Abstract
Written by a professor of design who is also an historian, with an ear to the political and sociological ground, Cold War on the Home Front usefully focuses on the way architecture and design operated as part of the post-war global contest between the West and East. The story unfolds symmetrically with Greg Castillo showing how the communist regimes mounted their products and buildings to prove the superiority of the “Red” way of life while the United States developed tactics to show that it (and its Western European allies) had the superior system. Castillo knowingly attends to the specific evolution of artifacts and schools of design thought, as they emerged in the two camps in the post-WWII period. He knows the difference between an Eames chair and its knockoff, whether created in Los Angeles or Kiev. The book is illustrated accordingly and one can trace the development of product as it aligns (or fails to align) with the national doctrines of the time.
The running motif is the severe weakness of the Soviet design system, dictated as it was by edicts from the top that failed to conform to popular taste, or exigencies of technological or distributional context. Design is one of those features of life that really cannot be dictated at all, one must conclude.
Although less subject to official doctrine, the West did have its own version of authority trying to move into the taste system. Some of this had to do with elite institutions, most notably the Museum of Modern Art, making an active effort to “upgrade” popular views on what should be valued and what should be kitsched. For its part, the U.S. government tried to use not only the bounty of the U.S. consumption system but also the specifics of its modernistic advances as a key soft power ingredient to win out against its adversary.
Not that this was a smooth path; the ironies abound. Conservative Republican adversaries attacked President Eisenhower’s funding of American design initiatives. At least for a period, modernism was “communistic” within the United States just as it was too capitalist-decadent in the East. The American design warriors sometimes had to resort to in-kind gifts from U.S. private corporations to furnish their exhibitions abroad, thus shaping what could be presented to the world as the “American way of life.” For their part, the design elite of the East had to either migrate to other countries or show stuff that had little chance of winning hearts and minds, or even customers.
East and West made active use of display, both within and beyond their own national borders, as for example at design and trade fairs—the most famous, and probably most consequential, being the American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow where Nixon and Khrushchev had their famous 1959 “kitchen debate.” Certainly in retrospect and for many at the very moment, Nixon won that debate hands down and the rest, as we say, is history. How odd it seems that the United States in its current moves through the world is so mired in military aggression, rather than throwing in the kitchen sink that worked so well in the past.
Castillo’s project shows us in very concrete terms the role of form in history, including how it works in mundane objects as well as more esoteric constructions. It also indicates the wildness of style and the many forces that assemble, at any given time and place, to make one version of artifact superior to another. All the features that Stanley Lieberson (2000) showed affecting how Americans choose first names for their children are also in play in constructing larger scale political and economic consequences.
A related set of “findings” are the internal contradictions and historic zigzags of what is or is not acceptable design sensibility; something revealed on both sides as modernism in particular found and lost favor across worlds and over time. We also pick up from this book the history of display and how both sociological context as well as emerging notions of formal aesthetics impact exhibition qualities.
Rich in concept and detail, this book can show sociologists the payoff for looking closely at artifacts and tracing their uses with a minimum of preconceived theoretical baggage (e.g., no Frankfurt School intrudes on Castillo’s narrative). However, some of the argumentation was oblique and some of the passages were distractingly overwritten. Castillo’s chronological and comparative skipping about sometimes was confusing. Readers will be wise to forgive such expositional flaws and get on with the fascinating detail and important epistemological and historical lessons.