Looking through the Lens of Gender: A Postmodern Critique of a Modern Housing Paradigm

Abstract

The shift from a modern to postmodern paradigm has dramatically impacted the nature and content of academic inquiry and has opened new categories and methods for research. Interior design has been traditionally critiqued on the basis of aesthetics, formal qualities, function, health and safety, and social/behavioral factors. A postmodern critique expands that criteria to include analysis of how designs may be inscribed with particular ideologies and meanings and consideration of how these meanings may empower or disempower certain groups, or philosophies. In a feminist critique, that analysis considers specifically the ideology of gender. This paper will demonstrate the use of the postmodern deconstructive method of “close reading” in a feminist critique of the Case Study program, a paradigm for modern housing in postwar America. A close reading makes the assumption that the text is not neutral and attempts to discover its biases by thoroughly examining how information has been edited, framed, explained, and constructed. Through this method every aspect of the design process as it has been documented will be scrutinized as texts to examine ideas about roles for women that are constructed through this method; it will not only demonstrate how ideological issues, specifically in this case about gender, can be inscribed within our designs for built spaces, but also provide a greater awareness of our ability as designers to perpetuate, create, or eliminate stereotypes.