Robin Schuldenfrei (Hrsg.) – Atomic Dwelling: Anxiety, Domesticity, and Postwar Architecture

Robin Schuldenfrei (Hrsg.)

Atomic Dwelling: Anxiety, Domesticity, and Postwar Architecture

London: Routledge / Taylor & Francis, 2012

320 Seiten, Format 23 x 15 cm
Paperback: 978-0-415-67609-0
Hardback: 978-0-415-67608-3
More information: http://www.taylorandfrancis.com/books/details/9780415676090/

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.

Introduction

Robin Schuldenfrei

Part I: Psychological Constructions: Anxiety of Isolation and Exposure

Chapter 1
Cammie McAtee
Taking Comfort in The Age of Anxiety: Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair

Chapter 2
Jane Pavitt
The Future is Possibly Past: The Anxious Spaces of Gaetano Pesce

Chapter 3
Margaret Petty
Scopophobia/Scopophilia: Electric Light and the Anxiety of the Gaze in American Postwar Domestic Architecture

Part II: Ideological Objects: Design and Representation

Chapter 4
Ana Miljacki
The Allegory of the Socialist Lifestyle: The Czechoslovak Pavilion at the Brussels Expo, its Gold Medal and the Politburo

Chapter 5
Robin Schuldenfrei
Assimilating Unease: Moholy-Nagy and the Wartime/Postwar Bauhaus in Chicago

Chapter 6
Sean Keller
The Anxieties of Autonomy: Eisenman from Cambridge to House VI

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

Chapter 7
Katharina Pfützner
“But a home is not a laboratory”: The Anxieties of Designing for the Socialist Home in the German Democratic Republic 1950-1965

Chapter 8
Fredie Floré
Architect-designed Interiors for a Culturally Progressive Upper-Middle Class: The Implicit Political Presence of Knoll International in Belgium

Chapter 9
Mary Louise Lobsinger
Domestic Environments: Italian Neo-Avant-Garde Design and the Politics of Post-Materialism

Part IV: Class Concerns and Conflict: Dwelling and Politics

Chapter 10
Christine Atha
Dirt and Disorder: Taste and Anxiety in the Working Class Home

Chapter 11
Jennifer Hock
Upper West Side Stories: Race, Liberalism, and Narratives of Urban Renewal in Postwar New York

Chapter 12
Anne Parmly Toxey
Pawns or Prophets? Postwar Architects and Utopian Designs for Southern Italy

Coda:

David Crowley
From Homelessness to Homelessness