ABSTRACT
“[S]urvival of mankind as we know it” is at stake, and the “natural human ecology stands in jeopardy.” Serge Chermayeff’s 1960 plea for environmental conservation addressed the growing use of cars, as he thought everyone’s access to them resulted in a noisy “auto-anarchy” with roads depredating the natural environment. The things affected by this predicament ranged from the privacy of his cottage, to the ecology of the neighborhood, the social order of the Wellfleet community, and even the planning of the entire peninsula. Only a powerful computer could solve the complexity of the problem, Chermayeff thought. Through the lens of social history of design, I argue that the early history of computing in design established a managerial view of the natural world benefiting the well-educated, liberal elite. Chermayeff was part of a group of modernist designers with vacation homes on Cape Cod who nurtured political ties to the Kennedy family. Their community was fashioned around using the Wellfleet environment as a place for leisure and vacation, a lifestyle threatened by various local housing and road developments. The computer became their unifying tool for a multilayered approach to environmental planning, which saw nature as rational in character. It offered managerial distance and an imagined socio-political objectivity.
