Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    An AI-Driven Work Force
    AI and Microcredentials
Sign In
The Review

When Design Lost Its Innocence; New Cars for New Cities

By Peter Monaghan May 16, 2010
Premier Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union and Vice President Richard Nixon debated the merits of capitalism near a model of an American kitchen at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959.
Premier Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union and Vice President Richard Nixon debated the merits of capitalism near a model of an American kitchen at the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959.Howard Sochurek, Time Life Pictures, Getty Images

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).

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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.”

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Opinion
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
About the Author
Peter Monaghan
Peter Monaghan is a correspondent for The Chronicle.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Photo illustration showing Santa Ono seated, places small in the corner of a dark space
'Unrelentingly Sad'
Santa Ono Wanted a Presidency. He Became a Pariah.
Illustration of a rushing crowd carrying HSI letters
Seeking precedent
Funding for Hispanic-Serving Institutions Is Discriminatory and Unconstitutional, Lawsuit Argues
Photo-based illustration of scissors cutting through paper that is a photo of an idyllic liberal arts college campus on one side and money on the other
Finance
Small Colleges Are Banding Together Against a Higher Endowment Tax. This Is Why.
Pano Kanelos, founding president of the U. of Austin.
Q&A
One Year In, What Has ‘the Anti-Harvard’ University Accomplished?

From The Review

Photo- and type-based illustration depicting the acronym AAUP with the second A as the arrow of a compass and facing not north but southeast.
The Review | Essay
The Unraveling of the AAUP
By Matthew W. Finkin
Photo-based illustration of the Capitol building dome propped on a stick attached to a string, like a trap.
The Review | Opinion
Colleges Can’t Trust the Federal Government. What Now?
By Brian Rosenberg
Illustration of an unequal sign in black on a white background
The Review | Essay
What Is Replacing DEI? Racism.
By Richard Amesbury

Upcoming Events

Plain_Acuity_DurableSkills_VF.png
Why Employers Value ‘Durable’ Skills
Warwick_Leadership_Javi.png
University Transformation: a Global Leadership Perspective
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin