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194X Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front Andrew M. Shanken |
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$75.00 cloth |
Rediscovering the visionary designs and idealistic rhetoric of American architecture during World War II During the Second World War, American architecture was in a state of crisis. The rationing of building materials and restrictions on nonmilitary construction continued the privations that the profession had endured during the Great Depression. At the same time, the dramatic events of the 1930s and 1940s led many architects to believe that their profession—and society itself—would undergo a profound shift once the war ended, with private commissions giving way to centrally planned projects. The magazine Architectural Forum coined the term “194X” to encapsulate this wartime vision of postwar architecture and urbanism. In a major study of American architecture during World War II, Andrew M. Shanken focuses on the culture of anticipation that arose in this period, as out-of-work architects turned their energies from the built to the unbuilt, redefining themselves as planners and creating original designs to excite the public about postwar architecture. Shanken recasts the wartime era as a crucible for the intermingling of modernist architecture and consumer culture. Challenging the pervasive idea that corporate capitalism corrupted the idealism of modernist architecture in the postwar era, 194X shows instead that architecture’s wartime partnership with corporate America was founded on shared anxieties and ideals. Business and architecture were brought together in innovative ways, as shown by Shanken’s persuasive reading of magazine advertisements for Revere Copper and Brass, U.S. Gypsum, General Electric, and other companies that prominently featured the work of leading progressive architects, including Louis I. Kahn, Eero Saarinen, and Walter Gropius. Although the unexpected prosperity of the postwar era made the architecture of 194X obsolete before it could be built and led to its exclusion from the story of twentieth-century American architecture, Shanken makes clear that its anticipatory rhetoric and designs played a crucial role in the widespread acceptance of modernist architecture. “Andrew Shanken offers a fascinating, compelling, and altogether convincing new frame for understanding the burst of creative and visionary design that accompanied America's engagement in the Second World War. Situating this ephemeral moment in relationship to forgotten economic mantras of the ‘mature economy’ and the end of frontier, Shanken provides a whole new framework for understanding American modernism and a bittersweet analysis of the country's brief faith in a planned future.” —Barry Bergdoll “194X brilliantly lights up that most obscure of subjects, the hypothetical architecture of the war years—a visionary body of ideas, forms, and images—which though unbuilt was every bit as influential as the fantasy architecture of Piranesi. By making resourceful use of oral testimony as that period recedes from living memory, Shanken demonstrates the historical imagination at its best. In every respect, this is an original and splendidly written contribution by one of the field’s most promising young scholars.” —Michael J. Lewis, author of American Art and Architecture Andrew M. Shanken is assistant professor of architectural history at the University of California, Berkeley. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Art Bulletin, Design Issues, Landscape, Places and Planning Perspectives. 288 pages | 96 b&w photos, 13 color plates | 7 x 10 | 2009 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface |
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