DesignIssues: Volume 32, Number 3 Summer 2016 55 © 2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Baudrillard and the Bauhaus: The Political Economy of Design Matthew Holt Introduction In 1972, French philosopher and radical sociologist Jean Baudril- lard—best known in English-speaking academia as a kind of prophet of “hyperreality” or, more widely, as the inspiration behind The Matrix films—was invited to attend a symposium in New York titled “The Universitas Project: Solutions for a Post-Tech- nological Society.” The conference was organized by a young cura- tor of design at the Museum of Modern Art, Emilio Ambasz. 1 Argentinian by birth, Ambasz was originally trained as an archi- tect at Princeton University (where he was also appointed assistant professor) and later successfully returned to that career. He was one of the founders of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (1967–1984), which was formed with support from MoMA. 2 The aim of the Universitas Project, according to Ambasz, was to establish a “new type of University concerned with the evaluation and design of our man-made milieu.” 3 Three years in the making the symposium was inordinately ambitious and Ambasz managed to draw in an incredible list of intellectual illuminati. 4 A project working paper was sent to the potential participants in which Ambasz set out the ideas, parameters, and expectations of the event. Selected individuals, Baudrillard among them, were invited to respond in essay form. 5 Baudrillard’s response was titled “Design and Environment: Or, The Inflationary Curve of Political Economy.” 6 In his provocation Ambasz sets out what he considered to be the new parameters of the designed, “artificial” world (and the possible forms of the university appropriate to conceptualizing it). 7 The “artificial” era is in the process of replacing the Renaissance world view that was concerned with the laws of nature. In its turn, the Renaissance supplanted the medieval, divine milieu. 8 Accord- ing to Ambasz, there is no evidence of a natural or divine law gov- erning technology. Thus “the structures, functions, and processes of the man-made milieu are best understood as the patterns of interaction of complex adaptive systems and are not analogous to the workings of physical systems.” 9 Scientific knowledge scruti- nizes what is measurable and quantifiable, and design concerns 1 See the documents collected in The Uni- versitas Project, Solutions for a Post- Technological Society, conceived and directed by Emilio Ambasz (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006). 2 The IAUS reopened in 2003 after a hiatus of some 20 years. 3 Universitas Project, 19. 4 They included Henri Lefebvre and Alain Touraine, Mexican poet Octavio Paz, Umberto Eco, Jean Baudrillard, György Kepes, Manuel Castells, Meyer Schapiro, Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin, Arthur Drexler, historian Carl Schorske, and Thomas Sebeok, among others. Those who could not attend were Michel Fou- cault, Louis Althusser, Roman Jakobsen, Roland Barthes, and Argentine design theorist, educator, and former director of the Ulm School Tomás Maldonado, from whom Ambasz received the idea of a “university of design” (Universitas Proj- ect, 26, n.10). See Felicity D. Scott, “On the ‘Counter-Design’ of Institutions: Emilio Ambasz’s Universitas Symposium at MoMA,” Grey Room, 14 (Winter 2004): 50, and Felicity D. Scott, Architecture or Techno-utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 92. 5 The paper was originally delivered to these invitees bound between black cov- ers, and thus is known as the “black book.” The text that formed the core of the black book was first published in 1971 in Perspecta as “I: The University of Design and Development. II: Manhattan: Capital of the Twentieth Century. III: The Designs of Freedom,” Perspecta 13/14 (1971): 359–65. They also made an appearance in the journal Casabella according to Scott (Architecture or Techno-utopia, 297–98, n. 15). 6 In Universitas Project, 50–65. See also Jean Baudrillard, “Brief Thoughts about the Symposium” in the same volume, 453–54. In the English edition of For a doi: 10.1162/DESI_a_00399