Celebrating the Design History Society at 40, and the Journal of Design History at 30

In 2017, the Design History Society (DHS) is celebrating its 40^th anniversary. At the same time, the Society’s journal, the Journal of Design History, is in its 30^th annual volume. Rather than reflecting on these landmarks with reference to canonical or well-known work from the past, the DHS agreed to mark these occasions through a call for new work which examines design history, past, present and future. This work was presented in a dedicated anniversary strand at the Society’s annual conference, Making and Unmaking the Environment, which took place from 7^th-9^th September at the University of Oslo in Norway. The conference was convened by Prof Kjetil Fallan who, among his many activities, was one of our annual TVAD Visiting Researchers. TVAD researcher Claire Jamieson attended the conference to give a paper about her research into NATØ. The anniversary strand comprised three panels, each with three presentations.

Making and Unmaking the Environment Conference brochure.  Photograph: Kjetil Fallan.

The first panel, ‘New Approaches to Design History’, began with Professor Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) recuperating connoisseurship for design history in his paper ‘Design History and Cultural Studies: Conjunctures, Tensions and Potentials’. Connoisseurship has been associated with art history and the decorative arts, but it has a function within contemporary design history, Highmore argued. Søren Rosenbak, a student at Umeå University, followed this with a short report on his project Design Research Failures, and asked what design historians might have to contribute to this work. Rosenbak assumes that design research has failed as a field, but the audience in Oslo were keen to recommend reflection on its successes as well.

The strand attendees. Photo: DHS Ambassadors, twitter.

The final paper in this first panel ‘The Environment as “Context” in Design Historiography’ saw Joana Meroz, of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, seek to move design history beyond regarding politics as a human affair, to capture the workings of a broader notion of politics and its sites including, especially, the political agency of materials and things. She explained how the inherent qualities of objects may determine the histories we share about them. For example, heavy machinery which cannot physically fit into galleries exhibiting examples of Dutch design may be erased from the history of Dutch design as a result of such exhibitions. This panel offered three quite different presentations which contribute in different ways to how we think about design history now. As the panel progressed, each paper appeared to engage around points of tension. For Highmore, the distinction between criticism and connoisseurship was key. Rosenbak’s talk engaged distinctions between success and failure and design research and design history. For Meroz, the relationships between people and things, and things natural and man-made, were salient.

Our second panel explored the ‘Places and Spaces of Design History’. Trond Klevgaard (Royal College of Art) shared some of his doctoral research in a presentation entitled ‘On Writing about New Typography from the Margins: Problems and Approaches’. He looked at how modernism in design resonates differently in different regions, and how it has been negotiated and adapted. Next, Dr Fredie Floré (University of Leuven) and Dr Javier Gimeno Martínez (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) presented jointly their call for ‘Making Room for Design History in Belgium’. Javier was a TVAD Visiting Researcher when he was preparing his book Design and National Identity (Bloomsbury 2016). His paper with Fredie Floré shared many parallels with the following one, ‘Learning from History – but how? Design History in Swiss Design Education’ by Meret Ernst (Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Basel). Both were concerned about the lack of a strong and distributed national base for design history, in Belgium and Switzerland respectively, and how this might impact on the development of design history in those nations. 

Sorcha O'Brien introducing her work on Irish design history. Photo: Grace Lees-Maffei.

The strand’s last panel, ‘Making and Unmaking National Identity: Design “In”, “Of” and "From" Ireland’ continued and increased the focus of the examination of national design histories with a trio of presentations. ‘Made in Ireland’? National Narratives and Global Networks in Irish Design History’ by Dr Sorcha O’Brien (Kingston University) explored the ways in which one lamp has been presented as part of the canons of both Irish and Scandinavian design, and what that might tell us about the importance of mediation in ascribing national identity in design. Dr Lisa Godson (National College of Art and Design, Dublin) shared her project work on ‘Irish Design in Africa: Practices of the Transnational National’, with a case study of churches built in Africa to Irish designs and specifications. Godson countered the idea that Ireland has simply absorbed external notions of modernity with a case study of a design dialogue between Ireland and Nigeria. These churches contribute to the histories of architecture in Ireland and Nigeria at once. The final presentation in this panel, and the strand, was ‘Putting the “Irish” into Irish Design 1950-2015’ by Mary Ann Bolger (Dublin Institute of Technology). Bolger examined the ways in which Irish design and manufacturing have been promoted overseas. For example, she outlined the decision-making process to name the butter known as Kerrygold and its associated imagery.

Mary Ann Bolger discussing Irish stamps. Photo: Grace Lees-Maffei.

The strand as a whole told us that the geography of design history remains critically important as a focus for the development of the field. It was a privilege to chair such a rich strand at the Design History Society’s 2017 conference. The audience were engaged and contributed many useful questions and comments for developing the research we heard still further. This anniversary strand showed that design history’s future is bright.

Prof Grace Lees-Maffei, University of Hertfordshire, UK.

Exploring radical architectural group NATØ

Earlier this year, Routledge published my monograph on the last radical architectural group of the 20^th century – NATØ, Narrative Architecture Today. My book, titled NATØ: Narrative Architecture in Postmodern London, sets out a detailed, contextual history of the group, told through photographs, drawings, and ephemera. NATØ never built together, so this is an architectural history without buildings – and I argue that architectural production is constituted as much by the drawings, texts, models and exhibitions by architects as it is by built works.

NATØ portrait by Sheila Rock, 1985. L to R: Peter Fleissig, Melanie Sainsbury, Catrina Beevor, Mark Prizeman, 
Christina Norton, Carlos Villanueva Brandt, Martin Benson, Nigel Coates, Robert Mull

NATØ emerged from the Architectural Association, where they studied under Nigel Coates. Coates and his students developed an approach to architecture that drew on fashion, television, music, video and nightclubs – very much in opposition to the more serious and inward-looking work happening elsewhere in the school. Indeed, they formed following the dramatic failure of the cohort by AA external examiners James Stirling and Ed Jones in 1983, who deemed their work little more than a ‘bunch of cartoons’. Initially conceived around the production of a magazine, NATØ went on to produce several exhibitions together, alongside three issues of NATØ, disbanding in 1987 following a major installation at the Boston Institute for Contemporary Art. Their approach was emphatically against the professional mainstream of architecture, both in discourse and in terms of practice. They sought an audience in the fields of fashion and design more broadly, aligning themselves with magazines such as The Face and iD. Indeed, NATØ aimed to ‘destroy the notion of the profession’ and ‘travel over the frontier and join the rest outside architecture’ – envisioning a city made by its inhabitants, without the top-down imposition of design by professionals. In their ‘apprentice’ character NATØ described an individual who somewhat ambiguously both discredits and becomes the professional: ‘From now on none of us, and yet all of us, will be professionals’. They imagined a street-savvy, creative individual who can make or alter their surroundings in the same way they would modify or customise their clothing, self-publish or record their fanzine or punk demo, and weld furniture from found materials.

Invitation to the first NATØ meeting, from Nigel Coates to Mark Prizeman (1983)

NATØ issues 1-3, magazine covers (1983-85)

Tracing the formation of the group at the AA, my book examines the evolution of Coates's unit, including his formative years alongside Bernard Tschumi between 1974-80, before investigating NATØ's short period of activity between 1983-87 across the media of drawing, publishing and exhibiting. I had access to a fascinating body of archival material from the period, held primarily in the private collections of the NATØ members, which is published for the first time in my book. The book is structured around these three core outputs – examining first the drawings, then the magazines and finally the installations. Through the analysis of these archival materials, the book explores NATØ’s preoccupation with narrative, drawing terms and definitions from narratology into architectural discourse for the first time to develop a new vocabulary of architectural narrativity.

NATØ, Gamma City exhibition at the Air Gallery (1985)

Objects from NATØ's Gamma City, left: 'Soft Chandeliers' by Catrina Beevor; right: 'Totem' by Carlos Villanueva Brandt (1985)

Catrina Beevor, ‘Terminal Culture (an english landscape)’ from Heathrow exhibition, ICA Boston (1987)    

Carlos Villanueva Brandt, 'Heathrow' from Heathrow exhibition, ICA Boston (1987)        

Part of the importance in telling the story of NATØ is the restoration of a more complete account of postmodernism, with the book reinstating one of the many contours of the inherently multifaceted field. The book contributes to the growing body of literature that is recuperating postmodernism from the often-reductive discourses that pervade writing on architecture. My contemporary re-reading of postmodernism through NATØ's work avoids the simplifying definitions of architectural postmodernism that have focused on the stylised, two-dimensional modes of pastiche historicism. Instead, NATØ’s provides a case study of architectural postmodernism that prioritised the pleasure and creative potential of the complex and chaotic, avoiding reduction to surface decoration in favour of rich, narrativised experience.

Finally, the book also describes a specific urban milieu: 1980s London. Contextualising NATØ’s work from a spatial, social, political and cultural perspective, I align the group with the street subcultures of the period, discovering parallels between their approach and the work of contemporaneous filmmakers, graphic designers, product designers and fashion designers working in London. Indeed, the specific state of post-industrialising London and its urban decay forms an integral part of understanding the work of both NATØ and their contemporaries – an idea I expand upon in the book.

I will be building on some of the ideas developed in the book in my paper ‘DIY and disorder: NATØ’s approach to making and materiality’ for the Design History Society Conference at the University of Oslo in September 2017. In March 2018, my TVAD Talk will explore the work of product designers including Ron Arad, Tom Dixon’s Creative Salvage group and Daniel Weil whose work echoes many of NATØ’s preoccupations.


Dr. Claire Jamieson is lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies for BA Architecture and BA Interior Architecture and Design at University of Hertfordshire.

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