Mid-century Modernism Research Articles

The Memory of An Apartment Couple in Denizli in Terms of Mid-Century Modernism: Gözde and Cillov Apartments

Sivil apartman mimarisindeki olgu ve dönüşümler, bir kentin barınma kültür tarihini oluşturan ve anlamlandıran katmalardan biridir. Konut bağlamındaki tarihsel eğilimleri ortaya koyduğu gibi farklı yaşam tarzlarının, bunlara ait değişimlerin izlenebileceği zengin ve verimli bir gösterge alan niteliği de sunar. Sivil apartmanlar bu açıdan, toplumun belli bir kesimine ait sosyo-ekonomik ve kültürel eğilimlerin, bunların etkileşiminde kurumsallaşan yasa ve yönetmeliklerin, bunlarla düzenlenen tarihsel içeriklerin biçim kazandığı toplumsal formlar olarak incelemeye değerdir. Bu makalenin amacı, 1970’lerde, orta yüzyıl modernizmi bağlamında değerlendirilebilecek Denizli kent merkezinin dönüşümü sürecinde, yazlık bir sinemanın yıkılıp yerine dönemin sosyo-ekonomik koşulları ve üst gelir grubuna ait belli bir sınıfın olanakları ve işbirliği dahilinde inşa edilen bir apartman çiftini, dönemine ait mimari mekân organizasyonu ve sosyal yaşam göstergeleri açısından inceleyerek, bu örnekte olduğu gibi çoğu yıkılma tehlikesi altında olan isimsiz, sıradan yapıları kentsel-kolektif hafıza ve gayri resmi tarihyazım açısından kayıt altına alma çalışmalarına katkı sunmaktır.

Looking into Mid-Century Modern Furniture Design in Turkey through Oral History

Looking into Mid-Century Modern Furniture Design in Turkey through Oral History

Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design by Kristina Wilson (review)

Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design by Kristina Wilson (review)

Mid-Century Modern Design as a Cinematic Vision of Dystopia Based on Selected Examples of the 21st-Century Films and TV Series

The text aims to investigate various uses of the mid-century modern period pieces in the production design of films and TV series developed after the year 2000 and presenting various visions of a dystopic future. The choice of time frame for the analysis was motivated by the desire to showcase the connotations between the mid-century modern and 21st-century visions of the future which can be broadly described as retrofuturistic. On account of its primary focus on progressive ideas, new materials and forms, mid-century modern has always been broadly associated with the design of the future. The author discusses various takes on set design to highlight a wide spectrum of narrations regarding the future and its cultural dimension in selected productions incorporating iconic mid-century design pieces and, more importantly, the non-verbal message they carry.

Mid-Century Modern Exhibition Halls of Brno Exhibition Centre and Their Renovation

Pavilions Y, C, and Z of the Brno Exhibition Centre, dating from the post-war period, are considered important monuments of Mid-century modern architecture in Czechoslovakia. However, they exhibit a number of operational shortcomings due to the time of their construction and the very nature of exhibition architecture intended originally only for seasonal use. The question of their future renovation and adaptation to a more sustainable operation is discussed in the context of their previous construction development, taking into account the peculiarities of the legislative environment in the Czech Republic and the specifics of exhibition and trade fair operations.

Towards an Architectural Theory of Jurisdictional Technics: Midcentury Modernism on Native American Land

How should we do the history of US midcentury modernist architecture—a period marked by intense campaigns of Native American dispossession in the face of organised Indigenous resistance? The spatial development of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians’ ancestral lands in Palm Springs, California, offers an illustrative case study for these intersections; a history of colonial settlement both enabled and constrained as much by canonical architects like Albert Frey and Richard Neutra as by the Agua Caliente’s own highly influential political activism. This history challenges the perfect model of nested state jurisdiction—seamlessly connecting territory and expertise—to show a tangle of jurisdictional relations of various degrees and kinds of opacity, marked and mediated by architecture. This article explores these entanglements as the effects of “jurisdictional technics,” or how architecture organised relations of authority among and between competing regimes of order.

Review: Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design

Book Review| March 01 2023 Review: Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design Kristina Wilson Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2021, 264 pp., 74 color and 80 b/w illus. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780691208190 Dianne Harris Dianne Harris University of Washington Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2023) 82 (1): 91–93. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2023.82.1.91 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Dianne Harris; Review: Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 March 2023; 82 (1): 91–93. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2023.82.1.91 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search Although scholars in the humanities and social science fields have for decades examined race, class, and gender in a broad range of contexts, and geographers and urban historians began to study the spatial implications of race even earlier, the vast majority of art and architectural historians have taken much longer to put race at the heart of their analyses. Fortunately, we are witnessing the emergence of publications that are serving as a corrective and beginning to shift the field in important ways. Kristina Wilson’s Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body contributes to this literature with a particular intervention in the critical studies of whiteness, focusing on the material culture of midcentury domesticity. Whiteness studies are typically political projects at their core; namely, they aim to dismantle white supremacy by shedding light on its structures, systems, and modes of operation. As a branch of critical race theory, studies of whiteness take... You do not currently have access to this content.

Ralph L. Sacco, 65, Dies: Stroke Expert With a Talent for Architectural Design.

Ralph L. Sacco, 65, Dies: Stroke Expert With a Talent for Architectural Design.

Ralph L. Sacco, 65, Dies: Stroke Expert With a Talent for Architectural Design.

Ralph L. Sacco, 65, Dies: Stroke Expert With a Talent for Architectural Design.

Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design

Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design

Crawling Glazes on Mid-Century Modern Maritime Canadian Studio Pottery: Shared or Re-Created?

<p>This paper presents compositional data for crawling glazes made by prominent studio potters in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia during the mid-20th century (Erica and Kjeld Deichmann, Eleanor and Foster Beveridge, and Carrie Mackenzie) with the objective of (1) identifying key glaze ingredients, and (2) determining whether glaze recipes were shared by these potters, or if the glaze produced by one (likely the Deichmanns) inspired others to re-create it. Crawling glazes are those that retract during firing, creating “islands”. They commonly have unusual compositions (e.g., high alumina contents) to ensure a high viscosity and surface tension, but crawling can also be triggered by treating the ceramic surface to minimize adhesion with the glaze prior to firing. The Deichmanns used different formulae to produce their signature “Snow on the Mountain” (SOTM) crawling glaze used on redware versus stoneware. Three of four of their analysed glazes are magnesian owing to the use of magnesium carbonate (the mineral magnesite); the fourth is highly potassic and calcic (suggesting the use of “pearl ash” and “whiting”) and less aluminous. The Beveridges’ counterpart, though visually-similar, has a distinct composition, and calcium-magnesium carbonate (dolomite) was used instead of magnesite. Crawling was ensured in most samples by high alumina contents. Mackenzie’s glaze is visually distinct (i.e., is brown, not white) and has very high lead and low alumina, lime and magnesia contents. Crawling in it and in the single low-alumina Deichmann glaze is attributed devolatilization of carbonate minerals, thick application and/or pre-glazing surface treatment. The analytical data suggest that the Deichmanns did not share specific details of their SOTM glaze formulae with the Beveridges, who evidently sought to re-create them. Mackenzie formulated a distinct crawling glaze, but also made knobbed wares likely inspired by the Deichmanns’ well-known “Kish” bowls.</p>

Conversation Pit

Conversation Pit

Review: The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture

Review: <i>The Routledge Companion to Women in Architecture</i>

Swedish-American Borderlands: New Histories of Transatlantic Relations

Swedish-American Borderlands: New Histories of Transatlantic Relations

Perancangan Brand Concept “Móta Studio” Dengan Inspirasi Karya dari Tokoh di Era Mid Century Modern

Mid-Century Modern is a style of architecture, product, interior, and graphic design that reflects 20th century developments in modern design. Mid Century Modern style is a combination of many styles and materials, one of which is retro style wrapped with the simplicity of Scandinavian style. Several Scandinavian design elements were applied to the Mid-Century Modern design by displaying clean lines, the use of wood, soft and minimalist organic curves. One of the popular design styles in the Mid-Century Modern era is the Biomorphic form which has a characteristic of curved shape, smooth surface, asymmetrical shape and is oriented towards natural objects and their environment. One of the iconic mid-century design is the La Chaise chair by Charles and Ray Eames, its biomorphic shape inspired by Gaston Lachaise's 'The Floating Figure' sculpture. Through analysis of politic, economy, social and technology and the work of figures in the Mid-Century Modern era, we were able to identify the key concepts, design elements and visual characters of this era, which were then used to determine the concept and design style’s visual character for the brand concept and product collection of Móta Studio.

Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, and Urban Change in Pre-Interstate America by Amy D. Finstein (review).

Reviewed by: Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, and Urban Change in Pre-Interstate America by Amy D. Finstein Geoff D. Zylstra (bio) Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, and Urban Change in Pre-Interstate America By Amy D. Finstein. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2020. Pp. 289. Part transportation history and part architectural history, Amy D. Finstein's Modern Mobility Aloft positions urban elevated highways, constructed in the early twentieth century, as harbingers of modern automobile-focused cityscapes. Beginning with a brief history of the automobile, Finstein shows that the quintupling of automobiles in the United States between 1920 and 1945—from 8.1 million to 40.4 million—created traffic problems related to speed and density, and required new infrastructures that included parking spaces, filling stations, and repair shops. Focused on three elevated highways—Chicago's Wacker Drive, New York City's West Side Elevated Highway, and Boston's Central Artery—this book projects elevated highways as modern twentieth-century technologies against the backdrop of preexisting nineteenth-century cities, constructed of brick and wood at the scale of pedestrians and horsedrawn carriages (p. 2). Finstein argues that "[u]rban elevated highways of the 1920s and 1930s developed in response to a complex dialogue among designers, engineers, social scientists, and municipal leaders about how to reconcile automotive freedoms with existing landscapes" (p. 39). Two themes tied to modernity animate Finstein's analysis of these elevated roadways. First, she uses the vertical transformation of cities that began in the 1880s to place these highways in the context of utopian, modernist technologies. Following the invention of the skyscraper, the vertically oriented city offered many possibilities for solving urban problems. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, urban designers suggested elevating street railways, crosswalks, pedestrian sidewalks and promenades, parking lots, and streets and highways. Finstein explains that "large-scale city plans sought to unite, coordinate, and systematically implement changes to multiple layers of urban form" (p. 53). Elevated highways were utopian approaches to constructing automobile-focused cities. Second, Finstein employs privatization as a way to analyze automobile culture as it related to urban design. Earlier technologies such as streetcars brought privatization to public space via corporate ownership and reorganized public spaces to accommodate privately owned vehicles. Automobiles intensified privatization by bringing autonomous drivers into street space and making streets into "arteries serving private automotive interests" (p. 34). Elevated highways, by separating individual transportation interests from adjacent aspects of cities, represented an unprecedented form of privatization. Three case studies demonstrate Finstein's argument that elevated highways brought modernity into U.S. cities. Chicago's metamorphosis into a [End Page 878] modern city produced a revisioning of urban highways. The architects Bennett and Burnham, along with the Chicago Plan Commission, designed Wacker Drive as a double-deck boulevard along the Chicago River that replaced South Water Street. This roadway "transformed South Water Street from a transportation channel to an essential piece of the city's armature. It would act as a building and thoroughfare, connector and border, mediating between the different components of the city's fabric" (p. 95). The development of Wacker Drive helped reimagine highways as architectural features of cities. Treatment of highways as urban architecture continued in New York City with the construction of the West Side Elevated Highway. The city's Board of Estimate hired the firm Sloan and Robertson, famous for their art deco buildings, "to synthesize modern transportation, modern engineering, and modern architecture into the public realm" (p. 123). Finstein makes clear that the architectural design of the West Side Elevated Highway matched the buildings that defined early twentieth-century vertical New York City. While engineering priorities dominated the state-sponsored Central Artery in Boston, architectural considerations influenced the design of the highway's ramps and substructure, which reflected mid-century modern trends emphasizing horizontal stripes and banding (p. 147). Finstein demonstrates that these highways brought modern design as well as automobiles into U.S. cities. Like many architectural histories, the analysis in Modern Mobility Aloft focuses on the aesthetics of the structures, the design decisions that went into these highways, and their legacies. In a few places, Finstein highlights the implications of these highways for the social lives...

Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender and the Politics of Power in Design

The cover of Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design elegantly encapsulates the themes of the book. The image, taken from a 1953 fashion spread in Ebony magazine, shows a young Black model in a fringed dress and silver shoes within the frame of a Butterfly chair, a recognizable mid-century design by Jorge Ferrari Hardoy that was featured in the Museum of Modern Art, New York ‘Good Design’ exhibitions. The abstract metal form of the chair, pictured without the leather sling seat, provides an abstract frame for the model as she holds a delicate mobile sculpture to dangle above her arm. Like this cover image, Wilson’s book depicts Modernism—especially furniture, interiors, and products—as a glamorous and aspirational style that had different meanings depending on the context. While the book incorporates a gender analysis in images such as this, the emphasis is on the racial divide, specifically of Black and white Americans, in the mid-twentieth century.1 In exploring both Black and white media, Black and white designers, and the objects and spaces that might appear in both Black and white homes, Wilson accounts for Modernism as the product of a racially exclusive design industry that was nonetheless a popular style among Black designers and tastemakers.

Elizabeth Bowen's Psychoanalytic Fiction by Victoria Coulson

Reviewed by: Elizabeth Bowen's Psychoanalytic Fiction by Victoria Coulson Jessica Gildersleeve Elizabeth Bowen's Psychoanalytic Fiction. By Victoria Coulson. (Midcentury Modern Writers) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2020. x+226 pp. £75. ISBN 978-1-4744-8049-9. Victoria Coulson's monograph is among the first in a new series from Edinburgh University Press. 'Midcentury Modern Writers', under the editorship of the prominent critic of modernism, Irish literature, and psychoanalysis, Maud Ellmann, is devoted to 'restoring undervalued writers, genres, and literary movements' (p. ix). A book, like the present study, devoted to the work of Elizabeth Bowen constitutes a welcome addition to such a project. A range of major publications on Bowen's work has emerged in recent years, including Ellmann's Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow across the Page (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), Nicola Darwood's A World of Lost Innocence: Elizabeth Bowen's Fiction (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), my own Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma: The Ethics of Survival (New York: Brill, 2014), and Elizabeth Bowen: Theory, Thought and Things, edited by myself and Patricia Juliana Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Despite this, as well as the formation of the Elizabeth Bowen Society and its associated journal, the Elizabeth Bowen Review, Bowen still haunts the margins of canonical literature. Although psychoanalytic methods, often with a deconstructive, trauma-informed, or feminist slant, have informed a number of such recent studies, a sole focus on Bowen's work as 'psychoanalytic' may seem curious, given her interest in but apparent lack of explicit commentary on psychoanalysis. Indeed, the short story 'The Cat Jumps' (1934) may at first blush appear to be the only one of her works which directly uses the terms of psychoanalysis—and does so in a satirical manner, as its very modern characters engage in lively discussion about 'Kraffi-Ebing, Freud, Forel, Weiniger and the heterosexual volume of Havelock Ellis' (The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (London: Vintage, 1999), p. 366). In her private life, too, Bowen appeared to hold some disdain for modern psychology, such that although she visited a psychotherapist, her lover Charles Ritchie observed that the therapist exposed more of his own private feelings to her than she to him. Yet Coulson marks a critical intervention in this interpretation: [End Page 296] she points out that 'the satire of "The Cat Jumps" is directed not at the ideas represented by the volumes stocking the Wrights' library but at the spectacle of their complacent uptake by a social group motivated primarily by a tribal desire to instantiate its intellectual superiority' (p. 13). More importantly, however, she observes more subtle references in Bowen's fiction, non-fiction, and personal writing to psychoanalytic concepts such as narcissism, neurosis, and complexes (pp. 13–14). Given such infiltration of these ideas within her work, as well as the clear impact of personal and historical trauma in her life, including her father's debilitating psychological breakdown and her mother's early death, not to mention two world wars, a study dedicated to psychoanalysis in Bowen, or indeed of Bowen as a '"theorist" of psychic life' (p. 11), therefore represents an important contribution to the field. Following Bowen's favoured tripartite narrative structure, across three sections Coulson maps out Bowen's psychoanalytic representation of 'Development', 'Sexuality', and 'Reproduction; or Legacy', ultimately arguing for a consistent and original advancement of her theorization of these concepts, such that 'there is operative in Bowen's writing a sophisticated implicit account or understanding of psychological development, of sexuality, and of the structure and function of gender identities' (p. 10), as well as how this 'psychodrama of individual development' functions 'in relation to contemporary world-historical events' (p. 17). To do so, Coulson examines a range of Bowen's extensive œuvre of novels and short stories—the fiction—but also makes use of her life writing and critical essays. Yet her psychoanalytic method is peculiarly unmoored: this makes for a more readable text, to be sure, but does leave the study's psychoanalysis methodologically free. Nevertheless, this is a welcome inclusion in the field of Bowen studies, and does much to gather together and reframe some of the disparate themes...

Shane Morrissy. Review of "Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design" by Kristina Wilson.

Shane Morrissy. Review of "Mid-Century Modernism and the American Body: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Power in Design" by Kristina Wilson.

Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature

Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature