The Americanization of postwar architecture
International Conference
Canada,Toronto, 1 - 3 dicembre 2005


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sponsored by:
• Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto
• Department of Fine Art/Graduate Department of History of Art, University of Toronto
• Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto
• Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto

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In the decades immediately following the Second World War, the United States launched a global initiative to transform nations within its sphere of influence both culturally and economically. America's formula for intervention in Europe and Asia was rooted in a New Deal model of democracy premised on government mediation between the interests of capitalist producers and citizen-consumers. Increasing industrial productivity and rising consumption were invoked to defend the free enterprise system against communist calls for a radical redistribution of wealth. US-initiated programs, led by the Marshall Plan, attempted to root postwar citizens within the structures of consumer capitalism and liberal democracy.

American interventions throughout the world provided support also for disseminating architecture and planning ideas of US origin. Vehicles for the transmission of American design culture included housing programs, publications, exhibitions, and exchanges between scholars and professionals such as engineers and architects. The Americanization of postwar architecture, however, did not always produce conclusive outcomes. As a strategy of cultural arrogation or outright resistance, foreign planning and design professionals amended American practices, sometimes so dramatically that the original intent was effectively subverted.

This conference intends to examine the architectural exchanges between the United States and the rest of the world after the end of the Second World War. The event aims at considering various methods of transmission for new formal models and professional practices, as well as their many possible modes of adoption. Particular importance will be given to the consideration of the results of the cultural exchange process as measured not in terms of "successful Americanization" but rather with reference to the range and manner of circulation of new models, their reassessment, simplification or misinterpretation (conscious and otherwise). Through consideration of case studies as diverse as built artifacts, mass media images and texts, institutional campaigns and individual biographies, the conference will try to take a first step toward developing a taxonomy of "Americanization effects," a scheme of potential utility for a variety of scholarship on postwar economic and cultural globalization.

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web site:
http://www.utoronto.ca/csus/arch/
http://www.fineart.utoronto.ca/faculty/specialLecturers/scrivano.html

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