House Beautiful Research Articles

Lin Huiyin, House Beautiful, and women’s place in architectural culture in the United States in the 1920s

Scholarly discussions of the experiences that Lin Huiyin would have had as a student in the United States between 1924 and 1928 have yet to include the experiences she might have had outside the classroom that educated her about contemporary and historic architecture in the country and about the role that women at the time had in understanding and shaping it. The shelter magazine House Beautiful provides an overlooked indication of the exposure to and participation in architectural culture available to middle class and wealthy women in the United States in the years in which Lin Huiyin studied at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. Understanding how the magazine, which was written largely by and for women, celebrated the architecture of the country’s own past, as well as of China, and the way in which it provided a stepping-stone to either a literary or an architectural career suggests the encouragement Lin may have received from the women she met and how they in turn may have been inspired to take an interest in the field, at a time when there were very few female architects.

THE SOLACE OF PILGRIMS: MOVEMENT, REST, AND SLEEP IN THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

Abstract Scholars of John Bunyan have understandably emphasised the progress of The Pilgrim’s Progress. However, the description of the places of rest along Christian’s journey call into question the role of the pause in the pilgrim’s journey, as well as the exclusive ‘futureness’ of the peace and rest of God as depicted by Bunyan. The encounter with Simple, Sloth, and Presumption, the Arbour on the Hill Difficulty, and the temptation of the Enchanted Ground are shown as moments of illusory or disobedient rest, where falling asleep is equated with spiritual drowsiness. The House Beautiful, the Delectable Mountains, and Beulah prove places that challenge the idea of unrelenting progress as ideal for the faithful pilgrim.

Domesticity at War: Bringing the War Home in Martha Rosler's "House Beautiful" Wartime Photomontages

The uneven, sometimes violent relationship between “here” and “elsewhere” is evoked powerfully in Martha Rosler’s House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home—two linked sets of photomontages that engage the gender and racial politics of domesticity in the US as well as the geopolitics of empire. Troubling mythologies of warfare and documentary realism with dazzling wit and critical fury, these works refer materially and specifically to places and times of war in solidarity with protest movements while also raising questions of historical linkages and political accountability. Suturing their times and spaces into discontinuous contact, the two series bring together seemingly incommensurate elements—exquisite domestic interiors, glamorous consumer commodities often associated with conventional femininity, and the landscapes and bodies damaged and destroyed by warfare--to produce images of great immediacy and visceral power. Across the long arc of the wars waged by the US from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, Rosler has shown us how the modernist aestheticization of US domesticity in the affluent post-World War II era promised personal empowerment and hopeful futures yet, emerging from warfare itself, only brought about more war.

Review: ¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now, by E. Carmen Ramos, Tatiana Reinoza, Terezita Romo, and Claudia E. Zapata

Review: <i>¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now</i>, by E. Carmen Ramos, Tatiana Reinoza, Terezita Romo, and Claudia E. Zapata

THE BEHAVIOR OF URBAN COMMUNITIES IN PLANTING USEFUL PLANTS IN THE YARD DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic that forces restrictions on movement between people is thought to impact the utilization of yards in urban areas positively. However, there is not much information about yard management practices, including plant species managed by urban communities. In the framework of biodiversity conservation, this research aims to explore the variety of plant species planted in the yards, the area of ​​managed yards, and the planting motivation of the urban community, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research was conducted from May to August 2020 using an online questionnaire (Google Form), and direct interviews with target respondents consisted of communities spread across two major cities in Lampung Province, i.e. Metro City and Bandar Lampung City. The research findings showed that only 8% of respondents planted various useful plant species during the COVID-19 pandemic, while the rest of them planted long before the pandemic occurred. The plant groups that the respondents commonly owned were ornamental plants (70%), while 30% of the existing species were medicinal plants and spices. The motivations included enjoying the yield (herbs and medicine), filling the spare time, enjoy gardening and love plants, making the house beautiful and cool, and even planting it for sale. Of the five planting goals or motivations of the urban community, the motivation to enjoy the yield was the highest, followed by the desire to have a beautiful yard and enjoy gardening. This condition is believed to continue to exist even though modernization is expanding. &#x0D; Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic, ethnobotany, ornamental plants, residential landscape, useful plants

House Beautiful, Climate Control Project 1949-1953

The postwar transition to suburbia inaugurated a trend in which most American builders opted to clear the land and build standardized houses without any regard for the site conditions and local climate. Elizabeth Gordon (1906–2000) was the editor of House Beautiful a popular design magazine. She launched the Climate Control Project (1949–1953) to offer the homebuilder guidance on constructing houses suited for the local climate using design principles of orientation, sun control, site planning, and ventilation. Gordon was a strong critic of the International Style that developed in Europe in the interwar period and came to America after the war. This paper will examine the techniques prescribed by the Climate Control Project and draw conclusions about the ideal postwar house promoted by the magazine. Using the Climate Control project, House Beautiful advanced strategies for physiological comfort and efficient utilization of space as central objectives for its readers. By analyzing the articles published throughout the project's duration, this study concludes that the Climate Control Project promoted the idea of a regional American home as the ideal postwar home – as an alternative to the prefabricated mass-produced suburban homes during this time period and the International Style.

Review: Tastemaker: Elizabeth Gordon, House Beautiful, and the Postwar American Home, by Monica Penick

Monica Penick Tastemaker: Elizabeth Gordon, House Beautiful , and the Postwar American Home New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017, 260 pp., 132 color and 55 b/w illus. $65 (cloth), ISBN 9780300221763 In recent years scholars have been actively constructing a new narrative of postwar architecture in the United States, reframing the remarkably resilient architect-centered tale of transplanted European modernism and replacing it with a more complex account that addresses a much broader cast of characters, contexts, and methods of influence and design. Monica Penick's Tastemaker is an important contribution to this rereading and rewriting of American architectural and cultural history, broadening both the discussion and the dramatis personae.1 As the subtitle suggests, the book is, at heart, a biography, but it is a departure from those biographical works that lionize well-known designers. Quoting George Nelson, Penick notes that “most of what happens to architecture is out of the hands of architects” (vii). She offers what she describes as a “critical professional biography” of Elizabeth Gordon, the influential editor of House Beautiful from 1941 to 1964 (viii). Chronologically organized around her tenure at the magazine, this monograph highlights Gordon's work with collaborators in graphic and interior design, photography, architecture, manufacturing, advertising, journalism, and even philosophy and contemporary cultural theory. Together with James Marston Fitch, Frances Heard, John deKoven Hill, Cliff May, Eiko Yuasa, Barbro Nilsson, Maynard Parker, Ezra Stoller, and others, Gordon sought to shape the postwar American way of life by advising and educating the public about home design. Citing Russell Lynes's 1954 concept of “tastemaker” as a framework, Penick offers a highly detailed, intensively researched, and boldly presented narrative of Gordon's influential activities as a design propagandist. Through an exploration of Gordon's editorial activities, this book puts issues of taste formation, …

‘[C]allee me Oscar’: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Aestheticism, and Opium

Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), one of the flagship novels of Aestheticism, contains an intricate opium narrative that has yet to receive adequate critical attention. The novel consists of two nested units: the House Beautiful that subsumes a Gothic nursery where Dorian's portrait is placed, and London the Metropolis that harbours Blue Gate Fields in the East End. The former might be read as a miniature of the latter. This double mechanism hinges on a Chinese box in which opium is stored. The structure, which evolves from the classic opium narrative established by Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), enables Wilde to stage a critique on the connection between Aestheticism and the imperial trade of opium. Besides, Wilde's aesthete trio in the novel, Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian Gray, and Adrian Singleton, are cast as opium smokers in order to disrupt the imperialist mindset showcased in the cartoons appearing on trade cards and in magazines that satirise Wilde's promotion of Aestheticism. This essay contends that Wilde's opium narrative exposes the hypocrisy of Empire by demonstrating that the coloniser and the colonised are anamorphic reflections of each other.

Tastemaker: Elizabeth Gordon, House Beautiful, and the Postwar American Home

Tastemaker: Elizabeth Gordon, House Beautiful, and the Postwar American Home

For Art’s Sake: The Aesthetic Movement in Print &amp; Beyond, 1870–1890: The Grolier Club of New YorkJanuary 25–March 11, 2017CatalogueFor Art’s Sake: The Aesthetic Movement in Print &amp; Beyond, 1870–1890Eric HolzenbergNew York: The Grolier Club, 2017.136 pp.; 146 color ills.Paper over board $50ISBN 9781605830643

For Art’s Sake: The Aesthetic Movement in Print &amp; Beyond, 1870–1890: The Grolier Club of New YorkJanuary 25–March 11, 2017Catalogue<i>For Art’s Sake: The Aesthetic Movement in Print &amp; Beyond, 1870–1890</i>Eric HolzenbergNew York: The Grolier Club, 2017.136 pp.; 146 color ills.Paper over board $50ISBN 9781605830643

Harmony in the Home: Fashioning the “Model” Artistic Home or Aesthetic House Beautiful through Color and Form

ABSTRACTBy the 1880s those proffering guidance on domestic decor were in agreement on one point: interiors had to be “harmonious.” This meant understanding the importance of color, form, and texture in fashioning the “model” interior popularly known as a House Beautiful; like a work of art, interiors were now compositions that required careful orchestration. Domestic advice pundits constantly drew analogies with both painting and music. Writers as diverse as “armchair evolutionist” Grant Allen, architect Owen W. Davis, designer and theorist Dr Christopher Dresser, and domestic experts Mrs Lucy Orrinsmith and Mrs H.R. Haweis all extolled the virtues of creating a “harmonious” ensemble. For the Aesthete “harmony” was a means of forging a distinct ensemble, one that expressed individual taste. A preference for secondary and tertiary colors exemplified superior cognition, as the common herd was apparently unable to appreciate subtle shades or tones. Journalist and art critic Harry Quilter condemned this obsession with “harmony” for instituting a dogma that was transforming art into a mystical cult. The quest for “harmony” was used to both define and castigate the aesthetic mission; due to their coloristic preferences they were judged to be “snobs.” The insistence on harmony would eventually result in the gesamtkunstwerk, the interior conceived as a “total work of art.” Although such unity of design would be hard to sustain, contemporary paint manufacturers still offer neutral or low tones with artful names, while “high-end” magazines feature model interiors devoid of humans least they rupture the harmony. Judging by current marketing strategies, a preference for subtle tones is still perceived as a mark of social distinction.

House Beautiful's “Victory Home” as Propaganda Tool

ABSTRACTThis article aims to contribute to the understanding of the significant power of home life as a patriotic ideal in the USA in the face of the difficulties, deprivations, and immediate aftermath of the Second World War. In particular, it focuses on how housing was used by the shelter magazine House Beautiful as a prescriptive tool for a range of gender- and consumer-oriented emotions and behaviors. The analysis focuses on how within the magazine the presentation of housing, interior furnishings and finishes, as well as attitudes towards domesticity shifted during and after the war. Detailed examination of articles from each period, including both assessment of images and emotional tenor of text will provide a clearer picture of the ideology and “emotionology” House Beautiful conveyed to its readers regarding changes in the American culture of emotions surrounding the war. This study concludes that in the magazine the single-family house and everything within it became a symbolic “Victory Home,” a concrete object and emotion management tool, around which House Beautiful editors propagandized a specific set of expectations regarding women's social roles.

CELEBRATING SHAW'S CHICAGO CENTURY AND BEYOND

Broadly speaking, the geography of Shaw’s dramatic career has been determined to a large degree by major metropolitan centers in Europe and North America and the cultural experiments and avant-garde movements they generated. Moreover, as the historical record shows, the reception of Shaw’s plays in these culture capitals has produced responses ranging from horrified to indifferent to enthusiastic. Yet while scholars have examined at length Shaw’s reception in cities such as Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and New York, they have yet to explore fully the importance of Chicago, a city whose long-standing importance to Shaw’s career challenges more traditional approaches to the dramatist’s life and work. 1 In diverse ways, Chicago has displayed its love affair with GBS for more than a century; indeed, according to bibliographer Sidney Kramer, it was “from Chicago that Shaw conquered America.” 2 In the most interesting ways, Shaw’s literary and professional relationship with Chicago cuts across the encounter of publishers, artists, and intellectuals with a metropolis that not only engendered but also supported and enhanced a revolution in the arts equal to both its American and European counterparts. At one level, the significance of Shaw’s relationship with Chicago—or “Shaw-cago” as we might term it—provides us with an opportunity to consider a counter-reading of the dramatist’s relationship with America; at the same time, the points of contact between Shaw and the “Windy City” speak to an alternative sense of literary history, one that connects the Irish dramatist to American cultural and political life from the late Victorian period through our own postmillennium moment. 3

Architectural and built environment discourses in an educational context: the Gottscho and Schleisner Collection

This essay examines architectural photographs of schools produced for consumer magazines like House Beautiful, which helped create aspirations for the rising American middle class during the period 1935–1959. It reveals the way that schools for the upper-middle classes were promulgated as ‘role models’ for the boom in school construction that accompanied the post-war baby boom. We examined images of exterior and interior school architecture and built environments in the Gottscho and Schleisner photography collection at the Library of Congress. Through Allan Sekula's process of archivisation and the use of constant comparative analysis, we re-organised the images in this collection and identified the prominent middle-class, architectural discourse inscribed on, in and surrounding the schools. We further discuss the maintenance of middle-class ideology through the guiding force of ‘conspicuous consumption’ patterns – the power behind the prominence of the archive and its accumulation process.

Domesticity beyond Sentiment: Edith Wharton, Decoration, and Divorce

Fraiman's essay challenges the usual conflation—generally unquestioned in discussions of nineteenth-century U.S. culture—of domestic preoccupations with sentimental views of family and femininity. It does so by turning to Edith Wharton, whose devotion to houses and interior design was evident both in her first publication, The Decoration of Houses (1897), and in her home the Mount, built in keeping with Decoration's vision. Yet Wharton's house-love, far from celebrating sentimental attachments, may be seen as the opposite: an expression of unhappiness in her marriage, anticipating her eventual divorce in 1913. The Mount was carefully designed to provide Wharton with her own quarters, segregated from her husband's as well as from the public rooms below. Withdrawing there to write, she developed as a professional novelist not by fleeing the domestic but rather by claiming a second order of privacy within the private sphere. The Decoration of Houses offers another example of domestic space reimagined to resist rather than embrace familial ties. Fraiman links the book's fifty-six photographs of immaculate, museum-like rooms to a fantasy of home purged of literal and emotional mess—purged, indeed, of people altogether. The book's seeming hostility to family life is all the more striking in contrast to a rival design manual, Clarence Cook's The House Beautiful (1877), whose sentimental sketches of husbands, wives, babies, and tea kettles insist that marriage and domesticity are happily inseparable. Examining Wharton's revisionary, extramarital domesticity, Fraiman invites scholars on the Left to own this much maligned category as one available for various ideological ends.

The Frontier of Leisure in California and the Shaping of Modern America (review)

Reviewed by: The Frontier of Leisure in California and the Shaping of Modern America William Philpott The Frontier of Leisure in California and the Shaping of Modern America. By Lawrence Culver. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. x + 317 pages, $29.95. Click for larger view View full resolution Anaheim Public Library, Bookmobile, Interior View. Ca. 1960. Photograph. Accession #P1756. Courtesy of the Anaheim Public Library. Depicted here is the first bookmobile operated by the Anaheim Public Library, purchased in 1958. The history of the bookmobile in the United States began with a horse and wagon at the Washington County Free Library in Hagerstown, Maryland; during the 1950s and '60s, bookmobiles proliferated with an increase in literacy and a decentralization of the reading public. [End Page 326] "Ranch houses suit any climate," declared House Beautiful in 1947. With its rambling, casual floor plan and its sliding doors and patios blurring outdoors and in, the ranch house might epitomize sunny Southern California, but it was equally at home in Connecticut or Illinois, the author of the article insisted (House Beautiful, January 1947, 61). For the ranch, more than just a house style, was "a Way of Living," a means of "planning house and site together" to achieve comfort, privacy, and "outdoor living in any season anywhere" (House Beautiful 66, 61, 66). This idea—that Southern California spawned not just a style but a lifestyle, premised on outdoor recreation in the privacy of one's own yard and home—is the core of Lawrence Culver's new monograph. We have long needed a history of Southern California's distinctive culture of leisure and its consequences, and now in this superb book we have it. A richness of recent scholarship has illuminated Southern California's cultural, racial, political, and environmental histories. Culver breaks new ground by revealing the central role leisure played in all of them. Leisure drove Southern California's growth from the late nineteenth century on as boosters promised tourists and new residents alike a relaxed, pastoral retreat from the East's urban chaos. Leisure reshaped environmental attitudes when Southern Californians learned to value nature more for personal pleasure than for national greatness or resource wealth, and leisure molded architecture and planning, as houses, yards, and subdivisions were designed to give homeowners their own private recreational spaces. Key to Culver's argument, leisure helped define social difference—including the very idea of "whiteness" in a racially diverse region—as these private, backyard leisure spaces took precedence over public ones and people of color found themselves barred from both. And not least, leisure catalyzed a significant social and political shift when consumers came to value their private recreational domains over community and collective enterprise. In short, leisure forged a world of equal parts "opportunity and oppression, happiness and hardship" (3); one of this book's great strengths is that Culver refuses to cast it in simplistic black-or-white terms. Especially after World War II, this culture of leisure would spread beyond Southern California, becoming America's middle-class, suburban culture writ large. Not a comprehensive history of Southern California leisure, Culver's book instead focuses on several pivotal people and places. Readers of this journal should especially appreciate his chapter on Charles Fletcher Lummis, the turn-ofthe-century author whose self-professed "scholarly" writings on the scenery and Native cultures of the Southwest helped make Los Angeles a major tourist destination. [End Page 327] Here Culver links Southern California's recreational rise to the longer history of American conquest in the Southwest, as Anglo boosters like Lummis relegated indigenous Mexicans and Indians to a romantic, idyllic past while also expecting them to work in the present so whites might play. Another chapter considers the history of recreational segregation in Los Angeles. Though leisure anchored LA's civic identity, Culver shows, the city and county prioritized private over public recreation and strove to exclude nonwhites from what little public park and beach space there was. African Americans, in particular, fought back, claiming and creating recreational settings for themselves. But LA's legacy would be one of recreational reinforcing of residential segregation, a sad blueprint for suburbia in the rest of America. Two...

Oscar Wilde at Toad Hall: Kenneth Grahame's Drainings and Draggings

Oscar Wilde at Toad Hall:Kenneth Grahame's Drainings and Draggings U. C. Knoepflmacher (bio) In 1888, the year in which he published The Happy Prince and Other Stories, Oscar Wilde explained that his fairy tales were only "meant partly for children," since they also addressed "those who have kept the child-like faculties of wonder and joy, and who find in simplicity a subtle strangeness" (Letters 215). He seemed to have changed his mind, however, after the 1891 appearance of his Dorian Gray. In a letter in which he boasted about having become enmeshed in "red roses of pleasure," Wilde abruptly dismissed fairy tales as a tepid and bloodless form unsuited for "bodies of flesh" and "souls in turmoil." He thus advised a friend who had sent him a fairy tale manuscript to abandon "such fanciful, winsome work," proclaiming that those who truly "know what passion is, what passions are" should clothe them in "their red raiment, and make them move before us" (315). Yet near the end of his career, Wilde signaled still another turn. In De Profundis, the confessional work written after his humiliating imprisonment, he claimed that tales such as "The Happy Prince" and "The Young King" might well offer some salutary alternatives to "the primrose path" he had taken (De Profundis 92). Oscar Wilde's oscillations provide me with a frame for this essay's contention that The Wind in the Willows can be read as Kenneth Grahame's attempt to distance himself from the excesses of the Aesthetic Movement with which he had once been identified. For the book that begins and ends with acts of house-cleaning undertaken by Grahame's band of male friends tries to domesticate Walter Pater's and Oscar Wilde's more extravagant versions of "The House Beautiful."1 Begun in 1906, The Wind in the Willows appeared in 1908, a bare three years after the posthumous publication of De Profundis and in the same year in which Robert Ross brought out a fourteen-volume edition of Oscar Wilde's Complete Works. [End Page 1] Grahame's lyric exaltation of the benign pastoral haven shared by Mole, Rat, and Badger is in keeping with his much earlier insistence, in his 1893 Pagan Papers, that it was "good to get back" to unencumbered and "sequestered" natural sites (Pagan Papers 23, 28). The comic mis-adventures of Mr. Toad, the garrulous speedster who is thrown into jail for his social transgressions and whose ancestral Hall becomes possessed by the anarchic inhabitants of the Wild Wood, now act as a foil to the wholesomeness of a reclusive life that features a de-eroticized male bonding. Unlike his more decorous animal friends, the attention-seeking Mr. Toad is childishly uninhibited. As I will try to show, Toad bears more than the casual resemblances to Oscar Wilde that both Seth Lerer and Annie Gauger have noted in their recent annotated editions of The Wind in the Willows.2 Still, Grahame's mockery of a cigar-smoking Toad he dresses in drag is not his only means to signal a retreat from the excesses of the 1890s. As I will show at the end of this article, even the most reliable of the river-bank's band of male friends, Water Rat, must be drained of any proclivity for untrustworthy Wildean "passions." The pastoral river bank that acts as the prime setting for The Wind in the Willows is a version of the landscape to which Kenneth Grahame and his motherless siblings were transported when he was but five years old. In 1906, two years before the book's publication, Grahame resettled in Cookham Dene in Berkshire after more than thirty years of life in London. The river-islands, weirs, and backwaters where an imaginative child had once watched otters, moles, water-rats—and toads—were now revisited in a sort of Wordsworthian return. Yet this river-world also contained a very different memorial. As Peter Green notes in his fine Grahame biography, Cookham Dene was "almost in sight of Reading Gaol," a prison bordered by the Thames marshes (Green 284). As the site of Oscar Wilde's incarceration and literary recantations, Reading Gaol must...

Dream Home: Remodeling American Expectations with Model Houses

In the years immediately following World War II, the model home became more than a simple promotional tool. During an era of social transition in which women's roles were in flux, technology and manufacturing were making rapid advances, and returning troops dramatically increased the demand for homes, houses and housing became important topics nationally, and the built environment responded to these conditions. Even with these trends, though, the popularity of model homes at this time is striking. While the model home had served as a promotional purpose for decades, the phenomenon exploded along with the housing boom of the 1940s and 1950s. Model homes became increasingly accessible. Neighborhoods and whole communities such as the Levittowns sprang from the concept. Not only were hundreds of model homes available to visit, they were also extremely visible in printed media, including a wide variety of magazines. Model houses played a significant role in an evolving domestic ideal as Americans' expectations for their houses changed profoundly. American-built landscape changed dramatically during the post World War II era. GI Bill allowed thousands of returning veterans opportunities for home ownership that would have been inconceivable in earlier eras, and their return from war increased already significant demand, which spurred the construction of thousands of new houses around the country. Such unprecedented development offered broad economic opportunities and competition while also allowing increased interest in and discussion of domestic space and its meaning for Americans. This wide-scale focus on the acquisition of domestic space redefined expectations. Domestic appliances that were unusual before the war became de rigueur in this era, raising demand among American consumers. While certainly houses had embodied meaning beyond shelter, houses gained new cultural significance. Spending on household furnishings and appliances increased disproportionately relative to consumer spending in general (May 147). standards of the preceding decade were overtaken by the media, developer-driven expectations, and shifting cultural values. concept of the began to take a more central place in the American psyche. propagation of these exemplary images was widespread. Evidence of the proliferation of the ideal took many forms. Visiting these idealized domestic environments became a leisure activity in its own right. Houses were increasingly depicted as objects to be admired. For instance, two model houses displayed at Minneapolis' Walker Art Center and at a similar exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art exemplified this new attitude toward domestic space. This idea of the resonated in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Similarly, the 1946 book Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House was a bestseller and became a movie blockbuster in 1948 with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy as the hapless homebuilders. At the same time, the term was becoming more prominent in periodicals. Articles such as House Beautiful's The Low-Down on Your Dream from 1945 served to whet the public appetite, suggesting that a custom built home was an accessible route for first-time home buyers (Colean 138). With the proliferation of model houses, the paradigm linking ideal lives with houses was established. Clearly, the prevalence of model homes cannot be explained by economic conditions alone. period in which model houses came to the fore was also defined by shifts in the social status quo. relationship between model houses of the era and women's roles is particularly revealing. In an era of potential dramatic cultural change, model houses suggested an antidote to the social unknown by creating self-contained, seemingly controlled domestic environments. During World War II, women were encouraged to join the workforce. After the war, though, perceptions of working women were more ambivalent as family and domestic life gained social capital. …

Modern Architecture and Complaints about the Weather, or, ‘Dear Monsieur Le Corbusier, It is still raining in our garage….’

Historians of Modern Architecture have cultivated the image of the architect as a temperamental genius, unconcerned by issues of politeness or pragmatics. Despite their indisputable place within the architectural canon, many of the most important works of Modern Architecture were heavily contested on pragmatic grounds, such as cost, briefs and particularly concerning issues of suitability and effectiveness in relation to climate and weather. This paper will discuss a number of famed instances in the history of Modern Architecture where climatic conditions have become a contested issue in the reception of ‘the masterpiece’.

Television, gender and space: an overview of Lynn Spigel

Lynn Spigel, the Frances E. Willard Professor of Screen Cultures at the School of Communications at Northwestern University, is a feminist media scholar who works on television and cultural history. Over the past two decades, she has produced a body of work that has been highly influential in the fields of television studies and cultural studies, and she has long-standing interests in sf and discourses about television in relation to public and private space, gender and technology. Spigel was a co-editor of the feminist media journal Camera Obscura for ten years and is one of the founders of the Console-ing Passions conference, a biannual international conference on feminism, television, audio and video. She is the editor of the Console-ing Passions book series for Duke University Press.Spigel is primarily concerned with feminist approaches to television in relation to place and urban, suburban, domestic and outer space, particularly in the postwar period. In order to provide an understanding of the cultural and historical contexts of media culture, Spigel primarily uses an interpretive method based on archival research. Indeed, her work has largely been concerned with uncovering details about the cultural contexts of television that have often challenged our thinking about the history of the medium. Much like television studies itself, Spigel's work is interdisciplinary, drawing on feminism, art history, architecture and design, geography, urban planning, cultural theory and sf studies, which has allowed her to ask questions that she might not have asked within the confines of her own field (Spigel, 'Theorizing the Bachelorette' 1211). Television studies, like sf studies, shares a history of marginalisation within the academy, and Spigel was one of the first scholars critically to examine television in relation to other 'low' or 'debased' forms of culture, such as women's magazines, dismissed by cultural hierarchies within the academy and popular criticism as undeserving of serious attention. Spigel has published three major works - Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (1992), Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (2001) and TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (2008) - that have expanded our understanding of television history. In addition, she has co-edited several influential anthologies: Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction (1991), Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer (1992), The Revolution Wasn't Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict (1997), Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader (1997) and Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (2004) - that have mapped key developments in the field.Spigel emerged as a key figure in the early 1990s with Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America, a cultural history of American television that focuses on discourses surrounding television's installation in the domestic sphere following World War II. At the time the book was published, the focus of television studies was largely confined to understanding the medium in terms of industry regulation and technology. In contrast, Spigel offered a social and cultural historical study that examined what was said about television in postwar America. In order to account for how television was understood as a new technology entering the home, Spigel used popular sources such as magazines, advertisements, newspapers, television shows and films that revealed 'a general set of rules that were formed for thinking about TV in its early period' (9). Importantly, Spigel examined sources such as Better Homes and Garden, Ladies Home Journal and House Beautiful that addressed women and domestic issues that had been previously ignored in histories of the medium. This technique reinserted women into the history of television in terms of their 'subjective experiences and the way those experiences might, in turn, have affected industry output and policies' (5). …