Beastly Encounters with Moderns: Animals, Architecture & Interiors, c.1920–1939 by Catherine Gregg

‘A filthy bloody swine of an animal? But what animal? An animal in the house?’ – Collette, The Cat, 1933

The significance of the animal in the 1920s and 1930s, as a metaphorical construction, a designed object, and an animate inhabitant of designed space, is the mainstay of this study. Animal beings are potent instruments in the articulation of human identities and social discourses; human-animal relationships are implicated in cultural constructions of modernity. For the design historian, however, the animal strays into new territory. Corporeally shaped by human breeders, primped and preened by human owners, animals are revealed as designed objects, yet living beings. Produced by the designed spaces they animate, animal beings perform the construction of modernity particular to those spaces, as living embodiments of fashion and luxury, for example, or as experimental bodies, articulating the reforming principles of modernist architecture. However, as living objects, animals have the capacity, and the disruptive agency, to subvert human design. Moreover, as a metaphorical construction the animal is loaded with human signification; invoked as a symbol of instinctual life, primitive desire or irrationality, the animal illuminates human states of mind, behaviour and aesthetics.  Thus, animal materials and animal beings are engaged in a complex network of human cultural expression. Focussing on the animal in the modern interior, this dissertation establishes a dialogue traversing Surrealism and Modernism, ornament and utility, sentiment and science. What happened to the modern home when the animal crossed the threshold?

catherine.gregg@network.rca.ac.uk

The Reception of Japanese Prints and Printmaking in Britain, 1890s–1930s by Miya Itabashi

Miya’s work aims to shed a new light on the second-stage Japonisme by considering the British printmakers who adopted Japanese printmaking techniques, tools and materials in the context of the Arts and Crafts Movement, ‘Englishness’, ‘modernity’ and the general rise in interest in domestic interior from the 1890s to the 1930s.

miya.itabashi@network.rca.ac.uk

On Living in an Old City: Bricolage as Adaptive Reuse, London 1977-85 by Miranda Zahedieh

‘We’ve learnt that everything in the city counts, the cars, the dead factories, the rubbish, the vulgar events, the expressive parts that go against the grain. Looking at the lot together you see how each thing brings out the strength in the next… which makes neat design a bit of a day dream.’ – Narrative Architecture Today
(NATO), 1983

miranda.zahedieh@network.rca.ac.uk

Taking Stock: Smithfield and the Butchers in Hanoverian London by Spike Sweeting

Taking Stock examines failed attempts to improve and reform London’s only livestock market, Smithfield in the early nineteenth century. Addressing both the aesthetics and aims of urbanism(s) in the period, and the stymieing force of the butchers’ professional practice, this dissertation attempts to nuance ‘geographies of design’, through both actor network theory and contemporary philosophy. Killing animals is a skilled job, this study hopes to explore why, and in doing so arrest what reformers tended to (dis)miss.

spike.sweeting@network.rca.ac.uk

English Holiday Camp Design, 1936–1951 by Elizabeth Bisley

Mid-century Britain was characterised by debate about the use of space for material means. In their designed plays between the stable and the transitory, the surface and structure, the open and the enclosed, holiday camps offer a route into these processes of physical change. Stretching between city and country, home and holiday, past and present, holiday camps speak to contemporary questions of designed nationality, designed ephemerality, or designed enclosure.

elizabeth.bisley@network.rca.ac.uk

Cryséde: Fabricating Conservative Modernity by Jeanie Sinclair

Cryséde produced handmade woodblock printed textiles in Cornwall in the 1920s and 1930s. Jeanie’s work attempts to situate Cryséde within contemporary discourses surrounding production, retail and consumption. Alec Walker’s designs are discussed in relation to the production of a feminine conservative modernity, the blending of tradition and modernity that is evident in the playful aesthetic of the inter-war years that appealed broadly to the middle-class and middle-brow. If craft creates a ‘third space’ between fine art and design, according to contemporaneous debates, with all spaces separate and opposing the commercial or mass-produced,  Walker’s textiles fall into an undefined void somewhere in between.  An interstitial space, traversing and transgressing the borders of definition, Cryséde simultaneously occupied contradictory positions; large-scale craft production; hand-made yet flawless; industrial knowledge into traditional production methods; commercial with a painterly exclusivity.

jeanie.sinclair@network.rca.ac.uk

Made in California: Women’s Play-Clothes, 1936–1959 by Carly Eck

Play-clothes embodied the aspirations of the ‘good’ life promoted by the media and booster industries as an idealised conceptualisation of the Southern California leisured, sun-laden and outdoor lifestyle. Play-clothes were a metaphor for the California dream. Carly’s work situates play-clothes in three different locales; the beach, backyard and beyond California.

carly.eck@network.rca.ac.uk

Making Waves: The Penetration of Electromagnetic Radiation into Post-War British Life by Kathryn Falla

The television and microwave oven were two uses of electromagnetic radiation popularised in Britain in the post-war years. By considering the response of domestic consumers I reveal the relationship between technology and society. The reaction to domestic uses of electromagnetic radiation revealed the desires and anxieties of a society in a state of flux.

kathryn.falla@network.rca.ac.uk

Power Dressing and Corporate Femininity in 1980s Britain: Stephanie Benjamin

Stephanie’s work explores the meanings invested in corporate femininity and practices of “dressing for success” in late twentieth-century Britain. The focus presents power dressing as distinct from the American context popularized in film and television drama and introduces the particularities inherent in a local case study. The project situates power dressing as a technique manipulated by “real” women working in the corporate sector, a mediated rhetoric of executive fashionability, and an ideological strategy implemented by organizations such as British Airways and Midland Bank Group to regulate the working body. Highlighting the dynamics of work clothing allows the various potentialities invested in corporate gender roles, and the ways in which those roles were manifested in contemporary design and culture, to be revealed. Power dressing and corporate femininity in this dissertation are not equated with synthetic glamour, but emerge as specific political, social, and economic discourses related to frameworks of aspiration, interpretation, and control.