In order to give myself context and language for thinking about Rev. Stanford's sermon and domestic architecture of the new Republic, I examined Lynn Walker's article, which explores the language, material culture, and feminist analysis of architecture over three cultural/historical periods: Victorian, modern, and post-modern. Here's what I learned:
Abstract
Walker, Lynne. “Home Making: An Architectural Perspective.” Signs 27.3 (2002): 823-835. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/337927. Web. 23 October 2011.
In “Home Making: An Architectural Perspective” Lynne Walker traces domestic architecture’s capacity to reflect and enforce gender norms through the Victorian, modern, and post-modern eras. She explores the embodiment of gender, class, and race in architectural language and the spatial relationships of the home, placing special emphasis on gender dynamics. Walker uses linguistic binaries, such as architect/occupants (823), that manifest the field's inherent preference of the masculine over the feminine to illustrate traditional marginalization of women's roles and private spaces in favor of male roles and public spaces. To balance the framework for her argument, Walker acknowledges the work of feminist writers and analysts Dolores Hayden, Jane Beckett, and others for exposing and contesting these driving paradigms and reflecting the post-modern movement away from inequality in domestic spatial design (823). Apart from her introduction and conclusion, Walker spends roughly half her argument focusing on a cultural approach to Victorian domestic architecture, in which rooms were designed for the particular use of one gender or the other, with the gentlemen's rooms adjoining entranceways or other public spaces of the house and the lady's rooms removed to the back of the house out of view of strangers. Servants' quarters were similarly divided with the butler's work and living spaces forming the transition between the house at large and the work and living spaces of the female servants. Walker points out that while the home was associated with the good wife on an ideal and anatomical level, male ownership and dominion were clearly expressed in the physical arrangement of the house(826). Modern and post-modern domestic architecture evenly share the remainder of Walker's argument. She discusses the modernist aversion to domesticity and attempt at creating an objective, gender-neutral approach to design, ultimately producing hyper-masculine spaces void of the decoration and sentimentality associated with femininity. Modernist architects saw spatial design as power and sought to manipulate inhabitants through domestic spaces that were designed as social "laboratories," equating architects to (objective) scientists and occupants to subjects of the experiment (830). Walker quickly transitions to Charles and Ray Eames, the architects who brought domesticity back to home design in the 1950's. From this point forward, post-modern approaches slowly took hold, eventually causing designers to consider the cultural context of their work. The break-down of the nuclear family, increasingly global and multicultural society, gay activism, and advances in technology begin to reflect in these new designs through the feminist interrogation of technologies technologies for the home (831), use of multicultural pattern and design, and an overall multidisciplinary approach to the field. Walker shows that as society moves toward the belief of equality among its various members, architecture reinforces that equality.
Analysis
Lynne Walker's introduction provides broad insight into the traditional masculinizing of the field of architecture by offering details of the linguistic paradigms of the field. The examples she gives of the dominant male terms opposed to the undervalued female terms are elegant in their simplicity: understanding that the very language in which a field expresses itself is gendered and unequal is enough to let the reader reasonably assume that all expressions of a more complex or physical nature will follow suit. Additionally, Walker includes important mentions of evolving feminist thinking that allows us to look at the periods she studies through a gender-sensitive cultural lens. This creates a framing structure that allows some symmetry between the beginning and the end of the article as the sequence of her studies moves her toward post-modern approaches to architecture which take into account the work of feminist analysis and work to design with greater gender equality. Walker includes reflections on the power of cultural studies and material culture in particular to call into question the implicit meanings behind historical fact, particularly in a field so physical and culturally connected as architecture. These foundations clarify her approach and define her intentions to explore the relationships between the social and the physical culture of her subject. Walker embeds images in her text, providing a floor plan, an exterior photograph, and a neighborhood plan. Each of these corresponds to one of the periods she discusses, and the views themselves reinforce the message of her text. The floor plan offers an intimate view of the interior space through which a Victorian family moved, allowing us to see the space that shaped the nuclear family. Choosing an exterior shot to illustrate modern architecture follows the concept of objectification of dwelling spaces, keeping the viewer at a distance. The housing project scheme exemplifies post-modernism's emphasis on a variety of acceptable means of family-making.
Evidence
Walker cites a number of architects and theorists throughout her text. The images also strongly support her case. However, in her introduction, Walker explicitly tells us that architectural language will have strong sway in her essay. Although she uses gendered binaries in her introduction, and does discuss the modernist expressions of objectivity and home as a laboratory, Walker puts little emphasis on language throughout the remainder of the work. It leaves the reader wondering whether the feminist and multicultural approaches which seem to be overcoming inequality have a special language associated with them. Walker does not clarify whether these traditional binaries are still in use or if they have been replaced. In fact, these duos of linguistic inequality have no historical context at all in the article, leaving readers to wonder when, where, and how pervasively they have been used. If they are still in use, then perhaps the argument for the movement toward equality in post-modern architecture needs to be more balanced. In the Victorian and post-modern arguments, there is a presence of architectural language as in Robert Kerr's book (824) and the labeling of the floor plan (825-6), but no explicit discussion ensues.
Relationship to My Research Project
Just as Sherry Turkle's introduction to Evocative Objects provided us as a class with a framework for considering material culture, this article has provided me with a framework for considering material culture in reference to feminism and architecture. While it does not address the new Republic from 1790-1840, Walker's essay places significant emphasis on the period immediately following and slightly overlapping these years. The Victorian era, at least in terms of architecture, is the distillation of the nationalistic ideas and gender roles that rolled like uncertain currents through early republic culture, and directly relate to concepts such as the Republican mother: "Woman in her role as wife and mother was the keystone of the 'moral' Victorian home; her position there was considered essential to the maintenance of social and even political order, the starting point of the moral regeneration of the family..." (Walker, 826). Another key similarity Walker's article illuminated for me was the continuing pervasive idea that the "work of a woman's body...both produced and was partly produced by the home," a concept John Stanford proposed in the sermon "Sacred Architecture," my artifact and primary text, when he stated that original sin necessitated the origination of architecture, particularly domestic architecture.
While similarities like this do not make Walker's article a substitute for works directly addressing architecture in the new Republic, seeing these ideas in the context of evolving approaches to the material culture that architecture engenders gives me a clear understanding of how I can take a material cultural studies approach to the era of my interest. By examining three different eras of material culture in architecture, and the Victorian era in particular, Walker has provided me with examples of how to approach my own study. I have a better idea of what to look for when I examine floor plans and elevations from new Republic architectural manuals. I have a clear idea of how to connect these spaces with the people who designed, built, and moved through them. The catalogue of architectural approaches over time also provides me with a much stronger understanding of my own cultural lens by addressing the way today's understanding of the field has come about. This will help me to avoid biases and supplies me with a vocabulary for discussing the material culture of architecture in the new Republic with precision. Walker's many citations of feminist works in the field offer opportunities to expand my bibliography. The work's greatest strength in connection to my own is providing me perspective, context, and a language with which to think and work.
