Masterly Confusion: Ported Protection in the American Interwar

Abstract

In domestic design projects ranging from carpet prototypes for the Metropolitan Museum in New York to bridge infrastructures for Robert Moses, architects Ralph Walker and Aymar Embury II drew from their experiences of trauma, play, and tectonic improvisation as camoufleurs during the First World War to work through logics of protective concealment. As with the operations of artillery and personnel camouflage, where makeshift flat tops of fabric and foliage provided portable spaces of relief within a brutal theater of reciprocal violence, the 'masterly confusion' of much interwar architectural work long deemed 'modernistic', middlebrow, or not fully modern was often animated by therapeutic desires for safety and comfort. Here, designs which sought to mask or avoid the aesthetic and physiological shocks of modernity also furthered the entrenchment of modern forms of mobilization, organization, and risk management. This essay traces how formal ambivalence born out of protective necessity on the battlefields of the First World War migrated across surfaces and mutated into surfaces back in the United States, advancing fluid forms of capital and corporatism via subtle tectonic and material means across a range of scales. It also argues that descriptive difficulty with respect to interwar style (and its relation to 'modernity') starts to dissolve when switching registers to look at the attitudes that pervade these architectural practices of conscious equivocation. This work marks a critical episode in modern architecture's construction of an expanded notion of environment, where engagement was produced through and experienced as relief.