navy, “Program Evaluation Research Task, Summary Report, Phase 1,”
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1958).
123
Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).
239
visions of domestic bliss, so too did PERT’s organizational logic serve the needs of ecological
designers waging a new war on the home front against environmental mismanagement.
Beyond its militaristic origins, PERT was celebrated as a major advance in managerial
science. In contrast to other planning tools, experts characterized PERT as a uniquely “integrated
methodological approach” that revealed “the interrelationship between all vital program
functions. In short, it [attempted] to give total program perspective.”
124
The flow plan, a graphic
device derived from early twentieth-century flowcharts, was critical to achieving this total
perspective. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth first introduced flowcharts, which they called “process
charts,” in 1921 as a way to establish efficient working methods.
125
Visual renderings of step-
by-step problem solving, flowcharts consisted of activities, represented by rectangles and other
shapes, which were linked by arrows, indicating the direction of workflow. Although potentially
applicable to any kind of work under any form of management, flowcharts were seen to be well-
suited to the repetitive routines of “production, selling, accounting and finance.”
126
Yet in their
initial presentation to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Gilbreths demonstrated
the flowchart’s utility by applying it to the process of “Loading VB Rifle Grenades” (fig. 4.17).
Given that the prospect of military usage was built into the very conception of the flowchart, it is
unsurprising that the U.S. Navy appropriated it decades later to develop ballistic missiles.
PERT’s flow plans, like the Gilbreths’ process charts, employed circles and squares to
symbolize “events,” which were connected by arrows of varying lengths and thicknesses that
signified “activities,” or the amount of time necessary to achieve each event (fig. 4.18). The idea

124
Daniel D. Roman, “The PERT System: An Appraisal of Program Evaluation Review Technique,” The Journal of
the Academy of Management 5, no. 1 (1962): 57–65.
125
Frank Gilbreth and Lillian Gilbreth, Process Charts: First Steps in Finding the One Best Way to Do Work (New
York: The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1921).
126
Ibid., 4.
240
of charting work or process flow was readily applicable to the science of ecology and the concept
of the ecosystem, which mapped flows of energy and resources between living organisms (fig.
4.19). The Integral Urban House book combined the logic of PERT’s flow plans with other data
visualization techniques to explain the mechanisms of integral design. In a diagram labeled
“Integral House Ecosystem,” for instance, arrows indicate the “activities” used to transform sun
and water into the energy and resources needed to support shelter functions (fig. 4.20). The main
“events”—energy, resource recycling, and food production—are rendered not as circles or
squares, but rather as spirals. This graphic device, which ecologists often used to depict patterns
of resource management—such as food, waste, and water cycles—helped convey the dynamic,
looping pathways of the ecosystem. According to Van der Ryn and Bunnell, such diagrams were
essential to integral design because they described ecological “interactions better than prose,
since the web is often complex and cyclical in time and space, rather than linear, as are words on
a page.”
127
By translating complex ecological processes into dynamic visual forms, PERT and
other graphic tools supported the totalizing perspective that integral design pursued. This total
perspective, like the diagrams that enabled it, was embedded equally in the logic of military
armament, managerial science, ecological thinking, and design practice. Ecological designers
employed militaristic and managerial tactics not simply as a subversive act, then, but also
because these visual techniques served their aim to regain control over the environment.
Sober charts and diagrams accomplished most of the data visualization required of The
Integral Urban House, condensing large amounts of information into more accessible formats. A
series of illustrations by artist Bill Wells performed a more subtle function in the cultivation of
integral aesthetics. Each image introduced one of the book’s four main parts, which addressed, in

127
Van der Ryn and Bunnell, “Integral Design,” 30.
241
order, “The Concept,” “Conserving Energy and Resources,” “Using the Sun’s Energy,” and “The
Interfaces.” The first image, which doubled as the book’s cover illustration, was the result of a
collaboration between Wells and designer Gordon Ashby. While Wells is largely absent from the
historical record, Ashby was a central figure in California’s countercultural network. He worked
in the Los Angeles office of Charles and Ray Eames before relocating to San Francisco in the
early 1960s, where he established a studio practice and cofounded the San Francisco Art
Institute’s graphic design program. As architectural historian Greg Castillo has observed, Ashby
was “a skilled mediator between ‘those who conformed to rules and those who broke them.’”
128

Through his studio, which counted corporations and rock musicians among its eclectic clientele,
Ashby “cultivated inlaw and outlaw personae as an eco-activist.”
The pro bono branch of Ashby’s studio, called “Transformer,” advanced a holistic
approach to eco-activism. Worried that “studying specific problems will only provide piecemeal
solutions,” Ashby promoted “the study of ecology from a total view.”
129
In addition to supplying
other eco-activists with facilities, materials, skills, and knowledge, Ashby also created posters
and other graphic designs that encouraged a holistic worldview through the use of spiral forms.
One 1970 poster entreats the viewer to “Be a Transformer…evolve the New Spirit.” (fig. 4.21).
Ashby employs the form of a mandala, a geometrical configuration used in Eastern spiritual
traditions to focus attention and aid meditation. In this poster, it serves as an aid to ecological
contemplation. The wreath of text around the outside includes instructions, like The Integral
Urban House book, on how to lead a more sustainable life: plant a garden; use less electricity;
join an ecology group, etc. The four-part image at the center depicts counterclockwise from top
left the environmental transformations such actions might produce. As vines grow and animal

128
Castillo, “Counterculture Terroir,” 92–4.
129
“Advertisements for a Counter Culture,” Progressive Architecture 51, no. 6 (June 1970): 72.
242
populations flourish, the empty pit in the human figure’s stomach disappears and their heart
grows. Viewed in the opposite direction, however, we see the potentially apocalyptic results of
humanity’s failure to change its behaviors.
130

Wells and Ashby used a similar mandalic form to represent “The Concept” of the integral
urban house (fig. 4.22). The resources fundamental to all ecosystems (sun, wind, water, and soil)
occupy the illustration’s four corners. They correspond with the four classical elements (fire, air,
water, and earth) that hold cosmological significance for many cultures by explaining the nature
of the universe in material terms. The elemental tetrad appears in all four of Wells’s illustrations,
serving as a guide for how to read each image as a synthesis of parts. At the center of the first
lies an integral urban house, its walls torn open to reveal the interlocking technologies contained
within. Features of the Berkeley project are recognizable—such as the composting toilet,
aquaculture pond, greenhouse, and rabbit hutch—but the overall illustration is a fantasy. The city
in the background is denser and more built up than Northwest Berkeley to provide a foil for the
meticulously composed property in the foreground. Whereas the prototype Integral Urban House
had a cramped, “imploded look,” according to visitors, the illustrated house and gardens appears
more spacious and orderly.
131
It offers a vision of ecological harmony that is more than the sum
of its parts—more coherent, more efficient, and more aesthetically pleasing.
Wells’s other three illustrations consist of central images divided into four quadrants, like
Ashby’s Transformer poster. These images visualize the integral urban house as a composite of
individual processes. To clarify integral design’s role in “Conserving Energy and Resources,” for
instance, Wells depicts four examples of conservation achievable in the home: thermal
insulation, grey water filtration, human waste composting, and recycling (fig. 4.23). Individually,

130
Castillo, “Counterculture Terroir,” 92–4.
131
Brower, “The Urban Farm,” 61.
243
each process constitutes a step toward sustainable living; combined, they create a whole system
that approximates the economy and efficiency of a natural ecosystem. Seizing on this principle
of ecological integration, Wells invites viewers to take part in an act of visual integration,
combining the separate parts of his composite images into a total vision of ecological living.
Taken together, the diagrams and illustrations that comprise The Integral Urban House
book generated an integral aesthetic predicated on the ability to see things whole. This visual
language was essential to the propagation not only of the integral urban house as a specific idea,
but also of ecological design more broadly as a coherent field of practice. The Integral Urban
House thus joined a network of technologies, activities, and initiatives centered in the Bay Area
that sought to carve out a recognizable identity within the crowded landscape of 1970s design.

The Visual Ecology of Countercultural Design
The graphic materials that the creators of the Integral Urban House produced, published,
and circulated contributed to a visual field, or ecology, of countercultural design. Scholars have
been reluctant to consider alternative design activities in tandem with more mainstream corporate
design programs, fostering a perception of corporate and countercultural design as visually and
ideologically incompatible.
132
Graphic designers such as Lorraine Wild and David Karwan have
perpetuated this binary between “aboveground” and “underground” graphics. They characterize
aboveground graphics, produced through high-end, professional typesetting techniques for the
purposes of advertising and commercial publishing, as “simple” and “sophisticated.” By contrast,
underground graphics appear “complex” and “clumsy” due in part to their often low-end, do-it-
yourself means of production, but also because the designs’ “rough, improvised nature” helped
advance the dissident goals of the counterculture. “The revolution could not be boiled down to a

132
See Heller, “The 1960s: Mainstream and Counterculture.”
244
corporate-style logo or a simplified presentation,” Wild and Karwan argue.
133
Compositional
density, stylistic diversity, and amateurish techniques instead created “a visual metaphor for the
noise of protest, the cacophony of the free concert, the accumulation of voices, and the riotous
results.”
134
“All that tumult,” according to Wild and Karwan, comprised “the visual ‘argument’
of underground graphics.” Yet tumult was no more the argument of countercultural design than
revolution was its objective. Chaotic graphics, like social uprisings, were simply means to an
end, that is, tools for achieving the utopian goal of a more integrated life.
For the creators and consumers of countercultural design, apparent visual complexity
served as a basis for perceiving latent compositional, typographic, and stylistic patterns. Even
Wild and Karwan acknowledge that, for all their diversity, underground graphics shared a “set of
common characteristics.”
135
Individuals trained in the rudiments of integral aesthetics, and with a
“do-it-yourself” mentality inspired by publications like the Whole Earth Catalog, would have
possessed the tools necessary to piece together these recurring elements into a coherent visual
field.
136
In fact, the disorienting chaos of underground graphic design became as much a style as
the persuasive precision of corporate design. A diverse yet consistent visual language generated a
recognizable “house style” not unlike those devised by large corporations. If corporate identity
programs served the aim to integrate complex companies and render them more recognizable, the
visual ecology of countercultural design operated in a similar way to consolidate the activities of

133
It is questionable whether corporate design programs, which consisted of much more than logos, were actually as
“simplified” as Wild and Karwan suggest.
134
Lorraine Wild and David Karwan, “Agency and Urgency: The Medium and Its Message,” in Hippie Modernism:
The Struggle for Utopia, ed. Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015), 46–7.
135
Ibid.
136
This combinatory and improvisatory process is also related to bricolage, the French loanword for “do-it-yourself”
projects with an emphasis on scavenging and mixed media. This period term, which French anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss applied to a broader social construction, appears in the archives of counterculturists like Stewart Brand.
245
the counterculture and communicate them to the public.
137
Amassing and assembling printed
materials related to ecological design alternatives also helped people acquire the tools necessary
to create more ecologically sound lifestyles. For countercultural designers, these opportunities
for active engagement were critical to the popularization of ecological design.
The effort to discern patterns of alternative design activity was perhaps most evident in
the counterculture’s urge to map its own interrelationships. In some instances, this mapping was
geographic, as in Ant Farm’s 1971 Truckstop Network Placemat (fig. 4.24). This proposed
system of service stations, scattered across the U.S. like truck stops, was meant to support “the
communication and educational needs of a community of ‘media nomads.’”
138
Stops included
CalArts, Arcosanti, Zomeworks, Earth Peoples Park, and other countercultural hotspots.
139
The
National Highway System served as a convenient matrix for this dispersed network, facilitating
interactions among its far-flung members. Nearly twenty years earlier, Buckminster Fuller had
charted a different network on a souvenir placemat map of Colorado (fig. 4.25). A dashed line
marks his journey from Wichita, Kansas, a center of aircraft manufacturing and the home of the
Fuller Research Foundation, to Aspen, where he attended the 1952 design conference.
140
After a

137
My characterization of countercultural graphics as constitutive of a “visual ecology” is more than a convenient
turn of phrase. Art historian Michael Leja has employed a similar metaphor to describe what he calls a new “image
ecology” of antebellum America, in which the transmedial production of images for mass audiences fostered an
appreciation for formal disunity. For Leja, the ecological metaphors of digestion, fortification, and consolidation
capture the ways in which different media interacted to produce new kinds of images and new imaging techniques. I
use the term “visual ecology” in a similar way to assert the diversity and interactivity of countercultural design,
which also happened to be in direct conversation with the modern science of ecology. While ecologists sought to
understand the biodiversity of natural ecosystems by charting energy flows and interactions between organisms,
ecological designers constructed a similarly networked ecosystem of periodicals, posters, and pamphlets to educate
the public in techniques of energy and resource conservation. See Michael Leja, “Fortified Images for the Masses,”
Art Journal 70, no. 4 (2011): 60–83.
138
Andrew Blauvelt, ed., Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015), 294.
139
For an analysis of the Truckstop Network project and the groups that comprised this network, see Felicity D.
Scott, “Networks and Apparatuses, circa 1971: Or, Hippies Meet Computers,” in Hippie Modernism: The Struggle
for Utopia, ed. Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015), 102–113. See also Felicity D. Scott,
Living Archive 7: Ant Farm: Allegorical Time Warp: The Media Fallout of July 21, 1969 (Barcelona: Actar, 2008).
140
Wichita, which appears as a node within the Truckstop Network Placemat, was the home of the Beech Aircraft
Company, which sponsored the construction of Fuller’s prototype Dymaxion House between 1944 and 1946.
246
week in Aspen, his route turned northeast toward Cheyenne, Wyoming, a stop, perhaps, on his
way to Dearborn, Michigan, where he was engaged in the construction of a lightweight geodesic
dome for the Ford Rotunda. But Cheyenne was also home to the Francis E. Warren Air Force
Base, which specialized in radio, radar, armament, and aircraft training programs, and may have
been a destination, rather than a stopover, for Fuller.
141
In any case, the placemat clearly maps
Fuller’s movements through America’s military-industrial complex, a circuit that relied on a
federally funded system of interstate travel.
142
In 1971, Ant Farm relied on this same latticework
of highways to connect the nomadic members of its countercultural network.
A year earlier, during the March equinox, many of these groups convened in person at a
conference in Freestone, California. Van der Ryn organized this gathering of architects, artists,
designers, planners, and political activists with the aim “to learn to design new social forms, new
building forms, that are in harmony with life.”
143
Readers of Progressive Architecture found in
the magazine’s July 1970 issue a section called “Advertisements for a Counter Culture,” which
recreated the Freestone Conference in graphic form. A two-page spread containing an annotated
site plan surrounded by a collage of black-and-white photographs displayed an array of
alternative architecture and design projects (fig. 4.26). A makeshift exhibition space erected by
the Farallones Institute sat beside an earthwork called “Stonehinge” devised by CalArts students.
One of Ant Farm’s infamous inflatables occupied an entire corner of the conference site. Nearby,
a geodesic jungle gym by Zomeworks served as a play area for children. The photographs reveal
a diversity of materials and functions, from cloth-based display spaces to plastic play sites. Yet

141
In addition to his ongoing involvement with the aircraft industry, Fuller also held an abiding interest in radio
technology. During his early naval career, Fuller helped develop the radio transmission of voice messages.
142
When Fuller embarked on his 1952 journey through the American Midwest, the Interstate era, inaugurated by the
Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, was still several years away.
143
Forrest Wilson, editorial introduction to “Advertisements for a Counter Culture,” Progressive Architecture 51,
no. 7 (July 1970): 70.
247
when seen schematically and from above, the structures’ differences disappear. Instead, the site
plan shows a harmonious ecosystem of similarly circular forms. Such cartographic techniques
facilitated the perception of countercultural activities as part of an integrated design ecology.
Other cartographic projects deviated from geographic reality, mapping relationships that
depended more on ideological congruities than physical proximity. Van der Ryn described the
Freestone Conference as the genesis of a larger, amorphous effort “to build a floating university
around the design of our lives.”
144
Untethered from the physical landscape, this community of
ecological designers and researchers would be free to interact in more speculative ways. A chart
designed by Curtis Schreier, also included in PA’s “Advertisements for a Counter Culture,”
plotted what Greg Castillo has called a “knowledge network” of counterculture groups (fig.
4.27).
145
The chart’s nodes are linked by a variety of graphic spokes, which indicate the kinds of
ideological and methodological affinities—such as “enviroecology,” shelter education, social
design, and media contact—shared by this subset of the counterculture.
146
Castillo emphasizes
how the chart, which instructs users to interact with it by correcting errors, adding new nodes, or
even making entirely new diagrams, anticipated open-source information systems before the
advent of personal computing. Yet the chart also harks back to military-industrial techniques of
data visualization, such as PERT flow plans or corporate organization charts. The gesture to
managerial culture was neither spurious nor simply ironic. Instead of merely “subverting its
establishment vibe,” as Castillo suggests, the counterculture’s appropriation of corporate
graphics supported similar efforts to establish an identity. For corporate and countercultural
designers alike, methods of integrated design helped render dispersed networks visible.

144
Ibid.
145
Castillo, “Counterculture Terroir,” 89.
146
Castillo has observed that because landline telephones are site specific, their numbers reveal that the Freestone
participants hailed primarily from Berkeley and Silicon Valley. Castillo, “Counterculture Terroir,” 89.
248
Even when they did not include explicit directions to identify interactions—such as those
in Schreier’s Freestone chart—underground graphics implicitly encouraged the perception of an
interconnected counterculture. In addition to maps and diagrams, countercultural designers relied
on other typographic techniques to construct a coherent visual ecology. Headlining this style of
underground graphic design was a predilection for robust serif typefaces, such as the Windsor
typeface that Brand used for the Whole Earth Catalog (fig. 4.28).
147
The counterculture’s
preference for serif and slab-serif typefaces was likely a reaction against the pervasive use of
Helvetica and similar designs in corporate branding. Yet the ubiquity of Windsor and other serif
typefaces in underground graphics helped endow the counterculture with its own house style.
Although Brand probably used it as a form of subversion, Windsor, and other typefaces like it,
quickly became typical of 1970s underground graphics. It appeared in many of Ecology Action’s
promotional materials, which combined Windsor with an abstract, “corporate style” trademark
(fig. 4.29). Ecology Action was one of many environmental nonprofits spread across the U.S.—
including the Ecology Center, the Center for Ecological Living, Environment Workshop, and
Environmental Action Coalition—that were associated not only in name and objective, but also
in appearance (fig. 4.30). Many of these groups had branches and chapters scattered across the
country, which cohered primarily through written correspondence and the circulation of printed
matter. Like corporations, these groups used typography to consolidate their activities.
Unlike corporate identity systems, countercultural graphics can best be distinguished not
by a particular typeface but rather by the intermixing of typefaces, many of them calligraphic or
hand drawn and some even sans-serif. The back cover of the 1967 Underground Press Guide,

147
Brand has commented that he chose Windsor for his publication in imitation of L.L. Bean’s catalog. Based on the
Cheltenham typeface designed by Bertram Goodhue in 1896, L.L. Bean’s logo was consistent with the house styles
of other outdoor equipment companies, but it ran counter to a broader postwar trend towards unembellished, sans-
serif typefaces and simplified identity programs. https://twitter.com/stewartbrand/status/887777586192859136?s=20
249
which depicts the titles of an array of underground publications, dramatizes the visual mayhem
that a miscellany of typefaces could produce (fig. 4.31). This typographic mixing is evident to a
lesser degree in a flyer the Farallones Institute produced to promote its “reverse garbage truck,” a
converted mail van that roamed the East Bay scavenging scrap materials for children’s craft play
(fig. 4.32).
148
The flyer combines the motto “Trash Can Do It” in hand-drawn block letters, the
name Farallones Designs (the Institute’s publishing arm) in calligraphy, and the organization’s
address and telephone number in a sans-serif typeface. The collaged image features a similar
assortment of imaging techniques. A photographic reproduction shows the Farallones Institute’s
members gathered around the truck, on top of which a winged beast, reminiscent of a wild thing
from Maurice Sendak’s popular 1963 children’s book, pulls a face. Its appetite for disobedience
symbolizes the Institute’s radical recycling efforts.
The flyer’s allusion to Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are evoked not only a sense of
disobedience, but also a broader countercultural interest in the ludic pleasures associated with
childhood. It is no coincidence that Van der Ryn and his colleagues focused early on in their
programming on the design of classrooms and other aspects of children’s play.
149
Timothy Stott
has shown how the collaborative and improvisatory nature of play, when incorporated into
design pedagogy, helped train both children and adults in the interactive technologies, ecological
principles, and networked sociability at the heart of the post-industrial information society.
150
By
assimilating a style of illustration most associated with children’s books, countercultural design
linked the creative act of pattern-seeing with the joys of children’s play. Ecology Action even

148
Castillo, “Salvage Salvation,” 313.
149
These projects are documented in Sim Van der Ryn, Farallones Scrapbook (Point Reyes Station, CA: Farallones
Designs; distributed by Random House, 1971). For a detailed history of the material culture of childhood, see Ogata,
Designing the Creative Child.
150
Timothy Stott, “Ludic Pedagogies at the College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley, 1966 to 1972,” in The
Culture of Nature in the History of Design, ed. Kjetil Fallan (London: Routledge, 2019), 58–71.
250
published a coloring book as a special issue of its biannual journal. Instructions directed readers
to interact with the issue by coloring the image of a smog-filled megalopolis “grayt” and a lush
vision of ecological utopia “psychedelicate swoomaroon” (fig. 4.33).
151

Sendak’s wild things possessed not only an unbridled frivolity, but also a primitivism that
has led scholars to interpret the children’s book and its adaptations through an imperialist lens.
152

For ecologically minded counterculturists, the primitive was a paradoxical figure that signified
both a pre-industrial past free of pollutants, but also a post-apocalyptic future, in which an earth
exhausted by unfettered industrialization could no longer support human life. Primitive figures
appeared in a 1969 issue of the magazine Win: Peace and Freedom through Nonviolent Action
(fig. 4.34). The special issue was devoted to the subject of ecology, defined as “the religion of
survival.” Criticizing modern civilization as barbaric because of its preoccupation with advanced
technologies, power, and wealth, the magazine’s contributors argued that humanity could “learn
from other ‘primitive’ cultures and societies” about “living close to the land” in order to provoke
an ecological revolution.
153
The spear-toting figures, reminiscent of those found in prehistoric
cave paintings, also resemble illustrations from Ecology Action’s promotional materials. In one
poster, a totemic male figure serves as the fulcrum in a set of scales. One hand holds gears,
smokestacks, and other trappings of industry; in the other rests an Edenic landscape complete
with trees, rolling hills, and a crescent moon (fig. 4.35). Countercultural graphics struck a similar
balance between the need to develop a recognizable brand image and the desire to subvert

151
Luther P. Gehrlach and Virginia H. Hine, with illustrations by Ron Ratto and Joe Fox, “An Eco-Activists Fable:
The Color-In Book,” Ecology Action: The Journal of Cultural Transformation (1971) 2:2, Ecology Action
collection, Carton 4, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
152
See Ruben Andersson, “Where the Wild Things Are,” in No Go World: How Fear Is Redrawing Our Maps and
Infecting Our Politics (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019), 205–236; and Eddie Falvey, “‘I’ll
Eat You up I Love You so’: Adaptation, Authorship, and Intermediality in Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things
Are,” in ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze, ed. Kim Wilkins and Wyatt Moss-Wellington (Edinburgh University
Press, 2019), 33–45.
153
Martin Jezer, “Ecology: Religion of Survival,” Win: Peace and Freedom through Nonviolent Action (1969): 3.
251
corporate modes of design. Typographic dissonance and ludic illustrations were among the
techniques designers used to achieve a distinct house style.
The entire gamut of countercultural design techniques appears in a poster Gordon Ashby
created for “The New Possibilities Show,” a traveling exhibition sponsored by California’s
Office of Appropriate Technology (OAT). After being appointed California’s first state architect
by Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr., Van der Ryn established the OAT in 1976 to develop and
implement more economical and energy efficient systems.
154
In 1977, he commissioned Ashby
to design an exhibition demonstrating a range of household appropriate technologies, such as
solar energy, water conservation, and recycling.
155
Like the Farallones Institute’s reverse garbage
truck—or Ecology Action’s pickup trucks, which traversed the Bay Area reclaiming salvaged
scraps; or Ant Farm’s Media Van, which traveled the U.S. creating a digital mediascape; or the
battered New Alchemy truck, which carried “Earth Gypsies” through “psychic, geographic and
historical space”—Ashby’s trailer of appropriate technologies employed auto-mobilization to
create a network of people trained in alternative ways of living (fig. 4.36).
Ashby’s poster did not simply advertise this environmental network; it helped construct it
(fig. 4.37). The star-spangled, red-white-and-blue design recalls posters that the U.S. Office of
War Information produced during the Second World War. Rather than enlist youths in a war
effort, Ashby instead invites viewers to imagine a new frontier of household management and to
acquire the ideas, tips, tools, and products necessary to construct their own “Whole Life Systems
Households.” A mandala-like image at the center, reminiscent of Van der Ryn’s diagram of the
“Eco-Tecture House-Hold,” depicts the house as a carefully maintained ecosystem complete with

154
Carroll Pursell, “Sim Van Der Ryn and the Architecture of the Appropriate Technology Movement,”
Australasian Journal of American Studies 28, no. 2 (2009): 23.
155
Castillo, “Salvage Salvation,” 319.
252
a grid of roof-mounted solar panels and rows of meticulously sown crops. Ashby’s poster invites
viewers to meditate on these ecological advances, but also to incorporate them in their own daily
lives. A tear slip at the bottom encourages fairs, schools, and community groups the opportunity
to contact the OAT about bringing the show to them.
This kind of active viewership was by no means new to American publicity, but it served
a key function in countercultural design by prompting viewers to make connections, both visual
and interpersonal. For in the context of environmental advocacy, making connections was itself a
critical form of activism that both disseminated and operationalized ecological knowledge. By
amassing and assembling printed materials related to ecological alternatives, individuals—
trained in the rudiments of integral aesthetics and with a do-it-yourself mentality inspired by
publications like the The Integral Urban House—obtained the tools necessary to create integral
houses of their own. When combined, these materials formed a countercultural house style not
unlike those devised by large corporations. If corporate identity programs helped integrate
complex companies and render them more recognizable, countercultural graphics operated in a
similar way to consolidate the activities of the counterculture and communicate them to the
public. Integral aesthetics did not simply subvert technocratic control, then, but rather
reconfigured it, and its visual apparatus, for the purposes of ecological edification.

Conclusion
Peder Anker has argued that in pursuit of environmental control, Cold War ecological
design initiatives produced closed environments akin to those devised for the purposes of space
exploration.
156
This interpretation is consistent with what Paul Edwards has called a “closed
world discourse,” in which languages, technologies, and practices of control structured the

156
Anker, From Bauhaus to Eco-House, 83–125.
253
operations of human minds and military command centers alike.
157
In the context of the Cold
War, these human and non-human operating systems were programmed, above all, to monitor
the carefully constructed yet permeable boundaries between capitalism and communism, human
and machine, masculinity and femininity, fact and fiction, etc. Alan Nadel has described a
similar form of postwar “containment culture,” in which the U.S. deployed images, like it
deployed munitions, to construct and control a narrative of American authority.
158

To a certain extent, the Integral Urban House participated in this closed world discourse
through its pursuit of self-contained and self-sustaining life support systems. Van der Ryn even
suggested that the concept of the ecotectural house, of “a habitat that tends toward autonomy,”
gained “new impetus from the space program” and might, therefore, be perceived as an “escapist
vision.”
159
Early renderings of the integral urban house presented it as a closed, circular system.
Arrows indicating the flow of energy pointed inward and around the system’s circumference but
never outward, for any outward movement would seemingly constitute a form of entropy,
understood as “the tendency of all energy to degrade into unusable waste heat, radiated back into
space.”
160
To counteract this inexorable loss of energy, natural systems had evolved through a
contrapuntal process of negentropy, defined as “the sum total of all life processes that capture
and transform energy into usable forms.”
161
The form of the circle—present in geodesic domes,
mandalas, ouroboroses, and even Earth itself—captured this concept of energy conservation as a
closed loop. The creators of the Integral Urban House translated this natural principle into a
mode of design that conserved not only energy and resources, but also information. “The closed

157
Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 1997).
158
Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1995), 3.
159
Van der Ryn, “Abstract of Proposal to Build an Ecotectural House,” 10.
160
Van der Ryn and Bunnell, “Integral Design,” 17.
161
Ibid.
254
integral loop is fundamental to the nature of living systems,” Van der Ryn and Bunnell argued in
their explanation of integral design. Moreover, “many benefits are realized from the intentional
application of this concept to the design of the built environment.”
162

Yet for all the talk of closed integral loops, the Integral Urban House was a closed system
only in theory. In reality, it was part of a diffuse network of ecological design initiatives that
were highly collaborative and community oriented. The creators of the Integral Urban House
insisted their project was an experiment in self-reliance rather than self-sufficiency, a seemingly
minor yet in fact vital distinction. Self-sufficiency, understood as the ability to provide for
oneself without any outside help, conjured up unwanted overtones of isolationism. “We do not
think the solution to environmental crises is self-sufficiency,” insisted Helga Olkowski, “because
such a condition is not possible even if it were desirable.”
163
House manager Tom Javits
maintained a similar distinction when speaking with reporters: “‘We always favor the term self-
reliance rather than self-sufficiency,’ said Javits. ‘Here we try to be self-reliant, depending on
ourselves. Self-sufficiency suggests that we are little islands, but we are in fact closely related to
each other and interdependent on each other.’”
164
This was the central message of Ecology
Action’s founding document, “The Unanimous Declaration of Interdependence,” produced in
September 1969. Read aloud by Humphrey at the Berkeley City dump, the declaration asserted
interdependence as the natural condition of all life in the cosmos.
165
By this creed, no individual
or species had the right to close itself off from other life forms, especially when such segregative
actions threatened earth’s natural and evolutionary processes.

162
Ibid., 20.
163
Olkowski, “Beginnings,” 4.
164
Foster, “A Better Energy-Saving Idea,” 43.
165
The Staff of the Ecology Action Educational Institute, “The Case Study of the History and Development of the
Ecology Action Educational Institute,” (February 1972), 5. https://revolution.berkeley.edu/case-study-history-
development-ecology-action-educational-institute/
255
A commitment to interdependence underpinned the organization and activities of the
Integral Urban House, whose existence relied on the interlocking expertise of a broad network of
individuals: architects and engineers, carpenters and photographers, biologists and community
organizers. All contributed to the design of the integral life support system. Maintaining this
system was also a group effort, feasible only if inhabitants shared such daily chores as caring for
livestock, watering the gardens, and maintaining a sanitary composting system.
The principles of interdependence and collaboration extended beyond the House itself. In
addition to being infinitely malleable—adaptable to corporations and advertising campaigns, to
buildings and exhibitions—the idea of integration was also, in the hands of ecological designers,
endlessly expandable. In the fourth and final part of The Integral Urban House book, titled “The
Interfaces,” the authors imagined how their work could extend outward to encapsulate the
relationship between house and street and, ultimately, how they might create an entire “Integral
Urban Neighborhood.”
166
Like the integral home, the integral neighborhood would pursue the
twofold objective of maximizing the quality of human life while minimizing damage done to the
environment. Expanding integral design to the level of community gardens, municipal recycling
centers, and citywide composting programs would create new jobs, additional energy and cost
savings, and greater economies of scale. More importantly, these community projects would
reconnect urban dwellers to the soil, to their surroundings, and to each other.
By focusing so intensely on environmental issues and the pursuit of ecological solutions
to urban living, the organizers of the Integral Urban House seemed to turn a blind eye to a more
complex panorama of cultural politics that animated urban America, and Berkeley in particular,
during the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, it was partly busing and other attempts to racially integrate

166
Helga Olkowski and Tom Javits, “The Integral Urban Neighborhood,” in The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant
Living in the City, by Farallones Institute (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979), 436–451.
256
Berkeley during this period that prompted many white, moderate and conservative families to
move to the suburbs, transforming the city into a center of radical politics.
167
The Integral Urban
House, part of a network of environmental groups that proliferated in Berkeley, benefited from
this transformed political climate. The idea of the “integral urban neighborhood” capitalized on
the language and sentiment of community organizing that underpinned leftist politics. Whereas
Baudrillard, speaking at IDCA 1970, criticized environmental design as a distraction from more
pressing social issues, the organizers of the Integral Urban House insisted that the dream of a
socially integrated citizenry rested on a foundation of environmental well-being.

167
Mike M. Milstein and Dean E. Hoch, “A Landmark in School Racial Integration: Berkeley, California,” The Phi
Delta Kappan 50, no. 9 (1969): 524–29.
257
EPILOGUE:
Apple in Aspen: The Technological Afterlives of Integrated Design

Integration was a major preoccupation in midcentury America. Within the context of
corporate design, it operated simultaneously as an economic, visual, and social ideal. A wide
range of organizations engaged with the idea of integrated design, testing and extending its
efficacy and possibilities. For Walter Paepcke, Egbert Jacobson, and the designers who worked
for Container Corporation of America (CCA) in the 1930s and 1940s, integration was a way to
correlate the work of design with processes of industrial production, portraying both as smooth,
continuous, and containable at a time when the U.S. economy was struggling back from the brink
of collapse. The designers, executives, and other professionals who took part in the International
Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA) spurned midcentury concerns with consensus building and
instead seized on the concept of integration as a basis for critical debate, bringing disparate ideas
and individuals together to cultivate a speculative discourse about design’s future. In response to
the postwar rise of systems thinking and a corresponding critique of conformity, Unimark
International justified its business of corporate design and marketing by promoting integration,
rather than innovation, as the basis of creativity in design. Critical of design’s role in abetting
environmental degradation, the members of the Farallones Institute devised the Integral Urban
House as a counterattack against the activities of corporate designers, co-opting the concept of
integration and its attendant techniques of control to promote an alternative vision of urban
dwellers in harmony with their natural surroundings. By examining these four organizations, all
tethered to conversations at the IDCA, this dissertation has shown how ideas and practices of
integrated design proved so potent in their ability to organize visual experience that even those
who opposed corporate culture felt compelled to assimilate its tools. Yet the history of integrated
258
design did not end with its co-optation by the counterculture. Since the 1990s, the personal
computing industry, led by Apple, has been among the most successful at operationalizing the
logic of integration, combining innovations in design, business, and technology to create systems
that are increasingly comprehensive and compulsory.
On June 15, 1983, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs delivered a talk at the 33rd Aspen design
conference responding to the theme, “The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be.” Nearly thirty years
later, in the summer of 2012, the tech community discovered a recording of the “lost speech” that
was quickly broadcast around the world through the magic of the world wide web.
1
Much of the
discussion around the fifty-four-minute tape focused on the seemingly miraculous premonitions
of a technological prophet. Forecasting the rise of personal computing, electronic mail, and the
“computer in a book,” Jobs appeared to be years ahead of his time, able to peer into the future of
a fast-approaching computer age. This futuristic fixation has obscured the historical contingency
of the talk, which positioned Jobs as the legatee and custodian of an integrative design ethic that
Paepcke, Jacobson, and many other executives and designers helped cultivate and disseminate
decades earlier. Indeed, the theme of the 1983 Aspen conference sought to interrupt the rush of
“futuristic discourse,” by examining the “startling interaction of all three tenses.”
2
Jobs navigated
a similar course in his discussion of personal computing, speculating about how lessons from the
past could be applied to design systems in the present capable of anticipating the needs of the
future. I argue that his engagements with design in the early to mid-1980s formed an important

1
See “Steve Jobs Describes Future of Personal Computing in 1983 Speech,” AppleInsider (August 24, 2012);
Walter Isaacson, “How Steve Jobs’ Love of Simplicity Fueled A Design Revolution,” Smithsonian Magazine,
September 2012, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-steve-jobs-love-of-simplicity-fueled-a-design-
revolution-23868877/; Adam Clark Estes, “Listen to Steve Jobs Describe the iPad in 1983,” The Atlantic (October 2,
2012); Chenda Ngak, “Steve Jobs’ 1983 Speech Predicted Maps, Mobile Communication,” CBS News (October 3,
2012); and Dylan Love, “Steve Jobs Predicted Siri and the App Store in 1983,” Business Insider (October 3, 2012).
2
“The 33rd International Design Conference in Aspen, The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be: A Conference for
Today and Tomorrow, June 12–June 17, 1983,” Box 35, Folder 7, International Design Conference in Aspen
records, Getty Research Institute.
259
hinge between the midcentury design projects examined in this dissertation and a resurgence of
integrated design in the last ten years that has introduced technology, alongside business and
management, as a core component of design pedagogy and practice.
Jobs first attended the IDCA in 1981, attracted by that year’s theme, “The Italian Idea,”
and the prospect of hearing talks by designer Mario Bellini, filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, and
other Italian luminaries.
3
At the time of his own talk two years later, Jobs was preparing for the
release of the first Macintosh computer. Announced in October 1983, the computer was available
for purchase three months later. In Aspen, before an audience of designers, executives,
educators, and other professionals, Jobs sought to demystify the personal computer, describing it
as a new type of machine and medium of communication and outlining its history and possible
applications (fig. E.1).
4
In keeping with the interdisciplinary spirit of the IDCA, Jobs drew
numerous analogies to help explain personal computing, comparing it at various points to the
human brain, electric motor, automobile, and television. He appealed to designers in particular
not only by describing the utility of the latest computer-aided design software, but also by asking
them for their help in designing both the machines and the media used to market them. Jobs
insisted that millions of computers would be sold in the next five years regardless of how they
looked. But he hoped designers would help aestheticize them, reasoning that computers would
soon be even more pervasive than automobiles, and claiming it cost no extra money to make
them more attractive. The request was somewhat disingenuous, for Jobs knew that a designer’s
services were by no means free and that without them even computers could not sell themselves.
5

3
Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 126.
4
For a full recording of the speech and the subsequent discussion with the audience, see https://soundcloud.com/
appleinsider/steve-jobs-idca-1983?utm_source=clipboard&utm_campaign=wtshare&utm_medium=widget&utm_
content=https%253A%252F%252Fsoundcloud.com%252Fappleinsider%252Fsteve-jobs-idca-1983.
5
Steve Wozniak, the engineer responsible for creating the first Apple computers, acknowledged that the company
and its products could not have existed without Jobs’s marketing abilities. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 73.
260
Why else spend so much time in Aspen and elsewhere attempting to demystify an object most
people still found strange and intimidating? And why spend over one hundred million dollars on
advertising, which Jobs proudly announced Apple planned to do in the next twelve months?
The myth that aesthetics are ancillary to business and technology is an abiding one, even
in the history of Apple, a company recognized and scrutinized as much for its use of design as
for its technological innovations. Biographer Walter Isaacson, for instance, has described Jobs’s
interest in design as an “obsession,” “compulsion,” and “indulgence.”
6
Yet as Paepcke learned in
the 1930s, and Jobs four decades later, design and aesthetics are in fact central to the logic and
operations of corporate capitalism. Just as Paepcke discovered in the concept of integration a
means of correlating the work of industrial and visual production, so too did Jobs recognize
integrated design as a way to manage both the aesthetics and operations of personal computing.
It may be impossible to know whether Jobs was actually familiar with Paepcke’s work, but his
aim “to create the first fully packaged computer” evidences the extent to which CCA’s approach
to corporate design and packaging, or corporate design as packaging, penetrated twentieth-
century corporate culture.
7

Jobs’s so-called “obsession” with design emerged during his first stint at Apple, when he
exhibited a fastidious interest in the appearance of the company’s early computers and computer
software, eventually hiring German designer Hartmut Esslinger to design the Macintosh.
8
Yet it
was only after being pushed out of Apple and founding a new company, NeXT, in 1985 that Jobs
was able to experiment with many of the integrative business and design strategies that he later
implemented so successfully upon his return to Apple in 1997. Much of the literature on NeXT

6
Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 83, 219, 225.
7
Ibid., 71.
8
Ibid., 71–85; 92–101; 125–135. See also Hartmut Esslinger, Keep It Simple: The Early Design Years of Apple
(Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2013).
261
focuses on the poor business decisions—many of which consisted of ill-advised expenditures—
that doomed the company from the start. One of Jobs’s first and most ridiculed decisions was to
pay graphic designer Paul Rand $100,000 to create a visual identity for NeXT long before the
company had any products to promote. Unlike the corporate identity programs that Unimark
designers developed in the 1960s and 1970s, Rand presented his design for NeXT not as a self-
evident series of standards, but rather as the result of a thoughtful and fastidious design process
akin to that pursued by Jobs in the field of personal computing.
9
Rand even produced a booklet
to explain in detail the design process behind NeXT’s logo. Film footage captures the moment he
presented the design to a gleeful Jobs at NeXT’s headquarters in Palo Alto in 1986 (fig. E.2). In
addition to justifying his choice of typeface and the use of a black cube as a mnemonic device,
Rand also explained his decision to set the letter “e” in lowercase so that it could serve as a focal
point, generating associations with “education, excellence, expertise, exceptional, excitement,
e=mc², etc.” (fig. E.3). A decade later, Jobs used a similar form of typographic rationalization
when he presented the first iMac in 1998, suggesting that the lowercase “i” could stand for
“internet, individual, instruct, inform, inspire” (fig. E.4).
10

According to Rand, a logo should, in theory, help explain the business it symbolizes. Yet
in reality, he acknowledged that this was rarely possible or even necessary. For visual design is
entirely capable of shaping, rather than simply reflecting, a corporation’s identity and operations.
This was the case, for instance, with Rand’s famous striped logo for IBM, which had no inherent
connection with the company’s computing business. Stripes eventually became associated with
computers, Rand argued, only “because the initials of a great computer company happen to be

9
Also unlike Unimark, Rand designed only a logo for NeXT, rather than a complete identification system.
10
I am grateful to Steven K. Galbraith, Curator of the Melbert B. Cary, Jr. Graphic Arts Collection at RIT, for
bringing this comparison to my attention.
262
striped.”
11
The same could be said of NeXT’s cuboid symbol. There was no reason for a
computer to take the shape of a perfect cube. In fact, most computers were (and continue to be)
flattened rectangles for good reason: their circuit boards fit most logically into this shape. Yet
influenced by Rand’s logo and the enticing symmetry of the cube, Jobs went to great pains and
expense to ensure that the company’s first product, dubbed the NeXTcube, was as perfectly
proportioned as its name implied (fig. E.5).
12
Jobs lavished similar expense on the interior design
of NeXT’s offices, which featured custom furniture and a floating staircase by Chinese-
American architect I. M. Pei, and its state-of-the-art factory, which was laid out in a way that
allowed visitors to observe the automated production processes from a viewing gallery.
13

Integrated design required more than just attending to the entire corporate visual
environment or generating formal resemblances between graphic and product designs. More
importantly, it helped create consistency between the aesthetics and operations of an
organization. In 1968, computer programmer Melvin Conway introduced the adage, now known
as Conway’s Law, that organizations tend to design systems that reflect their own organizational
and communication structures.
14
In other words, as an organization’s structure becomes more
complex and decentralized—comprised of larger numbers of employees and greater degrees of
delegation—it produces systems of communication and production that are similarly complex
and at risk of breaking down. A corresponding increase in integration, however, contributes to
clearer lines of communication and more cohesively designed systems. Conway believed his
principle was widely applicable, as true of product development or social reform as it was of

11
Paul Rand, The Sign of the Next Generation of Computers for Education (Weston, CT: Paul Rand, 1986), 10.
12
Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary
Leader (New York: Crown Business, 2015), 110.
13
Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 224–225.
14
Melvin E. Conway, “How Do Committees Invent?,” Datamation 14, no. 4 (April 1968): 28–31.
263
computer programming. It is not difficult to imagine an expanded version of Conway’s Law that
might account for structural correlations between an organization’s visual and operating systems.
Indeed, this was the crux of integrated design—that when properly coordinated, design could
serve as a means of organizing the corporation and its operations.
Conway’s Law was especially pertinent to early computer companies, for whom cohesion
and intercommunication proved particularly challenging. Most companies focused on producing
either hardware or software and relied on licensing agreements to supply the missing parts. The
results were expensive, esoteric machines usable mainly by technicians and hobbyists. “Those
rare instances where the system hardware and software tend to cooperate rather than merely
tolerate each other are associated with manufacturers whose programmers and engineers bear a
similar relationship,” Conway observed (fig. E.6).
15
In recent years, as technology companies
have become among the largest, most complex, and most heavily integrated corporations,
observers have been quick to interpret and satirize their structures and corporate cultures,
especially interdepartmental conflict and miscommunication (fig. E.7)
In the 1980s, when Jobs set out to create a company capable of producing every
component of the personal computer, cooperation between manufacturers, programmers, and
engineers was still uncommon. Unlike Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who focused on developing
operating systems (Windows) and software (Office) that could be licensed to run on any
computer, Jobs instead “believed in an end-to-end integration of hardware and software.”
16
In
other words, if Microsoft sought to be one part of every computer user’s experience, Jobs aimed
to control the entire user’s experience.
17
The NeXTcube, paired with a specially designed

15
Ibid., 30–31.
16
Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 230.
17
This difference is roughly analogous to that between horizontal and vertical integration.
264
monitor, mouse, and keyboard, ran a custom operating system called NeXTSTEP, which offered
an approachable interface through which users could interact with the computer’s software
programs. Jobs even assigned his engineers the ultimately insurmountable task of designing
custom chips capable of supporting the computer’s many functions.
18
Though unsuccessful
(eventually Jobs was forced to terminate NeXT’s hardware division), the NeXTcube contained
within its compact form a technological ideal of integration in which hardware and software are
designed together for optimized compatibility and performance.
Although NeXT fell short of this ideal of visual and technological integration, it helped
lay foundations for the enormous success of today’s “Apple ecosystem,” a network of hardware,
software, and services that interact seamlessly with one another on both an operational and a
visual level.
19
This ecosystem is not only self-contained and all-inclusive—as self-reliant, one
might say, as the whole life systems that ecologists designed in the 1970s. It is also increasingly
inescapable, a so-called “closed platform” or “walled garden” that, once entered, exerts total
control over users and their wallets.
20
Indeed, it seems almost inevitable that Apple would
eventually introduce a credit card, engraved with nothing but the Apple logo and cardholder’s
name, designed to be used with Apple Pay on Apple devices, and which rewards customers for
purchases at Apple stores. In Apple, then, we find one of the most complete articulations to date

18
Apple has only recently achieved this form of end-to-end integration in a computer with the development of its
own M1 chip to replace those produced by Intel, which have long been the industry standard. Specifically designed
to work with Apple hardware and software, the new processors offer a level of optimization unparalleled in the
personal computing industry. See Chaim Gartenberg, “Apple’s first-gen M1 chips have already upended our concept
of laptop performance,” The Verge (November 19, 2020),
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2020/11/19/21574057/apple-m1-chips-laptop-performance-intel-
qualcomm-competition.
19
For a discussion of the role that visual design played in creating this system, see Leander Kahney, Jony Ive: The
Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2013). For a broader discussion of the
material culture of personal computing, see Kimon Keramidas, The Interface Experience: A User’s Guide (New
York: Bard Graduate Center, 2015).
20
Ben Bajarin, “Why Competing with Apple Is So Difficult,” Time (July 1, 2011).
265
of the notion that capitalism and aesthetics are fundamentally intertwined, that the elemental aim
of both business and design is total integration.
Apple’s success in extending the concept of integrated design into the twenty-first
century, and in expanding its remit to include technological ideals of integration, is evident in the
number of academic programs in integrated design that have emerged in the last decade. These
include Carnegie Mellon’s Integrated Innovation Institute (est. 2013), MIT’s Integrated Design
& Management program (est. 2015), the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Integrated
Design (est. 2016), and the University of Southern California’s degree in Integrated Design,
Business, and Technology (est. 2017), among others. All incorporate technology and engineering
as core curricular components alongside design and business. These programs demonstrate how
the personal computer and related technologies have become critical tools for the organizational
activities of designers and executives. They also show how the interconnectivity that computers
model and facilitate has transformed the ideal of integration into the digital age.
Yet if twenty-first-century integrated design is more technologically sophisticated than its
mid-twentieth-century forebears, it is also equally concerned with the social valences of
integration. Compare, for instance, charts representing the curricula of three design training
programs: the Bauhaus (1922), the New Bauhaus (1937), and UT Austin’s Center for Integrated
Design (2021) (figs. E.8–10). Walter Gropius’s diagram of the Bauhaus curriculum famously
portrayed design education with a series of concentric rings as a synthesis of all branches of
design, achieved through the study of materials and theories of form, and applied in the service
of building, “the ultimate aim of all creative activity,” according to Gropius.
21
László Moholy-

21
Walter Gropius et al., Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar 1919–1923, ed. Lars Müller, Facsimile, Bilingual,
Translation edition (Lars Müller Publishers, 2019). For discussions of Bauhaus pedagogy, see Rainer Wick,
Teaching at the Bauhaus (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000); and Fern Lerner, “Foundations for Design Education:
Continuing the Bauhaus Vorkurs Vision,” Studies in Art Education 46, no. 3 (2005): 211–26.
266
Nagy’s New Bauhaus added to this basic curriculum a greater investment in the sciences and
humanities with its course on “Intellectual Integration,” taught by Charles Morris. But it also
placed “social services” alongside architecture and building at the center of design education.
The school’s focus, according to its first promotional booklet, was “to contrive a new system of
education which, along with a specialized training in science and technique leads to a thorough
awareness of fundamental human needs and a universal outlook.”
22
This philosophy has led to
concepts of “human-centered” and “universal” design, which foreground human perspectives in
the design process and the accessibility of designed objects. These approaches are now dominant
in most U.S. design schools, but especially in the recent batch of integrated designs programs. In
addition to foundational coursework in product development and digital prototyping, UT
Austin’s Center for Integrated Design also includes courses in “storytelling,” “deviant design,”
and “design for healing.” This suggests that the concept of integration continues to serve as a
critical link between Americans’ visual and social ambitions, that it still has a role to play not
simply in creating new and better objects, but also in connecting people, challenging societal
norms, and mending social wounds.
This dissertation has focused on integration as an ideal that critics and scholars have
acknowledged as fundamentally unattainable. Although I have been less concerned with tracing
the material effects of the integrated design programs examined here, I have alluded to the fact
that all remained unfinished to some degree, whether by accident or by design. The failure to
integrate, to find wholeness and harmony, in some areas of American life, such as race relations,
surely represents a failure of the nation’s founding crede of “unity in diversity.” In other areas,
however, I have shown it to be a strategic choice, a way to maintain the potential of aspirational

22
“The New Bauhaus, American School of Design” promotional booklet, Box 189, Folder 7, György Kepes papers
(M1796). Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA.
267
improvement rather than accept things as they are. The IDCA, for instance, intentionally deferred
total integration, or consensus, in order to hold open opportunities for critical debate as a means
of continuously assessing and enriching design thinking. We might view integration not as a
failed utopian dream, then, but rather as an unfinished project that remains as urgent today as it
was seventy years ago.
268
ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1.1. A. M. Cassandre, advertisement for Container Corporation of America, Fortune,
November 1937.
269

Figure 1.2. Edward McKnight Kauffer, advertisement for Container Corporation of America,
Fortune, June 1941.

270

Figure 1.3. (top) Organization chart showing Container Corporation of America’s first board of
directors, c. 1926; (bottom) Map showing Container Corporation of America’s network of mills,
factories, and offices, 1929. From Susan Black, ed., The First Fifty Years, 1926–1976 (Chicago:
Container Corporation of America, 1976), 16–17.
271

Figure 1.4. (top) Container Corporation of America’s accounting department, 1928; (bottom)
Interior of one of Container Corporation of America’s carton factories, c. early 1930s. From
Susan Black, ed., The First Fifty Years, 1926–1976 (Chicago: Container Corporation of
America, 1976), 22–23.

272

Figure 1.5. Early advertisement for Container Corporation of America, c. 1926–35. Walter P.
Paepcke Papers, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of
Chicago Library.
273

Figure 1.6. Cover of Gebrauchsgraphik, January 1935.

274

Figure 1.7. Egbert Jacobson, cover design for a promotional booklet for Cluett, Peabody & Co.,
c. 1918. From J. M. Bowles, Some Examples of the Work of American Designers (Philadelphia:
Dill & Collins, 1918), unpaginated.

275

Figure 1.8. Routing diagram for materials and for printed forms in a manufacturing plant, c.
1914. From Willard C. Brinton, Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1914), 18.

276

Figure 1.9. “German Reparation and Interallied Debt Payments,” 1931. From “A Portfolio of
Charts on the Subject of Reparations, Interallied Debts, and National Budgets,” Fortune 4, no. 5
(November 1931): 52.
277

Figure 1.10. Two advertisements for Container Corporation of America, Fortune, July and
October 1936.

278

Figure 1.11. Toni Zepf, advertisement for Container Corporation of America, Fortune, May
1938.

279

Figure 1.12. Toni Zepf, advertisement for Container Corporation of America, Fortune, June
1938.

280

Figure 1.13. Herbert Bayer, two advertisements for Container Corporation of America, Fortune,
April and October 1942.

281

Figure 1.14. Xanti Schawinsky, advertisement for Container Corporation of America, Fortune,
September 1941.
282

Figure 1.15. Jean Carlu, advertisement for Container Corporation of America, Fortune,
December 1942.

283

Figure 1.16. Matthew Leibowitz, advertisement for Container Corporation of America, Fortune,
May 1943.

284

Figure 1.17. (left) A. M. Cassandre, advertisement for Container Corporation of America,
Fortune, October 1937; (right) György Kepes, advertisement for Container Corporation of
America, Fortune, February 1939.

285

Figure 1.18. “Sources and flow of primary materials through mills and factories of Container
Corporation of America,” 1938. From Annual Report, Container Corporation of America, 1937
(Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1938).

286

Figure 1.19. Edgar Miller, “Modern Paperboard Processes,” 1937. From Alexander Weaver,
Paper, Wasps and Packages: The Romantic Story of Paper and Its Influence on the Course of
History (Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1937), 78–9.

287

Figure 1.20. Edgar Miller, “Number 6 Cylinder Paperboard Machine at the Philadelphia plant of
Container Corporation of America,” 1937. From Alexander Weaver, Paper, Wasps and
Packages: The Romantic Story of Paper and Its Influence on the Course of History (Chicago:
Container Corporation of America, 1937).

288

Figure 1.21. Reproduction of a conference room mural by Katherine O’Brien at Container
Corporation of America’s Lake Shore Mill, Chicago, n.d. From Egbert Jacobson, “Good Design:
An Important Function of Management,” Graphis 6, no. 30 (February 1950): 136.

289

Figure 1.22. View of International Package exhibition, including the “Making Paperboard”
mural by Wayne Colvin, displayed in the reception room of Container Corporation of America’s
New York office, 1936. From Annual Report, Container Corporation of America, 1936
(Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1937).
290

Figure 1.23. Reproduction of the “Making Paperboard” mural by Wayne Colvin, 1936. From
Annual Report, Container Corporation of America, 1936 (Chicago: Container Corporation of
America, 1937).
291

Figure 1.24. The reception room of Container Corporation of America’s Chicago headquarters,
1954. From Susan Black, ed., The First Fifty Years, 1926–1976 (Chicago: Container Corporation
of America, 1976), 60.

292

Figure 1.25. Egbert Jacobson, receptionist’s desk in Container Corporation of America’s
Chicago headquarters, c. 1937. From “How Container Corporation Forecasts Profits,” American
Business, August 1937, 44.

293

Figure 1.26. Maria Bergson using models to demonstrate the versatility of her unit furniture,
1948. Photograph by Bernard Hoffman.

294

Figure 1.27. Arrangement of Maria Bergson’s unit furniture in Container Corporation of
America’s Chicago headquarters, 1947. From “Many Combinations Easy with Bergson ‘Unit’
Furniture,” American Business, December 1947, 16.

295

Figure 1.28. Detail of Maria Bergson’s unit furniture, 1947. From “Many Combinations Easy
with Bergson ‘Unit’ Furniture,” American Business, December 1947, 15.

296

Figure 1.29. Egbert Jacobson, stationery forms for Container Corporation of America, c. 1936.
From Egbert Jacobson, “Good Design: An Important Function of Management,” Graphis 6, no.
30 (February 1950): 136.

297

Figure 1.30. Office designed by Maria Bergson in Container Corporation of America’s Chicago
headquarters, 1947. From “Many Combinations Easy with Bergson ‘Unit’ Furniture,” American
Business, December 1947, 14.

298

Figure 1.31. (top) Plant leased by Container Corporation of America in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, c. 1935. From Annual Report, Container Corporation of America, 1935 (Chicago:
Container Corporation of America, 1936); (bottom) Container Corporation of America plant in
Fort Worth, Texas, c. 1940. From Annual Report, Container Corporation of America, 1940
(Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1941).

299

Figure 1.32. (top) Interior of a plant leased by Container Corporation of America in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, c. 1935. From Annual Report, Container Corporation of America,
1935 (Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1936); (bottom) The same plant furnished
with Container Corporation of America’s machinery, c. 1936. From Annual Report, Container
Corporation of America, 1936 (Chicago: Container Corporation of America, 1937).
300

Figure 1.33. (top) Container Corporation of America factory in Cleveland, Ohio, c. 1938. From
Annual Report, Container Corporation of America, 1938 (Chicago: Container Corporation of
America, 1939); (bottom) Container Corporation of America plant in Medford, Massachusetts, c.
1944. From Annual Report, Container Corporation of America, 1944 (Chicago: Container
Corporation of America, 1945).

301

Figure 1.34. Walter Gropius, Container Corporation of America’s Greensboro Plant seen from
the west, Greensboro, North Carolina, c. 1946. Photograph by Lionel Freedman. Harvard Art
Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Walter Gropius.

302

Figure 1.35. Counterclockwise from top left: Containers awaiting shipment in a Container
Corporation of America warehouse, c. 1939; Container Corporation of America delivery truck, c.
1936; “Inquiry for Prices” form for Container Corporation of America, c. 1930s; Container
Corporation of America’s Greensboro Plant, 1946.

303

Figure 1.36. (top) Early Container Corporation of America delivery truck, c. 1920s. From Susan
Black, ed., The First Fifty Years, 1926–1976 (Chicago: Container Corporation of America,
1976), 19; (bottom) Container Corporation of America delivery truck, c. 1935. From Annual
Report, Container Corporation of America, 1935 (Chicago: Container Corporation of America,
1936).

304

Figure 1.37. (top) Walter Gropius, Office Unit and Factory Building, Greensboro, North
Carolina, 1944–1946: East and north elevations; (bottom) Exterior view of the Container
Corporation of America plant in Greensboro, North Carolina, c. 1946. Harvard Art
Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Walter Gropius.
305

Figure 1.38. (top) Walter Gropius, Office Unit and Factory Building, Greensboro, North
Carolina, 1944–1946: First floor layout. Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift
of Walter Gropius; (bottom) Interior of Container Corporation of America’s Greensboro Plant,
Greensboro, North Carolina, 1946. Photograph by Hedrich Blessing Studio. From “Container
Plant: Finely Composed Masonry Encloses an Efficient Factory,” Architectural Forum 89, no. 2
(August 1948): 92.
306

Figure 1.39. Flow sketch of the Container Corporation of America plant in Greensboro, North
Carolina, 1948. From “Container Plant: Finely Composed Masonry Encloses an Efficient
Factory,” Architectural Forum 89, no. 2 (August 1948): 93.

307

Figure 1.40. First and ground floor plans for the Container Corporation of America plant in
Greensboro, North Carolina, 1948. From “Container Plant: Finely Composed Masonry Encloses
an Efficient Factory,” Architectural Forum 89, no. 2 (August 1948): 92.

308

Figure 1.41. (top) Container Corporation of America plant, Fernandina Beach, Florida, 1947.
From Annual Report, Container Corporation of America, 1947 (Chicago: Container Corporation
of America, 1948); (bottom) Container Corporation of America plant, Muskogee, Oklahoma,
1948. From Susan Black, ed., The First Fifty Years, 1926–1976 (Chicago: Container Corporation
of America, 1976), 64.

309

Figure 1.42. Herbert Bayer, “Modern Art in Advertising” exhibition, Art Institute of Chicago,
April 28–June 24, 1945. From Alexander Dorner, The Way Beyond “Art”: The Work of Herbert
Bayer (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947), 214.

310

Figure 1.43. Herbert Bayer, Entrance to the exhibition “Modern Art in Advertising,” Art
Institute of Chicago, April 28–June 24, 1945. From Alexander Dorner, The Way Beyond “Art”:
The Work of Herbert Bayer (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947), 214.

311

Figure 1.44. Herbert Bayer, advertisement for Container Corporation of America, Fortune, July
1941.

312

Figure 1.45. (left) A. M. Cassandre, advertisement for Container Corporation of America,
Fortune, April 1938; (right) Toni Zepf, advertisement for Container Corporation of America,
Fortune, August 1938.

313

Figure 2.1. Herbert Bayer, Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies logo, 1950. Bayer Collection,
Aspen Historical Society.

314

Figure 2.2. Louis Danziger, mailer for the fifth International Design Conference in Aspen, 1955.
International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute.

315

Figure 2.3. Cover of a pamphlet for fifth International Design Conference in Aspen, 1955.
International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute.
316

Figure 2.4. Bruce Beck, poster for the ninth International Design Conference in Aspen, 1959.
International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute.
317

Figure 2.5. Margaret Mead and Paul Byers, The Small Conference: An Innovation in
Communication (The Hague: Mouton, 1968).
318

Figure 2.6. “Program of Panel Discussions” from the invitation to the first design conference in
Aspen, 1951. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute.

319

Figure 2.7. (top) Tentative program
and (bottom) final program for the
fifth International Design Conference
in Aspen, 1955. International Design
Conference in Aspen records, Getty
Research Institute.
320

Figure 2.8. (top) Tentative program and (bottom) final program for the sixteenth International
Design Conference in Aspen, 1966. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty
Research Institute.
321

Figure 2.9. (top) Walter Paepcke speaking at the first design conference in Aspen, 1951;
(bottom) Identification badge for the design conference in Aspen. International Design
Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute.
322

Figure 2.10. Speakers at the International Design Conference in Aspen, clockwise from top left:
R. Buckminster Fuller, 1952; Henry Wolf, 1966; Allen Hurlburt, 1966; Leo Lionni, 1967.
International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute.

323

Figure 2.11. Mildred Constantine responding—“You make taste sound like a 4 letter word”—to
a question from Russell Lynes at the fourth International Design Conference in Aspen, 1954.
Mildred Constantine papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
324

Figure 2.12. Herbert Bayer asking a question from the audience during the fifth International
Design Conference in Aspen, 1955. Will Burtin papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester
Institute of Technology.

325

Figure 2.13. Panel discussion during the sixth International Design Conference in Aspen, 1956.
Will Burtin papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology.

326

Figure 2.14. Businessman H. L. Baum, Jr. (right) leads a roundtable discussion at the second
International Design Conference in Aspen, 1952. From “Aspen Design Conference,” Fortune
(September 1952): 114.

327

Figure 2.15. A moment of levity during a group seminar session at the sixth International Design
Conference in Aspen, 1956. Will Burtin papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester
Institute of Technology.

328

Figure 2.16. Possibly the “Integrated Design” exhibition organized by Leo Lionni for the first
design conference in Aspen, 1951. Herbert Pinzke papers, Special Collections and University
Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago.

329

Figure 2.17. Installation view of the exhibition, “Olivetti: Design in Industry,” October 21–
November 30, 1952. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
IN523.2. Photograph by Soichi Sunami.

330

Figure 2.18. Panel discussions during the third (top) and sixth (bottom) International Design
Conference in Aspen, 1953 and 1956. Herbert Pinzke papers, Special Collections and University
Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago.
331

Figure 2.19. Participants viewing an exhibition of British design by W. M. de Majo at the fifth
International Design Conference in Aspen, 1955. Will Burtin papers, Cary Graphic Arts
Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology.

332

Figure 2.20. Photographs of participants interacting during the design conference in Aspen: (top
left) Walter Paepcke, Alfred Knopf, and Walter Dorwin Teague, 1952; (top right) Leo Lionni
and Charles Eames, 1953; (bottom) Mildred Constantine, John Entenza, Alfred Parr, and Herbert
Bayer, 1954. Herbert Pinzke papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of
Illinois at Chicago.

333

Figure 2.21. (left) Harry Bertoia, second from right, speaking with conference participants at the
fifth International Design Conference in Aspen, 1955; (right) Harry Bertoia, light sculpture
displayed at the fifth International Design Conference in Aspen, 1955. International Design
Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute.
334

Figure 2.22. W. M. de Majo adjusts his kite during the kite festival at the fifth International
Design Conference in Aspen, 1955. Will Burtin papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester
Institute of Technology.

335

Figure 2.23. Publicity material for the fifth International Design Conference in Aspen, 1955.
Walter P. Paepcke Papers, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University
of Chicago Library.

336

Figure 2.24. Likely Morton
Goldsholl, preliminary
announcement for the second
Aspen design conference,
1952. International Design
Conference in Aspen records,
Getty Research Institute.
337

Figure 2.25. Eric Fraser, cover design for Art & Industry, March 1947.
338

Figure 2.26. Final announcement and program for the second Aspen design conference, 1952.
R. Buckminster Fuller papers, Stanford University Libraries.

339

Figure 2.27. Jack Wolfgang Beck, inside cover of the 31st Annual of National Advertising and
Editorial Art (New York: The Art Directors Club of New York, 1952).

340

Figure 2.28. Donald Brun, cover design for Graphis, July 1951.
341

Figure 2.29. Albert Kner, slide illustration, part of a promotional slideshow developed by the
International Design Conference in Aspen, 1955. Herbert Pinzke papers, Special Collections and
University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago.

342

Figure 2.30. Membership
pamphlet for the sixth
International Design Conference
in Aspen, 1956. International
Design Conference in Aspen
records, Getty Research Institute.
343

Figure 2.31. Publicity material for the
seventh International Design
Conference in Aspen, 1957.
International Design Conference in
Aspen records, Getty Research Institute.
344

Figure 2.32. Tony
Palladino,
announcement for the
nineteenth
International Design
Conference in Aspen,
1969. International
Design Conference in
Aspen records, Getty
Research Institute.
345

Figure 2.33. Robert Miles Runyan, folder for the seventeenth International Design Conference
in Aspen, 1967. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute.

346

Figure 2.34. (left) Cover of “Report: Ninth International Design Conference in Aspen,” 1959;
(right) Cover of the papers for the fourteenth International Design Conference in Aspen, 1964.
International Design Conference in Aspen papers, Special Collections and University Archives,
University of Illinois at Chicago.

347

Figure 2.35. Invitation to the first Aspen design conference, “Design as a Function of
Management,” 1951. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research
Institute.
348

Figure 2.36. Part of the pamphlet for the second Aspen design conference, 1952. R. Buckminster
Fuller papers, Stanford University Libraries.

349

Figure 2.37. (top) Ferenc Berko, view of Eero Saarinen’s tented amphitheater during the Goethe
Bicentennial Convocation, 1949; (bottom) Interior view of Saarinen’s tent, 1949.
350

Figure 2.38. Alexander Ebin and R. Hunter Middleton, Impressions from the Design Conference
held at Aspen, Colorado, June 28 through July 1, 1951, 1951. International Design Conference
in Aspen papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago.
351

Figure 2.39. Students and other volunteers erect a geodesic dome on the grounds of the Aspen
design conference, 1953. R. Buckminster Fuller papers, Stanford University Libraries.

352

Figure 2.40. View of the geodesic dome erected during the third Aspen design conference, 1953.
R. Buckminster Fuller papers, Stanford University Libraries.

353

Figure 2.41. View at night of the geodesic dome erected during the third Aspen design
conference, 1953. R. Buckminster Fuller papers, Stanford University Libraries.

354

Figure 2.42. Herbert Bayer, geodesic dome covering a pool at the Aspen Chalets, 1955. Will
Burtin papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology.

355

Figure 2.43. Publicity materials for the 1955 and 1957 design conferences. International Design
Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute.

356

Figure 2.44. Film stills from “International Design Conference in Aspen: The First Decade,”
1960. Rhodes Patterson Collection, Chicago Film Archives.

357

Figure 2.45. Film stills from “International Design Conference in Aspen: The First Decade,”
1960. Rhodes Patterson Collection, Chicago Film Archives.

358

Figure 2.46. Film still from “International Design Conference in Aspen: The First Decade,”
1960. Rhodes Patterson Collection, Chicago Film Archives.

359

Figure 2.47. Chermayeff & Geismar Associates, advertisement for the fourteenth International
Design Conference in Aspen, 1964. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty
Research Institute.
360

Figure 2.48. Publicity materials for the
fifteenth International Design Conference in
Aspen, clockwise from top left: Giulio
Cittato and Bob Noorda (Unimark
International), cover design for the IDCA
’65 conference papers, 1965; Jim Lienhart
and Hans Graff (Unimark International),
corporate membership booklet, 1965; John
Massey (Center for Advanced Research in
Design), invitation and conference symbol,
1965. International Design Conference in
Aspen records, Getty Research Institute.
361

Figure 3.1. Unimark International, corporate organization chart, 1970. Unimark International
records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology.

362

Figure 3.2. Radio Corporation of America, Trade-marks: Usages, Practices and Procedures
(New York: Radio Corporation of America, 1946). Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester
Institute of Technology.
363

Figure 3.3. Ford Corporate Identity Manual, Volume 1: Corporate Systems, 1969/revised March
1971. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of
Technology.

364

Figure 3.4. Pages from a talk by Heinz von Foerster at the twelfth International Design
Conference in Aspen, 1962. International Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research
Institute.

365

Figure 3.5. Lester Beall, cover of the Connecticut General Style Book, 1958. Lester Beall
papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology.

366

Figure 3.6. Lester Beall, diagram from the Connecticut General Style Book, 1958. Lester Beall
papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology.

367

Figure 3.7. Lester Beall, trademark samples from the Connecticut General Style Book, 1958.
Lester Beall papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology.

368

Figure 3.8. Lester Beall, color samples from the Connecticut General Style Book, 1958. Lester
Beall papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology.

369

Figure 3.9. Lester Beall, typeface samples from the Connecticut General Style Book, 1958.
Lester Beall papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology.

370

Figure 3.10. Westinghouse Identification Manual (Pittsburgh: Westinghouse Electric
Corporation, 1955). Hagley Museum and Library.

371

Figure 3.11. Paul Rand, cover of the Westinghouse Graphics Identification Manual, 1961. Paul
Rand collection, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology.
372

Figure 3.12. Paul Rand, “The Circle W” from the Westinghouse Graphics Identification Manual,
1961. Paul Rand collection, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology.
373

Figure 3.13. Paul Rand, “Gothic Westinghouse Typeface” from the Westinghouse Graphics
Identification Manual, 1961. Paul Rand collection, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester
Institute of Technology.

374

Figure 3.14. Paul Rand, “Westinghouse Blue” from the Westinghouse Graphics Identification
Manual, 1961. Paul Rand collection, Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of
Technology.
375

Figure 3.15. Unimark International, phased project flowchart, c. late 1960s. Unimark
International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology.

376

Figure 3.16. Unimark International, “Control Communication System,” c. late 1960s. Unimark
International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology.

377

Figure 3.17. Unimark International, corporate identity analysis, n.d. Unimark International
records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology.

378

Figure 3.18. Unimark International, “Target: Focal Points Merchandising Environmental Design
Concept,” January 27, 1972. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies,
Rochester Institute of Technology.

379

Figure 3.19. Unimark International, “Symbol Development” from the Hortors Corporate
Identification Manual, n.d. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies,
Rochester Institute of Technology.

380

Figure 3.20. Unimark International, “Symbol Construction” from the Mondi Valley Paper
Company Interim Graphic Standards Manual, 1967. Unimark International records, Vignelli
Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology.

381

Figure 3.21. Unimark International, “The Corporate Symbol Construction” from the Truman
Limited Corporate Identity Manual, 1972. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for
Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology.
382

Figure 3.22. Unimark International, “Memorex Corporation: Typography” from the Memorex
Corporate Identity Manual, 1970. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design
Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology.

383

Figure 3.23. Unimark International, “Colors” from Volvo Dealership Identification, 1975.
Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of
Technology.
384

Figure 3.24. Unimark International, corporate logotype, trademark, and color samples for Parke-
Davis, 1969. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester
Institute of Technology.
385

Figure 3.25. Unimark International, “Signature Systems” from The Wickes Corporation Graphic
Identification Standards, 1970. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design
Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology.
386

Figure 3.26. Unimark International, “Stationery Systems” from The Wickes Corporation
Graphic Identification Standards, 1970. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for
Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology.
387

Figure 3.27. Unimark International, “Facilities Identification/Retail” from The Wickes
Corporation Graphic Identification Standards, 1970. Unimark International records, Vignelli
Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology.
388

Figure 3.28. Jan Tschichold, figures from The New Typography, 1928.
389

Figure 3.29. Le Corbusier, pattern exercises from The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the
Human Scale, Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics, 1954.

390

Figure 3.30. Unimark International, “Application of the grid” from Alcoa Print Advertising
Coordination Program, 1966. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies,
Rochester Institute of Technology.

391

Figure 3.31. Will Burtin, design process for
a typographic specimen page for the Upjohn
Brand Identification Manual, c. 1960s. Will
Burtin papers, Cary Graphic Arts Collection,
Rochester Institute of Technology.

392

Figure 3.32. Unimark International, diagram showing how the Information and Design Systems
Division screened problems to determine if existing or experimental systems techniques could be
useful, c. 1970. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester
Institute of Technology.

393

Figure 3.33. Photographs showing Unimark International’s use of computer-aided design
software: (top) “Graphic designer Harry Boller uses a CRT scope to automatically lay out pages
of graphic material many times faster and more accurately than by conventional hand methods”;
(bottom) “The designer, working with a computer driven photo setting device, checks for
accurate alignment of characters on a CRT scope connected to the main CRT in the
phototypesetting unit.” From Richard Branham, “The Case for Computerized Design,” Industrial
Design (March 1970): 24.
394

Figure 3.34. Photographs showing Unimark International’s use of computer-aided design
software: (top) “Product designer Dale Fahnstrom uses a time-shared storage tube CRT scope, as
a scouting tool in the development of a series of cologne bottles for men”; “The resulting
designers were drawn on a small XY plotter.” From Richard Branham, “The Case for
Computerized Design,” Industrial Design (March 1970): 27.
395

Figure 3.35. Selection of trademarks created by Unimark International, c. 1966–1976.

Target
Colorado State Bank
Dayton
Corry Jamestown Trans Union Dayton Hudson
Hortors Wickes
Mondi
Nelson
Interpoint Denver Public Library
Circle Court Central National Bank
Great Western United
Figure 35. Selection of trademarks by Unimark International, c. 1965–1975.
396

Figure 3.36. Various public signage designed by Unimark International, c. 1966–1976. Unimark
International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology.

397

Figure 3.37. Pantone Super Warm Red color swatch, n.d. Unimark International records,
Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology.

398

Figure 3.38. (top) New York City Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual, 1970; (bottom)
Knoll au Louvre, 1972. Massimo and Lella Vignelli papers, Vignelli Center for Design Studies,
Rochester Institute of Technology.
399

Figure 3.39. Selection of graphic designs by Vignelli Associates, c. 1980s–1990s. Massimo and
Lella Vignelli papers, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology.
400

Figure 3.40. Selection of publications by Vignelli Associates, c. 1976–2010. Massimo and Lella
Vignelli papers, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology.
401

Figure 3.41. Unimark International, advertisements for Alcoa, Memorex, and Ecodyne, c. 1966–
1976. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of
Technology.

The Ecodynewatertight pledge:
When we designa watersystem,
we won't leaveyou to sinkor swim.
Many companies are eager to sell
you awatertreatment or cooling
system. But they're not so eager
when it comes to helping you make
it work. At Ecodyne, we operate
differently.
We aren't satisfied until you are.
Ecodyne gives you awatertight
pledge. We won't call ajob complete
until you do. That means we'll work
with consultants and project
engineers to determine what is best
for your needs. As one of the largest
companies in water systems, we
have the experience and capability
to offeryou awider range of
solutions. Then, when the system is
completed, we stay with the job
until you're satisfied. That's a
promise.
Ecodyne handles trillions of
gallons of water a year.
Ecodyne provides cooling towers
to cool and recycle water and
treatment systems to clean boiler
feedwater, making it the cleanest
water known to man. We're even
separating water from contaminated
solutions for by-product recovery
and reuse.
But this is only part of the story.
We also design and manufacture
water and wastewatertreatment and
othercooling equipment that covers
the gamut of utility, industrial,
residential and municipal needs.
So before you consider awater
system, talk to Ecodyne. We are
the people who are pledged to
make it work.
Find out exactly howEcodyne can
help you. Write us at Ecodyne
Corporation, 90 Half Day Road,
Lincolnshire, Illinois 60015.
402

Figure 3.42. Unimark International, package designs for Target, Parke-Davis, and Great Western
Foods, c. 1966–1976. Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies,
Rochester Institute of Technology.

403

Figure 3.43. (left) John Greiner for Unimark International, table of contents for The Wickes
Corporation Graphic Identification Standards, 1970. Unimark International records, Vignelli
Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology; (right) Lester Beall, table of
contents for the Caterpillar Corporate Identification Manual, 1968. Lester Beall papers, Cary
Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology.

404

Figure 3.44. Bob Noorda, signage designs for the Metropolitana di Milano, 1964.
405

Figure 3.45. Unimark International, pages from the New York City Transit Authority Graphic
Standards Manual, 1970. Massimo and Lella Vignelli papers, Vignelli Center for Design
Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology.
406

Figure 3.46. Clockwise from top left: Jock Kinneir, signage system for British Railways, n.d.;
Jacques Guillon and Associates, signage for the Montreal Metro, n.d.; Cambridge Seven
Associates, signage system for the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, n.d.

407

Figure 3.47. Unimark International, mockup for New York City 53rd Street project, 1967.
Unimark International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of
Technology.

408

Figure 3.48. Unimark International, “Denver General Hospital Interior Signage,” 1971. Unimark
International records, Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology.

409

Figure 3.49. (left) Massimo Vignelli, “Unigrid Design Specifications,” 1977; (right) Massimo
Vignelli, Grids: Their Meaning and Use for Federal Designers (Washington, D.C.: National
Endowment for the Arts, 1978). Massimo and Lella Vignelli papers, Vignelli Center for Design
Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology.
410

Figure 4.1. “Habitat and Life Support System of an Integral Urban House,” 1979. From
Farallones Institute, The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the City (San Francisco:
Sierra Club Books, 1979), 10.
411

Figure 4.2. “City Map” Score for Day One of “Experiments in Environment,” 1968. From
Alison B. Hirsch, “Scoring the Participatory City: Lawrence (& Anna) Halprin’s Take Part
Process,” Journal of Architectural Education 64, no. 2 (2011): 133.

6. Master Score for "City Map" (The RSVP Cycles, p. 81).
Day Two of "Experiments in Environment" was
situated in Marin County and included what was
called 'Trails Myth/' The participants were asked to
join hands and perform the movement score
blindfolded in order to gain a "direct experience of
the kinesthetic sense in space." About "Trails Myth"
Halprin claimed,
When people lose the sense that we all depend
on for most of our environmental
information- sight- they get lost in space,
confused, panicky; the experience of [Trails
Myth]. . . brings this disorientation into focus
and makes what is a very difficult adjustment
for most people into a powerful experience.
After "Trails Myth," a "Blindfold Walk"
extended the group-movement possibilities into the
outdoors. Participants were asked to walk through
the woods blindfolded holding onto the shoulder of
the person directly in front. The intention was,
again, to heighten the other senses and experience
environmental conditions, such as "close-by sound
of birds and insects, far away sounds of children,
cars, planes; smells of trees and flowers; textures of
turf, tanbark and rock under bare feet." After the
blindfolds were removed, participants were asked to
draw the experience of their "Blindfold Walk" and,
according to Halprin, "without seeing it in their
customary mode of perception, the participants
recreated where the open vistas occurred, where the
terrain changed, where spaces were narrow or lofty
or threatening. . ."15 Such awareness activities were
carefully choreographed as a means of instilling a
deeper environmental perception and kinesthetic
sense. In Take Part workshops, although he did not
typically use blindfolds, Halprin had participants
isolate their senses while performing awareness
scores.
Taking Part in Practice: Charlottesville,
Virginia
The process in practical application in real (and
troubled ) urban communities reveals some
adjustments to the theoretical model and the
"Experiments in Environment." In fact, the firm was
even hired to apply the process in 1970s Cleveland
following a decade of severe racial turmoil. An
analysis of Taking Part applied on a smaller scale in
Charlottesville, Virginia seemed a more appropriate
example for this introductory essay on the process,
however. Prior to their involvement in
Charlottesville, the firm had applied Taking Part in
its fullest form in Fort Worth (Texas), Everett
133 HIRSCH
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412

Figure 4.3. Stills from IDCA 1970 by Eli Noyes and Claudia Weill, showing members of the
Moving Company performing at the twentieth International Design Conference in Aspen, 1970.
413

Figure 4.4. Still from IDCA 1970 by Eli Noyes and Claudia Weill, showing an inflatable
structure erected by Ant Farm at the twentieth International Design Conference in Aspen, 1970.
414

Figure 4.5. François Dallegret, “The Environment Bubble,” 1965. From Reyner Banham, “A
Home Is Not a House,” Art in America 53, no. 2 (April 1965): 77.

415

Figure 4.6. View of the geodesic dome erected during the third Aspen design conference, 1953.
R. Buckminster Fuller papers, Stanford University Libraries.

416

Figure 4.7. Pages from Sim Van der Ryn’s talk, “Persistence of Form,” in International Design
Conference in Aspen, June 14–19, 1970, Environment by Design (1970), 41. International
Design Conference in Aspen records, Getty Research Institute.
417

Figure 4.8. György Kepes, advertisement for Container Corporation of America, Fortune,
February 1939.

CONTAINER CORPORATION OF AMERICA
93
418

Figure 4.9. Leo Lionni, advertisement for Container Corporation of America, Fortune,
November 1941.

Q
\
\
\
\.
J
\
.
' .' / ' " ' ' ' '
"
. ',. /"
,._ .- ",' 0-'- ,.
--,; ....
- ---- ,.--
Pulp materials- paperboard mills- and package factories•.. organized for scientific packaging
CONTAINER CORPORATION OF AMERICA
143
419

Figure 4.10. Sim Van der Ryn, “Tecno-Fantacy House-Hold,” c. 1972. From Simon Sadler,
“Mandalas or Raised Fists? Hippie Holism, Panther Totality, and Another Modernism,” in
Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, ed. Andrew Blauvelt (Minneapolis: Walker Art
Center, 2015), 122.

420

Figure 4.11. Sim Van der Ryn, “Eco-Tecture House-Hold,” c. 1972. From
https://revolution.berkeley.edu/assets/AbstractofProposaltoBuildEcotecturalHouse.pdf.

421

Figure 4.12. Herbert Bayer, advertisement for Container Corporation of America, Fortune, July
1939.

422

Figure 4.13. Herbert Matter, advertisement for Container Corporation of America, Fortune,
March 1941.

423

Figure 4.14. (top) Photograph of boy scouts collecting wastepaper for Container Corporation of
America, c. 1930s. From Annual Report, Container Corporation of America, 1941 (Chicago:
Container Corporation of America, 1942); (bottom) Photographs showing the recycling program
of Ecology Action, c. 1970s. Ecology Action Records, The Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley.
424

Figure 4.15. (left) Herbert Bayer, advertisement for Container Corporation of America, Fortune,
July 1939; (right) Sim Van der Ryn, “Eco-Tecture House-Hold,” c. 1972. From
https://revolution.berkeley.edu/assets/AbstractofProposaltoBuildEcotecturalHouse.pdf.

425

Figure 4.16. “A Graphic Organizing Technique: PERT,” 1979. From Farallones Institute, The
Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the City (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979),
44.
426

Figure 4.17. Frank Gilbreth and Lillian Gilbreth, “Process Chart: Loading VB Rifle Grenades,”
1921. From Frank Gilbreth and Lillian Gilbreth, Process Charts: First Steps in Finding the One
Best Way to Do Work (New York: The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1921), 12.

427

Figure 4.18. (top) Simplified model of a PERT flow plan, 1962. From Daniel D. Roman, “The
PERT System: An Appraisal of Program Evaluation Review Technique,” The Journal of the
Academy of Management 5, no. 1 (April 1962); (bottom) “System Flow Plan-Missile” in
censored form, 1958. From U.S. Department of the Navy, “Program Evaluation Research Task,
Summary Report, Phase 1,” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1958).
428

Figure 4.19. “Schematic of a Generalized Ecosystem,” 1979. From Farallones Institute, The
Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the City (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979),
22.

429

Figure 4.20. “Integral House Ecosystem,” 1979. From Farallones Institute, The Integral Urban
House: Self-Reliant Living in the City (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979), 27.
430

Figure 4.21. Gordon Ashby, advertisement for the “Be a Transformer” poster, 1970. From
“Advertisements for a Counter Culture,” Progressive Architecture 51, no. 7 (July 1970): 83.
431

Figure 4.22. Gordon Ashby and Bill Wells, illustration for “Part One: The Concept,” 1979.
From Farallones Institute, The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the City (San
Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979).
432

Figure 4.23. Bill Wells, illustration for “Part Two: Conserving Energy and Resources,” 1979.
From Farallones Institute, The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the City
(San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979).
433

Figure 4.24. Ant Farm, Truckstop Network Placemat, 1970. Collection SFMOMA, Gift of Chip
Lord and Curtis Schreier.

434

Figure 4.25. Souvenir Map of Colorado with a route charted by R. Buckminster Fuller, 1952. R.
Buckminster Fuller papers, Stanford University Libraries.

435

Figure 4.26. “Freestone Conference Site Plan,” 1970. From “Advertisements for a Counter
Culture,” Progressive Architecture (July 1970): 74–5.

436

Figure 4.27. Curtis Schreier, Freestone Conference chart, 1970. From “Advertisements for a
Counter Culture,” Progressive Architecture (July 1970): 72.

437

Figure 4.28. Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, 1968.
438

Figure 4.29. Ecology Action, “Curbside
Recycling Guide,” c. 1970s. Ecology Action
Records, The Bancroft Library, University
of California, Berkeley.

439

Figure 4.30. (top to bottom) Letterheads for Ecology Action, Ecology Center Workshop,
Environmental Action Coalition, and The Environment Monthly, c. 1960s–1970s. Ecology
Action Records, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

440

Figure 4.31. Front and back covers of the Underground Press Guide, 1969. Ecology Action
Records, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

441

Figure 4.32. James Campe, “Trash Can Do It,” Farallones Designs poster, c. 1969. From Greg
Castillo, “Salvage Salvation: Counterculture Trash as a Cultural Resource,” in The Routledge
Companion to Architecture and Social Engagement, ed. Farhan Karim (New York: Routledge,
2018), 314.
442

Figure 4.33. Pages from “An Eco-Activist Fable: The Color-In Book,” Ecology Action: The
Journal of Cultural Transformation 2, no. 2 (1971): 2; 21. Ecology Action Records, The
Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

443

Figure 4.34. “Ecology of Revolution,” Win: Peace and Freedom through Nonviolent Action
(1969): 4–5. Ecology Action Records, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
444

Figure 4.35. Ecology Action poster, c. 1969. Ecology Action Records, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley.
445

Figure 4.36. (top to bottom) Ecology Action recycling truck, c. 1970s. Ecology Action Records,
The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; New Alchemy truck, c. 1970s. From
Journal of the New Alchemists 1 (1973): 59; Ant Farm, Media Van, c. 1970. Berkeley Art
Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley.

446

Figure 4.37. Gordon Ashby, poster for “The New Possibilities Show,” 1976. Oakland Museum
of California, All Of Us Or None Archive, Gift of the Rossman Family.

447

Figure E.1. Steve Jobs speaking at the 33rd International Design Conference in Aspen, 1983.

448

Figure E.2. Paul Rand (top) presenting his design for NeXT’s visual identity to Steve Jobs and
company (bottom) at NeXT’s headquarters in Palo Alto, 1986.
449

Figure E.3. Paul Rand, NeXT logo presentation booklet, 1986.

450

Figure E.4. Steve Jobs presenting the first iMac, 1998.

451

Figure E.5. (top) Paul Rand, NeXT logo, 1986; (bottom) The NeXTstation and Nextcube, 1990.
452

Figure E.6. Melvin Conway, Diagram showing the homomorphism, or structural correlation,
between a computer system and the organizational system of its designer. From Melvin E.
Conway, “How Do Committees Invent?,” Datamation 14, no. 4 (April 1968): 30.

453

Figure E.7. Manu Cornet, Organizational Charts, 2011.

454

Figure E.8. Walter Gropius, Diagram of the Bauhaus curriculum, 1922. From Walter Gropius,
Satzungen Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar (Statutes of the State Bauhaus in Weimar), July 1922.

455

Figure E.9. László Moholy-Nagy, Diagram of the New Bauhaus curriculum, 1937. From “The
New Bauhaus, American School of Design” promotional booklet, Box 189, Folder 7, György
Kepes papers (M1796). Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries,
Stanford, CA.

456

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2021.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archives

Archives Center, National Museum of American History
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Art Institute of Chicago
Baker Library, Harvard Business School
Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
Cary Graphic Arts Collection, Rochester Institute of Technology
Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley
Getty Research Institute
Hagley Museum and Library
New York Public Library
Stanford University Libraries
University of Chicago Libraries
University of Illinois at Chicago Libraries
Vignelli Center for Design Studies, Rochester Institute of Technology

Primary Journals and Newspapers

Advertising Arts
American Artist
American Business
American Sociological Review
Architectural Forum
Art in America
Berkeley Barb
Brush and Pencil
Businessweek
Chicago Tribune
Christian Education
Co-Evolution Quarterly
Commercial Art
Datamation
Design
Dot Zero
ETC: A Review of General Semantics
Financial Analysts Journal
Fortune
Gebrauchsgraphik
Graphis
Harper’s Magazine
Honolulu Advertiser
Human Ecology
458
Industrial Arts
Industrial Design
Journal of Political Economy
Journal of the New Alchemists
Magazine of Art
Management Science
Minneapolis Tribune
Natural History
Perspecta
Pi Lambda Theta Journal
Print
Printers’ Ink
Progressive Architecture
Public Administration Review
New York Times
Science
Shelter
Social Forces
Social Science
The American Economic Review
The American Journal of Psychology
The American Magazine of Art
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
The Aspen Flyer
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
The Christian Science Monitor
The Cincinnati Inquirer
The Daily Californian
The Journal of Negro History
The Journal of the Academy of Management
The Phi Delta Kappan
The Plain Truth
The Quarterly Journal of Economics
The Washington Post
The Village Voice
Win: Peace and Freedom through Nonviolent Action

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Brand Identification Manual. Kalamazoo, Michigan: The Upjohn Company, n.d.
459

Corporate Identification Manual. New York: International Paper Company, n.d.

Corporate Identification Manual. New York: Gulf + Western, 1966.

Corporate Identity Manual. Santa Clara, California: Memorex, Corporate Marketing Services
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Corporate Identity Manual. London: Truman Limited, 1972.

Corporate Identity Manual, Volume 1: Corporate Systems. Dearborn, Michigan: Ford Motor
Company, n.d.

Graphic Identification Standards. The Wickes Corporation, n.d.

Graphics Standards Manual. New York: New York Transit Authority, 1970.

Interim Graphic Standards Manual. Mondi Valley Paper Company, n.d.

Newspaper Advertising Control Document. Cleveland: The Halle Brothers Co., 1967.

Style Book and Some Notes on Typographic Design. Bloomfield, Connecticut: Connecticut
General Life Insurance Company, 1958.

The System of Corporate Identification: A Manual. The Carborundum Company, 1966.

Trade-Marks: Usages, Practices and Procedures. New York: Radio Corporation of America,
1946.

Westinghouse Graphics Identification Manual. Pittsburgh: Westinghouse Electric Corporation,
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