Tomás Maldonado and Texts
Here are some textual sources and other links that help to understand Maldonado’s position on critical ecology.
The seminal text by Tomás Maldonado used for the project discussions:
Maldonado, Tomás,. Design, Nature and Revolution: Toward a Critical Ecology. Trans. Mario Domandi and Larry Busbea, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Note: Originally published in Italian as La Speranza Progettuale and first translated to English by Mario Domandi in 1972.
Other texts written between 1956-1972 that are helpful to understand certain ideas presented in the book.
Maldonado, Tomás, “Neue Entwicklungen in der Industrie und die Ausbildung des Produktgestalters.” Ulm: Journal of the Hochschule für Gestaltung 2, (1958): 25–40.
In the beginning, HfG Ulm explicitly positioned itself as a continuation of the Bauhaus educational model. This 1958 essay by Maldonado shows an exact departure point. He tried to differentiate between the Bauhaus model of education and his vision for Ulm as he became the rector after Max Bill. He argued for the need for a radically different education model concerning future environmental challenges. For him, the new model of education should have “operational knowledge” at the center. In this text, one encounters Maldonado’s reaction to the original Bauhaus tripartite model (arts, science, technology) and his suggestions for rethinking these categories. A continuation of this discussion can be found in the following texts.
Maldonado, Tomás,“ “Ist das Bauhaus aktuell?” Ulm: Journal of the Hochschule für Gestaltung 8/9 (1963): 5–3.
See also Walter Gropius’s reply in Ulm 10/11 (1964): 62–70.
Maldonado, Tomas and Gui Bonsiepe, “Science and Design.” Ulm: Journal of the Hochschule für Gestaltung 10-11, May (1964), 2-29.
The authors discuss the relevance of the emerging fields of cybernetics, systems sciences, and operational research to design practices and design education, particularly in the context of the emerging interest in systemic complexity.
Maldonado, Tomas. “The emergent world: A challenge to Architectural and Design Training.” Ulm: Journal of the Hochschule für Gestaltung 12-13, March (1965), 2-10.
This paper argues why complex open systemic properties should be taken into serious consideration within design discussions. Maldonado discusses how the concept of “functionalism” is abused within architecture. He also makes a case against what he identifies as “virtual utopias.” For the first time, he distinguishes between specialism (by which he means a vertical specialization) and the need for specialization (horizontal).
Maldonado, Tomas and Gui Bonsiepe, “How to fight complacency in design education.” Ulm: Journal of the Hochschule für Gestaltung 17-18, june (1966), 14-20.
Both the conservative models as well as the modern reforms in education are subjected to critique within this text. Maldonado introduces the terms “inanimate environmental agent” and “animate environmental agent” to emphasize the existence of both a physical environment and a behavioral environment. References to the term ‘medio cosmos’ as something different from the microcosmos and the microcosmos are made. Maldonado critiques Buckminster Fuller’s technological optimism and argues for a technological imagination that has not lost touch with the sociological imagination. He refers to a possible education model identified as a “University of method,” a concept first proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce. Charles Sanders Peirce has a strong influence on Maldonado’s understanding of semiotics.
The complete Ulm journal collection can be found here: https://monoskop.org/Ulm
Within the journal, each article consists of a German version and an English version.
Here are some interesting texts that present a continuation of ideas on technology and ecology first presented in Design, Nature, and Revolution.
Maldonado, Tomás. “Taking Eyeglasses Seriously.” Design Issues. 17 (4), 2001, 32-43.
He argues against design positions that take technological determinism as the departure point. Invoking historian Fernand Braudel’s statement “Everything is technique,” Maldonado stresses that technology is not some untamed force running wild beyond society’s boundaries, but instead is a part of society. The ideas of society and technology co-evolving and constructing each other are discussed by referring to “assembled environments” consisting of animate and inanimate agents. The text concludes with the following thought-provoking question posed by Gaston Bachelard: “Utilization of a magnifying glass means paying attention, but isn’t attention already a magnifying glass in itself?”
Tomás Maldonado, “Industrial Design: Some Present and Future Queries: The Fourth Banham Memorial Lecture.” Journal of Design History, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1993), 1-7.
He discusses emerging Italian theories on “cold design” (industrial) and “warm design” (human). Maldonado is critical of warm designers claiming almost all supremacy in the field without extending any value to the other form. “Dematerialization processes in design” is a central theme addressed in the essay. By the term “dematerialization” Maldonado addresses the role of new materials, the dematerialization processes with the computerization of operations, and the dematerialization of ideology. The lecture ends with a critical look at the possible effects of virtual reality on nature, design, and politics.
Maldonado, Tomas. Digitale Welt und Gestaltung, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2012.
The following collection of articles provides a critical reading of the effects of digital technologies, particularly their ethical and political consequences for architecture. The texts offer finetuned reflections on concepts that appeared in his work during the 1960s, such as; technological complexity, open systems, sense-making, and animate/inanimate agents.
See: Maldonado, Tomas. “Cyberspace –ein demokratischer Space?” In Digitale Welt und Gestaltung, 23-111.
Maldonado, Tomas. ” Der menschliche Körper in der digitalen Welt.” In Digitale Welt und Gestaltung, 161-206.
Maldonado, Tomas. ” Noch einmal die Frage nach der Technik.” In Digitale Welt und Gestaltung, 109-238.
Maldonado’s interest in emergent open systems attracted him to theories of technical objects by thinkers such as Gilbert Simondon, Bruno Latour as opposed to philosophers of technology such as Martin Heidegger. Maldonado insists that one must not critique technology by referring to it as an abstract reality as one finds in Heidegger’s work. Maldonado advocates for a critical inquiry that frames technology as a living system that undergoes its own “ontogenesis” and “individuation.” The text also questions the relationship between the production of architectural knowledge and technological innovation. The attempt to develop a framework to inquire into the genesis of technical objects and their gradual evolution within a particular socio-political milieu while questioning its relation to architecture was present in Maldonado’s critical ecological project that began in the 1960s.
Other Writings on Maldonado and Later Ulm
Findeli, Alain. “Rethinking Design Education for the 21st Century: Theoretical, Methodological, and Ethical Discussion.” Design Issues: Volume 17, Number 1 Winter 2001
The article provides, among other things, a concise map of the Bauhaus education model’s changes starting from Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, and then at the HfG Ulm (emphasizing Maldonado’s scientific operationalism).
Sadler, Simon. A Container and Its Contents: Re-Reading Tomás Maldonado’s Design, Nature, and Revolution: Toward a Critical Ecology (1970, trans. 1972). Room One Thousand, 1(2013): 41-53.
This paper situates Maldonado’s project of critical ecology within the 1970s polarized techno-environmental discussion. Maldonado’s ideas are positioned and critically evaluated, and presented in relation to arguments between figures such as Reyner Banham, Buckminster Fuller that sought to see architecture as part of a broad technological field, and figures such as Peter Eisenman, who argued for the autonomy of architecture and its related knowledge practices.
Larry Busbea, ‘Forward’, in Design, Nature and Revolution: Toward a Critical Ecology, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), pp. vii–xv.
This essay situates the concept of ‘critical ecology’ as something that has less to do with the two separate categories of nature and culture and has more to do with the assembled nature-culture relations. Busbea reminds the reader that Maldonado’s discourse more closely resembled that of Bruno Latour than that of Racheal Carson. How terms such as “Form” and “mediating membrane” implicit in Maldonado’s discussion might be relevant to the present is discussed.
Martin, Reinhold. “Environment, c. 1973.” Grey Room (2004): 78-101.
The text makes references to Maldonado’s comments on Richard Nixon’s environmental initiative. Parallel appropriations of systems theoretical concepts within spatial planning discussions in the North American context are discussed. The text critiques Maldonado’s choice to take up social systems as defined by systems theorist Ludwig von Bertalanffy while ignoring the term’s relation to the economy. The text also contains an elaborate commentary on concepts such as “scandal of nature” and “scandal of society” appearing in Maldonado’s original text.
Maldonado, Tomás. Tomás Maldonado: un itinerario, an itinerary. Milano: Skira, 2007.
An edited collection of essays on Maldonado’s work as an artist, a designer, and educator in different periods across countries Argentina, Germany, and Italy.
The book includes an extensive bibliography of Maldonado’s work.
Two sample essays:
Bonsiepe, Gui. Ulm School of Design (HfG) as an experiment in cultural innovation, 122-136.
Riccini, Raimonda. “The Italian Experience,” 156-176.
Curdes, Gerhard. HFG – IUP – ZPI – Gestaltung oder Planung? Zum Paradigmenstreit der 1960er und 1970er Jahre am Beispiel der Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, des Instituts für Umweltplanung Ulm und des Planungsinstituts der Universität Stuttgart 1969 -1972. Verlag Dorothea Rohn, 2015.
This volume provides an introduction to the plight of Ulm after its 15 years of existence. After the closure of HfG in 1968, IUG (Institute for Environmental Design) later named IUP (Institute for Environmental Planning), opened in the buildings of the HfG. This institute secured the remaining students of HfG and assisted the continuation of their studies. The role of IUP within the environmental discussion is presented together with the problems the institute inherited from the later Ulm model. The book explains why the environmental planning institute existed only for three years.
Curdes, Gerhard HFG Ulm 21 – Rückblicke. Bauen, Gemeinschaft, Doktrinen, schriftenreihe club off ulm e.v. ulm, 2006.
Contains reflections on HfG Ulm by its former students.
García, María Amalia. Tomás Maldonado in Conversation with/en conversación con María Amalia García, Fundación Cisneros, CONVERSATIONS series, 2010.
A Bilingual Spanish and English publication with an introductory essay by architect and design historian Alejandro Crispiani. Maldonado discusses his early artwork and his role in the Argentinean avant-garde movement (Arte Concreto-Invención) and how it influenced his later work. Some video footage related to this publication can be found here:
Crispiani, Alejandro. Objetos para transformar el mundo: Trayectorias del Arte Concreto-Invención, Argentina y Chile, 1940-1970. Santiago and Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2011.
Medina Warmburg, Joaquín. “»Design, Nature, and Revolution«: Tomás Maldonado und die Architektur als environmental design”. In Zwischen Sputnik und Ölkrise: Kybernetik in Architektur, Planung und Design, edited by Oliver Sukrow, 101-121. München: Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte München, 2018.
This article draws on Maldonado’s notion of environmental design. The article provides a brief introduction to the background of the book, discusses the content briefly, and the repercussions of the book.
Medina Warmburg, Joaquín. “El mundo como artefacto Tomás Maldonado en el foco del diseño ambiental (1966-1972).” RA: revista de arquitectura 19 (2017): 439-58.
Lucena, Daniela. Contaminación artística: vanguardia concreta, comunismo y peronismo en los años 40. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2015.
Other Resource Compilations
For those interested in Maldonado as a designer and an artist here is a very short introduction to Maldonado, the changes in his career, a list of his key publications:
https://monoskop.org/Tom%C3%A1s_Maldonado
For those interested in taking a look at Maldonado’s artwork, here is a starting point:
https://www.wikiart.org/en/tomas-maldonado
2021, February, Compiled by Dulmini Perera and CEM group
Note: This list is selective and is based on the most used sources during project discussions. It is not a full list of all works published by Maldonado or about him.