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