My dissertation investigates questions of boredom and architecture in the middle decades of the twentieth century through the work of two figures: the American-Italian architect Robert Venturi (b. 1925) and the Romanian-born American architect and artist Saul Steinberg (1914-1999). The topic of boredom in architecture, and specifically within this timeframe, has been largely ignored in architectural history, theory, and criticism where, with the exception of a few articles, there is no consistent body of scholarship on this issue. Looming large in the sterile iterations of various –isms, boredom remains critical in contemporary architectural practice as the production and obsolescence of images becomes ever faster with new technologies. Quickly saturated with information presented in fleeting displays that are easy to produce, easy to delete, and easy to consume, as soon as our expectation for novelty and change fails to satisfy us, we fall back into the loop of boredom. While boredom as the dissociation of person from place has raised architects' interest especially during the middle decades of the twentieth century, there is no significant scholarship on this topic. In this context, my research looks at the work of two architects who go beyond the attractive rhetoric of boredom and explore its potential as both a critical and a generative tool. / PHD

This thesis examines the cultural and political messages found in "social guidance" films, a genre of films produced for pedagogical purposes in the United States following the Second World War. Educational film producers relied on social science consultants for legitimacy and employed plots that addressed ordinary challenges of daily living encountered by teenagers. Shown in high school classrooms nationwide in the postwar years, these films advertised to young people the usefulness of a psychological understanding of personality adjustment. These films reflected the influence of ideas from both the progressive education movement inspired by John Dewey and the theories of mental hygiene from prewar psychologists. By viewing these films, students encountered advice about improving their individual productivity and they received guidance for developing skills needed in social settings. By parsing the cultural and intellectual messages embedded in these films and relating them to interwar and postwar developments, this thesis shows one way that social experts mobilized to shape the socialization of adolescents. Social guidance films intended to employ the specialized knowledge of the social sciences to promote the production of healthy and successful personalities. More importantly, this thesis shows how social guidance films, in addressing ordinary teenage concerns, also addressed the political needs of American society at the dawn of the Cold War. The practical advice presented in these films showed adolescents how to tread the line between the preservation of individuality and commitment to the group—the essential problem faced by post war political theorists. Educators looked to the confluence of school, psychology, and film to guide the socialization of youths for their future roles as citizens of a democratic society. This thesis argues that the messages of psychological adjustment in social guidance films provided one means of promoting democratic values to counter the postwar threat of totalitarianism. / Master of Arts

Collaborative Poetics: Frank O’Hara and Robert Creeley draws on literary studies, art history, and bibliography to examine the transactions between the visual and verbal arts found in the American poets’ work. Bringing longstanding aesthetic debates about poetry and painting to bear on studies of collaboration, the dissertation counters the field’s prevailing intra-disciplinary focus. Visual-verbal collaborations, it suggests, undo conventional dichotomies between these descriptive systems, rendering insufficient a binary view of the “sister arts” as antagonists or analogues. By examining Creeley’s and O’Hara’s interdisciplinary forms and practices, this study advances a notion of “collaborative poetics” that centrally depends on both inter-artistic and inter-subjective exchange. As two of the most prolific collaborators of the mid-20th century – completing over 50 projects with visual artists between them – O’Hara and Creeley serve as exemplary case studies, situated at the forefront of an era in which reciprocity between the avant-garde arts was increasingly common. Through analyses of O’Hara’s early ekphrastic poems (Chapter 1) and Creeley’s literary self- portraiture (Chapter 3), Collaborative Poetics suggests that poets’ interactions with visual media destabilize lyric authority, creating space for reciprocal attachments between artists, artworks, and audiences. The poets’ artists’ books – Frank O’Hara and Michael Goldberg’s 1960 Odes (Chapter 2) and Robert Creeley and Robert Indiana’s 1968 Numbers (Chapter 4) – further advance a claim for alterity by refusing the conservative demand for “artistic purity” and prompting conversation between different (and traditionally opposed) artistic media. Restoring these little-studied works to their original interdisciplinary contexts, the project reinvigorates their status as material objects and subjects of analysis. Finally, the coda both considers the still-tenuous place of such interdisciplinary projects within many institutional spaces, including the academy and the museum, and reflects on the midcentury poets’ collaborative legacy as it turns to a brief reading of contemporary American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and painter Kiki Smith's 2006 artist’s book Concordance. / 2020-12-11T00:00:00Z

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

This thesis re-examines the life's work of German-American critical theorist, Siegfried Kracauer, to recover abstraction from tacit historical associations with modern fascism. Evoked in critical theory more generally, the abstraction-to-fascism-teleology imagines 20th century fascism as the dialectical fulfillment of modern alienation. Rooting such alienation in the flawed Liberal and Marxist conceptions of monetary relations, critical theorists conduct their aesthetic analyses via ambivalent condemnations of abstraction’s assumed primordial alienation. In the thesis, I critique the abstraction-to-fascism-teleology through an affirmation of neochartalist political economy’s conception of money’s essential publicness and abundance. Drawing from this abstract legal mediation, I trace Kracauer’s various condemnations of abstraction along the terms of his embodied contradiction among the WWII and Cold War fiscal mobilizations to illuminate repressed pleas for abstract mediation within his work and midcentury aesthetic realism broadly. Further, I move from the midcentury moment to the Weimar moment in order to locate potential in Kracauer’s early affirmation of abstraction as a communal medium. I find such affirmations neglected in the Liberal and Marxist responses to the unemployment crises of the Great Depression in Germany. By looking to Kracauer’s Weimar essays on architecture and photography, as well as a reading of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), I pinpoint historical and contemporary promise in their commitment to the inclusive potential of abstraction’s (no)thing- ness, a commitment that was mirrored in the proposed monetary issuance of the WTB public works plan of 1932, which was ultimately rejected by the Social Democratic Party of Germany in the lead up to their defeat in the parliamentary elections of 1933 and the Nazis’ rise to power.