Architecture and design have never been politically or culturally neutral—and not only in terms of form and function. But much remains to be told about the history of their loss of innocence, Greg Castillo argues in a new book, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (University of Minnesota Press).
For a case study, the associate professor of architecture at the University of California at Berkeley chooses a surprising passage in cold-war history: the tussle between American capitalism and Soviet communism for dominance in the great consumer-goods race. Who had the best living rooms, furniture, and kitchen appliances? Whose interior design indicated a better system of governance and economic development?
During the 1950s, the Soviets clearly moved well ahead in large-scale technology. They sent shudders down American spines by successfully testing a ballistic missile, detonating a hydrogen bomb, and launching the Sputnik satellite. At the 1959 Soviet Exhibition of Science, Technology, and Culture, in New York, “a replica of Sputnik hung like the sword of Damocles above the heads of entering visitors,” Castillo writes.
Later that year, the land of the free and bravura household appliances gave the Commies their comeuppance: The American National Exhibition showed off the U.S.A.'s best refrigerators, washing machines, clothing, cosmetics, soft drinks, mail-order catalogs, and labor-saving devices in Moscow.
There, to drive their point home, American diplomats maneuvered Premier Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union and Vice President Richard Nixon of the United States—to the news media, “Nik and Dick"—into debating the merits of capitalism and communism while standing in a mock-up of an American suburban dream home.
The exchange became known as the Kitchen Debate. It came at a time when “Stalinist socialism was largely based on deferred consumption and an idealized future of which there was very little evidence on the ground,” Castillo says in an interview. But it was not, as was later often claimed, the beginning of a superpower struggle for bragging rights about appliances and their significance, he argues. Rather, it was the culmination of a decade-long ideological battle fought with refrigerators, televisions, living-room suites, and prefab homes. Throughout the 1950s, the U.S. State Department had staged home shows in West Berlin, aimed at persuading East Berliners—not yet closed off by the Berlin Wall—to visit West Berlin to see what the running dogs of capitalism were sitting on, lying in, and feeding at.
East German apparatchiks staged their own home expositions, rather less impressive. They could not hope to keep up with the Joneskis because modern housewares provided “a domain of uncontested American pre-eminence,” writes Castillo.
Relating cultural history to political history is not a new undertaking, but his domestic-culture, “soft power” slice of the relationship is, Castillo says. “The idea of the cold war really has focused on the politics of military confrontation and diplomatic disputes, but very little so far in the area of domestic culture.”
He also notes that even most studies of Western postwar cultural influence on the Soviet bloc have not taken into account the way that the latter resisted the influence of American culture. From the 1960s to the 1990s, scholarly debate focused on the saga of U.S. cultural imperialism at the expense of native cultures, Castillo noted on the telephone. In fact, “far from passively accepting American cultural exports, foreign populations responded with tactics ranging from outright resistance to subtle processes of arrogation and reinterpretation.” Take the Kitchen Debate, where Nixon lauded American design: “What we want to do is make more easy the life of our housewives.” Khrushchev responded: “We do not have the capitalist attitude toward women.”
Castillo hopes to make his fellow architects and designers more aware of the political and social force of design artifacts. “In the past,” he says, “architectural history was largely written for a consumer group of architectural-design professionals. But architectural historians serve professional architects and designers better by giving them this new perspective, this new archaeology of their profession.”
New Cars for New Cities
Just as Soviet socialism promised citizens of the Eastern bloc all manner of consumer rewards, few of which eventuated, citizens of the West have for decades heard promises of revolutionary, fuel-efficient automobiles and commuter-friendly transport systems to save ever-more-crowded and polluted cities.
Is that vision any closer? Yes, say the authors of Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century (MIT Press). Christopher E. Borroni-Bird and Lawrence D. Burns have played key roles in General Motors’ research program, and William J. Mitchell, an acclaimed urban planner, is a professor of architecture and media arts and sciences at MIT. They advocate building vehicles that shun the internal-combustion engine and contemporary forms of driver control in favor of electric-drive engines and wireless-communication traffic networks and other devices that would prevent crashes and help drivers find parking spaces.
At the Smart Cities research group that Mitchell directs at MIT’s Media Lab, he and his colleagues have already designed a lightweight, quiet, battery-electric vehicle with the energy-consumption equivalent of 200 miles to a gallon of gas. Shorter than even today’s most compact cars, it can also fold up when parking. Miniaturization of mechanical systems permits the radical design. Each wheel has its own drive motor, steering motor, and digital suspension.
Future models, like one from Segway and GM, could even stand on two wheels.
To aid drivers, the authors of Reinventing the Automobile say that a “mobility Internet” could be constructed to share data on traffic conditions, coordinate vehicle movements, and much else. Through an electric grid partially powered by sun and wind, vehicles could recharge whenever parked.
Such ideas stem from rethinking vehicular mobility as an urban-design issue rather one of vehicle design, Mitchell says, speaking from his Cambridge office. After years of complaining about “how impossible it was to do effective urban design because the automobile had messed everything up,” he says, “I finally decided to stop whining and come back at it the other way, and say, Look, if you take seriously the proposition that automobiles should be designed for cities rather than cities for automobiles, what would that really look like?”
He and his co-authors also propose a form of one-way rental in which folding vehicles could be shared from racks around cities—with considerable efficiency savings. Such innovations would permit the development of less-expensive and use-based markets for electricity, road space, parking space, and the shared vehicles. Meanwhile, lessening street pollution and noise would stimulate the redesign of city spaces to be more friendly to pedestrians, bicycle riders, parks, cafes, and trees.
Williams insists this vision is not fanciful. “You’ve got to get the policy and the engineering right, but that’s not sufficient,” he says in an interview. “You have to engage people’s desire and imagination. I think the way to do that is to do beautifully designed, convincing, relatively small-scale pilot projects to get the idea off the ground.”
The technological hurdles are not insuperable, but reigning thinking about transportation does pose a major obstacle, he allows. As happened in the development of personal computing, he predicts, the entrenched giants will be pushed out by innovative new companies. “I have great respect for the automobile industry, but structurally they have some huge problems in pursuing these sorts of opportunities because they have an enormous investment in traditional ways of doing things,” he says.
Mitchell has long argued that creating a new urban life requires rethinking design and engineering in creative interdisciplinary ways. Education of designers and architects will have to keep up, he says. “I’m convinced at this point that the traditional models of professional education have become really obsolete. The big, important, social and economic and cultural problems take no account whatsoever of the traditional disciplinary boundaries. They sprawl in very messy ways.”
