Lecture
Architectural Damage & Creative Engineering
Legacies of Cold War Design for Development
Alison J. Clarke
17 April, 18.00 EDT 2025
When in the late 1960s, a radical pan-Scandinavian design movement initiated a full-blown attack on the ‘architectural damage’ wrought by Modernist welfare architects, their localized grassroot-activism appeared far removed from formal machinations of Cold War geopolitics. Yet, the radical environmental design discourse they helped promulgate, was inextricably linked to earlier US-government sponsored transdisciplinary experiments in design, media and anthropology that had sprung up in engineering and design institutes across the US. Based on original archival research, this talk explores the emergence of transdisciplinary and user-based design practice, its origins and legacies in contemporary contexts.