Bursary Report - Erin McKellar

1 January 2015 -

My dissertation, "Tomorrow on Display: American and British Housing Exhibitions, 1940-1955," examines exhibitions of domestic architecture and design during and immediately following the Second World War. These exhibitions, many of which were displayed within major art museums, centered on the family home as the embodiment of the ways of life that the United States and Britain, as allied nations, sought to defend. In the United States and Britain, exhibitions of town planning, housing, and domestic objects proliferated during wartime as architects on both sides of the Atlantic seized an opportunity to rethink dwellings on a mass scale. These architects sought public support for their visions by displaying them as prototypes for postwar living, employing exhibitions as interfaces that enabled a non-professional public to access transformative architectural ideas. Exhibition coordinators visualized, materialized, and concretized abstract ideas for approval and consumption by a skeptical yet curious lay public. Ultimately, these exhibitions demonstrated a two-part mission: first, the displays framed the home as the source of civilization in both nations, and second, their underlying ideological agendas also constructed and reinforced a democratic citizenry to combat the totalitarian regimes against which the United States and Britain were allied through the Cold War.

At "Design for War and Peace," as part of a panel chaired by Gregory Votolato entitled "Constructing America in Wartime Exhibitions," I presented "'Good Housing depends on You': Wartime Housing, 1942." Visitors to Wartime Housing, which opened at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on April 22, 1942, confronted a series of environments that contrasted present industrial squalor and derelict housing in the United States with architect-designed proposals for planned neighborhoods and modern dwellings. These proposals simultaneously demonstrated to their audiences the efforts of the American defense housing program, which endeavored to provide quality modern housing for war workers, and illustrated the possibilities that this program held for expanding access to good housing in the postwar years. This paper forms part of my first chapter's research on the ways in which wartime exhibitions framed the conflict as an opportunity to modernize housing. Wartime Housing exemplifies how exhibition organizers saw the war as an opportunity to create better housing and employed innovative exhibition techniques to communicate these ideas to a non-professional audience. A collaborative effort of the National Committee on the Housing Emergency, the National Housing Agency and MoMA, Wartime Housing sought to illustrate the integral role housing played in the war effort. This exhibition depicted the American housing shortage and claimed that the lessons learned from defense housing efforts would create permanent communities with lives beyond the war years. In so doing, the event's organizers anticipated an improved postwar future and reassured visitors that the conflict's end would bring about a better world.

All of the papers included in the "Constructing America in Wartime Exhibitions" session concerned exhibitions that took place just prior to or during the Second World War. My co-panelists, Nicholas Maffei and Caroline Riley, presented "'Constructing a Predicted Victory': Norman Bel Geddes's War Models Exhibit for the Museum of Modern Art, 1944" and "'Ambassador of Good Will': Three Centuries of American Art in 1930s Europe," respectively. Maffei's paper examined the ways in which Bel Geddes's models presented to MoMA visitors a positive vision of a controllable future. Meanwhile, Riley's presentation analyzed the first major exhibition of American art in Europe, which its organizers used to preserve a fragile peace between nations. Because each of our papers investigated MoMA organized exhibitions, our contributions and discussion fostered a productive dialogue on how this institution approached cultural tensions during these years: the museum acted as a diplomatic ambassador abroad and quelled fears on the home front by displaying an ideal‑almost utopian‑postwar future during wartime. Overall, my experience at the DHS Conference as a conference bursary recipient provided invaluable feedback and raised productive questions at a critical juncture in my graduate work, as I transform my research into written form.