Preface: Beyond the teaching apparatus? Technologies, institutions, design pedagogies

Emilio Ambasz, on being appointed design curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1969, immediately began to plan an international symposium which was to address the sociopolitical, ecological and especially technological challenges that architecture and design faced in a post-industrial society. The Universitas Project, financed by MoMA and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), did not want to just radically question the status and role of design in the present-day 1970s. Instead, the curator took his own institution, the Museum of Modern Art, as the starting point of a critical revision. Entitled ‘Institutions for a Post-Technological Society—the Universitas Project,’ the symposium linked the debates about the traditional role of the museum, which associated the collecting of design objects with aesthetic education, with the social re-perspectivation of design. ‘The once all-pervasive attitude of formal certainty is beginning to give room to an attitude of lucid perplexity.’[1] Given the challenges of the information age, the intellectual capital of MoMA, whose founding was so inextricably bound to a specific idea of modern design, the industrial paradigm and its object-centricity, had become depleted.[2]

The Universitas Project sought to pave the way for a research and education institution that with its all-embracing claim responded to the complexity of a now entirely man-made milieu. The aim was to establish an experimental university addressing questions of environmental design. Ambasz’s ambitious project invited scientists, theorists, architects, designers and philosophers to first of all produce contributions to working papers. Their theoretical positions reflect the trending discourses of the time. They included system thinkers and cyberneticians to whom Ambasz was connected following his period at the Ulm School of Design as well as sociologists and philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Manuel Castells, Hannah Arendt, Umberto Eco and others. Gyorgy Kepes, a key figure of the New Bauhaus in Chicago and founder of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was also among them.

Even if the contributors commonly interpreted the present as a confusing complex of problems in light of the threats to the planet and the technological pervasion of all social spheres, they had different ideas about how design and architecture might intervene in this complex picture. The fact that science and technology in particular were held responsible for the dynamics of the environment’s rapid transformation must also be seen in the context of the American economy’s reorientation along scientific and technological lines. Many of the research and education institutions which the contributors came from would not have existed without the New Deal and the boom in the knowledge industry and state support for research institutions that it initiated. The so-called human resources played a central role not only during the actual war years, but also during the Cold War; with the launch of Sputnik in 1957, scientific and technological excellence in particular became a focal point of American politics. The discourses on the development of the creative mind and the promotion of aesthetic and visual education may also be placed in this context and were made manifest in congresses at, for example, MoMA in 1949 and in the foundation of centres of visual studies such as the Carpenter Center at Harvard University and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT.

Was this about the instrumentalisation of aesthetic and visual knowledge or more about creating experimental settings for interdisciplinary cooperations between science and art, technology and design? In her research into the educational policies of Harvard and MIT, art historian Anna Vallye focuses attention on how aesthetic education and artistic creativity were positioned to develop the knowledge economy. ‘In the discourse on creativity traced here, visual arts was exactly not defined by its distance from utilitarian applications, but rather by the utility it could bear as an intellectual process in the training of the knowledge worker.”[3]

The educational model at MIT in particular sought a new symbiosis between the humanities, the natural sciences, engineering and the visual arts in a society shaped by science and technology. Here, Gyorgy Kepes found a stimulating environment in which to draw together art, technology and science in a new way. The experimental investigation of new visual cultures conveyed by means of technology now formed the foundation of architectural education. The laboratories of MIT, largely funded by the military-industrial complex, provided an ideal environment for this, enabling new cultures of perception to be trialled and put to the test in creative design experiments.[4]

Kepes belonged in this respect to the intellectual milieu that attested in the Universitas Project to a dramatic crisis in the relationship between humans and their environment, but also saw in the new communication technologies like radio, television and computer technology an opportunity to organise human interaction with the environment in a new way to create a new techno-democracy. Design was assigned a central role in the communication of these processes.[5] In doing so, Kepes represented positions that were widespread in technology-positive intellectual circles, but which also rejected their progression into technocratic managerialism.

That this was a balancing act was made particularly explicit in contributions that came from further left on the political spectrum. Jean Baudrillard spoke of a ‘political ideology of design today taking on its planetary dimension in the discourse of the environment. From Gropius to Universitas, the thread is unbroken, leading towards what we might call a metadesign.’ Technology supported the paradigm of unbridled progress and the ideology of late capitalism found its ideal expression in the incorporation of ‘environment and cybernetics’.[6] This critique gave rise to the suspicion that design approaches inspired by cybernetics, especially as propagated at American educational and research institutions, were now also promoting technocratic concepts based on organisational and management theories.

Ambasz sought to mediate between these two seemingly irreconcilable camps in his research and education institution Universitas. In her reflections on the symposium, design historian Ingrid Halland also emphasises that the positions represented here not only linked the disciplines of design and architecture with the Western epistemology of rational science, but also spoke out in support of holistic approaches that further developed the systematic thinking of cybernetics in other, namely, according to Halland, metaphysical ways. The advocates for such an approach included Erich Jantsch, a key figure of The Club of Rome, who criticised the paradigm of scientific methods and Western rationalism but at the same time proposed that design especially, as a mode of creative action, be considered in a wide variety of social spheres and in cooperation with cultural, social and political structures.

To understand design in such a way, as a creative act and knowledge modus, would mean more than merely moving away from the notion of the individual designer. Rather, Jantsch saw the future of design as being beyond human-centredness. ‘Most of the systems we are building today will be inhabited by people with technologically extended capabilities, functions, and desires.’ In this context, Jantsch spoke of a paradigm of ‘metaphysical techno-humanity’, which had little in common with technocratic thinking and more to do with circular thinking, feedback loops, biology and holism.[7]

The Universitas Project shed a bright light on the intellectual debates of a period of radical change shaped by threats to the planet, the dubious nature of the prevailing knowledge regime and the political instabilities and growing uncertainties of human existence in a world structured by technical and technological systems. And although Universitas addressed questions about the relevance of architecture and design as modes of action and knowledge in this complex, critical situation, at its core it was about the status of the institution per se. In her deliberations on Universitas, Felicity Scott points out that Emilio Ambasz conceived this radical examination of the status of the institution – and of the institution of Universitas itself – not only as a real-life experiment, but also in an institution that was itself in the throes of radical renewal.

According to Scott, when seemingly irreconcilable positions clashed in New York, this expressed the limits of discipline-orientated knowledge.[8] The powerlessness of thought, education and action manifested itself in heated debates, but Ambasz was hardly interested in showcasing these ‘identity crises’. Rather, this phenomenon was and still is open to diverse interpretations and narratives. With this, he practiced an understanding of design as an exploration of unknown territories in thinking, as a processual, speculative and open-ended process of knowledge production in the face of uncertain futures.

Why might these reflections on the Universitas Project, which are only briefly outlined here, provide an unexpected frame of reference for a journal on machine learning in the digital atlas Schools of Departure? Firstly, there is an institutional connection: in 1927, Alfred H. Barr travelled to Dessau, further visits by Philip Johnson followed in 1929. Inspired by this interdisciplinary school which unified art, design and architecture in response to the challenges of the modern age, both founded a new kind of museum, namely the Museum of Modern Art.[9] The fact that its legacy, materialised in the heritages of artefacts, could no longer provide orientation for the crises of post-industrial society supplied the point of departure for Ambasz’s ambitious project. Could it be that the artefacts of the historic Bauhaus Dessau, collected and made accessible to the public in exhibitions and publications, are currently facing a comparable loss of meaning? Ambasz combined unease with this museum structure with a proposition, namely to think more in terms of ‘institutionalisations’ than of temporary structures in a constant state of flux. This proposal is echoed in the movements in search of answers found in many contemporary cultural and educational institutions seeking new alliances, structures and practices.

This leads directly to the second point. Ultimately, this symposium provided a place in which the discursive centrifugal forces on the horizon of post-industrial society between neoliberal ideology and technocracy and a critical examination of the technological developments or post-structuralist and Marxist positions were possible. In respect of the Universitas Project, the contributions found in this collection of essays, which address the dilemmas and paradoxes of diverse technical and technological environments for design education, may also be interpreted as an invitation to consider the potentials of the new forms and formats, spaces and structures for learning environments as wandering, polycentric and polyphonic structures that evolve into different institutions and constellations and create new Universitas Projects. The debates that are stimulated by this journal are intended as a contribution to this context.
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Figure right: Josef Albers, Cover of the exhibition catalogue ‘Machine Art’, NY, MoMA, 1934. Offset litograph, printed in black, page size: 25.4 x 19.1 cm. The Museum of Modern Art Library. LI.72. © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025

(Dr phil) is head of the Academy and Deputy Director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and responsible for the conception and teaching of the postgraduate programmes for design, Bauhaus and architecture research. She curated numerous exhibitions on the Bauhaus and the cultural history of modernism. Her main areas of work include: international architectural and urban research, modernism and migration, cultural history of modernism and heritage studies. The results of her research and teaching have been published in numerous publications. She studied Cultural Studies and Art History at the University of Leipzig and completed her PhD at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Since 2019, she has been an honorary professor at the Institute for European Art History and Archaeologies at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.