Nobel designs ... on fire-worship: East-oriented original Nordic designwash

Questions of design integrity and ethics cast a shadow over the Nobel family’s exploitation of design in the late Tsarist empire. This essay probes how the Swedish arms and oil in- dustrialists had designs on design in order to gain psychological identification with their audiences and thereby further their corporate and individual ambitions. It leads from an examination of their extravagant commemorative volumes, published between 1904 and 1914, to probe how they translated design in multiple ways, for example, from actual in- dustrial designs, through architectural, graphic, painterly and applied arts design, to the filtering simulacra of cultural values. The course of its probing centres around and cul- minates in the Nobels’ evolving appropriation of the Ateshgah fire-worshippers’ temple on the Absheron peninsula, which they tellingly use as their trademark.