When American architects, designers, and cultural institutions
converted wartime strategies to new ends, the aggressive promotion of
postwar domestic bliss became another kind of weapon.
In the years immediately following World War II, America embraced modern
architecture--not as something imported from Europe, but as an entirely
new mode of operation, with original and captivating designs made in the
USA. In Domesticity at War, Beatriz Colomina shows how postwar
American architecture adapted the techniques and materials that were
developed for military applications to domestic use. Just as
manufacturers were turning wartime industry to peacetime
productivity--going from missiles to washing machines--American
architects and cultural institutions were, in Buckminster Fuller's
words, turning weaponry into livingry.This new form of domesticity
itself turned out to be a powerful weapon. Images of American domestic
bliss--suburban homes, manicured lawns, kitchen accessories--went around
the world as an effective propaganda campaign. Cold War anxieties were
masked by endlessly repeated images of a picture-perfect domestic
environment. Even the popular conception of the architect became
domesticated, changing from that of an austere modernist to a
plaid-shirt wearing homebody.
Colomina examines, with interlocking case studies and an army of images,
the embattled and obsessive domesticity of postwar America. She reports
on, among other things, MOMA's exhibition of a Dymaxion Deployment Unit
(DDU), a corrugated steel house suitable for use as a bomb shelter,
barracks, or housing; Charles and Ray Eames's vigorous domestic life and
their idea of architecture as a flexible stage for the theatrical
spectacle of everyday life; and the American lawn as patriotic site and
inalienable right.Domesticity at War itself has a distinctive
architecture. Housed within the case are two units: one book of text,
and one book of illustrations--most of them in color, including
advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, architectural
photographs, and more.
