Modernizing Main Street: Everyday architecture and the New Deal.
Item
-
Title
-
Modernizing Main Street: Everyday architecture and the New Deal.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9924804
-
identifier
-
9924804
-
Creator
-
Esperdy, Gabrielle.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Rosemarie Haag Bletter
-
Date
-
1999
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Art History | Architecture | History, United States | Political Science, Public Administration | Urban and Regional Planning
-
Abstract
-
This dissertation examines the impact of the Great Depression on everyday architecture in the United States and proposes a reevaluation of the acceptance of modernism in architecture before World War II. Specifically, it investigates a nationwide effort to "modernize" or improve commercial buildings as an antidote to the economic and social catastrophe of the 1930s. It offers a reassessment of the New Deal's impact on visual culture by broadening notions of federal sponsorship and by revealing the close relationship which existed between big government and big business, a relationship which, in turn, strongly influenced the architectural practice of building modernization. To this end, the dissertation engages issues of legislation (Title I of the 1934 National Housing Act), public policy (government-insured credit), manufacturing (of building materials) and marketing (of architectural service). On an urbanistic level it explores a moment when "Main Street," the traditional commercial core of the American city, attempted to stem the tide of burgeoning decentralization and rapid economic change through a program of deliberately modern architectural image-making. To this end, the dissertation explores the way architecture expanded the era's iconography of prosperity and contributed to a redefined self-image of small-town America that was progressive rather than nostalgic. On a theoretical level it demonstrates that debates about populism, consumerism, gender, and legibility were an important part of the discourse of the 1930s when architects and industrial designers began to exploit the scenographic and symbolic potentialities of the strip and when the practice of architecture, like the practice of advertising, emerged as a product of the consumer culture.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
