This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Due to the very old age and scarcity of this book, many of the pages may be hard to read due to the blurring of the original text.

The Culture of Nature in the History of Design confronts the dilemma caused by design’s pertinent yet precarious position in environmental discourse through interdisciplinary conversations about the design of nature and the nature of design. Demonstrating that the deep entanglements of design and nature have a deeper and broader history than contemporary discourse on sustainable design and ecological design might imply, this book presents case studies ranging from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century and from Singapore to Mexico. It gathers scholarship on a broad range of fields/practices, from urban planning, landscape architecture, and architecture, to engineering design, industrial design, furniture design and graphic design. From adobe architecture to the atomic bomb, from the bonsai tree to Biosphere 2, from pesticides to photovoltaics, from rust to recycling – the culture of nature permeates the history of design. As an activity and a profession always operating in the borderlands between human and non-human environments, design has always been part of the environmental problem, whilst also being an indispensable part of the solution. The book ventures into domains as diverse as design theory, research, pedagogy, politics, activism, organizations, exhibitions, and fiction and trade literature to explore how design is constantly making and unmaking the environment and, conversely, how the environment is both making and unmaking design. This book will be of great interest to a range of scholarly fields, from design education and design history to environmental policy and environmental history.

The editor has gathered together a body of writing in the emerging field of design studies. The contributors argue in different ways for a rethinking of design in the light of its cultural significance and its powerful position in today's society. The collection begins with a discussion of the various expressions of opposition to the modernists' purist approach toward design. Drawing on postmodernist theory and other critical strategies, the writers examine the relations among design, technology, and social organization to show how design has become a complex and multidisciplinary activity. The second section provides examples of new methods of interpreting and analysing design, ranging from rhetoric and semiotics to phenomenology, demonstrating how meaning is created visually. A final section related to design history shifts its emphasis to ideological frameworks such as capitalism and patriarchy that establish boundaries for the production and use of design.