Cold War on the home front: the soft power of midcentury design

Abstract

Scholars have long recognized the centrality of the home in Cold War discourse. They have also broadened research into the Cold War by looking at design and daily life behind the iron curtain. David Crowley, Susan E. Reid, and others have brought the design and material culture of the Eastern Bloc to the fore, and the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition Cold War Modern: Design, 1945–1970, curated by Crowley and Jane Pavitt with contributions by Reid and Greg Castillo, dedicated a significant portion of the exhibition and its catalogue to designs from Eastern Europe.1 In Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design, architectural historian Greg Castillo continues this trend, offering an informed reading of the interiors and material artifacts exhibited at trade fairs and exhibitions held in divided Germany and elsewhere. He situates the Cold War home and its material culture at the center of the ideological battle between the United States and the Soviet Union, and reinforces Beatriz Colomina’s argument that “everything in the postwar age was domestic.”2 Castillo elaborates on the work of historian Robert H. Haddow and expands our understanding of trade fairs and exhibitions by breaking down the polemic of case studies. Anne Massey’s essay, for instance, on the design of ocean liners, provides a detailed expose of the complex and collective design process involved, while Alison Clarke’s essay, examining the home furnishing choices of a retired couple, highlights the transitory nature of a domestic interior and the way in which stylistic aspirations and biographic memories structure its evolution. Like Clarke, Pat Kirkham’s essay on the Eames House in Pacific Palisades, California, also emphasizes the active and ongoing construction of interior spaces by their inhabitants as she analyzes the way in which the couple used their home to entertain. In this, both Clarke’s and Kirkham’s essays exemplify the influence of material culture studies, noted by Keeble in his introductory essay, as the interior is viewed as a performative setting, which is an ongoing process requiring constant work. What is less evident in the anthology is the way in which material culture studies has sought to uncover the normative practices that structure the domestic interior.6 While Keeble suggests, correctly, that much of this work ignores the importance of style and aesthetics, and can tend toward a synchronic analysis of the interior, there are some notable examples where the demands of both are interwoven with excellent results. Judy Attfield’s seminal essay “Inside Pram Town: A Case Study of Harlow House Interiors, 1951–1961,”7 for example, explored the ways in which women responded to “modern” open plan living and the strategies of resistance they developed as a means to appropriate “modernity to their own designs [my italics].”8 A little more analysis of such “ordinary” interiors would have been a welcome addition. Of course an anthology must draw its boundaries somewhere, and Designing the Modern Interior pulls together essays that both extend and refine existing (albeit dispersed) works of historiographic significance as well as essays that present new research, providing a stimulating and authoritative introduction to the history of the modern interior. Indeed, the quality of research— in particular the detailed archival research—is excellent throughout, and where the anthology is particularly successful is in its “spatialization” of history, which, as Sparke claims, leads to a more complex and nuanced understanding of the subject. This is backed up by extensive endnotes and a select bibliography that provide a rich source of information to any student wishing to learn more. With one hundred illustrations and an engagingly lucid text, Designing the Modern Interior should be essential reading for such students. While some of the essays and issues raised might leave those more familiar with the subject desirous of longer and more extended analyses, this should not be read as a criticism; rather it is an acknowledgment that the subject of this quality work warrants further investigation and publication.