Savage Mind to Savage Machine: Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Design

Not long ago, I ended up sitting through the review of an undergraduate workshop on design and biocomputation. Students fermented beetroot skins, fallen leaves, and other organic waste by mixing it with yeast, sugar, and vinegar, then layered and dried the mixture to create a series of what looked like crispy flatbreads. There was a lot of daydreaming concerning how the process could be scaled up to design spontaneous urban landscapes. The revealing moment came when a student reported that they struggled to prevent the organic mass from curling up while drying, prompting the tutor to retort by questioning the premise of the student’s point. Why not embrace the process instead of forcing it? Why not make a time-lapse of the fermenting beetroot and digitise it? And why then not iterate the transformation with varying parameters, to boldly experiment with a future city form? I was reminded of this episode while reading Ginger Nolan’s Savage Mind to Savage Machine, a ground breaking study that examines the intersections of technoscientific rationality and the attunement to the natural in twentiethcentury design. The book does a marvellous job in illuminating the epistemic substrate and enormous complications of the seemingly logical precept of designing with, not against, nature within the subfields of industrial design, architecture, environmental design, and media arts. Modern design, Nolan argues, was premised on an epistemic divide between the reflexive designer on the one hand and, on the other, the savage deemed unconscious of their own mode of thought. The latter category — at times described as ‘the primitive’ or ‘the magical’ — encompasses not only various colonised, indigenous peoples, but also a range of other subjects presumed to lack self-consciousness: urban ethnic minorities, manual workers, women, and children. Nolan introduces the term racial science to describe representations of cognitive difference that are more insidious than the effects of scientific racism (using scientific methods and authority to justify racial inequality). Similar to the noble savage trope, racial science neutralises ethnically and otherwise marginalised people by affirming their cultures as formed through natural force, as Review by Maroš Krivý Canadian Centre for Architecture Montreal Estonian Academy of Arts Tallinn, Estonia maros.krivy@artun.ee mkrivy@cca.qc.ca 463 The Journal of Architecture Volume 27 Numbers 2–3