Postwar British Fictions of Inhabitation
type: CreativeWork
description: The New Brutalist architect Alison Smithson is often quoted as saying that ‘a book is like a small building to us’. Indeed, her 1966 novel A Portrait of the Female Mind as a Young Girl, published by Chatto and Windus, underscores the fact that the putting-together of both books and buildings was an intensely charged project in the 1950s and 1960s. For Smithson, it was not that there is a mimetic relationship between the two forms. Rather, both house fictions. For Smithson, the writing of books and the planning of buildings was both a way of being in the world and a way of taking it apart and putting it back together. The question of where to dwell, and the search for an ideal location where the self could flourish, underpinned her project. Both of these questions, of course, were shot through with a reflexiveness on the historical moment and books and buildings were both products of her postwar ‘making’ as she sought to redefine the meaning of home in a deeply transitional world — and the structures that accommodated it. The three chapters of this thesis bring literary and filmic texts into dialogue with architectural forms, considering how both are kinds of construction that are contingent on the materials to hand. My first chapter explores some of the tensions I have been outlining here by looking at the Smithsons’ House of the Future installation which was displayed at the 1956 Ideal Home Exhibition. This immersive structure functioned as a kind of speculative fiction following in a modernist tradition of radical experimentation but was built using new postwar technology and industrially produced materials. This chapter considers this aspirational modernity alongside the scuffed and scratched materials that can be found in the literature and films depicting lodging houses and bedsits in inner city London. I will be looking at the way that these domestic spaces contrast with the promises of the glossy visions of ideal homes on display at the Ideal Home Exhibition …
abstract: The New Brutalist architect Alison Smithson is often quoted as saying that ‘a book is like a small building to us’. Indeed, her 1966 novel A Portrait of the Female Mind as a Young Girl, published by Chatto and Windus, underscores the fact that the putting-together of both books and buildings was an intensely charged project in the 1950s and 1960s. For Smithson, it was not that there is a mimetic relationship between the two forms. Rather, both house fictions. For Smithson, the writing of books and the planning of buildings was both a way of being in the world and a way of taking it apart and putting it back together. The question of where to dwell, and the search for an ideal location where the self could flourish, underpinned her project. Both of these questions, of course, were shot through with a reflexiveness on the historical moment and books and buildings were both products of her postwar ‘making’ as she sought to redefine the meaning of home in a deeply transitional world — and the structures that accommodated it. The three chapters of this thesis bring literary and filmic texts into dialogue with architectural forms, considering how both are kinds of construction that are contingent on the materials to hand. My first chapter explores some of the tensions I have been outlining here by looking at the Smithsons’ House of the Future installation which was displayed at the 1956 Ideal Home Exhibition. This immersive structure functioned as a kind of speculative fiction following in a modernist tradition of radical experimentation but was built using new postwar technology and industrially produced materials. This chapter considers this aspirational modernity alongside the scuffed and scratched materials that can be found in the literature and films depicting lodging houses and bedsits in inner city London. I will be looking at the way that these domestic spaces contrast with the promises of the glossy visions of ideal homes on display at the Ideal Home Exhibition …
author: Schneider, Katherine
language: eng
keywords: Postwar British writing, Architecture, Domesticity, Mid-century, Modernism, Ideal Home Exhibition, 1950s, 1960s, Brutalism, Alison and Peter Smithson, B.S. Johnson, Nell Dunn, Roy Ward Baker, Lynne Reid Banks, Rose Macaulay, Keith Waterhouse
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2020-12-01
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:04Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.86045