Sanctioning Modernism: Architecture and the Making of Postwar Identities

Introduction (Monica Penick)

182 D uringWorldWarIIandinthetwodecadesthatfollowed, scores of architects were engaged in the design of the postwar house, a building type that offered extraordinary opportunities and unprecedented challenges. In the United States in particular, the postwar house—singlefamily , detached, and increasingly built for a middle-class clientele—became, on the one hand, an arena in which a once-stagnant housing industry could expand and thrive; on the other hand, the postwar house offered a venue in which architects could explore progressive ideas. Perhaps more signi ficantly, as the three essays in this section demonstrate, the house became a repository of complex meanings, essential to the formation of postwar character, selfhood, and nationhood . Designers, builders, developers, tastemakers, and consumers understood the expressive possibilities of the postwar house (both the custom-built and mass-developed versions) and transferred onto this singular architectural form the deferred hopes, dreams, and anxieties of a war-torn world. In this context, the postwar house opened opportunities that were initially linked to absolute need. The wartime mandate to house defense workers, particularly in the United States, was historically unparalleled; this demand was INTRODUCTION monica penick introduction 183 matched and surpassed in the postwar years, fueled by unresolved housing shortages and the increased purchasing power of American consumers (made possible in part by federally sponsored mortgage programs and the GI Bill). The opportunity to design and build during these years produced very real challenges, including a demand for swift construction, innovative building techniques, durable materials, and affordable pricing. Architects were particularly compelled—by both individual clients and the larger housing market—to articulate the ill-defined concept of modernization with open floor plans, flexible interior spaces, “engineered” storage, and upto -date domestic equipment (especially in the kitchen). These challenges compounded and led again to opportunity, now within the untried laboratories of standardization and prefabrication . SOM’s “Experimental Houses” (discussed in this section), Walter Gropius’s and Konrad Wachsmann’s Packaged House, Levitt and Sons’ mass housing developments, the Lustron Houses, and the pioneering efforts within Arts and Architecture’s Case Study House Program all broke new ground.¹ These designers probed questions of materials, processes , form, function, and content. Alongside scholars, critics , the professional press, popular media, and cultural institutions , they opened perhaps the most controversial of all postwar debates: what is modern?² The contemporary meaning of modern (and modernism), as it was constructed between about 1940 and 1965, was complex , varied, and contested. To some, modern was reduced to Corbusian pilotis and flat roofs; to others, it meant a California ranch house; to others still, a Cape Cod cottage outfitted with an oversized picture window and the latest kitchen gadgetry. Modern was often used as an aesthetic concept, or sometimes spatial, sometimes functional, and sometimes technological. Each essay within this section presents a view 184 modernism and domesticity of these contested definitions of modern, from the technological modernism of SOM and their prefabricated houses for the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to the modern lifestyle and quasi-organic architecture promoted by House Beautiful’s American Style (“modern, but not too modern ”), to the anxious, “psychologically charged” modern of the fully transparent, exposed (yet isolated), and vulnerable postwar house within its haunted landscape. Within these three final essays, a secondary and unifying theme emerges. Each author argues not only that modernists engaged in a set of processes, or a way of living, or stylistic conventions, but also that modernism was appropriated for the larger purpose of establishing character or identity. If this identity was permanently linked to the rational, systematized corporate structure at SOM that would eventually perpetuate the legacy of high modernism, it was simultaneously linked to House Beautiful’s individualistic, democratic, and nationalistic American Style (a very particular variant of modernism that was positioned as the antithesis of SOM’s version of the International Style). The notion of selfhood is bound up in all of these versions of modern character, and, in the final chapter of this volume, modernism (now placed beyond the transparent fabric of architecture and out into the landscape) transforms the notion of character so that it is measured not in terms of mechanization, or individualization, or nationalization , but by its very dematerialization. Taken together, these three seemingly disparate essays form a cohesive argument: modern was infinitely varied in the postwar decades; definitions, forms, and aesthetic conventions evolved and changed, and (as the final essay...