1st Edition

Architecture, Democracy and Emotions The Politics of Feeling since 1945

Edited By Till Großmann, Philipp Nielsen Copyright 2019
    214 Pages 20 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    214 Pages 20 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    After 1945 it was not just Europe’s parliamentary buildings that promised to house democracy: hotels in Turkey and Dutch shopping malls proposed new democratic attitudes and feelings. Housing programs in the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union were designed with the aim of creating new social relations among citizens and thus better, more equal societies. Architecture, Democracy, and Emotions focuses on these competing promises of consumer democracy, welfare democracy, and socialist democracy. Spanning from Turkey across Eastern and Western Europe to the United States, the chapters investigate the emotional politics of housing and representation during the height of the Cold War, as well as its aftermath post-1989.

    The book assembles detailed research on how the claims and aspirations of being "democratic" influenced the affects of architecture, and how these claims politicized space. Architecture, Democracy, and Emotions contributes to the study of Europe’s "democratic age" beyond Cold War divisions without diminishing political differences. The combination of an emotional history of democracy with an architectural history of emotions distinguishes the book’s approach from other recent investigations into the interconnection of mind, body, and space.

    Introduction: Architectural History of Emotions—Emotional History of Democracy Till Großmann and Philipp Nielsen  1. Designed to Represent: Parliamentary Architecture, Conceptions of Democracy, and Emotions in the Postwar Netherlands Carla Hoetink and Harm Kaal  2. Building Bonn: Affects, Politics, and Architecture in Postwar West Germany Philipp Nielsen  3. Consumer Democracy and the Emotional Investment in Modern Architecture in Postwar Turkey: The Istanbul Hilton Hotel Emre Gönlügür  4. Structures of Feeling: Urban Redevelopment as Self-Development in Dutch Postwar Architecture Tim Verlaan  5. Images, Films, and Emotions in Postwar Architecture in Britain Liat Savin Ben Shoshan  6. Affective Economies of Race and Housing in Postwar New York City Kavita Kulkarni  7. "Palaces in Our Hearts": Caring for Krushchevki Susan E. Reid  8. Defending Modernist Architecture in Poland: Space of State, Emotions, and Democracy Karol Kurnicki  Index

    Biography

    Till Großmann specializes in the modern social and political history of Germany. He is a PhD candidate at Freie Universität Berlin and a member of the International Max Planck Research School—Moral Economies of Modern Societies, Berlin. His dissertation project on love, marriage, and partnership in state-socialist East Germany reflects his research interests in the history of emotions, gender, and subjectivity.

    Philipp Nielsen is an Assistant Professor for Modern European History at Sarah Lawrence College and Associated Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. He received his PhD from Yale University. His research interests include Jewish German history, German political and architectural history, and the history of emotions.