The Bauhaus of Nature

Anker, Peder

doi:10.1353/mod.2005.0051

Cited by 45 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…12 Phil Baines, Penguin by Design: A Cover Story, 1935-2005(London, 2005, 13; Kristoffer Bundgaard Almlund, "But Why a Penguin?," Penguin Collector 63 (December 2004): 51-55; Jeremy Lewis, Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane (London, 2006), 91; Lloyd Jones, "Fifty Years of Penguin Books," 16; Alistair McCleery, "The Return of the Publisher to Book History: The Case of Allen Lane," Book History 5 (2002): 161-85, at 167. 13 See Preston Benson, "10,000,000 Books in Two Years from £100 Capital," Star (London), 7 October 1937; Ian Coster, "He Got the Bird," London Evening Standard, 1 November 1938.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“The Penguins Are Coming”: Brand Mascots and Utopian Mass Consumption in Interwar Britain

Hornsey¹

2018

J. Br. Stud.

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This article explores the cultural dynamics of branding and mass consumption in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. It focuses on Penguin Books’ cartoon mascot, which appeared on all of the firm's paperback covers and in-store promotional material from 1935. A familiar but critically ignored cultural icon, Penguin's mascot followed a wave of prominent advertising characters that energetically burst onto Britain's commercial scene in the early 1920s. Highly visible on packaging, poster hoardings, and advertisements within the press, brand mascots became popular media stars in the 1920s, seeming to herald a dawning age of material parity and collective consumer sovereignty. A decade later, Penguin's mascot used this utopianism around branded mass consumption to forge a leftist vision of social-democratic progress. Augmented by certain in-store display techniques and modes of purchase, Penguin Books appeared to constitute an enlightened public sphere. The cartoon bird became a lucrative mechanism through which browsers were invited to contribute to this progressive cultural project.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“The Penguins Are Coming”: Brand Mascots and Utopian Mass Consumption in Interwar Britain

Hornsey¹

2018

J. Br. Stud.

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“…of architectural history and theory, Huxley has been seen as an important figure bridging ecological thinking with debates in planning and preservation. 7 What is lesser known is that Nicholson, whose career triangulated civil service, policy planning, and conservation, also had been involved in the theory and practice of landscape, planning, and architecture in Britain since the 1940s. For example, he helped set out the agenda of the Festival of Britain (1951), an event that was instrumental in the promotion of modernist art, architecture and design in post-war Britain, through his role as the secretary to the director of the festival.…”

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confidence: 99%

‘What are people for?’

Kei

2020

Footprint

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This article revisits previously overlooked exchanges between pre-eminent figures in British architecture and ecology, William Holford, Julian Huxley, and Max Nicholson, which were incorporated in one of the earliest uses of the term ‘built environment’ in 1964. By examining how an energy-entropy interpretation of the ecosystem had shaped their views on the natural, human-made, and psychosocial milieu, I will consider the way cybernetics conditioned the articulation of the built environment. Contextualising their exchanges in the socio-cultural climate of the early 1960s, I trace an almost concurrent environmental turn made by architecture and ecology. Moreover, the exchange between architecture and ecology has engendered an environmental conception that prioritised the transformative and reciprocal relationship between humans and what surrounds them. In this effort, I pay particular attention to a co-evolutionary view of the technosphere, biosphere, and political sphere formulated by Nicholson. I also discuss the infiltration of eugenic and technocratic views in this reconceptualisation of the environment. Despite the peculiarities of these theories, their conceptualisation of the environment had pointed towards an important question in employing the ecosystemic metaphor: what are people for?

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Lamarckism by Other Means: Interpreting Pavlov’s Conditioned Reflexes in Twentieth-Century Britain

Hill-Andrews

2018

J Hist Biol

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This essay examines the reception of Ivan Pavlov's work on conditioned reflexes in early to mid-twentieth century Britain. Recent work on the political interpretation of biology has shown that the nineteenth-century strategy of "making socialists" was undermined by August Weismann's attacks on the inheritance of acquired characters. I argue that Pavlov's research reinvigorated socialist hopes of transforming society and the people in it. I highlight the work of Pavlov's interpreters, notably the scientific journalist J. G. Crowther, the biologist Lancelot Hogben, and the science writer H. G. Wells, who made Pavlov's work accessible to a British audience and embraced the socialist implications of his research - especially the idea that people could be persuaded to become socialists through science writing for a nonspecialist audience and through use of a simplified language such as Basic English. They saw, in the followers of National Socialism, how Pavlovian conditioning could create a national movement, and believed that this could be used for their own more democratic form of socialism. In the final part of the essay, I suggest that this broad socio-cultural movement to reshape humanity proved controversial, especially in the post-war period and in light of Soviet use of brainwashing. The likes of Aldous Huxley and F. A. Hayek feared that conditioning could only lead to totalitarianism, while the historian E. P. Thompson put forward a socialist humanism that left room for human agency.

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The Bauhaus of Nature

Cited by 45 publications

References 25 publications

“The Penguins Are Coming”: Brand Mascots and Utopian Mass Consumption in Interwar Britain

“The Penguins Are Coming”: Brand Mascots and Utopian Mass Consumption in Interwar Britain

‘What are people for?’

Lamarckism by Other Means: Interpreting Pavlov’s Conditioned Reflexes in Twentieth-Century Britain

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