"In January of 1972, The Museum of Modern Art hosted "The Universitas Project," a two-day conference sponsored by the Museum"s International Council and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. The distinguished participants, from a wide range of scholarly and artistic disciplines, including Jean Baudrillard, Umberto Eco, Gyorgy Kepes, Octavio Paz, Anatol Rapoport, Meyer Schapiro, Carl Schorske and Jivan Tabibian, among many others, engaged in a multidisciplinary debate on the future of design and design institutions in the postindustrial era. The project, conceived and directed by the noted architect and designer Emilio Ambasz, then Curator of Design at the Museum, was originally described as "a critical and prospective inquiry into the relation of man to the natural and the sociocultural environment...specifically planned to explore the possibility of establishing in the United States a new type of institution centered around the task of evaluating and designing the...