ATOMIC DWELLING Anxiety Domesticity and Postwar Architecture

Description

In the years of reconstruction and economic boom that followed the Second World War, the domestic sphere encountered new expectations regarding social behaviour, modes of living, and forms of dwelling. This book brings together an international group of scholars from architecture, design, urban planning, and interior design to reappraise mid-twentieth century modern life, offering a timely reassessment of culture and the economic and political effects on civilian life.
This collection contains essays that examine the material of art, objects, and spaces in the context of practices of dwelling over the long span of the postwar period. It asks what role material objects, interior spaces, and architecture played in quelling or fanning the anxieties of modernism’s ordinary denizens, and how this role informs their legacy today.

CONTENTS

Part 1: Psychological Constructions: Anxiety of Isolation and Exposure

• Cammie McAtee: Taking Comfort in the Age of Anxiety: Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair
• Jane Pavitt: The Future is Possibly Past: The Anxious Spaces of Gaetano Pesce
• Margaret Petty: Scopophobia/Scopophilia: Electric Light and the Anxiety of the Gaze in American Postwar Domestic Architecture

Part 2: Ideological Objects: Design and Representation

• Ana Miljacki: The Allegory of the Socialist Lifestyle: The Czechoslovak Pavilion at the Brussels Expo, its Gold Medal and the Politburo
• Robin Schuldenfrei: Assimilating Unease: Moholy-Nagy and the Wartime-Postwar Bauhaus in Chicago
• Sean Keller: The Anxieties of Autonomy: Peter Eisenman from Cambridge to House VI

Part 3: Societies of Consumers: Materialist Ideologies and Postwar Goods

• Katharina Pfützner: “But a home is not a laboratory”: The Anxieties of Designing for the Socialist Home in the German Democratic Republic 1950—1965
• Fredie Floré: Architect-designed Interiors for a Culturally Progressive Upper-Middle Class: The Implicit Political Presence of Knoll International in Belgium
• Mary Louise Lobsinger: Domestic Environment: Italian Neo-Avant-Garde Design and the Politics of Post-Materialism

Part 4: Class Concerns and Conflict: Dwelling and Politics

• Christine Atha: Dirt and Disorder: Taste and Anxiety in the Working Class Home
• Jennifer Hock: Upper West Side Stories: Race, Liberalism, and Narratives of Urban Renewal in Postwar New York
• David Crowley: Pawns or Prophets? Postwar Architects and Utopian Designs for Southern Italy Anne Parmly Toxey. Coda: From Homelessness to Homelessness

316 pages, b&w ills / 15,5 x 23 cm / English