At Home with Modernism

3:30 -5:00 pm
Goldsmith Lecture Hall (GOL 3.120)

confirmed participants:

Sandy Isenstadt

Sandy Isenstadt is Assistant Professor in Yale University's Department of the History of Art, where he teaches the history of modern architecture, concentrating on developments in Europe and the United States. He has published essays on post-World War II reformulations of modernism by well-known émigré architects Richard Neutra and Josep Lluis Sert, visual polemics in the urban proposals of Leon Krier and Rem Koolhaas, as well as histories of American refrigerators, picture windows, landscape views, and real estate appraisal. His book, The Modern American House: Spaciousness and Middle-Class Identity, published by Cambridge University Press in 2006, describes the visual enhancement of spaciousness in the architectural, interior, and landscape design in American domestic design. He is also co-editor of Modernism and the Middle East, a volume of essays that will be published by University of Washington Press in 2007. His work has been recognized with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.

Prior to receiving his PhD in architectural history from MIT, Sandy Isenstadt practiced architecture in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working on projects ranging from historic preservation to the design of the 1988 Olympic Village in Seoul, Korea. He has also worked in Manhattan and the Bronx, where he specialized in low-income housing and non-profit economic development.

Christopher Long

Professor Long's interests center on modern architectural history, with a particular emphasis on Central Europe between 1890 and the present. Trained in history rather than architecture, his approach borrows from cultural and intellectual history, as well as political and economic history. He has studied questions of cultural representation in architecture, the larger ideological context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architectural theory, and the development of architectural education. Long's interests also include modern design in Austria, the Czech lands, and the United States. He has worked on several exhibitions and publishes widely on a diverse range of objects.

Monica Penick

Monica Penick is a Doctoral Candidate in Architectural History at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from UT Austin, and a Bachelor's degree in History and Classical Studies from Stanford University. Penick was awarded a 2006-2007 American Association of University Women (AAUW) American Dissertation Fellowship, which will support the completion of her dissertation "Livable Modernism in Postwar America: House Beautiful's Pace Setter House Program, 1945-65." Her research has also been recognized with fellowships from the Beverly Willis Foundation, the Young Women's Alliance Foundation, the University of Texas Graduate School, the University of Texas School of Architecture, and Stanford University.

Penick's work on postwar American housing continues along with her interest in twentieth-century Design History and Historic Preservation (specifically that of the recent past). She is currently preparing an essay on mid-century textile and pattern design for publication in a special issue of Studies in the Decorative Arts, has recently completed an essay on designer Paul László, and has published two book reviews of publications concerning postwar architecture, design and culture.

Gwendolyn Wright

Gwendolyn Wright is Professor of Architecture at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she has taught since l983, with joint appointments in the departments of History and Art History. From l988-92 she was director of Columbia's Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. She was born in Chicago in l946 and received her MArch and PhD degrees from the University of California at Berkeley.

She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Getty Center, the Stanford Humanities Center, the University of Michigan Humanities Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. In l985 Wright was elected a fellow of the Society of American Historians, which honors literary quality in American history.

In 2003 and 2004 she hosted a PBS television series, "History Detectives." She has lectured at major universities and other public institutions throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Lebanon, Canada, Argentina and Japan.

Wright is currently at work on a history of contemporary housing in the United States and a cultural history of 20th-century modern architecture in the United States.

Moderator: Christopher Long

The detached single-family home is perhaps the most powerful architectural icon of the American postwar period. In the 1950s alone, a record 15.1 million new homes were constructed, double that of the previous decade. With newly available long-term and low-interest mortgages, individual home ownership increased exponentially. This new group of homeowners, predominantly middle-class and overwhelmingly suburban, formed an entirely new domestic consumer market with an evolving demand for the "up-to-date." Technologically, materially, functionally, spatially and aesthetically, this translated as a trend toward the "modern." The various forms that postwar domestic modernism took -- and the meaning and significance ascribed to each of these variants -- were quite distinct from the avant-garde variants that had developed in Europe during the prewar years. What, then, defined American Modernism in the postwar period, and what set it apart from preceding (and succeeding) conceptions? How did modern design find its way into the mainstream of postwar architectural taste? How were these ideas transformed and disseminated? What, for example, was the role of the popular press, professional journals, museum exhibitions, design competitions, model homes and idea houses, department store displays, movies, and television? More generally then, this sessions seeks to explore the ways in which Modernism, in its many incarnations, was sanctioned by designers, critics, tastemakers, and most notably, the home-buying public.