Modern Architecture, Handicraft Design, and Twentieth-Century Tourism
The development of mass tourism during the twentieth century brought increasingly large numbers of travelers into contact with distant locales. Tensions between demonstrating modernity, offering expected levels of comfort, and representing host locations and peoples, produced mixed built environments charged with complex objectives. While references to “local” identities were at times achieved through regionalist approaches to modernism that incorporated elements of the vernacular, the decorative application of “traditional” handicrafts to structures, interiors, and furnishing was a popular means for such representation. Levels of theorization, authenticity, and inclusion regarding the use of handicrafts varied in different contexts and time periods, opening compelling questions regarding the definition, value, and purpose of handicraft in built environments as well as the gendering of roles and concepts designated as architectural or artisanal. Questions one might ask include the following: What elements of handicraft were deployed by modern architects in tourism settings, and why? How were crafts transformed, theorized, and modernized in the process of that deployment, and in what ways were they feminized? How did the use of handicraft shape narratives of identity that privileged specific histories, identities, mythologies, and marginalized others?
Members of this panel address intersections between modernist architecture and "locally" inspired handicraft from twentieth-century sites of tourism in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and North America. In its totality the panel considers gender, power dynamics, colonialism, and collaborations between artisan and architect, as well as the current state of these sites.
Field of Study:
Africa
Asia
Middle East
North Africa
Twentieth Century
Chairs:
Daniel E. Coslett,Western Washington University - dcoslett@gmail.com
and
Jessica Gerschultz,University of Kansas - jgersch@ku.edu