Review: Atomic Dwelling: Anxiety, Domesticity, and Postwar Architecture, by Robin Schuldenfrei, ed.

Abstract

Robin Schuldenfrei, ed. Atomic Dwelling: Anxiety, Domesticity, and Postwar Architecture Abington, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2012, 301 pp., 85 b/w photos. Cloth, $170.00, ISBN 9780415676083; paper, $49.95, ISBN 978415676090; e-book, ISBN 9780203142721 The publication of this collection of interdisciplinary scholarly essays, many of which were presented in a session organized by the book’s editor, Robin Schuldenfrei, at the 2010 conference of the Association of Art Historians, demonstrates just how far the historiography of midcentury modern architecture and material culture has come since the appearance of Thomas Hine’s groundbreaking Populuxe in 1986.1 In the more than twenty-five years that have elapsed since that lavishly illustrated text, replete with bold color images drawn from advertising, movies, and television, suggested to a wide readership that the field was worthy of both broad popular interest and in-depth scholarly study, investigators from a number of fields have contributed to the making of a richly detailed and critically complex historical picture of the period, its architecture, social history, and visual culture. Architectural history and design studies in this area, building on the foundation laid by the earliest research, have generally concentrated on interdisciplinary and syncretic approaches; more important—and perhaps because of the crossover activities of the principal Bauhaus designers and their followers—architecture, interiors, and material culture have often been studied as interlocking elements rather than as separate entities or areas of study. Collectors, curators, and researchers, ranging from online bloggers and Flickr posters to museum-based scholars and gallerists, have researched products, designers, and manufacturers, establishing reliable chronologies and identifying the many newly invented materials and production technologies that played such significant roles in the architecture and design of the period. Drawing on new archival research, scholarly monographs on architects such as Richard Neutra (the earliest of which appeared in conjunction with a Museum of Modern Art exhibition in 1982), Philip Johnson, R. M. Schindler, and Eero Saarinen, along with important new studies of …