Following the Second World War department stores transitioned from the downtown establishments of the first half of the century to the enclosed shopping malls of the second; however, for a period of about six years, from 1945 to 1951, the standalone department store fulfilled the needs of suburbanites. During this struggle to define the new suburban shopping experience, Welton Becket and Walter Wurdeman designed Bullock's Pasadena--the first embodiment of their research-based "total design" philosophy. Today, Becket is best known for his iconic Capitol Records building and the assembly line efficiency of Welton Becket and Associates, but he devoted much of the late 1940s and 1950s to designing department stores and shopping centers. As store managers and fellow architects strained to build department stores for automobile, Becket emerged with a research-based solution that he later termed "total-design." Similar to the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, Becket's "total-design" was a philosophy that required attention to nuance and detail--in the case of department stores this included furniture, fixtures, carpet, and even price tags and restaurant menus. But he also sought to support his designs with research and study.1 Before Becket designed Bullock's Pasadena, his first department store, he dedicated a year to analyzing the customers, employees, and efficiency of Bullock's. This investigation resulted in an open-plan store with flexible furnishings and a sympathetic approach to the automobile, including parking lots that integrated with the store's layout. Becket was not alone in his exploration of suburban department stores. Architects from around the country, including Raymond Loewy, Victor Gruen, John Graham, and Morris Ketchum, created their own prototypes for this new building typology. But many found it difficult to compete with Becket's extensive research and empirical method. Several stores, such as B. Altman's Miracle Mile branch on Long Island (1947) and Bamberger's branch in Morristown, New Jersey (1949), had to be renovated or relocated within ten years of opening, unable to keep pace with growing storage and parking demands. Becket, by contrast, studied population densities and demographics, freeway connections and traffic congestion to establish the number of parking spaces and their location on site. Instead of utilizing parking space ratios, favored by his peers, he relied on a wider scope of analysis to inform his designs. Bullock's Pasadena provides the basis for this study and demonstrates the evolution of Becket's design process that would come to define one of the world's largest architecture firms. / text

The purpose of this study is to examine the position of twentieth century American poetry at the mid-point of the century to ascertain whether contemporary poetry--poetry written in the fifties and sixties--has been justly relegated to the obscure position which it now occupies.

A recent report by Terrapin Bright Green “Mid-century (Un) Modern” discusses the desperate condition of mid-century modern high-rises in Manhattan. The article argues that it would be beneficial both economically and environmentally to demolish these buildings and build new ones with an assumed increase in FAR. To re-build, repair or re-skin are the questions Mid-century Modern High-rises (MMH) face today. This study focuses on Houston, Texas, which is very different from New York City both climatically and from a planning stand point. It is dreaded for its hot and humid climate and notorious for its consistent refusal to adopt any zoning. These high-rises in Houston represent the economic success of the city immediately after WWII. These buildings were constructed as the city transformed from the Bayou City to the Space city. In this study I have mapped the status of these high-rises and the strategies that were used to renovate them. The questions I further wish to address are how preservation or energy efficiency are addressed while renovating these buildings. Even preservationists might agree that all buildings are not equal and a new look would benefit some. The real challenge lies in resolving the grey areas, where one is not talking about a Seagram or a Lever House, but a well designed environmentally sensitive building. / text

abstract: Mid-Century ranch house architecture and design is significant to the architectural landscape of the Phoenix Metropolitan Area. The increasing age of the city's post-WWII properties is creating a need for renovation and rehabilitation, and new technologies have created modern conveniences for today's homeowners, changing interior space plan requirements. These homeowners will need guidance to alter these properties correctly and to preserve the home's essential features. This thesis analyzes the design trends and materials used during the mid-twentieth century, and demonstrates methods for applying them to a current renovation project. The research outlined in this document proves that it is possible to maintain historic integrity, include "Green" design strategies, and apply contemporary technology to a modern ranch renovation. / M.S.D. Architecture 2010

San Luis Obispo’s mid-century spanned the years beginning in the Great Depression and ending during the post-World War II housing boom. During this time the City grew in population and in size, adding several acres of land and thousands of single-family residential parcels. This research presents a chronological representation of the City’s growth, as well as key events in the City’s history. Residential development in the mid-century brought several new styles of architecture to the City including Mid-century Modern and Prairie homes among others. These architectural styles are detailed and presented in order to identify and guide the preservation of historic resources.

In 1950, Roger and Louise Amory founded the Johann Fust Community Library in Boca Grande, Florida. After the death of Louise's son John Austin Amory III in 2018, John's son ­– and Roger Amory's namesake – donated a collection of Louise Amory's papers to the Library Foundation. The archive consists of 140 pages, mostly handwritten. Louise wrote most of the material between 1949 and 1954. As Executive Director of the Foundation, I solicited the help of one of our docent volunteers, and we took on the challenge of transcribing her writing. I was excited to undertake the resurrection of this 20th-century archive, and I began to research women's life-writing to set a framework. My original expectation was that the work would be diaristic, but my preconceptions required adjustment. An analysis of Louise Amory's writing soon led me to conclude that she wrote to create a record of the library's founding and that her audience was public, not private. While building the library, Louise and Roger purchased a boat, that they christened Papyrus, to provide library services to the islands around Boca Grande. Traveling aboard Papyrus introduced a maritime aspect to the Amorys' project and Louise's writing as she recorded these island-hopping journeys along with other yachting adventures. I came to see Louise's writing as a travel narrative that is also life-writing.

This thesis is written on the subject, state fully, "A Comparison of the Education Opportunities of the Whites and Negores of Walker County." The study is based, as far as possible, on a per-pupil comparison. The writer found Walker County an excellent county in which to make such a study for the simple reason that there was not another county in the state of Texas where there was such an equal balance of negro and white approved scholastics. The counties of Harrison, Marion, San Jacinto, Walker, and Waller were the only ones in the state of Texas that had more approved negro scholastics than white approved scholastics. In Walker county during the year 1937-1938 there were 2,498 white scholastics and 2,505 negro scholastics. This shows that there were only seven more negro approved scholastics than white approved scholastics.

This thesis explores the figure of the trickster in the works of Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark. By looking at these writers’ treatment of elusive, illusive and allusive characters, the thesis argues that they each incorporated what can be read as “trickster” figures in their fiction as a means of addressing anxieties about art, society and the self. The trickster is a character-type found in narratives from a multitude of cultures and eras, and is typically characterised by his subversive presence, his boundary-crossing and his role as a healer of predicament. While the trickster is often perceived as a universal phenomenon arising from a collective unconscious, this thesis instead focusses on writers’ intentional inclusion of trickster characters in literature as a way of thinking through specific problems. Bowen, it will be shown, interpolated tricksy characters drawn from myth and fairy-tale into her fiction in order to expose a perceived rift between art and academia; Taylor used the trickster to think about the construction of identity in post-war Britain; Murdoch took models from Shakespeare to create tricksters that helped her explore the ethics of writing fiction; and Spark’s tricksters allowed her to conceptualise truth and lies, and good and evil. Concentrating on four mid-century writers whose works have been seen to vary in genre and style, this thesis demonstrates that a trickster paradigm emerged in mid-twentieth-century British fiction – a period not previously associated with the trickster. Influenced by converging strands of trickery and allusion in art through the early decades of the twentieth century, notable mid-century British writers used outsider characters to probe social and artistic shifts in a landscape fractured by war and to reach for a sense of healing. By identifying such characters as trickster figures, this thesis sheds new light on patterns of subversion, healing and character in mid-century fiction. It explores the particular affinity the trickster had with women’s writing, and illustrates how the trickster was important to twentieth-century concerns surrounding metafiction and the role of the reader.

Panoramic Sham is sunset and sunrise, a walk through a field of wildflowers or a day in the forest. It is that moment when a light breeze tousles your hair and chirping birds reaffirm vitality. Panoramic Sham is also a heap of outdated home goods that once transformed our living rooms into artificial habitats. I reimagine decommissioned domestic goods as a way to confront trends of mass-production, habits of consumption and to explore systems of artifice, authenticity, and the consumer haze perpetuated by contemporary American society. Comprised of synthetic materials and manufactured to impersonate nature, these 20th century cast-offs provide an abundant cycle of cultural and generational refuse.

While documentation of the work of a select group of modernist landscape architects of the mid-twentieth century is available, little is known about the professional contributions of transitional landscape architects active in the period following World War II. Using selected projects framed by existing literature covering contemporary social, economic, political, and artistic influences, this study examines the career of one such transitional figure, Sidney Nichols Shurcliff (1906-1981). Project descriptions and analysis measure the scope of Shurcliff's work and the degree to which he contributed to the discipline and its transition to modernism, thereby augmenting the history of landscape architecture practice.