Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture

The home as part of material culture is the very place where the intricate relations between architecture, gender and domesticity become visible. This book investigates the multi-layered themes evoked by the interconnections between these terms. Despite modern architecture's prominent emphasis on housing, the point is often made that modern art and architecture were about the suppression, rather than the glorification of domesticity. The contention of the authors however is that the modern era marks the rise of a new sense of domesticity that developed simultaneously with re-definitions of gender roles and that lead to unprecedented articulations of sexuality with domestic space. The essays brought together in this book address this issue through interdisciplinary contributions that enrich architectural theory and history with sociological, anthropological, philosophical and psychoanalytical approaches. They explore the relationships between modern domestic spaces and sexed subjectivities in a broad range of geographical locations of Western modernity.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Modernity and Domesticity. Tensions and Contradictions. Figures of Woman in Contemporary Architectural Discourse. Gendered Subjects:'A Citizen as well as a Housewife.' New Spaces of Domesticity in 1930s London. The Housewife, the Builder and the Desire for a Polykatoikia Apartment in Post-War Athens.Promoting Catholic Family Values and Modern Domesticity in Post-War Belgium. Rehearsing Domesticity: Post-War Pocono Honeymoon Resorts.Sexual Articulations: 'Only where Comfort Ends does Humanity Begin.' On the Coldness of Avant-Garde Architecture in the Weimar Period. The Uncanny Architect: Fears of Lesbian Builders and Deviant Homes in Modern Germany.A Queer Analysis of Eileen Grey's E.1027. An Architecture of Twenty-Words: Intimate Details of a London Blue Plaque House. Denatured Domesticity: An Account of Femininity and Physiognomy in the Interiors of Frances Glessner Lee. Spatial Practices: Unequal Union: La Casa Estudio de San Angel Inn, c. 1929-1932. Looking at/in/from the Maison de Verre. The Third House: Marie-Jose Can Hee's Dealings with Domesticity. Photography's Veil: Reading Gender and Loo's Interiors.The Modernist Boudoir and the Erotics of Space.

About the Author :
Hilde Heynen is a professor of architectural theory at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. She published Architecture and Modernity-A Critique (MIT Press, 1999). She is co-editor of a substantial anthology of 20th century texts on architecture, and co-edited Back From Utopia, The Challenge of the Modern Movement and Inside Density. She regularly publishes in periodicals such as The Journal of Architecture and Home Cultures.Gülsüm Baydar teaches in the Deaprtment of Interior Architecture and Environment Design at Bilkent University. She is co-editor of Post-Colonial Space(s) (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997). Her articles, which question the disciplinary boundaries of architecture, appeared in such journals as Assemblage, The Journal of Architectural Education, The Journal of Architecture and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.