House Beautiful, Climate Control Project 1949-1953

The postwar transition to suburbia inaugurated a trend in which most American builders opted to clear the land and build standardized houses without any regard for the site conditions and local climate. Elizabeth Gordon (1906–2000) was the editor of House Beautiful a popular design magazine. She launched the Climate Control Project (1949–1953) to offer the homebuilder guidance on constructing houses suited for the local climate using design principles of orientation, sun control, site planning, and ventilation. Gordon was a strong critic of the International Style that developed in Europe in the interwar period and came to America after the war. This paper will examine the techniques prescribed by the Climate Control Project and draw conclusions about the ideal postwar house promoted by the magazine. Using the Climate Control project, House Beautiful advanced strategies for physiological comfort and efficient utilization of space as central objectives for its readers. By analyzing the articles published throughout the project's duration, this study concludes that the Climate Control Project promoted the idea of a regional American home as the ideal postwar home – as an alternative to the prefabricated mass-produced suburban homes during this time period and the International Style.

‘[C]allee me Oscar’: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Aestheticism, and Opium

Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), one of the flagship novels of Aestheticism, contains an intricate opium narrative that has yet to receive adequate critical attention. The novel consists of two nested units: the House Beautiful that subsumes a Gothic nursery where Dorian's portrait is placed, and London the Metropolis that harbours Blue Gate Fields in the East End. The former might be read as a miniature of the latter. This double mechanism hinges on a Chinese box in which opium is stored. The structure, which evolves from the classic opium narrative established by Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), enables Wilde to stage a critique on the connection between Aestheticism and the imperial trade of opium. Besides, Wilde's aesthete trio in the novel, Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian Gray, and Adrian Singleton, are cast as opium smokers in order to disrupt the imperialist mindset showcased in the cartoons appearing on trade cards and in magazines that satirise Wilde's promotion of Aestheticism. This essay contends that Wilde's opium narrative exposes the hypocrisy of Empire by demonstrating that the coloniser and the colonised are anamorphic reflections of each other.

Domesticity Beyond Sentiment

Analyzes Edith Wharton’s late-century guide to interior design, The Decoration of Houses (1897), as a vision of home extricated from and opposed to sentimental conceptions of marriage and family. Takes its photographs of pristine and depopulated rooms as antidotes to the emotional mess of Wharton’s doomed cohabitation with Teddy Wharton. Contrasts these images to the conventionally warm and fuzzy ones featured in Clarence Cook’s rival design manual, The House Beautiful (1877). Citing Wharton’s guide, contests the tendency in American Studies today to treat domesticity and sentimentality as necessarily interchangeable terms.